Support NeoGAF

[dark_chris]

The day this game is playable offline and EA/Maxis fixes this is the day my money goes to this game.

Till now, Ill find other things to use my monies on.

 

[Dead Man]

I don't even understand what's going on. Candidly admitting "I guess I was wrong about that!" would be so much easier than all of this twitter drama.

Yes it would. Unfortunately, ego exists.

 

[orznge]

To be fair, we should have seen his denial of reality long ago:

these are so good

 

[Jeff-DSA]

I had to stop listening to RebelFM simply because of Arthur's ego and attitude. Now that he's in an actual position of power, both have run rampant. It's a shame.

 

[Kayhan]

Polygon?

Better off Polygone

 

[Cipherr]

Arthur Gies ‏@aegies

@akwinters this is organized bullying against anyone who deigns to not toe a line about what this group demands simcity be.

Alright, he is being a bit of a little itch-bay right now. I gave the guy at least a little rope, but now he seems to just be either faking it, or he is just hilariously obtuse. The woe is me shit needs to stop, along with the crocodile tears for pwoor wittle EA.

 

[SatansReverence]

The day this game is playable offline and EA/Maxis fixes this is the day my money goes to this game.

Till now, Ill find other things to use my monies on.

Needs offline and bigger citys to get my monies.

 

[ClovingWestbrook]

Alright, he is being a bit of a little itch-bay right now. I gave the guy at least a little rope, but now he seems to just be either faking it, or he is just hilariously obtuse. The woe is me shit needs to stop, along with the crocodile tears for pwoor wittle EA.

Lol he has to be trolling.

 

[sonicmj1]

To be fair, we should have seen his denial of reality long ago:

Polygon should get rid of the wrap-up section of their reviews if they're just going to be a place to stick hyperbole.

Didn't we all know Polygon was going to be absolute shit from the moment of its inception? Just look at the staff. I see very few people deserving of respect. It's Kotaku on steroids.

They've done some really great feature stories. No need to throw out the good with the bad.

 

[Septimius]

I contacted Polygon and said I would no longer follow the site due to Gies. When I used the contact-form, I really wanted to choose the "I think something's broken!"-category.

 

[Fistwell]

along with the crocodile tears for pwoor wittle EA.

But won't someone think of the poor investors!?!

Some coverage from EG, not sure if already posted.

 

[wizzbang]

I had to stop listening to RebelFM simply because of Arthur's ego and attitude. Now that he's in an actual position of power, both have run rampant. It's a shame.

I like it best when the rest of the people on RebelFM ask Arthur technical questions and he spouts shit off to them which is either partially wrong or completely wrong as if he knows it utterly flawlessly (generally related to PC's or hardware) and unfortunately no one else on the show has the knowledge to correct him.

 

[ElyrionX]

To be fair, we should have seen his denial of reality long ago:

To be fair, early impressions of Diablo 3 were uniformly positive, even among consumers. People generally only got disillusioned after hitting Inferno.

 

[Darklord]

I prefer to make big, dense cities rather than the suburbia that SC4 steers you toward. But to each his own/


In other news, Arthur Gies apparently doesn't know how to use the word "deign".

Gies: I guess I was wrong, my bad!

If he said that everyone would be over it but acting like a whingy bitch and refusing to back down even after you're proven wrong over and over is just sad and worth ridicule.

 

[xenist]

I like it best when the rest of the people on RebelFM ask Arthur technical questions and he spouts shit off to them which is either partially wrong or completely wrong as if he knows it utterly flawlessly (generally related to PC's or hardware) and unfortunately no one else on the show has the knowledge to correct him.

That's why I stopped listening to that clusterfuck. I got tired of pulling my non existent hair whenever he'd start "dropping knowledge. "

 

[Lime]

To be fair, early impressions of Diablo 3 were uniformly positive, even among consumers. People generally only got disillusioned after hitting Inferno.

Almost no reviewer worth their critical salt should apply such amount of hyperbole and superlative language. But maybe that's just me.

The quote even contains incorrect information, such as saying that Blizzard has worked on D3 for 11 years, when this is not the case given what we know with Blizzard North and all.

 

[PoweredBySoy]

To be fair, early impressions of Diablo 3 were uniformly positive, even among consumers. People generally only got disillusioned after hitting Inferno.

I think that's fair too. Diablo 3, in the beginning, was pretty goddamn amazing. Only after playing it 30 hours, in the endgame, did the difficulty curves and the auction house make themselves truly known.

 

[PetriP-TNT]

It doesn't really matter at all if the game doesn't kick you out after 20 minutes if the game gets out of sync / stop doing stuff after certain time.

 

[partyphone]

It doesn't really matter at all if the game doesn't kick you out after 20 minutes if the game gets out of sync / stop doing stuff after certain time.

But it doesn't do that, does it? Like it assumes resource delivers from other cities are constant.

 

[RionaaM]

He has some more to say. I don't completely disagree with Arthur by the way, but I felt I needed to have my say.

Anyway, I screencapped it cuz that's quicker. Start right at the bottom and work your way up.

Man, could he sound any more defensive of EA?

 

[partyphone]

I think he's being more defensive of polygon and since their review praised SimCity the transitive property applies.

They pulled the trigger early on the review so that they could get more clicks. They never had any integrity to begin with.

 

[PetriP-TNT]

But it doesn't do that, does it? Like it assumes resource delivers from other cities are constant.

Didn't people say in the OT that it did break after a while?

If not, I have been thinking all kinds of cool online emulation mods all weekend for nothing!

 

[daycru]

It's almost as if my main man has a financial interest here.

