1661

I’m really worried about Guillaume Pierre.
He’s a programmer on the Maxis team and after communicating with him today about the education bug, plus he was looking into the pollution bug he came to the same conclusion we all did. There’s no way in hell that could have escaped QA if they were doing half their job. It only took 10 hours of sim to find those game breakers and they either weren’t reported period, or the person receiving those reports decided not to pass it on to the rest of the team.

1662

Arghhhh, ambien post nerd rage. Knew it when I woke up. Sorry all.

1663

Dude, that’s the worst kind of internet nerdrage armchair analyst hate-on. Chalk it up to a major EA screw-up and let it go. There’s no need to compose a blame list when, frankly, you don’t know what happened at EA over the course of the game’s development. Lucy Bradshaw is terrible at writing chummy blog posts to despondant SimCity fans, but she’s worked wonders for Maxis over the years. I was at a talk Stone Librande, #6 on your hate list, gave at GDC and it’s very nearly heartbreaking to see the design documents he put together for the game. It’s a good design, and a solid smart foundation for an online city builder. Furthermore, he’s a bright likable guy who killed a little time before the talk by showing a game he made to play over the mail with his teenage sons who are away at college. I noticed that one of the slides included his home address and I hated that, for a moment, I wondered if maybe that wasn’t a good idea. And because of the tone in your tirade, which just encourages assholes on the internet to be assholes, it probably wasn’t a good idea! Stone Librande doesn’t deserve any anger. The company he works for might, but you have no right, and not enough information, to make it personal.

It’s totally cool to hate the game – I’m right there with you, brother! – but don’t pretend you know enough to call out a handful of names from the credits. :(

-Tom
1664

You know the hate list reminded of a statement someone posted in SimCity facebook. This was after Lucy Bradshaw offered to answer questions online. The “fan” (a mid-30s guy judging by his facebook pic) posted: “Can I rape with questions?”

What a dickwad.

Also Ocean Quigley should shave off his luxurious mustache and beard in penance :)

1665

Decisions were made, and they were bad. A tiny beta masked just how bad they were. Lucy should never be put in front of a gaming community with a keyboard and a blog without reeducation training mostly because she stoked fires instead of calmed them. I hate this blameless mistake approach, but there is no way of knowing who did what. Even if you could pinpoint a specific decision, decisions are not made in a vacuum. Hopefully EA can look inward long and hard enough to learn from their mistake but… I am not hopeful.

1666

A witch hunt is definitely what’s needed here. That’ll fix everything.

1667

So if a programmer made a mistake in his programming code and it was released without proper testing, everyone else has a right to call him out individually, post his real name on the internet singling him out, and start abusing him?

Why stop at Maxis? Let’s apply the standard to every games and business software out there.

If the game suck, don’t buy it. If the company suck, boycott the company. No need to name and shame individuals (as a general rule of course - exception being the WarZ game CEO).

1668

Mr. Kancil99, I’m pretty sure Nesrie is agreeing with you. From reading the rest of his sentence that you decided to cut when you quoted him, he seems to agree that jpinard’s hate list is inappropriate.

-Tom
1669

But at which point did jpinard suggest to do any of the folks on the list any ill?
I’m unaffected by the SC5 debacle as I haven’t played it (I probably never will unless they fix it up to a degree and then sell it super-cheap), but to me, the sublimal message of his post is: “don’t believe a word those peope write or say” rather than “go find their house and cause them physical pain”.

rezaf

1670

What? He wrote a message on a forum. What in the world does subliminal have to do with it? Oh, never mind, you were talking about his sublimal message.

1671

Well, how do you like it if you made a mistake in a project and the boss pulls you out in front of the whole company and say: “Don’t hurt him physically… but the reason the project sucked is because of his fault. And oh he has a tendency to lie as well.”

It sucks when the boss does it and it sucks when the customer (a type of boss btw) does it as well. More so if it’s done on the Internet.

1672

My comment was about his tone. But the statement that eight people deserve “ALL (caps not mine) the anger” is tantamount to ill will. At any rate, it’s a childish and short-sighted way to have a conversation about a busted game. I’m surprised you want to defend it.

As for believing what “those people write or say”, are you guys just new to how companies try to sell their games? Particularly publicly traded companies?

Again, I understand being upset about SimCity. I am, too. But calling out individuals when you have no insight into what actually happened is the worst of kind of internet nerdrage.

