Sim City *Limited* Edition

[friznit]

http://www.jonathancresswell.co.uk/2013 ... w-simcity/

[TezzRexx]

[Dog Pants]

Just because this is doing the rounds:

http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18gs2vg ... iginal.jpg

Oh dear Adrian, I think you'll be having a chat with your team leader.

[friznit]

I feel it's only appropriate to take him up on his penultimate statement. Internet bros unite etc.

[Dog Pants]

To try to be subjective about it, it's not a great piece of evidence. It's an edited forum post rather than the original chat, and it's only the opinion of that one customer services spod. However, I'm inclined to believe it's true because it's far from being unheard of in these scenarios, and companies should have better representation. They ultimately are responsible for the actions of their agents because that customer has no other recourse, and so I'm happy to propagate it. I'd be interested to know where he stood legally though. Not great I imagine - I expect he's American, given our version isn't released yet, but over here I think the 'cooling off period' for contracts would be the normal recourse for a poor service, and of course there's no contract involved.

[TezzRexx]

Amazon have removed it from their digital downloads due to the issues and people complaining/asking for refunds...

Was very tempted to go out and buy this tomorrow but I bet it'll be £20 in a few weeks time.

[FatherJack]

Adrian's team leader was likely the one who told him that refunds cannot be offered so he was just passing on what he'd been instructed. In the face of evidence to the contrary provided (or at least points raised) by the customer though, he should have just taken further contact details and promised to get back to the customer after checking with his team leader.

It's difficult to resolve everything over a live one-on-one chat, but the basic principles of customer service still apply. A CS operative should only reject a customer's request if it directly contravenes or exceeds a stated, published, or agreed-upon policy - and if a leading company figure or press officer makes a public statement that is in conflict with any of those policies under any of the circumstances to which they apply then they need to make damn sure that everyone at the sharp end knows about it. Press Officers should keep their gobs shut about policy decisions if they don't know how what they promise is actually applied in all scenarios

Reading a bit more, though it sounds like Marcel Hatam was using weasel words in his press release. He stated if you were unhappy that you could request a refund - not that one would be granted. How much he knew of the policy at the time he made that statement is unclear, but it is certainly published at https://help.ea.com/article/returns-and-cancellations that refunds for digital downloads are generally never granted (which you supposedly agree to when you buy them).

Trying to appease customers by stating they they can request a full refund while knowing full well that if some of them do so their request will be summarily denied might take the flak off the issuer of said statement, but hardly does very much for the company's global image (which is surely where a press officer's concerns should lie) and ultimately only generates shit for people far lower down the pay scale than him, like Adrian.

[FatherJack]

As far as the actual game goes, I'm waiting for the price to drop. And maybe an advisor-advice fix update. I'm kind of interested, moreso after brief reunions with both SimCity4 and CitiesXL-variouseditions and I've come to a conclusion.

While I'm not actually very good at either of them (my skill level being somewhat lower than that required to get any but the most basic trophies in the laughable Sim City Societies) I do sort of enjoy them insofar as doing-what-you're-told-then-expanding-that-a-bit more goes.

Just from playing the tutorials tonight of SC4 deluxe and CitiesXL platinum a couple of things stood out. CitiesXL has all the components and looks graphically yummy, but lacks the granularity and depth in the stats you can view which guide you in what to build next. SC4 looks like a bag of smashed crabs that a pixellated cat did a pixellated sick on, but once you know what the stats menus actually mean (which the tutorial is super at explaining) you don't really need any further guidance - just take what you know and make it biggar.

I never quite got to grips with how in CitiesXL I might progress beyond S or M, never mind L or XL, but in SC4 the principles are outlined from the get-go and the gotchas for things like high-density zoning mentioned long before you'll need them. I even directly used my SC4-tutorial knowledge to build moderately succesful towns in CitiesXL, but they're not the same game and I always hit a wall where I couldn't logically extrapolate what I'd learned.

[TezzRexx]

Been pulled from Argos and Sainsburys...

You can still buy the normal edition in GAME though for only £42.99

[buzzmong]

Hmm, being pulled from Amazon, Sainsburys and Argos is going to ruffle some feathers amongst the PR and management at EA, because it makes it very obvious there's been a big cock up.

Hopefully other publishers will learn that always-on-DRM for singleplayer games is a fucking stupid idea.

[friznit]

CitiesXL is nice, but has some infuriating drawbacks when you've been used to playing SimCity 4. Road upgrades are not actually upgrades, you can't rezone without first nuking everything, and because the underlying algorithm is transparently 1 industry=1 job=1 citizen=1 house, nuking things very quickly causes a failcascade across your city.

SC4 + Rushhour + Network Addon Mod was the the nirvana of city building games, with the only part lacking being a more sophisticated rail network. I had high hope for SC5, but have so far been disappointed by the very limiting change of direction.

I will probably buy when it goes on panic sale.

[Grimmie]

http://www.ea.com/news/a-simcity-update ... you're-trouble

Here’s a quick update on the problems we were experiencing with SimCity – and a little something extra for people who bought the game.

The server issues which began at launch have improved significantly as we added more capacity. But some people are still experiencing response and stability problems that we’re working fast to address.

So what went wrong? The short answer is: a lot more people logged on than we expected. More people played and played in ways we never saw in the beta.

OK, we agree, that was dumb, but we are committed to fixing it. In the last 48 hours we increased server capacity by 120 percent. It’s working – the number of people who have gotten in and built cities has improved dramatically. The number of disrupted experiences has dropped by roughly 80 percent.

