baertooth

Recently a dev from Maxis said they were helping modders make content and that they hadn't abandoned Simcity2013 when asked if they were doing any more patches etc. If I had to guess what it is Capton knows, it's probably tools to help modders make 3rd party content.

My one suggestion would be to make only a few generic buildings, cars, sims, etc. and don't waste your time on making content for the game. Instead make tools to make content and release those so you can focus on game mechanics. The community will happily (if the game mechanics are good) make content for the game for you. That way you can focus on the underlying quality of the game but still have a critical area of the game still advance (and advance in a way the customer wants as they are making the content). Then I would try to hook up with Simtropolis to get them to host the community generated content so you don't have to moderate that.

Doubt there is an easy way to do this. Maybe uninstall then reinstall just the base game would probably work the best.

This was suggested about 30seconds after everyone found out how they were handling regions way back in the wee days of development.

EA Forum to post comments The blog post itself

All well and good but EA is the company that buys it's competitors and closes them just for their IP and then seek to force their milk you to death business model down the throats off all gamers. It will take years and years for EA to live down their current reputation. As is I don't see EA any different than they were a year, two years, or five years ago until they start acting differently. All I have seen so far is they are starting to see their actions are affecting their bottom line and what can they do to increase the bottom line. I don't see the recognition that repeatedly screwing the customer, even if it's just a little tiny bit, adds up each time it happens until... this happens.

Concerning adjacent tiles... It could be something to do with regional connectivity/balance and distribution of agents. At worst I would imagine the map is laid out in such a way to give an illusion of size. The only limiting factor that I'm 100% aware of is a 7 connection (air, sea, road), etc, limit per city. It would be good to have this improved so that city tiles could sit next to each other connecting on all sides to produce a larger city, even if these do need to be micro-managed. However, I'm still trying to get to the bottom of where this 7 limit comes from, what technical decisions are surrounding it (if any) and whether improvements to it can be made or not. This is from the thread the above link points to in the Simcity forum.

If Maxis continues to work on SC2013 I think they might eventually allow modding. But probably that modding will be things like new buildings or props but not things like NAM or game influencing or changing mods. Essentially just filler content. However look at what's going on now. I complaint I read about often is being unable to claim a city because of missing DLC even when all the available DLC is purchased. If there is syncing problems like that now, I really really really really really doubt Maxis is going to spend the time to work out how this is going to work on the backend when I already see signs the player base isn't as large as they would have hoped as well as I can't see how that would help Maxis make more money.

If you've read this thread then you've read counter arguments to everyone one of your points. But in a nut shell I helped build that market share that EA/Maxis is using to sell their NEW GAME using my efforts to advance their business model. Had EA/Maxis been paying attention during SCSocieties and Cities XL they would have learned a lot about what was wanted. Which was a flexible tool to create cities. Instead they are trying to sell a walled garden that you RENT RENT RENT RENT RENT RENT access to for the privilege to buy overpriced DLC of stuff modders provided for free in the past. You're happy with online only? Well too bad. I'm not. That's the one thing I really didn't want because look at what it did. And regardless the game is still like only 70% there and I see signs EA/Maxis may fix a little more and may be moving on to DLC paid improvements only. The real question now is did Mac sales bolster SC2013's active player base enough? Or have most SC2013 players move on and the Mac #'s weren't as great as hoped for due to the incredibly bad PC launch and now crunching the #'s EA/Maxis is realizing they aren't going to be putting a lot of "free" work into this and instead will be satisfied selling all the improvements they think they can milk from you? As in (I really hope not but) I'm going to really laugh if they charge for larger maps. However I digress and I'm going to end with I know only one person out of all my gamer friends who owns this game. He stopped playing a couple of weeks after launch due to shallowness and bugs. He has since returned to play the Mac version he said it's less buggy but it's still just the same shallow game it was before. Online only seems to have had a detrimental affect for at least some of the potential customers that EA/Maxis is trying to reach such as me and him. That's on them to fix, not on us as in they need to figure out what the customer wants, and not try pulling some amateur business maneuver like "it's our vision" as an excuse. That's what you say after you're successful and not as an explanation when things are going wrong. FYI, "it's our vision" closes business when their vision isn't the customers vision.

