Lactose_Intolerant
Member
yep, all the added stuff doesn't need to be in here either. Just keep it about RPS and the people not calling out EA for the clusterfuck.
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John Walker's anti-BS SimCity news articles.
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yep, all the added stuff doesn't need to be in here either. Just keep it about RPS and the people not calling out EA for the clusterfuck.
cartoon_soldier
Member
Yea title change is confusing. It almost made me think someone made a serious anti-RPS thread...
Eh, way I see it thread title should be "RPS's investigative journalism and SimShitty fiasco |OT|"
Those twitter "fights" by Arthur and the other dude just make me not want to visit
Polygon and their no-name sites. Good on RockPaperShotgun for continuing to investigate and report on this.
Those twitter "fights" by Arthur and the other dude just make me not want to visit
as if I ever visit
Ya, I'll get it changed back, but I was having so many people asking about the twitter fights, and not everyone will want to seach through the pages to see what is being talked about. So I added it. I'll trim the fat though.
It's especially brilliant when Arthur Gies wasn't even on 1UP FM at all. He was Anthony's roommate that got an "in" to the industry riding off of fan donations made to people other than him. Nick and Phil were never on the show after the first episode which were who the donations were going to.
Arthur bought a gaming laptop with fan-donated money, because it would allow him to play games to talk about on a spiritual-successor to a podcast he was never even on.
I'm going to guess Matt just commented without knowing this situation, but I knew Arthur would try to paint himself as the victim of insults without addressing the issues that are being presented to him. He will never admit he is wrong. He hasn't even admitted to making a mistake in posting the Sim City review before testing it in real-world conditions. The night before Sim City came out he said they will have to adjust the score.
The review score edits are Arthur's way of covering his ass for posting a de-facto exclusive review of Sim City. They get the extra traffic without having to worry about damaging Polygon's credibility. Most will comment about how progressive and forward-leaning they are for adopting this system that is only used in the most opportunistic ways.
It was supposed to give me wiggle room to add more then just RPS stuff, since people were asking for some sort of timeline. I'll just keep the title though and add PR timelines and share the twitter battles that happened from RPS' articles.
Thanks for updating. Those lies are WarZ level bad. I am literally in shock at how deep this goes. I have no idea how EA/Maxis can salvage this now. The Better Business Bureau needs to get involved, honestly.
As long as consumers and the industry learn from this, and this comes back to bite EA in the ass in a way that forces a perspective shift, I'm fine with whatever. Of course, I've always wanted to ride a unicorn too, but I doubt that will ever happen.
Ya, it is why I changed it back and cut the fat. And pointed people to the new EA topic. I'm just gana keep it centered around the RPS stuff(which is quite large).
And as of 5 minutes ago, when I saw this post, I regret my donation to talkingorange. God damn.I remember Matt C. getting money from generous people on GAF after the 1UP layoffs.oh my god this reply
Wow.
WOW.
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW.
At least it was only a small one.
LOL. He's an official EA apologist/PR tool masquerading as journalist.
Looks like Arthur is referring to his SimCity tweet which had him on the offensive with Walker to, "that tweet".
https://twitter.com/aegies/status/313164470987943937
Which I'm assuming he is refering to this reddit post:
http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1ag3qt/arthur_gies_needs_to_be_laughed_at_for_being_a/
https://twitter.com/aegies/status/313164470987943937
Which I'm assuming he is refering to this reddit post:
http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1ag3qt/arthur_gies_needs_to_be_laughed_at_for_being_a/
I was rolling my eyes a bit when people were asking for refunds from the server stuff. I've played too many online game to expect anything other than a train wreck.
But "It would take a significant amount of engineering work from our team to rewrite the game so that all of those functions are calculated locally without a significant performance hit to the player" is a bold face lie to the consumers. Baffling.
Neuromancer
Member
Integrity breeds consternation.
EmCeeGramr
Member
Neuromancer
Member
Haha
That's Gies saying that? Holy shit.
"Vocal minority, bla bla, vocal minority", "then don't buy it, vote with your wallet", "I'll go with what the developers say", etc. The usual.
