Hellken

EA “confident” it can avoid repeat of SimCity launch debacle Hoping for smoother sailing with Europe, Japan, Australia, and UK launch. by Kyle Orland - Mar 7 2013, 12:51am CST While a staggered worldwide launch for EA's new SimCity wasn't enough to prevent substantial launch problems in North America yesterday, the publisher is projecting confidence that it will have the issues fixed in time for the launch in Europe, Australia, and Japan on Thursday and the UK on Friday. "Due to the high demand for SimCity, Origin has experienced delays impacting a small percentage of users. We’re working non-stop to resolve," the company tweeted on the official Origin Twitter account yesterday. "We’re making changes to prevent further issues, and are confident that Origin will be stable for international launches later this week," it tweeted further. EA does seem to be making every effort to reduce widely reported server wait times and stability issues with the game. Two new game servers were launched yesterday afternoon, and the companyrolled out a new server update today that it says should resolve problems with city loading, trading, and tutorial freezes. The SimCity Twitter account is suggesting that players running into problems loading their cities switch to other servers, but it fails to mention that existing saved games and cities-in-progress are inextricably tied to the server they were created on (though that issue is directly addressed in an official FAQ regarding server waiting rooms). Meanwhile, complaints about the game's "sometimes online" features continue. One popular thread on Reddit discusses the loss of a successful city and $2 million of in-game money thanks to server synchronization errors. A flood of 174 one-star reviews on Amazon have dragged down the game's average rating at the online retailer, with many reviewers complaining about not being able to log in. Complaints continue to fill up threads on EA's official forums as well. Polygon decided to officially lower its prerelease review score of 9.5/10 down to an 8/10 after encountering disconnection errors and city corruption post-launch. Dorkly's getting in on the act witha timely comic making fun of the launch situation. All these problems may well become a distant memory, but for now, forcing the traditionally single-player SimCity into an online infrastructure hasn't been the painless process EA promised. Lee HutchinsonSenior Reviews Editor You show me a game with an online component whose launch hasn't been a total ******* debacle of biblical proportions, and I'll show you Santa Claus. Neither of those things exist. Heavily online-focused games have had lol-tastic catastrophic launches dating back to Ultima Online. ****, even before that. The primary problem is that it's impossible to accurately judge launch day loads, and even if it were possible it's economically unfeasible to scale an infrastructure to handle launch loads and ALSO to handle regular production loads. You either sink too much money into launch infrastructure and are left holding unneeded equipment, or you screw up the launch and things eventually fall in line with the infrastructure you DO have. "The cloud" and outside elastic compute resources are most decidedly *NOT* a viable solution, either, at least not for almost every single game out there.

This chat should go viral. They can ban your accounts for this? Seriously?

http://screwpile.wordpress.com/screw-pile-exchange-spex/maxis-files/ Get all the Maxis files here ^^ EDIT: You need it to see Maxis Buildings as "props".

