In Wake of Poor Reviews, Amazon Yanks SimCity Download 511
An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from Geek.com: "In what must be a big blow for EA and Maxis, Amazon has stopped selling download copies of the just released SimCity. The game has at time of writing received 833 reviews on Amazon, and has an average rating of just one star. That's because 740 of those are one star reviews. Only 20 people gave it 5 stars. There's few better ways to gauge how a game has been received, and this is pretty damning as to how EA has handled the launch."
Not sure... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not sure if this is good for the PC games industry, or bad. It's good, because games with bad DRM shouldn't succeed. It's bad because I like PC games, and want the industry to focus on PC games again.
Re:Not sure... (Score:5, Interesting)
In other news, a sequel to Planescape: Torment got funded on Kickstarter in 6 hours flat. It looks like the good guys are finally winning for once.
Re:Not sure... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yah, I don't know why this story was tagged "failure", it's actually an epic win. Not for EA, but for everyone else.
Re:Not sure... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not sure... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's EA, they don't care about either of these things. If they did they would have actually fixed the capacity issues before launch. This isn't the first time this has happened for an EA launch and it won't be the last
Why pay for more servers for launch, when you can put in as many as you'll need to run under normal load once it settles down and lose so few customers that it won't even make a blip on the graph.Especially as the ones who get punished are obviously the "hardcore" ones who will just keep coming back, even after bitching the whole time when the servers can't handle the load
Seriously, the Oceana launch that happened today is having exactly the same problems.
At this point this is what you get if you buy EA games. Give it a week and it might be working enough to play, give it a month and it might be reliable
Re: (Score:3)
Yea... I give a month for new releases to iron out the bugs on PC games, I've never gotten a game that didn't have substantial patching by the 1 month mark. It kind of sucks, but it seems the trend has been to make the games as simple and big as possible while leaving quality to the beta (SCII), or the community (skyrim).
Re:Not sure... (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazon Elastic Compute.
No excuses.
Re:Not sure... (Score:4, Interesting)
So....
I don't know if the SimCity main servers, or maybe just authentication servers are hosted by Amazon.... but... NO EXCUSES. IIRC EC2 has plenty of tools for rapidly cloning servers.
Re:PeerBlock (Score:4, Insightful)
Or PeerGuardian Linux.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PeerGuardian_Linux [archlinux.org]
Re:Not sure... (Score:5, Insightful)
And give it three years and they will shut off the servers and ask you to buy the sequel, so it can all happen again!
Re:Not sure... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Seriously, the Oceana launch that happened today is having exactly the same problems..."
That is because this is NOT about DRM--this is about killing the Used PC Game market. The server connection is to verify first-install. After that, the game will not work on any other machine (or be whittled down to Demo functionality). That being said, all EA PC games will have this "feature" from this time forward as they and every other major game developer/publisher are all involved in a major assault on First Sale doctrine.
Corporate Gaming is dying...don't throw it a life-preserver by purchasing their bullshit. There are a TON of Emulators and Kickstart projects out there--give THOSE folks your money.
Re:Not sure... (Score:5, Insightful)
Wake me up when there's an indie equivalent to Fire Emblem (and no, Battle for Wesnoth is not the same thing...) or indeed RPGs in general.
Re:Not sure... (Score:5, Insightful)
While this will of course be used as an excuse for forced obsolescence, the reality is that an unlock patch could of course simply include the server code, perhaps even running it in the same process as the main game.
Oh well. After reading about the always connected requirement, I decided to wait and see rather than preorder. It turned out to be a wise decision.
Re:Not sure... (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't that the same thing? DRM causes excessive server load and extremely poor player experience, masses of negative reviews. DRM costs EA sales, and they only way to fix it is to throw more money at the problem.
Better yet there is no way to recover from all those negative reviews now. Even if they fixed it tomorrow they would remain, and the chances of 800+ people bothering to write positive reviews is nil. The game is tainted forever, the disaster unrecoverable. Well, that isn't entirely true, they could release a DRM free version, that is the only thing that can turn it around.