Internet outrage seems to immediately shut down people's capacity to discuss something critically. My opinion is the only valid one, and if you don't like it, then don't buy it. What? I get they're annoyed with the wave of shit coming their way, but come on.
The new guy, Mitch, was especially annoying about it. He tried so hard to to act tough to the people in the room it bordered on sycophancy. You gave the internet what for, chum. I say.
I think Twitter must be one of the worst things that's happened for certain parts of the games media. It's really shocking how anti-consumer some of the stuff they post up is. I don't think I've ever been put off an outlet by an article or a podcast anywhere near to the extent of some of the stuff that gets tweeted. I'm sure being relatively public figures a lot of them get sent a lot of stupid/abusive shit on twitter but that doesn't mean they should assume that everyone that reads their tweets is the same. Perhaps it's easy for me to say that though as I'm not on the receiving end of it.
Gies as many have said is particularly bad at it. I don't even dislike the guy and still listen to Rebel Fm regularly but if you only knew his twitter feed you'd think his sole purpose there was to lecture his audience with a pretty heavy dose of condescension.
A shockingly high number of his tweets could be started with "Listen up you entitled, manbaby, chauvinist monsters..."
Gies as many have said is particularly bad at it. I don't even dislike the guy and still listen to Rebel Fm regularly but if you only knew his twitter feed you'd think his sole purpose there was to lecture his audience with a pretty heavy dose of condescension.
A shockingly high number of his tweets could be started with "Listen up you entitled, manbaby, chauvinist monsters..."
old manatee
Banned
I stopped listening to rebel fm after like 3 episodes because I couldn't stand how condescending Arthur was. Also, you could make a drinking game out of how many times he corrects someone about a minor point and then pats himself on the back.
Why do you listen to that poison?
dragonelite
Member
Pr and press should learn cant argue with the internet.
It will be like you vs the world.
It will be like you vs the world.
...Force of habit, I guess.
LumpOfCole
Member
SimCity |OT| simcity.GetFudgedPopularity
Nope just doubled down on his idiotic statements.
Basically "hurr durr offline multiplayer hasn't been modded in".
90TilInfinity
Member
He has previous. He once said journalists who scored Vanquish well were biased.
WHAT
Never been to rock paper shotgun before Sim city, am donating 20$ to their site along with sending a kindly worded email to ChrisGrant on why I will not be visiting polygon in the future at all despite them having had some nice features (reviews have been pretty awful). RPS deserves support, god knows they won't get EA advertising money.
https://www.paypal.com/uk/cgi-bin/w...63663d3faee8dd75b1e1ec3ad97b7af62835dd81d5d52
Chris@polygon.com
Sent similar email to verge explaining why I won't be visiting there anymore either since they are affiliated.
I would recommend people do the same.
https://www.paypal.com/uk/cgi-bin/w...63663d3faee8dd75b1e1ec3ad97b7af62835dd81d5d52
Chris@polygon.com
Sent similar email to verge explaining why I won't be visiting there anymore either since they are affiliated.
I would recommend people do the same.
He's a jack ass. This is the guy who used money donated to his "crew" to buy a laptop. Money that came from the same community he disdains.
Polygon is total shit. What sucks is I have "internet friends" that now work there and they are wearing "team polygon" shirts and shitting on things and I cannot reply because it does no good.
you'll never hear back.
I don't want any response, just figure it's worth letting them know why people are unhappy with their product.
Hot Coldman
Banned
Personally, I think posting on here that you sent that email- and then saying others should do the same- comes across less like a personal motion and more like trying to stir up a crusade. It'd probably be more effective if they weren't able to come on GAF and come to a conclusion that the email wasn't necessarily genuine.
I believe you're genuine, obviously, I have no inherent bias here. I'm just saying.
I believe you're genuine, obviously, I have no inherent bias here. I'm just saying.
Barack Lesnar
Banned
Is this stuff Arthur said true:
The other guy had no reply for it:
The other guy had no reply for it:
Never too late to start listening to actually good gaming podcasts that are worth your time. The Bombcast would be a good start.
Also, this is Sim City 4 with region play and multiple cities interacting with each other: http://i.imgur.com/MIj0Kad.jpg
Offline. Multiplayer was optional.
