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SimCity code includes 20 minute force shutdown timer for offline play
- Thread starter zomgbbqftw
- Start date
How will all this bad news affect sales? It probably won't.
It's sad to say, but the people on this forum who are 'voting with their wallets' are probably/most likely a minority. A single piece of toilet paper against the mountain of shit. It'd be nice to see this on the tech portion of the news, but it won't.
EA will keep on counting that cash.
C.R.E.A.M.
It's sad to say, but the people on this forum who are 'voting with their wallets' are probably/most likely a minority. A single piece of toilet paper against the mountain of shit. It'd be nice to see this on the tech portion of the news, but it won't.
EA will keep on counting that cash.
C.R.E.A.M.
Audioboxer
Member
SimCity arguably taking over Aliens, who'd of thought a game would've done that this quickly... great start to 2013 :/
LunaticHigh
Member
I'm sitting here clutching my deluxe edition of SimCity 4 and glossing over what Spore could have been in my mind.
Maxis once was full of greatness. The games aren't for everyone, but they were fun.
EA's twisted vision of what fun is destroyed SimCity.
I feel so bad for Will Wright. SimCity used to be so wonderful. I guess Tropico holds the thrown now.
Maxis once was full of greatness. The games aren't for everyone, but they were fun.
EA's twisted vision of what fun is destroyed SimCity.
I feel so bad for Will Wright. SimCity used to be so wonderful. I guess Tropico holds the thrown now.
Yeah this mess has gone way beyond simple mistakes or miscalculation into utter contempt for your customers.
Just all the PR lies on top of lies and horrible business practices like you mentioned with the censoring of their help line. It's just horrible.
Before when someone was all 'EA is evil, boycott them.' I would just sort of roll my eyes and not even comment about it because, ah yeah businesses need to make money too right? But after all this, I can't even support this behavior as it's just so anti-consumer it's laughable.
Games are supposed to be fun, but what fun this game is has been marred by all the lies and trickery. I am convinced the beta for this game was nothing more than something meant to generate hype. It's why there was 1hr time limits for cities so 'beta testers' could not expose all the underlying issues of the game. Really what has happened is that we have paid to play the beta right now. This game was with all the bugs and outright bad ai not ready to launch. This will not be a complete game for months to come. It's sad as there is some brilliance here; but they took it out of the oven too early and we are all getting to the undercooked raw bits.
Phoenician_Viking
Banned
WTF! Fuck you EA.
ComputerMKII
Banned
Every time I wake up I find something hilarious on GAF.
I love you GAF.
I love you GAF.
Though they won't affect sales nearly as much as it should, the low user scores on Amazon/Metacritic/etc are probably not what EA was hoping for. Even so, it was pretty clear from the start that EA's profit plan for this game depends more on a ton of DLC than a finished product that sells a lot during the launch period. I expect it to get Steam-like sales on Origin often, if only to keep the DLC buying user base constant.
Once again, I have to wonder how many people bitching about this game have even played it (insert joke about servers) considering this is incredibly obvious to anyone that has. In fact, it is incredibly obvious to anyone who even just read the long ass thread we already had on this: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=523776
I get that people want to pile on because it is fun watching a train wreck, etc. but there are so many more legitimate problems with the actual gameplay than rehashing for the 30th time whether or not they could have let you play offline
Seriously, with all the server problems it is impossible not to know this. The servers go down and you can play for 20 minutes and then get dumped back to the menu.
I get that people want to pile on because it is fun watching a train wreck, etc. but there are so many more legitimate problems with the actual gameplay than rehashing for the 30th time whether or not they could have let you play offline
Seriously, with all the server problems it is impossible not to know this. The servers go down and you can play for 20 minutes and then get dumped back to the menu.
Plinko
Wildcard berths that can't beat teams without a winning record should have homefield advantage
If one good thing came out of this mess, its the metacritic average. People will see the score for ages and at least will be reminded of what happened on this launch.
Plinko
Wildcard berths that can't beat teams without a winning record should have homefield advantage
If I see injustice in the world I don't feel I need to have taken part in it to make a statement condemning that action.
Skyfireblaze
Member
How right you are
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPnd2A-curQ And it was all the way up till after 4... things went to hell then :/I really looked forward to this new SimCity but after seeing all this chaos almost just because of this line of code I guess the franchise is done for unless EA notices they did wrong and rethinks the whole idea which won't happen.
Slayer-33
Liverpool-2
After this shit he should say that he has to eat his words, this is ridiculous. Maybe he's capable of admitting he was dead wrong but who knows..
Sax Russel
Banned
New day, new Sim City fuck up thread. Gets better and better.
Hot Coldman
Banned
I love it when the developers make sure the decisions of their bosses can be so easily subverted.
Boss Doggie
all my loli wolf companions are so moe
Yup, you can turn it off.
I'm not "tech savvy" but one reason may be that since saves are stored on the cloud they wouldn't want you progressing super far for like an hour and then not having that progress saved. So no, no there is not.
Also, #DRM.
Due to the way saves work in the game, if the game didn't have any timeout and your net connection wouldn't be up again by the time the connection re-established to upload the save, everything you've done in the time between the last save and that point would be gone.
It's a sensible default for a few scenarios.