Sorry, that's false. I remember 2003 very well and I remember the transition from SC 3000 Unlimited to SC4. Hell, I played vanilla SC4 last year. I even have copies of gaming magazines from back then. SC4 was rated by most as a step up in many ways from the well - presented but terribly glitched SC 3000/Unlimited. It did not get many perfect scores but it was far from negative and nowhere near the server crisis EA is having right now. The general consensus at the time of release was that: "Only patches could save SC4 from all the bugs". Otherwise most were somewhat okay with it and many praised the region and God mode idea. Compare it to this launch with hundreds of users across the internet demanding a refund or unable to unlock or play the game due to EA's poor servers. The standard deviation in scores for SC (2013) (as of the time I write this) is quite big. Not many people found SC4 vanilla perfect or super positive but reception was at least acceptable. It was not praised immensely but it wasn't criticized to death either. It had a number of flaws initially but the flaws were not as crippling as SC (2013)'s. A more positive launch? Really? At least at launch, SC4 was a headache to install but playable by most people who got a copy. ...and of course, people could save and load normally without all their progress deleted because... um... the servers failed to sync. You obviously didn't have the internet and/or use internet forums back then. The forums were a buzz with claims of EA buying the reviews and releasing a half baked product to market because the original game suffered from many issues that rendered it almost unplayable and constantly crashing. To add insult to injury EA released Simcity 4 Deluxe to market in less than a year for $30 while releasing Rush Hour for $20. Rush Hour contained a highly Yes gamers didn't trust the reviews of Simcity 4 either. This is ridiculous nonsense and baseless. SC4 vanilla was criticized by many people due to computer performance but the difference between mean scores, standard deviation, and range of scores between users and the press did not differ so ... "violently". Sure, the general consensus was that it could have been a better polished game if some time had been spent to test the game, but otherwise, SC4 was playable on launch day. Hell, I followed SC4's development back then and I can even remember the "Is it ethical to include the WTC Towers as landmarks in SC4?" debate. Take a sample of video game magazines and internet reviews and blogs back in 2003. The lowest magazine review for SC4 I ever saw was from some computer magazine with a score of 50% and the highest from another gaming magazine with 100%. Internet website scores ranged from the upper 60's to the mid 90s. Scores below 66 and above 93 were uncommon and we can safely say they were outliers; majority of gaming magazines and websites (some published around March or April 2003) gave scores that were between the upper 60s and lower 90s. That is a pretty reasonable range of scores and we can deduce that the mean score from reviewers were around the 70s to mid 80s region. (Actually majority of them were). Most "normal users" in 2003 gave scores within the 60s, 70s, 80s (with some outliers in the 50s and 90s). It's a bigger range of scores but but the estimated mean average wouldn't be too far from the critic's reviews. Probably lower but the range of scores between the critics and "normal reviewers" did not differ a lot. Heck, I remember following Gamefaqs and IGN reviews after the launch. The reviews (mostly) gave SC4 an acceptable score. SC4 was far from perfect but it was decent enough. If you can remember, a lot of the crappy reviews were complaints about Aspyr's crappy version of SC4. SC4 on the Apple with Intel Processors were the ones which received the butt of the criticism. Windows version was somewhat flawed but operated okay with a few hiccups. Seriously, EA was nowhere near the crisis they are having now. When was the last time the SimCity staff and company officers were forced to apologize to hundreds of users for problems with the launch? Was Will Wright running around in his pajamas, with a bag of money in the snow, in early 2003, just to refund angry customers just 48 hours after SC4 was launched? Compared to SC4' s bumpy but "okay enough" launch, SC (2013)'s launch is an epic PR disaster with so many people demanding refunds ...... and only 48 hours have passed.

I predicted this would happen. Even if you had good internet connection, it won't protect you from server failures. And I knew the idea of not allowing "normal" saving/loading was a doomed idea from the beginning. I expected people to eventually see the bigger picture now but I never expected hundreds of people to demand refunds in the first 24 hours. This is a "Public Relations" disaster for EA.

I feel bad for all the video game store workers and credit card companies that have to cancel or refund the orders. This will be a bad week for them.

*clap*Clap*Clap*   Amazing shot!    MMPs are excellent. I wish I had them. 

Don't get the CAM if you are not sure about what to do. It is a permanent game changing mod and adds extra developments stages. It is VERY difficult to uninstall if ever you need to do so. There is the XXdita Turbo Mod on sc4devotion.com which can be removed from the Plugins folders anytime (some minor risks, however). It fixes the simulation a LOT but might be CPU intensive. It can be used with or without the CAM. I HIGHLY recommend it since it is not a radical mod and is very safe. It is also compatible with the SPAM. The SPAM Traffic Mod is not compatible with the NAM.

SimCity city sizes will “eventually” expand, says Maxis Omri Petitte at 07:01pm March 1 2013 We’ve already examined the effects of SimCity’s city size limitation after Maxis stressed the necessity of the restriction for a gain in performance. City sizes will remain fixed when the game launches next Tuesday, but in the words of Gandalf (who’d make a pretty great mayor), “Hope remains.” Speaking toIncGamers, Creative Director Ocean Quigley says SimCity’s team “could certainly make the city sizes larger” as a reaction to more powerful hardware setups. “We need to keep in mind that SimCity is a mainstream game,” Quigley clarifies. “It’s not a game that’s only going to run on high-end gaming PCs. It has to run in your dad’s PC as well. We’ll eventually get around to expanding the city size, but I can’t make any promises as to when.” Yeah, well, my dad just installed his second Titan, so there. In any case, the prospect of seeing my populace spread across the map in a wave of prosperity and garbage trucks feels exciting indeed. That is, of course, if Maxis’ plans involves a substantial grid increase and not a fractional bump—I’d like to see the amazing GlassBox Engine roar with its newfound freedom, not mumble.

