The trash bug has been in since release , nice to see its been a priority for them to fix it.
Inter-connected cities could compensate for the small city patches, but commuting between cities is not working at all.
jpinard
1903
I don’t know how this happens. They fix it, then it comes back again.
Man, you guys in this thread are a real testament to the indomitably of the human spirit. :)
Still, keep it coming. I’d love to read at some day that the whole big mess has fallen into some semblance of its intended design.
-Tom
EA releases their modding policy for SimCity. In short, it is “anything that modifies the simulation of the multiplayer aspect of this game or requires changes to a .com, .exe, or .dll file is disallowed, as are things that break the normal terms of use for the game, exceed its existing rating in any territory, or that we just don’t like.”
Since this is a multiplayer-only game, anything that “modifies the simulation” in multiplayer includes “anything that modifies the simulation” period. Since you can’t make changes to any of the game logic-producing files anyway, you’re basically left with texture and sound packs.
EA are fucking shitbags. Online-only is fucking shitbags. And because I’m just extra-special angry today, if you disagree with the second statement in particular, YOU’RE fucking shitbags and are literally the cancer that is killing gaming, so please go hang yourself :)
Fortunately I escape your wrath because I too think SimCity and EA screwed this pooch but good.
Um, does anyone even care? Do they expect a massive thriving modding community?
Honestly at this point I think they just enjoy saying “fuck you” to SimCity fans every so often as a reminder of how much they loathe us and the series.
I expect at some point a $15 expansion to come out that is just a 15-second FMV of their executive leadership mooning the camera.
tgb123
1910
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Even at their peak of their creativity (that is to say, the 80’s) EA fostered an asshat culture from the top down. Trip Hawkins an Bing Gordon are two of the biggest douchebags I’ve ever had the displeasure to meet.
Interesting reaction, especially since you can’t legally modify movies to create sequels, and you probably don’t think movies are “dead” or “being killed.” EA invested substantial resources in making a game, and they have every right to control how their property is used. Your juvenile language does not help your point.
fdsaion
1912
Really?
Let’s leave bad analogies out of this, shall we? Because I can give you an equally stupid car analogy that says the opposite.
Movies and games are a poor comparison since there are so many differences. Movies are merely a consumption-only medium and it’s always been that way for a 100+ years. By contrast gaming in the home has been around roughly 40 years and there’s at least 20 years of tradition behind modding. It’s not unreasonable to expect that upon buying a game you should be able to mod it.
Also, banning modding is nonsensical because modding increases a game’s value. One good mod could give a lot of people a reason to play SimCity. Maybe that’s what EA’s trying to prevent. Perhaps they see SimCity as a lost cause and want it dead and buried ASAP.
sim city 4 had an amazing modding community, so it is possible, although not at this rate…
Aye. Look at sales of ArmA 2 from DayZ for months or years on end; now, sales of SSBB are even likely thanks to the recent mod for that. And of course, yes, SC4 is still a beloved and much-played game thanks to its modding community. Modding communities for Quake, Half-Life, and Warcraft 3 spawned Team Fortress 2, CounterStrike, and DotA (and thus League of Legends). Modding is sort of an intrinsic and vital part of PC gaming. That EA reflects such a poor appreciation of that–along with so many other things–can be seen as proof positive that the are, indeed, fucking shitbags :)
Nesrie
1916
It still amazes me how badly they screwed this up. What a short-sighted, short-term company. The modding community in the city simulation genre is pretty awesome. The farm mods for 4 were/are just amazing. You don’t have to worry about me Armando, I feel like I should pay my sister back for buying me this game for my birthday. It’s no fun at all, and she really wanted to play together based on all the empty promises EA made about cooperative play. I didn’t think it could much worse than Cities XL’s online scheme.
Your analogy is actually significantly worse. Modifying your own car is fine, because it’s a first-sale issue. I’m talking about distributing modifications to an expressive artistic work, which becomes a copyright issue – one that is far more like movies than modifying a vehicle for personal use. (Again, the car modification for personal use would not even implicate copyright at all).
No, they just want the ability to profit on sequels, which is a perfectly reasonable motive and an incentive fully provided to them by the Copyright Act and other laws. Full moddability would allow people to make Simcity 6 with larger city sizes, meaning lots of lost revenue for EA in terms of expansions and sequels.
The fact that there was a “tradition” in gaming – which, especially in the 90s and early 00s, was a very young industry – to allow mods isn’t really a compelling reason for a game company to surrender its intellectual property rights to modders in 2014. It’s understandable you don’t like the policy, but it’s not understandable to assume you have rights to distribute modifications to the software and create illicit derivative works (which are rights reserved to the game creators by law). You aren’t the one who has to pay the bills at EA. It’s silly to suggest that they should voluntarily abandon profits that could result, when they put all the work in to make the underlying game.
jpinard
1919
Jeremybriangreen - the reason this brings out the most anger in people is that the core game is still fundamentally broken because region-play is still broken. In the latest release patch, students won’t attend a University city most of the time, trucks just stop delivering for no reason. They must be bulldozed and rebuilt to function, low class students will literally walk across the length of the map to go to school (or return home) because they won’t use mass transit or drive, numbers on one screen don’t remotely reflect numbers when you delve into other overlays. Power just cuts out for no reason from a trading city so power plants are required in cities even if you have a primary node for it elsewhere. Recycling plant trucks break and must be re-bulldozed over and over again to function. Most of this relates to region-play issues.
So region play of the core game is still fundamentally broken and leads at Maxis (or EA) decided just a few months post release that they no longer needed a dedicated team working on region play. So very basic problems, like those mentioned above, are no longer getting the attention they deserve because the leadership at Maxis and/or EA just doesn’t care enough to get the resources back to fix it. So yes, this brings outrage from gamers as we know Maxis has the money to do this (they’re still a massive cash cow for EA with the Sims), but they still regard fixing core issues and its customers with disdain. The people down the line like the programmers care but are not given the time, priority, or resources to fix stuff.
Are you sure those issues are still in the most recent patch? I thought they fixed the recycling one, at least.
But anyway, it makes a lot of sense that people are unhappy with the state of the game. What doesn’t make sense is people’s angry reactions to EA refusing to open the game up to user mods.
Let me try another example. Games (code), like novels, are considered literary works under section 102. If I read a good book with a terrible ending, I’m not allowed to rewrite the last five chapters and then post the whole thing online (even if I don’t make any profit). Similarly, if I play a good game with some missing features, I’m not allowed to go in there and create a mini-sequel by messing around with the design to make it good. While it may be true that the “gaming public” would be better off if I could – just like the “reading public” would be better off if I could fix that book’s ending – the content creator would likely be much worse off.
What is missing from a lot of these conversations (“EA is evil” etc) is some respect for the fact that this content doesn’t materialize out of thin air, and it’s not free for EA to create.