Re:Not sure... (Score:5, Insightful)
Online DRM won't fail while we still have a giant fan base who supports DRM. They would rather divide the world into good guys with DRM and bad guys with DRM instead of realizing that everyone with DRM is a bad guy (even Valve). When people think that some DRM is ok and even desirable, they make the war to defend consumer rights much more difficult.
Re:Not sure... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've hated EA ever since back in 1985 when I bought a game for my C64 that hammered my 1541 disk drive out of alignment. It took about 5 minutes to load and you could fry an egg on the drive's cover by the time it was finished. I finally got the copy protection stripped out and it loaded in about 24 seconds just as smooth as silk. I haven't bought a game from those fuckers since. I can't believe they're still in business the way they've screwed over their customers and they are still at it today.
Re:Not sure... (Score:4, Interesting)
As I pointed out yesterday in another thread, EA have scrapped Dead Space 4 because DS3 sold poorly.
The reason it sold poorly was because of microtransactions, I'd like to think this means microtransactions aren't going to sneak more prominently into games too now as a result, but I'm not sure it works like that. EA's scrapping of Dead Space 4 seems to imply that they don't think microtransactions were the problem, and that it was the franchise that was at fault, which is silly, because that's blatantly false, it was entirely the effect microtransactions had on the game that stopped people buying it.
So yes it's nice to see bad ideas fail, but don't assume that companies necessarily recognise that the games failed because of the bad ideas.
That's not to say this wont select out such stupid companies in the long run, but we're nowhere near yet.
Re: (Score:3)
In other news, a sequel to Planescape: Torment got funded on Kickstarter in 6 hours flat. It looks like the good guys are finally winning for once.
Here's hoping they'll set a new record
They have more than doubled the initial $900,000 goal ($1,903,586 as of now), after less than 2 days on kickstarter.
Re: (Score:3)
Not even a whole day and it's at 1.91 million USD.
Re:Not sure... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not sure... (Score:4, Insightful)
The tree of Innovation must be refreshed at times with the blood of failed product launches.
FTFY
Re:Not sure... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not sure if this is good for the PC games industry, or bad. It's good, because games with bad DRM shouldn't succeed. It's bad because I like PC games, and want the industry to focus on PC games again.
Stop, just stop. You're completely missing the point. The point is that EA deceived consumers into thinking it was a single-player game. It's not, there is no single player mode, so no offline mode is possible. DRM is a moot point, it's like bitching about having to go online to play a single player instance in World of Warcraft.
YA, EA sucks, they fucked this all up big time. Yes, they could and should have made an offline single player mode, but they didn't. They chose to make a game where you cannot EVER truly play a completely isolated single-player game mode... even in the "solo mode" your city is influenced by other players in an indirect fashion.
Re:Not sure... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not sure if this is good for the PC games industry, or bad. It's good, because games with bad DRM shouldn't succeed. It's bad because I like PC games, and want the industry to focus on PC games again.
This is good for PC gaming, because it means strategies like this will not succeed in the marketplace. The best outcome of this would be EA losing a ton of money on SimCity. Hopefully EA withdraws from the PC gaming market and focuses on only producing console titles, that would also be a win. EA is not a friend to PC gamers, we don't need them. PC gaming is much, much larger than EA. PC gaming will succeed because of companies like Valve, and because of the developers and fans who use things like Kickstarter to get their games funded (speaking of which, where the hell is Star Command?). PC gaming will succeed in spite of companies like EA, not because of them. I would love it if companies who start their game design by including DRM left the PC market, it will become a bigger market for the developers that want to make great games.
Re: (Score:3)
Not sure if this is good for the PC games industry, or bad. It's good, because games with bad DRM shouldn't succeed. It's bad because I like PC games, and want the industry to focus on PC games again.
It's good all the way around.
What it shows is that PC users won't put up with really stupid ass DRM and poorly managed launches.
What surprises me is that Amazon would pull the listing, even with bad reviews, any sale is sale.
I didn't read the article, barely glanced at the summary. Simcity was cool in the 80's & early 90's, but now? I doubt it. If people are going to bring any old franchise back from the past, X-wing and Tie-fighter would rock...