Almost.

 

[Joe Shlabotnik]

Didn't people say in the OT that it did break after a while?

If not, I have been thinking all kinds of cool online emulation mods all weekend for nothing!

I think that was just the timer kicking in, as it turned out. It *has* to be able to continue simulating with no new information because otherwise your game would screw up every time it checked region information while your friend wasn't actively running his city.

 

[partyphone]

Didn't people say in the OT that it did break after a while?

If not, I have been thinking all kinds of cool online emulation mods all weekend for nothing!

nope!

Removing this line allows indefinite offline play.

early on someone reported that they were playing offline for 2 hours and the game started breaking. but this was before anyone knew about the timer. so it was impossible that they were offline for that long. what was likely happening was that the game was connecting and disconnecting sporadically and the broken servers were messing up the game.

 

[Thai]

While commenting out that line would certainly stop it from doing the countdown, I'm not sure that it would 100% 'defeat' the DRM.

All the web service calls the game has to make to update the servers would fault and ...possible crash the game / stop the play anwyays.

 

[ironcreed]

Jeff Gerstman from Giant Bomb weighs in on this and other stuff:

http://www.giantbomb.com/articles/gerstmann-takes-on-video-game-wrestling-madness/1100-4605/



This week's joystiq podcast talks about the disaster in their second segment as well.

So are Polygon literally the only deniers of how stupid and fucked EA's handling of this has been?

"For EA's part, it's still in the middle of an internet rage storm as enterprising modders keep finding ways to disconnect SimCity from its various limitations and disprove a handful of EA's official statements about the nature of the game. Is it offloading complex calculations to the remote servers? Nah, probably not. Does it have extreme issues with how it handles its population as individual Sims move from one part of the city to the other? Yeah, it sounds like it does."

Jesus, rather than wasting my time in this mess trying to find ways to keep playing offline, I would simply stop playing the game in general and promptly tell EA where they can stick it. Not that I give shit about this game anyway, just sayin'.

Anyway, if this is the kind of debacles we can expect in the future with these 'always online' shenanigans, then may the gods help us all. Take notes, Microsoft. Don't do it.

 

[LuchaShaq]

Whenever people disagree with him Arthur just turns their argument on it's ass.

"We think the ME3 ending sucks due to plothole X/y/z/q/4 also space magic/space kid is really dumb, in the best ending shepherd shouldn't have been shown "alive".

AG - There are no plotholes I can't hear you LALALALALALA. You're just mad it wasn't happy ending.


"It's a bummer Diablo 3 has boring loot, and doesn't take any thought until the third difficulty level".


AG - STOP CRYING MANBABIES


"It sucks that sim city is crippled by super tiny cities, "sims" that are so dumb they all try the same street, and that EA spewed a shit ton of lies about online calculations, not to mention busted DRM servers"


AG - ITS NOT DRM GET WITH THE FUTURE ITS THE INTERNET JEEZE



It's like he doesn't even read what peoples issues with stuff is, just jumps to conclusions and throws a hissy fit.

 

[bluehat9]

Didn't people say in the OT that it did break after a while?

If not, I have been thinking all kinds of cool online emulation mods all weekend for nothing!

Pretty sure nothing breaks, it'll just keep using the same values it got from other cities in the region before you disconnected. Same as if you stayed connected online, you'd still just keep getting the same values from someone else who hasn't logged into their city in a week. Disconnecting just stops it from checking for other city updates.


As for Gies, you just have to ignore him. No doubt he's trolling and loving it and all it's doing is making you guys mad. He's like Skip Bayless, come up with crazy ideas, refuse to back down, make yourself the story, and then sit back and enjoy the fame that comes from people continuing to argue with you. Right or wrong doesn't matter, having thousands of people talking about you is the name of the game.

 

[PetriP-TNT]

Pretty sure nothing breaks, it'll just keep using the same values it got from other cities in the region before you disconnected. Same as if you stayed connected online, you'd still just keep getting the same values from someone else who hasn't logged into their city in a week. Disconnecting just stops it from checking for other city updates.
.

Bu-bu-bu-but isn't that kinda stupid from online perspective?

Hah

 

[DrM]

They should find some smarter way to get around the illegal downloads problem, doing it all on internet-access only is not the way.

It seems that is the easiest way to battle with illegal DL. You remember that Starforce stuff from several years ago and all the drama about it?

 

[SlipperyFishes]

More coverage over at Polygon

While speaking with Polygon, Cronin was clear that he can't determine everything that the servers are doing for the game, only the data that is being sent back and forth between server and a local computer running the game.

"I can tell you what your (computer) is doing, and thus what the server isn't doing," he said. "But I can't tell you what the server does by itself (eg. cheat checking, gathering global statistics on all cities, things like that), I can only take some decent educated guesses there."

There's more at said site, still working my way down but seems they've also been speaking to Azzer. Reckon by April 1st he can release an offline patch and be like 'Huehuehue, EA'?

 

[FyreWulff]

More coverage over at Polygon



There's more at said site, still working my way down but seems they've also been speaking to Azzer. Reckon by April 1st he can release an offline patch and be like 'Huehuehue, EA'?

Depends on what you mean by offline patch. If you mean the features the server provides, probably not.

I mean, I can edit the heartbeat values client-side in Halo, Battlefield, and Quake to not disconnect me from a server 10-15 seconds after I pull the cord. I can still play the game, walk around, and do things and 'play' the game. Everyone's characters will stop being puppeteered and either walk into walls or just stand there, but technically it works.

And that's all changing the timeout really does.