Sim City 5 (2013) - Sim<parameter: string>

[Mistral]

Pretty much play the same way. However, I try to keep myself interested a little bit longer now by creating houses with characters from like my favorite current anime or something to mess around with dramaz. (lol)

[Ksandra]

I always build my family (which is why I HAD to get pets). Then save up money to build this super awesome mansion I wish I could live in one day. D:

[Lucavi]

Don't you fucking ruin this thread, Ksandra.

Don't you fucking do it!

[Ksandra]

http://images.lazygamer.net/2012/06/KPHeader.jpg

[Waraji]

S'k for Mods to derail the thread tho...

On Off-Topic: Over time its become rather apparent the dissimilarities between Katy Perry and Zooey Deschanel. Zooey is best clone yet.

[Uzor]

I always start my Sims the same way. Cheap house, then save enough money to buy the best bed. That way you get more out of a day. After that, buy best fridge, then toilet/shower, and last best stove. Never saw the point in mid-range stuff, always aim for the best. I don't make changes to the house until I have best TV, fridge, stove, toilet, shower and bed, since those cut down on the amount of unnecessary dead time and allows more time to train skills. Besides, most of them give nice mood boosts that makes your sims happier and in turn gives you more life points.

[Ksandra]

S'k for Mods to derail the thread tho...

not really derailing? people were complaining about various EA games. Sims is an EA game.

[kuronosan]

Katy Perry sucks. End of imaginary story.

[Lucavi]

not really derailing? people were complaining about various EA games. Sims is an EA game.

This is the Sim City thread. See the title? We were actually on-topic until Red.

I still love you, Ksan, I just want the focus to always be on EA taking shit from every corner about Sim City until some fixes start getting rolled off the assembly line.

[Ksandra]

I won't talk about sims anymore but I was not the first to mention other EA games (yourself included). My posting it was my frustration with the SimCity madness and me not wanting to support EA anymore, but can't break that habit.

[6souls]

Most importantly, UKAzzer was able to disable SimCity's disconnection timer, thus setting it to unlimited. Tests have shown SimCity kicks you out after around 20 minutes of offline play.

I want that for SWTOR.

CVG Q&A with Lucy Bradshaw

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8242/8...5c269514b7.jpg

Spoiler: show

One suspects that, by the time you read this, the majority connection problems will have been remedied. Specifically with regards to the connection issues, what is the ETA on a complete fix?

BRADSHAW: I'm happy to say that we've addressed the accessibility issues we had at launch. We deployed new, higher performing servers and upgraded our original set so that everyone playing the game benefits from these enhancements; 40x server response times, 92% fewer crashes, better server navigation etc.

We've also addressed some issues that affected gameplay performance and we're happy to say that players are connecting and playing by the hundreds of thousands daily. We'll continue to make improvements both in the performance of our service and in game features as this game is very much a living and evolving experience that we will support.

Do you agree that players should not be refunded a game specifically if it doesn't connect online straight away? Do you think a legal precedent needs to be established for such a nascent issue?

We have the best fans in the world, some of whom have stuck by us for more than 20 years. They are a very vocal bunch and we heard their voices loud and clear: they expect better of us. We've got the server accessibility issue behind us and we're ensuring that the game experience is great for all players.

Still, we know that this is our fault so we're giving SimCity players who were affected a free EA PC game download via Origin. We'll have more details for that on March 18. With regards to legal precedents, I will leave that to the experts. I'm focused on ensuring our players have a great experience.

To what extent did initial demand outweigh server capacity, do you think? For a problem of this scale it would not be surprising if demand more than doubled expectations.

I can't reveal numbers but I can say that we experienced a significant increase in demand in the days leading up to the launch and it caught us off guard. It was our fault that we underestimated our fans and to that end, we should have known better.

We had conducted several betas and load testing leading up to the launch of the game. Those were helpful in helping us assess and address a number of issues related to our server architecture. However, our servers did not perform in the live environment as they had in testing. We quickly moved to address this situation by adapting our servers, deploying higher performing new servers and upgrading the original servers. So it really was a combination of these two issues that led to our issues. We've got that under control now.

As someone with first-hand experience of the studio challenges that come with 'always-online' games, would you say you are still an advocate of them?

I'm an advocate for creative freedom in the design process. In the 10 years since we completed SimCity 4 we've been kicking around ideas on what a brand new SimCity had to be.

We created the genre in 1989 and we've been iterating on it ever since. We wanted to take it in a new direction and our team has been thinking about examining the city-to-city relationships that exist in real life. Cities trade resources, workers, shoppers, infrastructure and more. How do we you translate that into a game?

So we changed the core of the game, and the simulation was no longer city based, it became regionally based. What became very clear is that we needed to create an online, connected experience for our players. And, finally, the technology was in place to allow us to do that.

Does the always-online feature attached to SimCity mean that the game will eventually become inoperative in the years down the line when EA switches off the servers? (Publishers have a history of "sun-setting" old games when demand flat-lines)

SimCity is an important part of our company's legacy and we want players to be able to continue their experiences well down the line from now. As far as I am concerned, the servers will stay on as long as there are people playing.

What's your personal view on a publication changing the review score of a game based on its connectivity issues?

We understand that there are some people who reviewing SimCity on its merits as a game, and some are reviewing it on its merits as a service. To that degree, I don't disagree with the way in which reviews have been handled.

