mcallisterw

We hear this a lot, usually people arguing that the things others have picked out as faults with the new SimCity are more realistic. In reality cities are built within specified boundaries and if as mayor you don't like the fact there is only one road in from a highway which falls outside your city, you just have to work with that limitation... In real life you can't terraform the land before you build, and so on. All I will say is, I like my cities to look like real cities (key word being 'look'), but if realism were the main way on which SimCity should be judged then in real life one person can't decide everything about the city. Real mayors don't decide which land to allocate for housing, where to put schools and roads etc. If SimCity were designed this way then your job as mayor would be to chair meetings to decide what to do about an issue, listen to proposals that were put forward by other councillors, council officers or members of the public; vote along with the other councillors on which proposal to accept and then hire a consultant to do the actual designing. And the best bit is you don't even get to pick which consultant! You do get a casting vote though if the votes are tied, and perhaps being mayor gives you more influence over other councillors. Good idea for SimCity 6?

What's been going on here... Still a lot of mud-slinging (with pictures of mud-slinging to boot) going on. Happily the thread's more on a productive course though. I'm with GenX in that I really do want to like the game... personally I have no beef with the graphics which have been described as bland or cartoony or somesuch. But I like to create and I feel I don't get enough of that in this game. I know being able to rename things and drop labels doesn't add anything to the gameplay, but I miss it, and part of my disappointment at the lack of things like terraforming and control over access points into your city isn't just about gameplay but also about customisability... The main reason I got bored is I'd toyed with all the plots of land on offer I didn't find one I really liked. There's lots of stuff I really like about the game, but not enough to overcome what I don't like and actually make the game enjoyable to play. When I said that this was just the reality of a new game for a new demographic I wasn't really enthused about that, I would much rather play the games of the styles I know and love. I don't know whether it's just me being older and grumpy and intolerant of what the kids do these days, or whether I actually have a point when I talk of lost utopianism and games being all about collecting and sharing... maybe collecting and sharing is the new challenge... the new games won't be about solving puzzles that are logical and mathematical at hard (if pleasingly chaotic), but will be about managing social relationships, making friends with someone who can gift you that really cool building you want (yes I know Sim City doesn't work like that... yet) But yeah, gameplay too. Terraforming is all part of the joy of making a city that is all yours... it's not as much fun if everyone's building on the same land. And maybe people wouldn't feel the desire to terraform as much if you had the whole Earth to choose where to build your city, but you don't you have a few measly options. If I want my city to be at the mouth of a river that flows into a bay with a couple other rivers, with cliffs running through the city centre... why shouldn't I be able to? I could in SC4, and now suddenly I can't. As I said earlier, I was probably wrong to assume that 'SimCity' in the title of a game meant something. I should have treated the game as if it were a newcomer.

The first couple of Sim Cities paid very little attention to realism, who ever saw an actual completed arcology? I know there has been one under construction in the Arizona desert for decades now; and I believe on the original, if you so chose, you could build your city on the moon. At the same time there is realism of another level, in the way that the city grew organically. I would say that over the course of the whole series there has been a shift from that kind of scientific realism, with it's inbuilt utopianism towards a more social/domestic realism, where small details and individual Sims are much more important... I don't think EA sat down and said 'this is what we want to do', I think it's what happens when they sat down and said 'people like the Sims, and they like FarmVille, what can we learn from that?'

Personally I've hardly played SimCity 2013, I played it for a week after I bought it, then got bored with it... I will probably reinstall SC4 though, I loved that game. I think the problem is mainly the fact that in the 6 or 7 years (can't remember off hand) since SC4 came out, a lot in the gaming world has changed... and with many of the people who were originally responsible for Sim City no longer being at Maxis, EA have I think, built the game from the ground up, and tried to appeal to 'new' gamers who wouldn't have even thought about games before the more twee types of games you get on Facebook came out. Ultimately it's a new game for a new demographic of gamers Personally I've said before that gaming now is less about challenge, practice and perfect, and more about create (within set limitations, don't want to present people with too many choices), solve simple but varied puzzles and share what you've done. Unfortunately our problem (or at least my problem) Is we put too much stock in the fact that the game was called Sim City, we assumed things about the game that were never actually said. I bought the game after looking at the website and getting excited that a new Sim City was coming out. I read a lot of stuff about the game on the website, and it looked fantastic, all this stuff about city specialisation, modular buildings and yes (hangs head) curvy roads. It never said that you would build huge metropolises, create your own regions, build highways, play with different modes of transport or name everything in your city what you want. I just assumed that the name 'SimCity' implied all those things... I was wrong. Can we draw a line under this please... You've got me confused with who you want me to be, not who I actually am. You keep pulling quotes out of my original post but chopping off the bit at the beginning of the post when I said things like 'not this' or 'this is what some other people say'. As I said, I never said terraforming was unrealistic, I said that some people use 'it's more realistic' when defending the fact you can no longer terraform.

