Spam
2041
You guys don’t even play games. That’s cool though, keep on trying to tell people what they want.
In all fairness, it’s sort of hard to not give them money after realizing how wildly different the game was, and a lot of the simulation problems that really, really rubbed me the wrong way don’t become evident quickly or without some research/wondering why things don’t work as you’d expect. A lot of early reviewers totally blew by that stuff when awarding the game massive scores, so even not pre-purchasing may not have saved me from this particular instance.
In the end, “GameY 1, 2, and 3 were good, so 4 will probably be good, too” isn’t an entirely unreasonable assumption, particularly if you take “good” to mean “enjoyable to people who enjoyed the previous ones since it’s liable to contain many of the same traits that said people found enjoyable.”
Still, it does get into an interesting debate technique I’ve seen crop up a lot about this game. “You bought it and played it? Got what you deserved and paid for then, right?” “Oh, you didn’t even buy it? Then what right do you have to sit here and criticize it?”
Not accusing you of either specifically, but it shades in that direction at least, and I see a lot of it in SC5 threads.
EA is just burning through good will. I bought DK iOS because I loved DK. Damned if I’m going to buy another DK from EA unless there are unanimously good reviews. Same for anyone else burned by SC5 - they’re not going to be launch day purchasers anymore.
Good corporate behavior creates customer loyalty. Bad corporate behaviour creates customer ill will. I haven’t bought BF4 not because I don’t just absolutely love the genre. I haven’t bought BF4 because I figure EA will find the least cost alternative to screw over my gaming experience after launch. Had it been any other company publishing BF4 I would have been all over BF4 like a bad rash.
EA may have started off as a great games company, but now its just about maximising profit without any thought for the gamer or the gaming experience after they’ve received your cash; DK was a sad and transparent attempt to claw money from a freemium game which was far more “mium” than “free”. They’ve quite clearly also misled consumers about needing always online as part of the fundamental SimCity design, and even pretended to simulate the Sims in the game when it’s just really fluffed numbers, but I’m sure that someone will find an excuse for EA’s dreadful behavior even now.
That is a willfully uncharitable and misleading way of summarizing peoples’ expressed views in this thread. First off, no one, and I mean NO ONE has advocated changing anything without EA’s permission. The entire discussion of the previous few days stems from people’s disappointment with EA for WITHHOLDING their permission, thus leaving people who were hoping for legal mods with no chance of that outcome.
At this point I think you’re just trolling, but on the off-chance you are serious - and because I need a break from my tedious project - here’s the score:
[ol]
[li]The SimCity games are a beloved franchise that had not had a meaningful release in a decade.[/li]
[li]The previous SimCity games all provided greater or lesser degree of user “modability”, from simply changing the costs of zoning though replacing the image sprites/models of the buildings, to complex scenario creation, traffic-pattern calculations, terrain modification, and even new buildings and industries with complex associated rules.[/li]
[li]The newest entry into the SimCity family disappointed many long-time fans because of how much of a departure it was from the previous versions.[/li]
[li]Many of those fans were hoping that EA would introduce tools and/or support for user modding so that some of the game’s shortcomings may be rectified by the user community through such mods; this was not an unreasonable expectation given the history of the franchise.[/li]
[li]EA not only chose not to support such modding tools/support, but they specifically declared that modding would not be tolerated.[/li]
[li]The user community that wished to legally and ethically mod the game expressed their disappointment with this decision.[/li]
[li]jeremybriangreen arrives and calls those people entitled brats while posting non-sequiturs about huge companies’ legal rights that no one has questioned.[/li][/ol]
Enough DRM vs modding talk. Here’s what a Maxis engineer says it took to make SimCity offline mode:
The original creative vision for SimCity was to make a game where every action had an effect on other cities in your region. As such, we engineered the game to meet this vision, setting up the player’s PC (client) to communicate all of its information to the servers. That means that our entire architecture was written to support this, from the way that the simulation works to the way that you communicate across a region of cities. So yes, while someone was able to remove the “time check” shortly after launch, they were unable to perform key actions like communicating with other cities that they had created locally, or with the rest of their region(s), or even saving the current state of their cities.