Re:Not sure... (Score:5, Informative)
Amazon was getting bombarded by refund requests. That is why they pulled it. Selling it was costing them money.
Re:Not sure... (Score:5, Informative)
It seems lot of customers who wrote 1 star were also getting pretty offended when the 5 star (one time only reviewers) also included personal attacks against the 1 star reviewers many of whom are an "Amazon Verified Purchase", this pushed many of them into demanding a refunding.
Re:No refunds on software (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not sure... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also good that it happened to EA and not a smaller company. EA has a better chance of absorbing the loss and learning from it. Not that this is likely, but I'm an optimist like that.
Sure, Not (Score:4, Insightful)
"It's bad because I like PC games, and want the industry to focus on PC games again."
I call Troll. This is all bad and everyone knows it. There is no 'PC gaming industry'...the Personal Computer (PC) is a type of platform for consumer games.
The problem is the notion of requiring an internet connection to use. The problem is FEE PER USE.
DRM is bad for *any* industry in its current usage. Sure there is no law against properly implementing DRM in the right situation so not to harm your users, but that virtually never happens. Once DRM creeps into a type of media it is historically resulted in anti-user DRM implementations.
Lamenting something like 'PC games' is the exact wrong thing to notice. Lament FEE PER USE as industry standard across all gaming platforms.
Oh god why - Three Days with the new Sim City (Score:4, Informative)
As a sucker who bought this game, let me share my two days experience with it.
Half the time the game won't even launch - It briefly flashes "Servers not available" then the text changes to "checking for update" with a progress bar 100% full. If you just let it sit there, nothing happens. Ever. What you need to do is alt-F4, and then try again until the server is back up. Once the server is up, you get to launch the game.
There are only two servers per most regions, and only one for Oceania. I signed up for West Coast, US #2, correctly guessing it would be available more often than US #1. By day 2, West Coast #2 was stuck on "Busy" so I switched to Oceanea
EA has been promoting the fact that the servers aren't region locked, but it seems like a stupid move given the game releases in those regions today and tomorrow, but they're already full with overflow players from north america....
I did not play Sim City as a child and so don't have any sentimental attachment to it - I enjoy the game but find the multiplayer experiance oddly silent. I was expecting voice chat, as is normal in multiplayer-emphasized games but rarely have I gotten so much as a chat response. Because literally every game is hosted online (single player regions are just locked games), EA had to use asynchronous communications - Functionally when you send a written chat, it has to be delivered to the other regional players in a periodic region update so chat messages can sometimes lag 2 or 3 minutes before showing up.
Now granted, I didn't go into this with a full origin friends list so it's been all pubbies, but in 7 games with 20+ players I've gotten one response to a basic greeting, that's a terrible ratio and I'm pretty charming.
The real kick to the shins is that most of the time the game just doesn't work. I've got a DVD in my drive that says Sim-CIty on it, and I just want to get back to Myrtle City - my highly successful singleplayer region on the Oceania server and continue work on New Wageslavedom, the adjacent settlement I'm also mayor of.
Unfortunately the Oceania server has just filled up and after giving me the longest loading screen in the world, literally 10 minutes, it says my city isn't available right now.
Don't buy this game
Re: (Score:3)
There are though games that are fair to good everywhere but can with the help of the community really shine on a PC.
Counter Strike, ARMA 2, and the like.
Games that are decent but games that will become awesome and live long lives due to mods.
PCs can if the game designers are smart become immortal on PC. Not so much for consoles.
"Always on" is "Mostly Unusable For Several Weeks" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Always on" is "Mostly Unusable For Several Wee (Score:5, Interesting)
Alegedly it's not "just" DRM. EA has stated that their servers are handling some portion of the gameplay itself.
Anyway, it sucks that this game probably won't be playable after the servers inevitably go offline in a few years. Guess there's no room for nostalgia in the world of cloud computing.
Re:"Always on" is "Mostly Unusable For Several Wee (Score:4, Interesting)
Alegedly it's not "just" DRM. EA has stated that their servers are handling some portion of the gameplay itself.
They are. It's actually pretty damn good, when it's working. It's funny, because I didn't even know people were having problems until the /. article yesterday. I was too busy enjoying the game to see what other people thought about it.