No different people mean different things, some people mean the things you said, some people mean the things I said, I was never trying to say 'all people mean this',,, but you are.

I know no-one has ever said there should be a committee etc. that was my example of 'you say you want realism, well this is an extreme example of realism'. But I have encountered people who weigh in on discussions about the way region play works and the other limitations of the game, defending the limitations by saying that it is more in line with how real cities work. Yes there are also people who are criticising SC2013 in relation to SC4 using realism as an argument too, but those weren't the people I meant. In truth I don't think whether or not something is realistic should be an argument at all, not as far as the city-building process is concerned anyway (like I said I personally like to create cities that look realistic, but sometimes in SC4 the process of creating this city meant doing some things which were 'unrealistic', my point is that i don't care about those things) I think I speak a different language to everyone else. No doubt the next person will read this post and instead of what I've written they'll see 'I think terraforming is a government conspiracy' and will post a response to that instead.

*Sigh* I've had enough of being snarky now and hoping that the penny drops with you guys so I'm just gonna have to spell it out now. @Bravogreenone, yeah having looked through the posts I had noticed that you were the only one not calling me retarded. Actually I've decided what probably happened is that no-one actually read the original post. Most people probably just read GenXisT's post and inferred what was going on from that. My original post starts 'We hear this a lot, usually people arguing that the things others have picked out as faults with the new SimCity are more realistic.' I.e. I was saying that when we complain about the lack of terraforming, city size etc. other people use the claim of realism to say why they think it's better. This is what we call a straw man, a hypothetical opponent created to argue against, in my case the whole terraforming shebacle was one of the things the straw man has said (that's the straw man, not me, the straw man). It's not even an important part of my post, the point was that realism shouldn't be an measure of quality of SimCity, it's already unrealistic in that you don't have to delegate decisions to a committee, but nobody would want a SimCity where you had to do that. I think GenXisT has skim-read the post and gotten the straw man confused with me. Unfortunately it's kicked off this retard-o-fest which is a shame, because it means when I try and point of your errors it makes it look like I'm some kind of troll, and I'm not, I didn't start the thread with any intention of causing all of this. And while we're on the subject of terraforming, when the straw man said in real life you can't terraform, I know I don't agree with the straw man (that's the whole point of having a straw man), but I did have in mind someone thinking it was unrealistic that you can build mountains and such, not someone thinking it was unrealistic to reclaim land from the sea or prepare land with earth-moving equipment. For the record I do want terraforming to be available in the game, my point is that I don't care whether or not people can build mountains in real life. I'm a town-planner by trade, I used to work on an earth-works site and have managed some of the machinery GenXisT puts in his/her post (not the last one though, that is insane), so I know fine well what can be achieved.

I suggest you all read my original post again (you may have to read it a few times, I understand limited intellects such as yourself won't get it on the first go). It does make me chuckle though at how much effort you guys put in to attacking a straw man (if you don't know what a straw man is, Google it, it'll only be a tiny bit of extra Googling for one day). No you didn't read my last paragraph correctly. P.S. Having now taken time to read through I'm gonna excuse BravoGreenOne of this comment, however GenXisT gets s double helping of stoopid for actually employing irony in his/her response... it's a riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a quote box.