-Tom
1673

As you wrote yourself, jpinard isn’t exactly the boss of those people (I’d say an individual customer in the video game business is in no shape or form the boss of one of those folks).
And to me, a more befitting analogy would be the following:
If I took a contract to renovate a guy’s bathroom, and repeatedly say to himself, his wife and his friends: “You’re gonna LOVE the new bathroom, it’s the best thing ever. The whirlpool is gonna blow you away. And you can see the stars through a huge window in the ceiling!” and when all work’s finished it becomes clear that the tiles are falling from the walls, there is not only no whirlpool but no bathtub as well, and the window in the ceiling I was supposed to install didn’t work out the way I planned, so I saw fit to just install no window at all, leaving the “bathroom” exposed to the elements, then I guess I’ll have to live with being called out for it / called a liar. I shouldn’t have promised any of those things in the first place.

rezaf

1674

I hadn’t even read what Tom wrote and stopped after the first sentence as I knew I’d written something I regretted the moment I woke up. It’s been a while since I wrote something out of character ala Ambien.

But I do feel bad the programmers are taking so much crap from people, spending lots of free overtime to fix this, when the producers/directors aren’t doing anything - when it’s the organizational problems that are causing the issues, not the code. Buggy code getting released is a side-effect.

1675

Pretty sure it tells you on a splash screen. Garbage is an exception as jpinard mentions.

Nice list JP. Sounds like they made trains into bigger sinks to get rid of main intercity traffic?

1676

Nope, traffic was a mess just because of all the bugs and the sims always wanting to go the exact same way. As soon as a left turn would come up, traffic would back way up, and when you backups start covering more one intersection, then total gridlock. They also added stop lights to medium density street intersections and this has helped a bit too. But personally I don’t even use medium density streets, just light and heavy. Trains do carry more tourists now.

1677

Here’s the powerpoint from that talk. I agree with Tom, I want to play the game in this design doc. I’m hopeful they will continue to support it and get the bugs squashed. http://www.stonetronix.com/gdc-2013/GDC2013-SimCity-OnePage.pptx

1678

This wasn’t clear for me, either, and I’m surprised to hear this is how it works. The tutorial left me with the impression that it’s a choice I have to make with certain trade-offs, not something that I’d be stupid not to do because it creates parallel phantom services for neighbors. Suffice it to say, I continue to be baffled by how poorly they’ve integrated the features that are supposed to make this “always online” experience worthwhile.

1679

Thanks. Though the initial disclaimer made me oddly sad. So he/publisher/whomever knew by then that this design wouldn’t survive intact through the process there. I’m referring to the one about these slides not reflecting the released game. So, in light of that, from a manager process point that’s bad design (yes, even if you like it) or the slides and early prototype design are there for hype. Either or a combination is sad. I however didn’t like the design, either promised, or delivered.

I didn’t really like the way regions went in the end of the last one. I love my simulations as sandbox toys. I look forward to learning the guts of a sim, pulling them out and modding them (or playing others modded sim guts) for more sandbox fun. Regions seemed anti-sandbox and making the franchise on-line was obviously not going to work with modding and the tinker aspect. I have no nerd rage, as I didn’t buy it, expecting I wouldn’t enjoy it.

I don’t even have schadenfreude, its just sad. I have enjoyed sims for a very long time, both franchise ones and others. I have liked and played MMOs. On paper maybe I might have looked like a target but my response is “yuck”. EA wouldn’t make either the game as designed, or as delivered, to be one that appealed to me. MMOs also seem to be chasing a subset that is … not me. So regardless of publishers doing well, or badly, I do not see many AAA quality games I’m likely to enjoy. No more games for me? I’ll just have to scour indie stuff more, and hope the chase of the mobile, “design to monetize” thing (nothing to add to another thread here) doesn’t devour too much potential publishing dollars.

However, where are the games as toys? Even under those design slides there is a start and an “endgame” for a sim city. Rush to endgame, more levels, press bar for rewards faster! yay? Where is the build, fail, tear it up/crash, go back to save, ponder, rebuild, loop? I feel like I want to hold a funeral for simulations. Oh, and old, I also feel old now.

1680

Well I think I am done again for awhile, my city is pulling in around 500k a month thanks to fuel / plastic / alloy / metal sales, and I am again bored due to lack of map space to build outward, I filled in my last high value area with QT3 written in road. I will say traffic does seem better, so thats a plus.

Now all I need is a map 4x this size.