So we’re close to fixed, but not quite there. I’m hoping to post another update this weekend to let everyone know that the launch issues are behind us.

Something Special for Your Trouble

The good news is that SimCity is a solid hit in all major markets. The consensus among critics and players is that this is fundamentally a great game. But this SimCity is made to be played online, and if you can’t get a stable connection, you’re NOT having a good experience. So we’re not going to rest until we’ve fixed the remaining server issues.

And to get us back in your good graces, we’re going to offer you a free PC download game from the EA portfolio. On March 18, SimCity players who have activated their game will receive an email telling them how to redeem their free game.

I know that’s a little contrived – kind of like buying a present for a friend after you did something crummy. But we feel bad about what happened. We’re hoping you won’t stay mad and that we’ll be friends again when SimCity is running at 100 percent.

SimCity is a GREAT game and the people who made it are incredibly proud. Hang in there – we’ll be providing more updates throughout the weekend.

[buzzmong]

Cunts. Also in denial considering the concensus among critics seems to be that even if you ignore the launch issues it's not as good as previous games and the parts forcing you online add nothing much.

[Dog Pants]

I'm rather surprised, that's a pretty honest response. They must really have been shaken by the bad publicity this time. I'm with Buzz though; the reviews I'm seeing aren't all that positive even without the server issues. Probably on average somewhere between 70-80%, which isn't great for such an anticipated game. I also note the conspicuous line "but this SimCity is designed to be played online." It would seem they're still defending their DRM.

[Grimmie]

Maybe it is just meant to be played online, maybe that's what SimCity 5 will turn out to be? The telling thing will be whether or not they learn from the vocal feedback of their fans and horse the next game in the series online too.

I guess the wisest option would be to release a single-player region fix as soon as possible, or failing that improve the formula for the next game,vwhen hopefully PC's will be powerful enough to handle glassbox calculations themselves?

[Dog Pants]

I'm sure they mean for it to be played online, but I've seen no evidence that it's necessary. The online components of the game are pretty weak. If it was designed to be an MMO SimCity I wouldn't have an issue, but it's still just you in your zone with your own city. There's a little trading between other people in your area, but it's hardly central to the game. And I'd actually be a lot more interested if it was more MMO like, like the big MP games of OTTD we used to have. That would be great, and the online requirement would be a natural part of the game. But I'm not in the least bit convinced that this needs to be online to the point where you can't play if it isn't. As for the processing bit, that doesn't make any sense to me. They expect me to believe that my internet connection is a better bus than my FSB? That the game is so complex that my PC can't handle it and they need to have server farms to do it for me? The reviews would suggest it's not that complex at all, and my PC can run a lot more demanding software than SimCity.

[buzzmong]

I call bollocks on the Glassbox calculations requiring a server connection to a cloud because they're so demanding.
If the game truly required that sort of power crunching behind it, there's no way they'd be selling it as a single one off purchase, they'd be forced to do a subscription or go for microtransactions otherwise they'd just be pissing lots money down the drain for no gain.

[FatherJack]

They do sound contrite if a little over-familiar, but I don't buy their arguments.

Pretty much everyone who buys a new game is going to want to play it right away. This is true of every big release, but it seems nobody has gotten the formula worked out yet and always find themselves with less capacity than they need. I'll help them out with the maths, which I hope they will be able to follow as it's pretty complex and involves some numbers.

Take the number of games that you sell, then using a pen, write that number down somewhere - it's probably quite a big number so make sure the pen has plenty of ink. Then take this and show it to the guys provisioning the 0day authentication servers and say "see this number? This how many people will be trying to log in at some point today. So plan for that capacity, okay"
There, hopefully this won't happen again, now.

That this connection is required at all times though, I don't believe - at least not for any reasons they have claimed. Because it's not Diablo, they can't use the excuse that it's to ban the rife cheating that everyone was so upset about, so have made up some utter bullshit about server-side processing.

If my PC is so pathetically underpowered that it can't even calculate some numbers that it could calculate ten years ago but with not as good graphics representing them, that I need some farm of super-computers to do it for me - then how the hell can they afford to provide such a stupendously enormous slice of processing power to each and every player?

Using an Amazon server instance as an example, it costs around 12p an hour to rent processing power roughly equivalent to my PC. Even if they only sold 100,000 copies, that would cost them £3 a second to provide. Maybe they get a discount.

No, there's no processing going on that my computer would be unable to do, only processing which they do not trust my computer to do - such as checking I haven't suddenly started using a stolen or hacked version of the game, because of course that's what we as gamers do at the slightest provocation unless you watch us like hawks at all times.


I'd still be interested in hearing what's new and what if broken now gets fixed, or maybe can't be. It's a title I want to be good, and can I overlook a bit of intrusive DRM if it doesn't stop me playing legitimately. The in-game store hard-selling would be more of a turn-off though, so some info on that would be good.

[Dog Pants]

Earlier one of the EA people Tweeted that patching out the always online requirement wasn't out of the question, just not any time soon. Which I take as confirmation that it isn't as integral as they make out.

In other news, I'm enjoying SimCity 4.

[FatherJack]

In other news, I'm enjoying SimCity 4.

I am too, but hit a wall fairly quickly (or slightly less quickly if I choose a bigger tile)

I fill up the map with low density stuff and generally keep the people happy (well, not actively rioting) and make a modest stream of money, but the leap to medium or high density stuff is always more than I can afford with the increased demands like water supply on so on.

I get stuck in a rut where I have to basically leave it running for years with a trickle of cashflow coming in before I have the money to revamp the entire infrastructure.

I now see why NTL failed.