I have as it happens... used to live in Grand Rapids. Also, you could visit most of the major cities in the Netherlands without ever seeing any countryside, or drive between places like Liverpool and Manchester, or along the Ruhr valley in Germany

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/03/depressing-suburbanisation-simcity This is an article from the cultural section of a chiefly political/current affairs magazine. They take an interesting slant on their review of SimCity here and one that picks up on one of those things about the game that I couldn't quite put my fingers on, but I knew was missing. The article focusses a lot on the lack of transport options, and the fact you can no longer avoid a total reliance on roads (now that roads are even required to carry power and water), but it mentions arcologies too and gives some examples of super-cities concieved by committed gamers in previous versions, which had no roads, or in which everyone lived in high density super-blocks. It got me thinking that the new SimCity really is missing the utopianism of the earlier games. I remember a big part of the original SimCity was in reflecting the idealism that existed in town-planning at the time, and then came the arcologies and futuristic clean power sources of SC2K, you could build a dirty city or attempt to recreate cities similar to the one you lived in, or you could try and build a hi-tech clean green city (personally I like to do a combination of all of the above and create a storied city which has had the traditional European style medieval layout and the dirty factories, but which is now modernising). SC3K and SC4 did away with some of this, no more arcologies and this has culminated in the latest incarnation, which the review linked above describes much better than I can. So read it.

The money is there, but not the will to spend it. Particularly in the U.S., suburban taxpayers will balk at sinking money into mass transit, but will happily approve multibillion dollar freeways in the exurbs so that new subdivisions can be built. In Houston, the west side Republicans have relentlessly tried to cripple the Houston MTA because, in the minds of the suburbanites and exurbanites, mass transit is just a charity program for poor inner-city minorities. The pervasiveness of the car culture here is insane, so much so that people who don't or can't drive are treated as invalids, and owning a car (and the detached house to park it in) is considered THE gate to adulthood. As a result, our light rail system is years behind schedule, and anything more advanced than a streetcar ends up staying on the drawing board for eternity. It could be that the money is more spread out that it was before, cities that have built trams here have had to look for private investment and funding from various regional, central and European government bodies. All this consensus-building takes time and there is the possibility that while you're concentrating on getting funding from Y, X will withdraw their funding because it is taking too long. When I was in Liverpool (whose tram system plans are still on the drawing board due to this exact situation), there was a little public opposition to the trams, people saying it was a waste of money (the sort of people whose arguments, if followed to their logical conclusion would result in 100% of the national budget being used to pay nurses, nothing against nurses but every piece of public spending is weighed against the number of nurses you could have hired for that money, people saying 'I think it's criminal that the council are spending money on this new bypass, that could have paid for 20 nurses'). Edinburgh's tram system has become nationally known for the fact it has taken them (so far I think) almost 10 years to build a single line through the city centre. I think it's the same sort of thing going on there.

Flicking through the forum I've seen a lot of people, who like the new city sizes and region layouts, saying they think it is realistic because in the real world cities don't all merge into each other, there is countryside between etc. etc. Well besides the fact that in most urbanised parts of the world cities do merge together, that's not the real issue I have. Personally I just don't like the fact that all you can hope to design is a city centre in the size of the tile, and then there will be no inner-city, no suburbs... it will just go skyscraper, skyscraper, skyscraper, virgin meadow.

The following quote: from this article http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/29/4161422/simcity-pedestrians-teleport I don't want to obsess over the details of it, as though I really want to be able to micromanage my power station. It's the reason they gave as to why they simplified this that bothers me. It seems to suggest that the possibility of being able to do something incorrectly is seen as a negative feature of a game.

It's happening in a lot of places, over here, Sheffield, Manchester, Nottingham and Edinburgh have reintroduced trams recently. Often running on streets in the city centre, but then switching to dedicated lines in the suburbs. However this was largely a noughties phenomenon, Liverpool were in the advanced stages of planning a new tram system but with public cuts that has hit the skids (excuse the pun). As Cobhris says, in a lot of European cities the trams have always been running. Blackpool is the only city in the UK that still has its original tram system, or the only major city at least. I have an old map of Liverpool on my wall, and if you look at that you can see tram-lines literally everywhere, I doubt we'll see a return of tram systems like that. It may be that monorails and subways can handle more passengers than trams, but trams, and their cousins, guided-busways, have the advantage of dropping you right on the street as opposed to some feet above or below it; also monorails and subway systems are astonishingly expensive and nowhere in the Western world I think has that kind of money anymore. As for the idealism, I think that is probably down to SimCity no longer being Will Wright's personal project and the corporatisation that EA have brought to the table. The originals reflected his personality, whereas currently there is no personality to reflect. Big companies like EA would probably prefer to steer clear of idealism, lest it offend any of their sponsors and investors.