Re:"Always on" is "Mostly Unusable For Several Wee (Score:5, Informative)
The servers are handling a part of the game which is not that important. That is: The global marked placed. And while it is an interesting feature it is in no way vital to the system.
And I know this because I bought the game, and managed to play half an hour with absolut no internet connection and it worked fine. But then I wanted to change region, and I have been unable to play since. But once you get a game started you can normally play until you want to change to a new city. (Or the game crashes, or you look the wrong way).
Re:"Always on" is "Mostly Unusable For Several Wee (Score:4, Funny)
The global marked placed
You know how I know you posted from a mobile device?
Re: (Score:3)
What is the reason for running aspects of effectively single player game play on a server?
Yep DRM.
Re:"Always on" is "Mostly Unusable For Several Wee (Score:4, Interesting)
Alegedly it's not "just" DRM. EA has stated that their servers are handling some portion of the gameplay itself.
I call BS on that one. The servers may be handling the inter-city calculations but that's it. There's just no way that these mini-cities have so many calculations that a decent desktop stumbles with them.
Actually, it'd probably run a *lot* better if it was running entirely on the local machine. But that's not the point.
As was mentioned several times in yesterday's story [slashdot.org], the setup itself was almost certainly designed this way as a form of DRM. It makes perfect sense- if enough critical parts of the game code run on the servers (and the end-user doesn't have direct access to the code), they can restrict access to paying customers only.
Sure, people can still pirate the "game" (or rather, the game client), but without access to the servers, it's pretty worthless in itself. You'd need to replicate the server functionality too- but EA obviously aren't going to let you have the code needed to run them! Sure, you could rewrite it, or hack the game to be entirely client-based, but if enough of the game is server-based, you'd have to rewrite a significant portion of the entire game from scratch.
Expect to see a lot more software (games *and* applications) use this model in future. I predicted it a few years ago- as a lot of people probably did, since it was a pretty logical step.
Of course, if a publisher is going to run things this way, they have to make sure that the servers run smoothly and are able to handle the load. Oops...
Re:"Always on" is "Mostly Unusable For Several Wee (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:"Always on" is "Mostly Unusable For Several Wee (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:"Always on" is "Mostly Unusable For Several Wee (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe we aren't giving EA enough credit. Maybe they discovered the best DRM was to make a total crap game that no one would even attempt pirate.
Re:"Always on" is "Mostly Unusable For Several Wee (Score:5, Informative)
Biggest duds of the year? For whom? Certainly not Activision.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_III#Sales [wikipedia.org]
Sales
Before its release, Diablo III broke several presale records and became the most pre-ordered PC game to date on Amazon.com.[98] Activision Blizzard reported that Diablo III had broken the one-day PC sales records, accumulating over 3.5 million sales in the first 24 hours after release and over 6.3 million sales in its first week, including the 1.2 million people who obtained Diablo III through the World of Warcraft annual pass.[99] On its first day, the game amassed 4.7 million players worldwide, an estimate which includes those who obtained the game via the World of Warcraft annual pass.[99] In its second quarterly report, Diablo III was reported to have pushed Activision Blizzard's expectations. As of July 2012, more than 10 million people have played the game.[100] Diablo III remains the fastest selling PC game to date, and also one of the best-selling PC video games. As of the end of 2012, it had sold more than 12 million copies.[5]
Certainly not from critics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_III#Critical_reception [wikipedia.org]
So unsuccessful that it was the 3rd best selling PC game of all time....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PC_video_games [wikipedia.org]
Re:"Always on" is "Mostly Unusable For Several Wee (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, and out of everyone I know who played the game (dozens, including me) there are maybe 1 or 2 that continue to play the game (I don't, though I'll pop in from time to time to see if anything has changed). The initial success was great and it sold like hotcakes. The continued success? Not so great because the game is so damn boring. I don't believe I'll be playing D3 in a decade from its release, like I was with D2- partly because the game sucks and mostly because I doubt Blizzard will keep its servers going that long.
Re:"Always on" is "Mostly Unusable For Several Wee (Score:5, Insightful)
Blizzard doesn't care what you do after the purchase, or whether you keep playing. They already have your money. If anything, many people stopping playing after first few days is better for them - less server load.