My team did, however, see a path forward towards Offline, one that would maintain the integrity of the simulation. Lucy once said that Offline wouldn’t be possible “without a significant amount of engineering work”, and she’s right. By the time we’re finished we will have spent over 6 ½ months working to write and rewrite core parts of the game to get this to work. Even things that seem trivial, like the way that cities are saved and loaded, had to be completely reworked in order to make this feature function correctly.
You conveniently left out the part where people in this thread made sweeping, judgmental claims about everyone at EA, including calling them “corporate dicks,” and then proceeded to accuse me of being part of EA’s vast conspiracy to undermine this forum, but okay. You also claimed I used the term “brats,” which I didn’t – you guys are the ones using hateful personal attacks, all because you can’t edit a file to change your videogame traffic pattern or whatever.
You have expectations that you think are reasonable. EA did not meet them. I presented arguments why your expectations – which may have been reasonable in 2003, when SC4 came out – may no longer be reasonable. The industry is changing, and the economics are complicated. As an aside, some game companies have very good reasons to preserve the artistic integrity of their creations, and they shouldn’t have to justify that to anyone. At least, until those people demonstrate some semblance of maturity, which frankly has not been demonstrated here.
Nothing he says suggests that the online requirement was a “core design” which precluded accommodating offline. Basically they decided that they were not going to do offline and didn’t build it.
Aye, a lot of self-inflicted troubles there.
What’s perhaps funniest/saddest about it is that even starting from that flawed vision of “online only forever yippee!” they to date have not been able to make the features that depend on it–that is intra-city communication and region play–work properly. I almost wonder if this theoretical offline version will work better solely because we’re no longer reliant on their netcode not breaking horribly when trying to send firetrucks across the region.
JBG, when I said “99% of the time DRM does not work” I meant that 99% of the time companies make games and give them these ridiculous DRM schemes, a pirated version shows up within a week or two of release anyway, and it has the advantage of not making the “customer” jump through hoops to make sure things work. The fact that people managed to figure out a way to get SimCity to work offline within a few weeks (though perhaps not flawlessly…which is not really any different from the pathetic state of the nonpirated version) is proof of this. One of the great things about Steam for publishers is that a) it makes buying the game really easy (and often really cheap) and b) its DRM is not ridiculously fascist, both of which encourage people to buy the game instead of pirate it.
No one was saying everyone at EA is a “corporate dick.” I do not think Joe Developer at EA is any less interested in developing a good game than Joe Developer at Valve or Mojang or Firaxis. I do think that they are placed under much more pressure from the business side of things to design games around extracting the most profit per customer than at other companies, however, just judging by the way recent EA releases have gone, especially from recently acquired studios like Bioware and Popcap.
Nesrie
2050
Because in 2003, we expected features in a game to work and today, that’s unreasonable? You are welcome to set your bar as low as you want to. I would have been fine with no offline mode and a game that functions properly. The only entitlement I see here is your need to try and force everyone to see your view as an absolute and everything else as a fallacy. You’re not going to get that kind of response no matter how many fun ways you concoct to say the same thing over and over again
My bet is copying the server code into the client and changing the internal routing logic to localhost was probably relatively easy. Getting the game to completely change how it was doing saves was probably the bigger challenge.
I say that, of course, with no understanding of the true complexities that may have been involved…
I don’t understand EA’s lack of respect for their customers and community.
Working on it as soon as was practical after release? You mean as soon as practical after the business finally realised they had screwed up and alienated their customer base and genre fans.
Working on this since August? How hard would it have been to release a statement saying “We have heard your feedback and are listening. We are taking steps to try to implement an offline mode, but it will be challenging given the core design. No promises at this stage, but we will keep you informed of the progress.”
Nope, got to tow the party line and spout rubbish about it being impossible, despite modders demonstrating some glimmer of possibility.
biosc1
2053
In my line of work, this is the number one thing I explain to my clients. Customers expect something from you. Some message or response…anything. Silence is your worst enemy as it just builds speculation, rumour-mongering, and ill-will. In today’s world of social media / near-real-time responses, it is expected that a message is delivered in a timely manner. Anything…even, as you said: “we have heard you” is enough to assuage public opinion.