I certainly don't think that those of use who want a more involved and complex game are some tiny niche, we make up a sizable (if no longer the majority) number of the gaming community. The same goes for 'hardcore' gamers the world over. Well not even hardcore, I certainly don't consider myself a hardcore gamer, I will play a game for, at most an hour at a time, but I would still prefer something more challenging and with more scope for creative solutions to problems. Even though we no longer form a majority of the market for games, we are less fickle, the danger the companies like EA make in abandoning the 'persevere and innovate' model of gaming preferred by this market in order to chase the larger social gaming market who want to 'collect and share' is that the people they are going hell-for-leather to court are people who might not be customers for very long. All it would take is for someone to design a game from the ground up to appeal to the social market, something like a beefed up downloadable version of a Facebook game, like CafeWorld with more options for customising your cafe and sharing it, and better graphics but still intertwined with Facebook, and EA's imagined market for the DLC they are planning to release will be gone.

Sure there are games that are so esoteric in what you have to do to succeed at a particular task that you give up, but the whole point of a game is that there is some legitimate challenge. I'm not saying SimCity2013 poses no challenge whatsoever but I was a little worried by the suggestion that the reason for removing something from the game was that it was possible to get it wrong.

I think we probably just have to accept the fact that we, the gamers, for so long used to being the market for the gaming industry are now relegated to the level of niche market within a gaming industry that is now catering towards people who want to collect and share rather than think and challenge and who would be put off by a game that brings with it the possibility of losing (or in the case of SimCity, struggling). The big players don't see the need to cater for this niche market. I'm sure there will be a DLC at some point to increase city size and bring back a few more of the other features we used to love (am I the only one here who sorely misses being able to rename streets, neighbourhoods, buildings etc?) I can only hope that it will be a single expansion and not what someone else mentioned before where you have to pay each time you want to increase your city size by a small amount. As for EA moving the goalposts on what it considers to be hacking, and banning customers from playing the game, I hope that this won't happen, or that if it does it is found to be illegal. I also hope that (if future expansions tempt me back to playing the game) they don't then retire the servers without allowing offline play. All this sort of behaviour by the big game manufacturers, placing onerous restrictions on the enjoyment of their product. Piracy is still on the increase and they are only playing into the pirates' hands. Piracy is no longer about simply wanting to play a game but not wanting to pay for it. Now it's about taking back control of your own gaming, breaking free of the shackles DRM and anti-modding EULA's place on you, while at the same time sending a clear message to games developers that if you put out shoddy, unfinished, dumbed down games with draconian DRM, then you can't count on starry-eyed gaming fans buying it simply because it's the next installment of a title they love. For me personally, except for any future update which I will consider paying for just to make my original £40 outlay worthwhile, I think in future I will steer clear of any game made by EA.