The problem is after Rush Hour (that's nine months later) EA/Maxis all but abandoned Simcity 4. The following ten years of growth was the result of the community. Now EA/Maxis has it that all new development on the game depends on them.

SC4 didn't sell as well because Maxis did with SC4 as they did with SC2013 and released it prematurely as an unfinished product. It took until Rush Hour, which was NINE MONTHS later, that SC4 became a half way decent city builder. In that NINE MONTHS the damage was done and SC4's reputation suffered and sold poorly. It seems the same is happening now and the longer it takes to fix SC2013 the worse the damage is. And the game wasn't too complicated. The problem is Maxis didn't ship any working cities or make it easy to share cities. Because if either had happened then beginners and those that don't want to either climb the curve or take the real time investment that it takes to make a good looking city could play with big cities without having to master the mechanics to get there as well as giving incentive to make cities worthy to share.

First thing I'd want to say is I would prefer living in a place where I could defend myself, my family, my home, and my neighborhood. So much so if Trayvon and George were switched and hoody wearing black Trayvon was protecting his neighborhood by following George and George decided he was going to jump Trayvon because he was offended by being perceived poorly of I would still consider it justified if Trayvon killed George if George attacked Trayvon on the way back to Trayvon's truck. People who don't like to have that right have the right to not fight to have that right if they don't want.

Sales is one thing but another important and related aspect to consider is how many people are still playing? The last report was 1.6million in sales with ~750,000 active cities with 2-3 cities per player. That's means there is about 250-400,000 active players at that time. Why this is important is they need a certain sized player base to justify working on the game, either patches or content. Future support has less to do with sales as it has to do with how many active players they still have.

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9512405.page

From what I understand if you buy the PC version you will have access to download the Mac version for free.

Many of us want features, or game design changes, that Maxis said was not in their vision. Not only that, EA has budgeted only so much for SC2013's design I think making substantial changes now would be impossible. And adding small things or fixing anything is low prioity for me as I never bought the game because of those changes Maxis won't make. I'm just saying this so you know why at least some of us won't put any effort into fixing SC2013. We're here mostly for the train wreck value.

Over on the official forums the mods have put together a Q&A session with the developers. You post your question and they will answer it in batches or if there is a quick answer to a question, it will be posted quicker. Read the first page for the rules. http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9532799.page

One guy on Simcity.com is reporting he has it. I don't know and this is more than likely wrong but it sounds like it's three buildings or parks. You place the park and then activate the modules, aka rides concessions, etc from there to build up the park. I was hoping that each ride was going to be ploppable. Still waiting to read more of his reportings. http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9529042.page

Unfortunately they know we want offline mode but they have said it does not fit in with their vision of the game so they've decided against it. My guess is there is no budget left to rework the game for single player so this is it.

Unfortunately there is no terraforming. And because of the need to keep fairness in the leaderboards, there probably will never be a tool to terraform in SC2013. All that will probably be is the predefined regions that have been game play tested to be fair. There is a high likelihood that new maps will be released as paid for Downloadable Content (or DLC) in the online store.

First off I said around half and hondaciv said 8% and you said 48%. I'll admit I was lazy and saw the 38% vs 44% and roughly halved it. Made a mistake and didn't include WinVista and Win8. But see how if you're not careful, like I was, it's easy to introduce error? Steam is not Universal. I was just in the game department at the local Walmart and there is still a PC section. Same thing for the game store I usually buy my games from, and I don't use Steam. There must be some reason why this is so. If Steam was universal enough to actually measure all PC gamers this shouldn't be. Why bother ever going to a store if you can just make a couple of clicks on your PC? I'm not saying Steam won't ever be a accurate measure of PC gamers, but pray that it doesn't. Or at least hope that there is a competitor(s) to Steam like going to the store. Last thing we need is another choke point as ORIGIN is already dead for the likes of me.