Regarding region play in Sim City 5:
“I’ve analyzed all of the data calls to and from EA servers – all of the APIs, every request for data, and all of the data that comes back,” explains the modder. And in doing so, he’s found some surprising results. “The SimCity servers are not doing any calculations that could not be done on your PC, even for an entire region single player offline mode, let alone just the city you are in.”
It’s his belief (clearly we don’t have a clue – we’re not experts here at all) that the servers aren’t chugging nearly as hard as Maxis say. “All the server sends to your client, is some very basic data about each city – how much power they have available, how much spare fire trucks, you know – that sort of stuff. It’s minor, and it’s sent as raw numbers. Your client then just goes ‘oh there’s XXX power spare from city Z.’ It’s that simple.”
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/201...r-tells-us-offline-regional-play-easily-done/
There is a world of difference between a raging email complaining demanding someone is fired and a politely worded email shortly stating why you will not come back to a website.
You're not their customer. The game companies that advertise are their customer. You're their product.
I never said there wasn't.
Based on what I have read and heard of Chris Grant, including his interaction with users and readers on other websites, I wouldn't pitch him many rungs above Gies in all honesty.
All power to you for sending him an email about it and I hope people airing their thoughts about this gets somewhere. But I fear a reality where Gies, Grant and others at Polygon are reading this and other threads daily and having a good chuckle to themselves is far more likely. There are certain "high profile" internet commenters who have had their colours nailed to certain masts over things like the SimCity/EA scenario for a long time, and quite a few of them work at Polygon.
His assumption is that playing offline requires massive work, and that someone that believes it's otherwise has no idea what they're talking about. Well, first off, it's been proven that there's no work involved in being able to simply play offline. We can do that, so long as you go online to save.
So yeah, region stuff can be an integral part of the game. I have yet to enjoy it, since I can't gather GAFers to a server, since they're all full, and the join game function doesn't work, so I have no idea how it is playing in a region with others. Non the less, the problem now is if there would take a lot to be able to play a full region without going online.
Of course it's possible. Developer builds probably save to disk, anyway. The servers are only a man in the middle. This multiplayer server-behaviour is as old as the internet. There's nothing "always online" about the interactions. If a hacker/modder was going to fix this today, the solution would be to run a server on your own computer. This would take no CPU away from your game, as the interactions between regions are as basic as they come. If I have 4 fire-trucks, and I send them to your zone - if you're not playing, that doesn't mean the server pretends you're playing, and has my firetrucks put out fire. No, it would mean that when you log on, you'll get four firetrucks from me. They're simply subtracted from my city, and added to yours. It has nothing to do with when we play. What is needed is a man in the middle, updating us on how many firetrucks you have available for me. They're plain numbers.
Think about it. All the promotional stuff EA has done. All live demos. You don't really think that had to be done to a server to do these rudimentary things, do you? Of course it doesn't, and of course the build they brought had a sort of memory-table that included all this data. That means if I export 10kgal of water, and swap to a nearby city in my offline region, that water is available to my city there. This is completely asynchronous multiplayer. What you do has no bearing on my city, except for what values are available to my city.
This means there are no server-side calculations. They've turned off cheetah speed because higher speed means more saving, since the city's status updates more often (people's happiness, density etc). They simply can't handle saving 200 000 games at once every second. This of course would've been no problem what so ever if it were offline, since you wouldn't have to save it all the time, merely keep it in memory then save it once every 10 seconds, or when you quit or the game crashed.
What this means is that "online" is nothing but a fancy DropBox. If you had offline saves, you could have the same functionality by sharing your city and region saves (I imagine 2 MB total) in a shared folder on DropBox and link it to the files you load in game. Now you have online functionality like SimCity does. And they do a lot of cheat-checking online. Because you absolutely do not want people to be able to play the game like they want. No, you have to conform to having disasters on always, so you can be on the leaderboards! Which is turned off.