Basileus777
Member
Gies won't eat his words. Neogaf just doesn't have the moral clarity to understand Maxis' goals with Sim City.
I'm not tech-savvy, but if there's nothing in the way of "complex calculations" going on server-side, then it's mandatory to implement something like this, or people could just pull the cord and continue playing.
The better solution would be to keep a local copy until online again then upload it same way that ps3/360 works with cloud saves, in fact even better have local saves with the option to store in the cloud
The concept really isnt anything new you can even have a resolution to a dispute between local can cloud save by having the user selecting which one to prefer like steam does
Doesn't fit with their vision, scrap it.
If the game had a capability for a local copy, the always online nonsense would just be optional.
I'm sure someone will mod the game in another week or so to do your suggestion though, it's the proper way to do a game like this.
legacyzero
Banned
LOL nice
Alcotholic
Banned
I wonder what else we'll find out about this game?
It's true, Tetris without always-on wouldn't be possible because of the heavy block calculations they offloaded to the cloud. Well they could do it but it would be a huge undertaking. Well not a huge undertaking but you wouldn't be able to see your friends high score. Well you could but that's not the vision for the game. Also, players all over the world have been telling EA how much they love the impressive block rotations and being able to share their high score on Facebook.
Fuckin' Nostradamus, aye.
ThaiGrocer
Member
This game has reached legendary status, and I don't even have to play it.
EA isn't going to suffer more than a blip over this. Boycotters will vanish when Battlefield 4 or the next Mass Effect comes out. Because EA keeps doing this (Dragon Age 2, KOTOR, Mass Effect 3 ending, even the latest Need for Speed was pretty lousy) and it never seems to make a noticeable dent in their sales.
No...this is it. This is something we, as the gaming community should not let go. This is an example of such horrendous proportions that EA or any other company should know that stuff like this will never be acceptable and never be forgotten.
We can't just brush this under the rug and roll our eyes "oh EA...up to your old tricks again you rascal". No....people need to remember that this is the lengths they will go to to part you with your money for the least amount of work effort they can invest. People need to punish this sort of indignity with years of rememberance so they can suffer their own repurcussions. If anything more people need to know. Tell every casual gamer the horrors that EA are inflicting on the game so even they think twice about the next EA game they buy.
Very few "scandals" like this reach the level where it's so nearly unanimously indefensible. It would be folly if we let that go.
The pitchfork should be the DRM.
Why does anyone still want to play offline? I mean before we all actually played the game it was an issue but now that we have it's just not a very good game. You don't have to balance your budget at all you can run a 30k /hour deficit and still be a millionaire with ease. The plot sizes are so tiny that every city you make basically looks the same. It's just a boring game. I don't see how playing a boring game offline makes it fun.
Now when the modders start fixing the actual game then I'll be excited. Building roads outside the boundaries was a great start.
Now when the modders start fixing the actual game then I'll be excited. Building roads outside the boundaries was a great start.
But we don't want offline play, remember?
This is only going to end up 2 ways:
1: EA go into complete idiocy, pretend that people still do not want to play what is essentially a single player game offline if they want to. Lucy Bradshaw posts update after update basically insulting anyone who dares to differ with EA/Maxis' "vision".
2: EA realise the utter PR disaster that this is, ties Lucy Bradshaw to the stake and fires her as a handy scapegoat, patches in offline play.
Knowing EA? They'll probably try to hold out for 1 for as long as they can.
This is only going to end up 2 ways:
1: EA go into complete idiocy, pretend that people still do not want to play what is essentially a single player game offline if they want to. Lucy Bradshaw posts update after update basically insulting anyone who dares to differ with EA/Maxis' "vision".
2: EA realise the utter PR disaster that this is, ties Lucy Bradshaw to the stake and fires her as a handy scapegoat, patches in offline play.
Knowing EA? They'll probably try to hold out for 1 for as long as they can.
partyphone
Banned
The takeaway from this is that cracking and modding the game is going to be a lot easier than if EA wasn't lying about calculations being made on the server or if the game had well implemented DRM.
Can you save, bro? Can you save? Can. You. Save. All right then, bro, guess I was right.
Oh what was that? You can save? No? Guess I was right, bro, guess I was right.
JakkuFurosu
Member
Just make the game f2p like it was obviously originally designed for.
This is one helluva ride
This is one helluva ride
kurtrussell
Banned
Fuck those guys! How dare they modify their own code for purposes of their choosing! They have no right! Fuck EA! etc..
Seems to me that you'd all be happier if you just ignore the whole fucking thing and find something else to do. I can literally hear the GAF blood pressure rising every time there's a new SimCity revelation.
Let it go, it is what it is. It's not the first time a reboot has fucked a franchise.
Seems to me that you'd all be happier if you just ignore the whole fucking thing and find something else to do. I can literally hear the GAF blood pressure rising every time there's a new SimCity revelation.
Let it go, it is what it is. It's not the first time a reboot has fucked a franchise.
*cough* DMC *cough*
Basileus777
Member
It did make a dent is DA2's sales and we'll see how the next Mass Effect sells. By KOTOR do you mean The Old Republic? That MMO didn't do so well...so I'm not sure why it's on your list. EA hasn't exactly been the most profitable company this generation to begin with, their policies aren't some guaranteed way to make a huge profit.