Think about 2003 for a second. There was no DLC, because there was no distribution mechanism for it. Expansion packs were basically the only way to get new content to users, and those were few and far between (SC4 had only one). In that market environment, it is more reasonable to expect developers to sanction mods. Now, in 2014, thanks to online distribution services, developers themselves can push this content instantly to users for a small ($2-10) fee. It therefore makes less market sense for developers to ignore this revenue stream, or to endorse a competing free user-made product.
Whether you think it’d be better for everyone if mods were encouraged isn’t the point. All I’m arguing here – and I’m getting way more resistance on this point than I should – is that EA staff, as well as those who support them, should be free to make or support this determination without being ridiculed with juvenile ad hominems. It is, at best, an open question as to whether mods actually enhance revenue in all cases, and it’s discouraging to see so many armchair analysts here skipping that complicated question and settling on “they are rich dicks corporations bad mods good.”
JBG, when I said “99% of the time DRM does not work” I meant that 99% of the time companies make games and give them these ridiculous DRM schemes, a pirated version shows up within a week or two of release anyway, and it has the advantage of not making the “customer” jump through hoops to make sure things work. The fact that people managed to figure out a way to get SimCity to work offline within a few weeks (though perhaps not flawlessly…which is not really any different from the pathetic state of the nonpirated version) is proof of this. One of the great things about Steam for publishers is that a) it makes buying the game really easy (and often really cheap) and b) its DRM is not ridiculously fascist, both of which encourage people to buy the game instead of pirate it.
To be clear, no one got SC5 working offline properly. The DRM was not cracked for SC5. And many, many Steam games have been cracked.
I’m pretty sure I remember Total Annihiliation having DLC units for people to download back in 1998. Between that and your inability to understand what mods even are, perhaps you should take your own advice to everyone else about things they don’t understand and shut up your ridiculous line of argument here.
I do not think it is a stretch that, given the pre-release talks about SC5 and the release that it discouraged more people from buying the game than any availability of a drm-free version would. If you are thinking day 0 downloads of a drm-free version it is not the same as a lost sale. Except maybe on the black markets in Asia where you buy a bunch of DVDs for 3-4$ and hope that at least some of it works. (And such a great distribution platform for Trojans…). On the other hand, if the game had worked offline but had added-benefits with online components it would probably have GAINED a lot of sales from being warezed as people who get into the game realized there is a huge potential to the game in online play – and thus they would have to buy a key to enable online functionality.
Steam has been cracked and emu’ed for years, but the popularity, reach and income of the platform has grown year after year.
Hell - Minecraft was warezed from early alpha and still it probably outsold SimCity 5.
Word of mouth is (a lot) more important than DRM.
(That said, a bad crack that limits the game might create bad word of mouth – but the people making it will look like fools when it is discovered that it was because of a bad RE and not a game issue - not to mention that usually these things are fixed fast.).
Oh yea, EA would’ve been better if they remained the publishing company from the 90s instead of what they turned into now. :-)
Still, they make a profit and that is all that matters - right? Heard there is big money to be made in black market arms sales.
Quaro
2057
Minecraft is the fifth best selling game of all time (and has yet to be on the new consoles…)
Silent Hunter V was not cracked for ages (maybe still isn’t).
Really looking forward to Silent Hunter VIII as Ubi churns them out yearly now since they sold millions being uncrackable and all.
Oh wait…
In reality no cracker bothered to re-visit that game once the new protection method from Ubi was cracked as no one gave a f*ck as the game sucked.
It also tanked in sales that’s why the series is on hold / dead / in limbo whatever.
deanco
2059
I think I get it.
The bigger the company, the more infallible they are, because they have all these smart people looking at the problem. So us plebs should never question why a big company does something, because they know much more about it. All those layers of vice-presidents and middle management are just there to insure that a company always makes the right decisions. So if they need 10 patches (and counting) to get the game to sorta work, and need to give away a free game to make up for their train-wreck launch, or disallow mods to sell more DLC, it’s all good, because Big Brother is looking out for you, and they have the expertise to know what is the right thing to do.
I suppose that analogy could be carried over to any large company. Or government.
I got it.
Menzo
2060
I think it’d be super constructive to turn this post into an argument about piracy. Let’s do that! Surely we’ll finally crack that one and come out of it closer than ever.
PS - today is OPPOSITE DAY