Sorry, that's false. I remember 2003 very well and I remember the transition from SC 3000 Unlimited to SC4. Hell, I played vanilla SC4 last year. I even have copies of gaming magazines from back then. SC4 was rated by most as a step up in many ways from the well - presented but terribly glitched SC 3000/Unlimited. It did not get many perfect scores but it was far from negative and nowhere near the server crisis EA is having right now. The general consensus at the time of release was that: "Only patches could save SC4 from all the bugs". Otherwise most were somewhat okay with it and many praised the region and God mode idea. Compare it to this launch with hundreds of users across the internet demanding a refund or unable to unlock or play the game due to EA's poor servers. The standard deviation in scores for SC (2013) (as of the time I write this) is quite big. Not many people found SC4 vanilla perfect or super positive but reception was at least acceptable. It was not praised immensely but it wasn't criticized to death either. It had a number of flaws initially but the flaws were not as crippling as SC (2013)'s. A more positive launch? Really? At least at launch, SC4 was a headache to install but playable by most people who got a copy. ...and of course, people could save and load normally without all their progress deleted because... um... the servers failed to sync.

Refunds Offered for Launch Issues [Mar 05, 2013, 09:36 am ET] EA announces that the Windows edition of SimCity is now available in North America, saying the OS X edition of Maxis' urban planning reboot will follow sometime this spring. The SimCity Website has a blog post from Kip Katsarelis where the Senior Producer on the project offers some thoughts on what to expect. The first review scores are up on Metacritic, where it has so far received much acclaim from critics, while the user score scrapes along the bottom, as many gamers are using this opportunity to voice disapproval of the game's DRM, which requires it to be played online. On that topic, the Origin twitter account has a steady stream of tweets explaining delays in distributing and unlocking the game though the Origin service, which is struggling with the demand, at various times saying the delay to unlock the game would span 90 minutes to as much as four hours. Polygon has word from Origin global community manager Marcel Hatam that the service is still struggling, and they note a post on the EA Forums sympathizing with frustration at the delays, and offering refunds for unhappy customers. They explain that they understand how important pre-loads are to a smooth launch, and apologize that they could not put this knowledge to use in this case, saying: "This didn't come together for SimCity unfortunately, for which I again apologize." http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=viewthread&boardid=1&threadid=139619&id=836165 ======= How I got my copy of SimCity refunded (and you can too) http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/19po9s/how_i_got_my_copy_of_simcity_refunded_and_you_can/ I'm not the kind to hang around, so I got out my cell phone and immediately called my credit card company (Capital One if anyone is interested) - they agreed that this wasn't fair and that they'd send me a form in the post to formally make the claim. I told the manager this and he balked. He looked visibly annoyed by the situation but was restrained. He sighed and offered me an in-store credit or exchange. This was good enough for me. If nothing else my grandson (who appreciates games a bit more than I do) would find use for it. It's not strictly a refund, but I can only hope that the turn of events somehow makes it's way up and someone up there learns that this isn't a way to treat paying customers. Loved and lost, all within about an hour and a half. ====== I really do not want to add to EA's misery but their customer care is ill - equipped to deal with this crisis. Many people have to wait for hours for help. Things will get even worse tomorrow when the game is released in more countries. "SimCity Refund" is trending on Google. I feel sorry for all the people who work in video game stores and in credit card companies. This week will be a very LONG week for them. Hopefully, things will improve and I hope EA learns from this.

Why? Please, explain me why you people keep defending companies like EA. I really see no point in doing that. Life doesn't work this way. If you do something wrong and it's your fault, you get the blame. It's as simple as this. EA only cares about money and the result of this behaviour is in front of your eyes. I'm really happy things went so badly (and they're only going to get worse as soon as Europe starts playing the game) because this is the only way to make you people understand you need to stop paying for broken and rushed games. Open your eyes. They built a game around DRM and constant internet connection at the price of gameplay and quality. They put limits (I can only built so many cities... WHAT?!?) that made this game a parody of what a SimCity game should be. Remember when City XL came out? The first one I mean. They wanted to make an MMO out of it. Remember how it ended? You are fueling this market with your money. They feed on your tears. It's time to stop it. Don't you think? Err... ???? I don't think I ever defended any of EA' s decisions with this game. I even predicted things would go wrong on the first day since you can't save/load "normally". But, I never expected hundreds of people to ask for refunds after Day 1. I haven't bought the game yet. If so many people are asking for refunds, that is a bad sign for me. I hope they get things right next time. Things will get worse when it gets released in more countries. Dear EA: We told you!