Hi, I'm new to Simtropolis, I came here to see what other people were saying they liked and disliked and have decided to chip in myself with my thoughts. Like most of you I have played every previous version of SimCity (except Societies) and thought SimCity 4 with the rush hour expansion pack was a very difficult act to follow. On the first day, I played through the tutorial, but that was as far as I got, server issues kept me off the game for the rest of the day, I returned yesterday and managed to get enough time for about 2 hours of gaming, in which I built two cities. I won't dwell on server issues here though, i'll just get a couple of concerns about the always-online DRM concept out of the way at the start. Firstly that this game cost a lot more than most other new releases this year and I'm sure that most of that is becuase we're paying for them to run the servers. In no other industry could the manufactuers of the product get away with adding a feature which limits customer's use of it in order to benefit the manufacturer and then ramp up the price to cover the costs of the feature. Secondly it signifies that EA no longer think they are designing a game like previous SimCitys were, which people will continue to play for many years after they stop supporting the game. As soon as they require the servers for a new game, everyone's copies of SimCity 2013 will become worthless. So initially the game impressed me, the graphics were beautiful (though I found the camera movement a bit limited) and the look and feel of the interface were very nice. I had also been looking forward to drawing curved roads (living in the UK where roads generally aren't straight it's nice to be able to build cities with a similar layout to real cities I know), and the system for drawing roads I found works very well, allowing me to draw curved or straight roads, specific shapes (should I decide I want a perfectly circular road), and better till helping me if I want to draw parallel curved roads. These are mainly cosmetic features, but it brings me to another couple of things I liked about the game. I like the way that roads dictacte land use, you assign zones to frontages rather than parcels of land, and assigning zones is free (with roads being more costly to make up). This caught me out a couple of times, you can quickly run out of cash drawing a road because you're used to being able to scatter streets here and there at very little cost in earlier SimCitys. The type of road also dictates the density of the zone, which is in keeping with what I've already said about roads but I haven't decided whether or not I prefer this to having control of density myself. There are a few other things I liked as well before I get to my criticisms of the game. I really do like the new data views, more beautiful, clearer and more useful than in any previous versions of the game, and I also like the interactions with the citizens of your city, the little thought bubbles above houses and little symbols that pop up to give you instant feedback on things such as adding a park in a residential area makes the people who live there happier. The idea of being able to extend buildings is really good as well. It's nice to know that eventually each school in your city will have its own unique appearance, and if you need extra capacity it is more realistic to extend what you have first, before demolishing a small building to build a bigger one. The first issue is the thing I noticed right from the outset. I went to start a new game and had a look at all the regions available to me to build in. None of them really took my fancy, I like a city on the mouth of a river which I can build a port around and bridges across. Never mind, I'll create my own using the terrain editor... except I can't becuase there isn't one. Suddently it seemed like there were very few options for where I could start my city, big disappointment before I'd even started a game, never mind, let's get started. The biggest criticism I have, which many other people on here are also complaining about is the size of the cities you can build. The trailers gave the impression this game would continue in the fine tradition of SimCity of building on an epic scale and I was looking forward to getting started on my own metropolis. Unfortunately the first city I selected was very small. 'Is that it?' I thought, 'I must have selected a beginner city, I'll go back to the regions and find a bigger city'. Unfortunately as most of you now know. This is your lot.... literally! This is SimCity not SimNeighbourhood, the biggest complaint is hinted at in my very first paragraph 'the first two hours of gaming, in which I built two cities'. When I say I built two cities, I mean I filled the city area and ran out of space, this isn't something which should happen after two hours in SimCity, this is something that you work at for days and feel very proud when you achieve. Although as someone on this forum has already pointed out that the objective of the game isn't to create a square city that fills your whole area, wth SimCity 4, you could then start building seamlessly into the neighbouring area, but as areas don't neighbour each other any more, that is no longer an option. Another thing I like with my cities is the ability to customise them, renaming buildings and streets and plopping neighbourhood signs was all part of the in-depth SimCity experience. You didn't just have a collection of roads and buildings like some kind of engineering project, you had a living breathing city. I feel that SimNeighbourhood has pared back seriously on the customisabilty, starting with the removal of the ability to name things but I also notice that gone are the options for which kind of bridge you want when you cross water. I know that the ability to name streets wasn't included in SC4 until the Rush Hour expansion pack, but from the general feel of this game, I doubt will see any expansions like that for SimNeighbourhood. There is also a lot of paring back of the micromanagement aspects of SimCity 2013, I won't bother to list everything I've seen here, but I think most of us will agree when I say this iteration of the game seems a lot more 'dumbed down' than before. EA are seeing the success of simpler games like *shudder* Farmville, and going for the mass market, are there not enough people who like an in-depth game with many layers of complexity to drill down into, to keep EA in business? It doesn't seem so here, but maybe I'm wrong, the game has been a big seller so far and maybe it will become a huge smash, breaking into markets which SimCity previously didn't reach. Maybe the marketing guys in the EA boardroom are high-fiving each other as I speak. Overall I think the game is a lot easier, they throw mini-challenges at you, but in the original games, the real challenge was simply to build a functioning city, and this no longer feels like a challenge. This is another thing inherited from the 'Appmageddon', games that are really just cute diversions, no challenges because people who play apps don't like losing, they want to create (but don't want to customise really) and then share, and perform the odd little challenge. So in conclusion, I have compared the game with apps and browser games like Farmville, and I think that is pretty much what we have here, a new SimCity for the appmageddon, SimCity Lite, SimNeighbourhood, Townville. At most a pretty diversion. The biggest disappointment is that already I'm getting a little bored of the game, I've only been playing for a few hours and it already seems repetitive. I didn't wake up this morning exciting to play the game, I didn't play it until late last night. I really don't know how long this game will keep my imagination for. Which is a shame, because in my view the things it does badly are the things which SimCity always stood out for doing well.