Steam metrics are accurate for measuring Steam users. That makes complete and perfect sense. Trying to say all PC gamers can be measured by Steam metrics is what doesn't make sense.

I'm not a programmer so I don't know and I'll accept I'm totally wrong. But I'm around people who are and listen to them complain about WindowsXP all the time. They do simulation and WinXP has a hard time balancing the load over multiple cores. While WinXP can see all the cores of a multi-core processor, it starts to have stability problems when managing an application that's using more than two cores, something about this being a throw back to when XP only saw two physically processors when processors where single core only and the tools for programming multi-core programs on XP are primitive. So I alway understood it that programmers of XP applications in general avoided that problem by only using two cores or less, instead of using all the cores. And from what I understand most multithreaded application for XP do just what Simcity2013 does. There is a main thread and then some work is hardcored to be offloaded to other cores instead of the OS slicing up the work and balancing the load over the cores as more modern applications take advantage of more advanced OS capabilities. This is coupled with the fact that around WinXP's hayday it was Coreduo mostly. Quad cores and more are more or less WinVista or greater. MS hasn't put a lot of work into making XP work with more than two cores well. Also, I don't know how an application access hardware the OS isn't addressing, so I'm not sure why the OS isn't more important when it comes to what can and cannot run. As far as the 50%, http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0 so in the Windows family it's more like ~35-40%. However Steam isn't a good measure. Steam metrics is only good for measuring Steam users.

XP should not have that much to do with it. Processor power, sure, but not which OS is running. The simulation still uses only one core on multi core machines after all. I run SC13 on a 2 year old laptop, with the high settings, with no issues (granted it was the top end 2 years ago and comparable to what is still near top end today). A larger map means the game slows down, no big deal. When SC4 came out, even on the best of the best PCs at the time, the largest maps were very tough on the computer, even todays top PCs a large SC4 map can be a burden. Just like SC4, they can offer larger maps, let people with high end machines play them, let people with low end machines suffer through them if they like or play smaller maps if its too painful. EA I think judged their core audience poorly. Though I can see why they did. They were not aiming to please to diehard SC4 types still playing a decade later, why would they? Its a small group compared to the entire market. They also were not aiming to please to hardcore "gamer" types, it is essentially meant to be a casual game. They thought their audience would be mom and pop, people who played SC games through their life, but never got into other games, who have their PC but dont invest in expensive gaming rigs. I think thats why we got stuck with small maps, they didnt realize how loud and annoyed those people with decent computers would be, figuring they would be off playing whatever the latest FPS is instead anyway. I do really think there is probably more then half the people playing SC today that have few complaints if any (after the launch issues that is). Then an extra quarter who really only take issue with the actual bugs rather then limitations. And the people screaming to high hell on the various forums and the lurkers who watch them scream are less then 5%. With this in mind, did they really get it that wrong? From their perspective? I do like to notice the huge difference in what you see here on simtropolis, where many of the posters have been fans of the series for a very long time, versus what you see on the EA forums. I dont think the difference is in moderation tactics, I think the difference is in generation. The OS has a HUGE affect on the software it runs. Simcity2013 seems to be coded to run on 2005-6 WindowsXP machines which happens to make up about half of the market they are shooting for, which is gaming PC's and also perfectly explains why it only runs on no more than two cores (another WinXP limitation) and the city size is tiny to keep under the 2gig file limit XP has. And following both sites I feel the moderation is MUCH heavier here. That's why it "seems" to be less negative because most of us realize the uselessness of saying anything negative about the game here in many contexts. Maybe that's good, but I do know that when I got something to say I take it to Simcity.com's forums and let the majority of SC2013 players read it where it's more effective in that sense than here. As far as a metric to see where the game is at... consider how many games sold vs active cities. The last time I checked the numbers are poor. That tells me more than trying to weigh how much the active community might or might not feel.

I think it's going to be a long time before larger maps come out. About half of the gaming PC's out there are running WinXP which means there are some hard limits they are working with such as the 2gig file limit. Until they loose XP, I'm getting the impression it's extra work to retool Simcity2013 for bigger maps just for Win7 users. So I expect this to be low on their to-do list.