Yes, Diablo 3 was a roaring success - it made Blizard loads of money. I'd hazard a guess that this is big part of why EA dared to come up with similar scheme.
Re:"Always on" is "Mostly Unusable For Several Wee (Score:5, Insightful)
This absolutely not true. Of course Blizzard cares about whether people are going to keep playing or not. It is a brand. It is IP with value. They do not want it watered down. Future sales matter, people's passion about it fuels the RMA, people buying collectors editions of future Blizzard games because of access to D3, posters, merch, a steady stream of small sales (like D2 got). On top of those concerns, top talent wants to go to places where they make great games. There are real people in these places.
Z
Re:"Always on" is "Mostly Unusable For Several Wee (Score:5, Informative)
Diablo 3 was "unsuccessful" because people "only" played it for 60+ hrs before getting bored/disinterested/frustrated, instead of the 1,000,000 hrs they thought they'd get out of it after playing Diablo 2.
And those same people could log back in right now, patch to 1.07, and end up with an experience that was a lot closer to the D2:LoD clone they were hoping for.
Re:"Always on" is "Mostly Unusable For Several Wee (Score:5, Informative)
I wish I had pirated it lol (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I wish I had pirated it lol (Score:4, Informative)
The Fine Summary misses most of the point. They could have simply copied the second paragraph from the Fine Article:
A note has been posted by Amazon underneath the “Currently unavailable” message. It states that many customers are having connection issues and they have no idea when it will be fixed. As we reported earlier, EA is bringing new servers online over the next 2 days to try and solve the problem, and Maxis is fixing bugs as quickly as they can, but server architecture issues are hampering them.
Re: (Score:3)
How are you going to pirate it when it is a client+server model? All your cities live on EA's servers and there's no local saving/offline play. The only way it will ever be pirated is if the developers left some hidden local saving in it that management told them to disable, or if someone reverse engineers the network protocol and writes a server for it.
Re:I wish I had pirated it lol (Score:4, Interesting)
All you really need to implement to pirate the game, is a service which can load/save the game. And then you can just return fixed values for the global marked place. Then you have a perfectly working pirated game.
I don't know how complicated the load/save thing is, but If we are luckey, save just serialize the data and send it to the server, and load just get the same serialized stream back. If they do it that way, making a pirate save function should be rather simple. They did it for settlers 7.
Re:I wish I had pirated it lol (Score:4)
I do wish you'd stop using that. The correct term is "global market place." I don't want to be a grammar/spelling/usage nazi, but the way you mangle the term is getting to be positively painful.
Re: (Score:3)
I guess the reason the pirates don't have a working server already, is that it's very difficult to reverse-engineer the client/server communication as long as it is as unreliable as it currently is.
Re:I wish I had pirated it lol (Score:5, Interesting)
I haven't had a single problem since I played the first time the night of the launch.
All the problems I've run into are simply the shitty game, itself, with all the problems everyone has already covered a thousand times over (social, regional stuff, tiny cities, crappy road system, inability to build an all inclusive city, etc).
After playing for a bit, I wanted to reset my city and start from scratch, again. I could not find any way to do it, whatsoever.
Eventually I got tired of it (probably about five hours worth of play, into it) and I don't know that I'll ever go back to it. I wasted my money and I regret it. I buy a lot of games and put up with a lot of let-downs as just part of being a gamer, but this one felt like a particular waste of money. Especially after all these years of being excited that someday we'd eventually have a new awesome Sim City game with all that having it on modern hardware would offer (which, as it turns out, is nothing).
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Sorry bro, my GPU doesn't support text acceleration. No sale here...
Re:I wish I had pirated it lol (Score:5, Insightful)
Return it.
Do it now before you can't. It is broken and you should get a refund.
Re:I wish I had pirated it lol (Score:5, Informative)
...No you wouldn't. The *game logic* is on the server. You'd have to create your own server to play it. This makes it very hard to pirate, AND very tied to having a good internet connection even in "private" mode
No, it's not. The game uses an extreme amount of CPU as it crunches those numbers itself, and the game continues to run even if your internet connection is lost. The only thing the server handles is the Facebook-like social gaming elements, and the save files.