^^ LOL.

I had a bad feeling this would happen. Well, it was expected but I never imagined it would happen on this scale. Dear EA, I am not trying to be rude here (and I really hate to make things worse) but the sad truth is this:

Samuel Jackson tries to resume SimCity (2013) when the servers are down...

That's a very good BAT, blunder! It looks like Cloud Gate in Chicago by Anish Kapoor. http://anishkapoor.com/

Did the road go under the bridge in the first pic? Is this a new NAM feature? 

Thanks for making this. NAM Team did a really good job with the FAR and curvy roads.

Modern HK style city and beautiful water mod. Where did you get that? :) 

Bravo! Excellent update! 

This is why they hate the game: Towns too small A system of roads ultra painful (they hate the road system) Unable to select the direction of a building Too frequent disasters AI sometimes calamitous Many inconsistencies Lack of explanation for the uninitiated Often cities again, this is not great (this I do't understand) No metro (Subway) Yeah they don't like the game because it is too American. What on earth? How did you ...? Do you really think that ...? ... oh never mind... Next! --------------------------- I don't read early reviews. I am far more concerned about the long - term sustainability. I believe I have stated here before that SimCity (2013) would be fun in the short run but with its limited save slots and other limitations I am still worried about its future and lifespan. Unlike other genres, city - builders require time investment beyond the first months of play. We will see if it stands the test of time. Will it stagnate 3 years from now or will it still be going strong? 5 years? 10 years?

If the game had performance - scaling options then there would be fewer compromises... Mr. Krabs smells....DLC.

I believe the main principles behind the development of the Glassbox simulation are good in general. It could use some work to fully maximize potential. I would suggest that they put in some performance scaling options so that we could balance the game for everyone. People with higher end PCs could maximize the game as they see fit and people with lower end hardware could pick options to suit theirs. That's a fair trade - off. They could have included all options and just let customers customize and play around with the performance settings and depth of the simulation. I run SC4 with the powerful XXdita Turbo Mod since my PC handles it very comfortably. Others say it gives their PC a heart attack and uninstall it. But that's the nice thing about personalized and individualized games: you can play around with the performance and remove or adjust things that don't work. Even the NAM team takes that into consideration with the traffic controller plugin. That said, the bigger problem might be the "always - online" requirement and the necessity to keep cities "live". From EA's point of view, people who have the hardware to maximize the potential of the Glassbox might have a "unfair advantage" over others in the world leaderboards and the global market. I feel the lack of "real" performance scaling options may be intentional to keep everyone equal. This is unlike SimCity 4 which is extremely individualized and there is 0 consequence of what I do in my cities to someone else's. To be fair, we have yet to see the true power of the Glassbox Engine potential. Removing the online requirement and making it optional would be a good start: That would make the game easier to personalize and allow people to go all the way and hopefully features from the previous games could be included without compromise. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is not related to SimCity in any way, but this is what a game engine could look like if you "cut corners" in the right places. This is Konami's FOX Engine on the PS3. (I know someone will accuse me of "comparing apples and oranges" but this is just to demonstrate and nothing more ). It's incredibly detailed and supports big environments. In 6: 06 you can see blue "strobe" lights to hide the blur in the background. The FOX engine uses similar "tricks" to "simulate" parts near the player while "hiding" stuff without compromising CPU performance or "draw speed".

3:22 "..Road density was the most straight forward way [to control what grows next to the roads].." Surely, the developers could have just controlled the type of zoning density (low, medium, high density) if you wanted to control what grows next to the roads? That would be a simple solution. There's hardly a correlation between road density and what grows next to it. New York, Los Angeles, Manila, Tokyo, etc... ----- The music sounds nice.

Most likely it will be DLC. Indeed.