Some may call it unfair that we are being punished for our server issues, but it is fair. SimCity is an online game and everyone - fans and critics - have every right to expect the experience to be smooth from start to finish. My hope is that some of those reviewers will revisit the game now that we have smoothed out that experience.

It is fair to expect that some people at Maxis who have sacrificed so much to make SimCity an acclaimed game could be disgruntled or disillusioned by the whole episode. What is your message to them?

I've been at the Maxis studio almost 24/7 since we launched on March 5 and I have an open rapport with each and every one of them. I've been a part of Maxis since 1997 when I was brought in to oversee development on SimCity 3000 and I've worked with a number of people on the team for years.

I feel like I let them down, this was my responsibility, but I tell them what we all know: SimCity is a wonderful game and that we should all be proud of the effort that went into making it. I'm taking every step possible to bring the game to stability so that the rest of the world can enjoy all of their hard work.

Reflecting on the whole episode, are you satisfied by the manner of Maxis and EA's response?

Maxis performs at its best when it is challenged, and this is the most challenging situation that any of us have ever faced.

Since we launched it's been all hands on deck and everyone has been pitching in. We're getting phone calls from people across EA asking how they can contribute and we were more than happy to take some of them up on their offer. I'm happy that we've been getting so much encouragement and support from across the company. It's been great for team morale and it's motivating us to resolve these problems as quickly as possible.

What lessons can the industry learn from this issue?

Never underestimate the power of your fans. All of the sales data, charts and graphs can't tell you the entire story. Test your game in the real world as much as possible because your players will challenge your game in ways that you never thought possible.

Is there anything else you would like to say to the games community regarding SimCity?

I want to thank all of our fans. We have a team of more than 100 of the most talented developers in the world working over the course of the past few years to make this game. We made this game for you because you asked us for another SimCity. It's our fault that we got a little too ambitious and I'm disappointed that the Live Service didn't live up to its end of the bargain. But we are responding quickly and I am so proud of the team at Maxis for the way that they've come together to resolve these issues .

http://www.computerandvideogames.com...saster-launch/

She is good at dodging questions and the interviewer is bad at perusing the preferred answers.

[Lucavi]

Yeah, lets get back on track:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/vide...6978-SimShitty

This one is fantastic.

Edit: My god, I don't know what's worse: the dodging of the questions of the fact that the "interview" had every question clearly pre-established beforehand. I think Vince McMahon could slap together a more believable "legitimate" interview.

[Correction]

Looks like they're working on a patch to address the congestion problem.



EA thanks you for beta testing Maxis' game.

[Ohemgee]

Great. But I still hate the Sims AI logic. Why do they not own a home? This isn't Russia.

[The Blackrose]

Looks like they're working on a patch to address the congestion problem.



EA thanks you for beta testing Maxis' game.

But are they going to work on the abundant problem of cars performing suicidal feats?

[safer]

The wording of the first question in the interview implies that the questions were submitted together at once and it was not live. The answers were all very predictable.

[Lucavi]

Another great review by Eurogamer:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...simcity-review

And a fantastic exerpt:

A trip about town reveals roads overlapped by jagged ground textures and sometimes even buildings. A house sits in the middle of one street while another is buried under a strange pile of earth. A car is half-parked in a hill. One wing of the grade school is a strange and misshapen pile of grey rubble. That school, incidentally, is closed, because since the opening of Jefferson's university there's been no need to keep any of the antecedent educational establishments. Nobody needs to go to school in the city that doesn't make sense.

If EA thought the nightmare was over, simply because the servers were becoming stable, they've once again grossly underestimated their player-base. The more newbish pick-up-and-plays may not understand, but for everyone who has played a past sim city, the bugs and glitches become that more jarring, and that more annoying. A second wave of negative PR is rushing behind the first, and this one cannot be defended simply by saying "we effed up and underestimated player demand. our bad."

Reinforced:

The rage players have expressed over the always-online requirement, important as it is, fogs the far more serious fact that many of the systems that underlie the game are broken and it exhibits a host of bizarre behaviours. Weird things happen out on the streets of SimCity, all day and every day. As a blaze takes hold in a downtown restaurant I watch as a fire truck is dispatched. It begins driving off in the wrong direction before performing a few loops up and down the same street, circling as if warming itself up. Nearby, buses bought to alleviate traffic congestion can also be spotted driving up and down the same strip of road over and over again. Their 40 passengers have never been known to disembark and I wonder if all on board have long since perished, leaving the ghostly carriage to haunt the streets forever. In one of my towns, the main road is forever clogged behind a parked car that refuses to move and which is thus blocking all the city's critical services.

[Aevis]

After EA deleted all threads in their forum related to the mod video:

https://twitter.com/buzzspinner/stat...44180099801088

"We love you and you are amazing, but if we don't like your mod, we just call it a hack and bann you"

[Lucavi]

Its not hacking when you do it to your own product. Artificially inflating population to grant the illusion of having not a suburb, but an actual city (hell, they use terms like Metropolis; there is no Metropolis in -THIS-game) is essentially hacking, but only EA and Maxis are allowed to split hairs, because its their game. We're just being licensed the game.

Just keep the bad press rolling. The head honchos may be counting the stacks of money and laughing, but everyone else is having some sleepless nights.

[Gekii]

fuck I was so stoked about getting this too, chitttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt mane