The "Oh, our server handles all the number crunching" was a bold faced lie by EA and Maxis, because that kind of number crunching would not be possible without a monthly fee to pay for server maintenance.
Re: (Score:3)
The "Facebook like" referer to the fact that you get free items(Firetruck, police cars and so on) which you can't use in your own city, but which you can give to an other city and earn a bonus that way. Like all the facebook games, where you give resources to your facebook frinds.
Re:I wish I had pirated it lol (Score:4, Insightful)
For those of us trying to use Facebook who don't play Farmville, this is not a selling point.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:I wish I had pirated it lol (Score:5, Informative)
Too bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Too bad they made all the money from the idiots who pre-ordered. Never-ever-ever-ever pre-order a game, unless you don't mind getting literally nothing in return. Uninformed markets are broken markets.
Re:Too bad (Score:5, Funny)
But but but the game sites hyped it so much I just had to pre-order it
What if they ran out of digital copies after a week of two?
Re: (Score:3)
The game industry is shit, filled with shit, and they keep piling on more shit.
Not that some games are bad, I enjoy Indie/Greenlight games as much as the normally made industry games. But the drivers of games released in this way have driven good ideas off the cliff (Warhammer Online, EA games in general, bad console to PC ports), because they want money, not excuses.
Take these jackass investors out of the loop and find games go back to a better state, where demos were rel
Re:Too bad (Score:4, Insightful)
Can you return it?
I'm not sure if there are special exceptions, but in the UK if something's "not fit for purpose" you have the right to a refund or (working!) replacement.
Re:Too bad (Score:5, Informative)
Ah, the rights don't really apply, there's a gap in the law: http://m.computeractive.co.uk/ca/consumer-rights/1931491/isnt-software-covered-undere-sale-act [computeractive.co.uk]
Re:Too bad (Score:4, Insightful)
Too bad they made all the money from the idiots who pre-ordered. Never-ever-ever-ever pre-order a game, unless you don't mind getting literally nothing in return. Uninformed markets are broken markets.
However, paying for a game on Kickstarter before the development has even started is totally awesome!
Shame the game looks good (Score:5, Insightful)
I really want to buy SimCity, it looks pretty awesome, but I'm not going to allow EA to treat me like a thief and I'm certainly not going to pay them for the privilege.
DRM (Score:5, Informative)
Use always-on, internet-requring DRM they said. It will work fine, they said.
Sadly, EA will not admit DRM is the problem, they will just attribute it to "overwhelming demand".
Re:DRM (Score:5, Informative)
And when/if sales are lackluster because of the shit DRM or the shit quality of the game *itself*, they'll blame *that* on "piracy".
Read the reviews yourself (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Read the reviews yourself (Score:5, Funny)
Do you really think it need to be referer free? I can't imagine anyone reading this story, and then thinking: Hey I need to buy this game now :}
Re:Read the reviews yourself (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you really think it need to be referer free? I can't imagine anyone reading this story, and then thinking: Hey I need to buy this game now :}
Amazon referrals are a lot more tricky than that. When you load an amazon page with a referral code it sets a cookie on your system that lasts for something like 24 hours. Any purchases you make while that referral cookie is active send cash to the original referrer (and amazon also gives them a report on what you bought, but not your identity, at least not directly) -- even if you never actually purchase the original item.
That's why some websites [brainpickings.org] will do annoying things like make every image clickable as a referral link to amazon, making it much easier to accidentally click a link so that if 12 hours later you buy something unrelated at Amazon, the referrer still gets the cash.
Re:Read the reviews yourself (Score:5, Informative)
This ea support chat screencap posted in one of the reviews seems worth sharing far and wide [imgur.com], and judging from the way it ends I would guess the owner doesn't mind my posting it here.
"There Are Few Better Ways?" (Score:4, Insightful)
The game has at time of writing received 833 reviews on Amazon, and has an average rating of just one star. That's because 740 of those are one star reviews. Only 20 people gave it 5 stars. There's few better ways to gauge how a game has been received...