I wouldn't say that EA particularly wanted all of this to happen, or that it is good for business. Sure they got all their money from those of us who bought the game from the outset simply becuase it was SimCity; and sure they probably knew that they didn't need to put a lot of effort in becuase those same people would pre-order the game as soon as it became available; but they also know that a lot of gamers out there are now thinking 'hmm, perhaps in future I should assume that I won't enjoy any game EA come out with'. They've lost a dedicated and insatiable market because they are chasing a fickle and casual one, this is likely to come back to bite them in the long run as they find that they are easily outcompeted by the likes of Zwinga while smaller independents are muscling in on serious gamer's markets. Sure they can just buy their competitors (as EA are known to do) but at a vastly inflated price. I think for EA the opportunity to strike while the iron is hot has already passed, a lot of people who have now decided not to bother with EA games in the future might have stopped playing SimCity and might not even notice if EA were to release a fix that gave the gamers everything they wanted. As far as the EU is concerned, seriously dude? What are you on? But yeah it's not so much that the game as a product rather than a service changes the fact that it is copyrighted and licenced, think of it more like a car. You buy a car from Ford, you don't own the right to reverse-engineer and copy the car, but you can modify the car you do own. EA can legally use the always-online requirement as part of their DRM, but if they use it to deny people access to the game then they are breaking the law for the exact same reason as Ford would be breaking the law if they decided you weren't driving their car right and tried to take it back. Of course when I say 'breaking the law', EU law carries no weight in itself, instead member nations must incorporate it into their own laws, and all the EU can do if they don't is tut noisily.

I think though that at some point in all of that it stops becoming a city planning simulator and starts to become a rubix cube with buildings instead of blocks. People bought the game because they wanted to design a city, and wanted a challenge... but they feel they got the latter without the former... and not so much of the latter either.

Someone on a review I read pointed out a flaw I'd hardly noticed myself but now I have noticed it seems like such a glaring flaw. In some maps, you can only have one road in and out of your city, and no matter how smartly you plan your roads around your city, you'll always have traffic jams on that one road. As for realism, I don't know, certainly the small city size gives its own challenges, but I wouldn't call it realistic. The small town I live in at the moment would spread over several map tiles if it were to be recreated in SimCity, to build a big city you end up with a standalone city centre with no suburbs at all, just a big square mass of skyscrapers surrounded by untouched virgin land. I know of nowhere like that in real life. In theory, even if they provided a larger map tile, I think that redeveloping the centre of your city would be a good idea as opposed to always only building new development on the outside of your city. The cost of building new roads means that a new brownfield development would be much better value for money than a new suburb.

It seems a point has been reached where I'm now too bored of the game to be bothered playing it. I went to play and apparently when you save a game you save it to a particualar server, so you can only resume your save game on that server. So my previous server is now always full, I selected another server and discovered that additionally I now have to play the tutorial again. So I just quit the game, this is the first time in almost a week I have come to the game, and it doesn't have enough of a hold on me for me to be bothered going through minor inconveniences like this in order to play it. I shall keep an eye on the game to see if any updates make it a better game.

Don't quote me on this, but I read an article in PC Format today entitled 'Could Steam Be Evil'. It was a pretty lighthearted article about doomsday scenarios involving Steam leading to a dystopian future. Anyways, one of the things they mentioned was the possibility of the big game developers deciding to turn servers off after a few years, or preventing people selling licences so games can be sold as second hand. The upshot is, a European Union ruling has decreed that a computer game is a product, not a service. Therefore if they turn off the servers (without at least turning off the DRM so it can be played offline), they are infringing consumer rights in the same way that the dealer who sold you a car on finance can't decide a few years down the line 'Actually I don't want to you make any more payments, I want the car back instead'.

I'd love it if they did. I'm not massively hopeful though. As far as expansion packs go, it would be a pretty major one and I don't think EA have the appetite for it. This isn't the only game I've played this year that has led to me to think that PC Gaming is increasingly becoming led by the browser/app/casual gaming market. As far as the large developers are concerned away.

But the game is called SimCity, its marketed as the successor to SimCity... EA told us it was the successor to SimCity. Your point would be valid if they had called it SimNeighbourhood, but they didn't so it's not.