All in all, Gies was as wrong as he could be. That's OK, EA lied to everyone and said it was impossible to play offline. But the way he's been shown proof that he was wrong, but he keeps backpedaling to change the definition in such a way that he technically wasn't wrong, is just the sign of not only a gullible man, maybe due to wanting to suck up to the publisher, or maybe just being naïve. But he's also a man that has no intention of correcting his errors, and is more prone to making the situation worse than just admit he didn't know what he was talking about. Typical Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
So yeah, region stuff can be an integral part of the game. I have yet to enjoy it, since I can't gather GAFers to a server, since they're all full, and the join game function doesn't work, so I have no idea how it is playing in a region with others. Non the less, the problem now is if there would take a lot to be able to play a full region without going online.
Of course it's possible. Developer builds probably save to disk, anyway. The servers are only a man in the middle. This multiplayer server-behaviour is as old as the internet. There's nothing "always online" about the interactions. If a hacker/modder was going to fix this today, the solution would be to run a server on your own computer. This would take no CPU away from your game, as the interactions between regions are as basic as they come. If I have 4 fire-trucks, and I send them to your zone - if you're not playing, that doesn't mean the server pretends you're playing, and has my firetrucks put out fire. No, it would mean that when you log on, you'll get four firetrucks from me. They're simply subtracted from my city, and added to yours. It has nothing to do with when we play. What is needed is a man in the middle, updating us on how many firetrucks you have available for me. They're plain numbers.
Think about it. All the promotional stuff EA has done. All live demos. You don't really think that had to be done to a server to do these rudimentary things, do you? Of course it doesn't, and of course the build they brought had a sort of memory-table that included all this data. That means if I export 10kgal of water, and swap to a nearby city in my offline region, that water is available to my city there. This is completely asynchronous multiplayer. What you do has no bearing on my city, except for what values are available to my city.
This means there are no server-side calculations. They've turned off cheetah speed because higher speed means more saving, since the city's status updates more often (people's happiness, density etc). They simply can't handle saving 200 000 games at once every second. This of course would've been no problem what so ever if it were offline, since you wouldn't have to save it all the time, merely keep it in memory then save it once every 10 seconds, or when you quit or the game crashed.
What this means is that "online" is nothing but a fancy DropBox. If you had offline saves, you could have the same functionality by sharing your city and region saves (I imagine 2 MB total) in a shared folder on DropBox and link it to the files you load in game. Now you have online functionality like SimCity does. And they do a lot of cheat-checking online. Because you absolutely do not want people to be able to play the game like they want. No, you have to conform to having disasters on always, so you can be on the leaderboards! Which is turned off.
All in all, Gies was as wrong as he could be. That's OK, EA lied to everyone and said it was impossible to play offline. But the way he's been shown proof that he was wrong, but he keeps backpedaling to change the definition in such a way that he technically wasn't wrong, is just the sign of not only a gullible man, maybe due to wanting to suck up to the publisher, or maybe just being naïve. But he's also a man that has no intention of correcting his errors, and is more prone to making the situation worse than just admit he didn't know what he was talking about. Typical Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
Neuromancer
Member
I'm glad I stopped listening to that podcast years ago (mostly because Gies was insufferable).
It's not really a fair fight is it.
Oh, no worries there. I have 24 podcasts in my feed, most of which are gaming related. That's a problem in and of itself, I suppose.
Key word there. Arthur insists on multiplayer regions being a big part of the game so he can safe face. Think ten seconds more about what he's saying and you'll realize he's saying that you can't play the multiplayer portion of a single player game offline.
I suppose there's some wiggle room if he has LAN in mind to make even that independent of an internet connection, but still...
Best thing that could come from this whole simcity garbage is more people recognizing how great RPS is, and it's not just all Walker there either they have other pretty good writers. They have the occasional odd review (calling new vegas a lazy game, calling Dishonored the best stealth game since Thief 2) but they're on the point more often than not.
Bitmap Frogs
Mr. Community
Pretty much.
Gies job is to keep the ad money flowing, integrity is not part of his job description.
The sooner you understand it, the sooner this whole mess makes sense.
I can't think of any other industry where twitter fights are not only accepted, but encouraged by your bosses. It accomplishes nothing and is incredibly juvenile. I understand that for a lot of these people their only real draw is having a "personality" on the web, but you can do that without dragging yourself, your readers, and your publication through the mud. It is so mind boggling.
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