A star rating on Amazon is one of the best ways to gauge a game's reception? On the contrary, I'd say the fact that 20 people rated a game that lacks basic functionality as worthy of five stars is an indication that the star system is ineffective and fails to tell you much of anything. Were those 20 people rating the graphics of the splash screen? We're they rating what they imagined the game would be like once they could save? Were they purists who believe saves are a form of cheating, and they welcome this new, more-realistic gameplay?
Actual discussion of what is good and bad is and always will be the best way to gauge a product's reception.
You should read some of those 5-star reviews (Score:5, Funny)
LOL @ EA (but sad for Maxis) (Score:4, Funny)
Another failure, i wonder when they'll learn. Sad part is Maxis is the one that's gonna end up getting hurt. City size is a joke (see SimTown). Can't actually save (thats half the fun!). No map editor (really!?). Dumbed down mechanics. Oh, and the kicker, ALWAYS ON DRM bahaha. No thanks. Did you see Amazon yanked it because it received so many bad reviews?
Re:LOL @ EA (but sad for Maxis) (Score:5, Funny)
Did you see Amazon yanked it because it received so many bad reviews?
What??? No, I didn't hear that! Where can I learn more about it?! Maybe I'll head over to Slashdot and see if they have a post about it!
Sounds like a story I heard before. (Score:3)
Wasn't there a similar backlash over Spore, another EA title?
What I want to know is why people still give money to EA when they pull these sorts of shenanigans.
Re:Sounds like a story I heard before. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know exactly who was responsible, or how it happened; but they managed to go from 'concept so sweeping it makes Civilization look myopic' to '5 mini-games, all shitty, plus a low rent 3d modelling application that lets you share penises with eyeballs online'
1. 'Cell Stage': Ooh, a more or less direct unimprovement of Flow a flash game from 2006!
2. 'Creature Stage': Hasn't everyone always wanted to see Simlife rebooted as a terrible over-the-shoulder 3rd person action title?
3.'Tribal Stage': Because the world needs more really terrible RTSes.
4.'Civilization Stage': See #3. So terrible that even the game's developers had mercy and added a 'superweapon' that would automatically cause you to win the stage and end the pain.
5.'Space Stage':Is it possible to clone Escape Velocity and simultaneously add lots of fiddly complexity and suck out any reason to play? Lets find out!
The 5-star reviews are hillarious (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously - they're like the Mountain Three Wolf Moon Short Sleeve Tee [slashdot.org]
Here are some choice examples of 5-star reviews [amazon.com]:
"Got me off my video game addiction!"
"Like Russian Roulette, slot machines and slicing your wrists all in one!"
"Great Loading and Queue screen simulator!"
Peeved. (Score:4, Informative)
EA Providing Refunds to SOME People Only! (Score:3)
Clarifying the "server-side calculation" confusion (Score:5, Informative)
I think there needs to be some clarification as to the nature of why the game thinks it needs to be always online. Some people have suggested that ALL the computing and simulation logic happens on EA servers, but this isn't true.
It has been shown that if you lose a net connection/connection to the server, the game will continue to run offline for about 20 minutes. During this time, YOUR city will continue to simulate properly. However, neighboring cities being developed by other people will freeze in time and be held in this state until such time that your connection is reestablished (if it doesn't before the timeout, the game session ends). Once it reconnects, the state of your neighbors is synced with your city and hence any changes to your neighbors' cities during the time you were offline will immediately be represented.
If you connection drops, your city lives in isolation. Once it reconnects, it returns to the world and is affected by the effects of your neighbors. If you happen to be developing a city next to a tard who is polluting like crazy, your city will suffer the effects. That's the whole purpose of the always-online feature - to provide this MMO-style relationship between players. BUT, given the game runs fine with your city if the connection drops, this is bullshit because it means it should be trivial to enable the player to just play on their own.
The simulation logic is there, available on the installed game. EA just doesn't feel it's worth having an offline mode despite it basically being readily set up for it - it thinks being interconnected with other players who might be dicks and ruin your city is much more important.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Game is part server-side, not 'always on DRM' (Score:5, Insightful)
The game is partly calculated server-side. This is why you need a constant internet connection, because some of their servers are doing the work for you. This is almost certainly also why they've collapsed in a heap.
Prove it. There's no reason to believe that they're doing any mathematics other than DRM to prove you're not running a cheat and tampering with your game, and there's no reason to believe that they would sell you such a game without charging you a monthly fee, and if for some bizarre reason they did there would be no reason to believe that they would continue to run the servers once the game stopped selling, because someone has to pay for them.
Re: (Score:3)
That's not proof, that like me saying I'm a millionaire, and to prove it you link to my quote saying I'm a millionaire
Re:Game is part server-side, not 'always on DRM' (Score:4, Informative)
You can make a region private. That way only you, or frieds who you explicit invite can play a city in the region. That way it is single player.
As numerous players have noted in this discussion, the game works fine once authenticated, so there's no reason they couldn't let you play in a region without multiplayer without their servers.
Re:Game is part server-side, not 'always on DRM' (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Game is part server-side, not 'always on DRM' (Score:5, Insightful)
The game is partly calculated server-side. This is why you need a constant internet connection
You have the causation reversed. The game is calculated server side in order to force you to need a constant internet connection. There is no reason to do this except to act as a form of DRM.
Re: (Score:3)
This is possibly BS, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were true. Either way, the server debacle shows how bad EA is. This is first and foremost a single-player game, and there should be no server requirement to play. Zero. Really, there should be no server-side requirement even for multipl
Re: (Score:3)
They didn't quite get there with Sims 3, since it's still run on the user side and thus users can load stuff. I'm sure the primary motivation for always-on DRM in SC5 is to test completely locking out users and beginning the move to pure dollar-and-tenning everyone (have you seen the price of their DLC?).
My jaw dropped when I discovered that Sims3 + all expansions was still $100+ with a 66% off Steam sale; non sale price was in the $300~400 range, IIRC.
Re:Heh reviews... (Score:5, Funny)
even when 740 out of 833 people give something a one star review, 20 people will still give it 5 stars.
You mean, EA has only 20 employees?
Re:Heh reviews... (Score:5, Insightful)
even when 740 out of 833 people give something a one star review, 20 people will still give it 5 stars.
You mean, EA has only 20 employees?
Only 20 dedicated to astroturfing on Amazon.
Re: (Score:3)
Do you think that EA employees would rate their games that high? They've seen what goes in to the sausage...
Re:Geek.com doesn't know EA (Score:5, Interesting)
The only alarm bells that will be ringing over at EA is that Amazon is full of libelous astro-turfers from "the competition" and internet trolls who are jelly of EA's success. The "poor sales" will be seen as a sign that their new-angled DRM is working since most people are Pirates and can't handle their masterful security scheme.
It isn't poor sales that is closing it down... It is high returns and chargebacks.
People are going first to their retailer (Amazon) for a refund, then the factory (EA) then their banks (Amex,Visa,MasterCard) ... If they follow that, at one of the three steps they will get a refund. And the people to fit the bill at the end of the day will be EA (and I don't know if you have ever seen amazon chargeback fees...).
Re: (Score:3)
We can't, though. You're anonymous.
Re: (Score:3)
Eh? I see 1039 one star reviews.
Re: (Score:3)
Given what peanuts it costs to rent some EC2 instances or something, I do expect anybody who wants to require a bunch of fancy server hooks to get it right. If they can't do that, perhaps they should back off and take on a challenge more in line with their abilities.
Re:Amazon is Giving Refunds to Opened/Installed Ga (Score:5, Informative)
EA ruins game. Amazon saves day.
I did this. Amazon was great. Return/refund is the only way EA will ever take a hint.
I suggest:
1. If you bought from Amazon return it. Amazon made it painless for full refund of my opened game.
2. If bought from Orgin ask for refund. EA says in press release you can do this. Though I hear problems from customer service
3. If you cannot get refund from Orgin/EA call credit card company and have them stop payment for defective product.
Maybe EA will fix if this hurts their bottom line?
If problems get fixed in a month or so you can always buy the game again. Otherwise not worth my time now to play with so many problems