Hello again ol' friend: Simcity 5 introduced

[Mota]

Bradshaw said Maxis understands that longtime fans of the SimCity series are upset the game does not accommodate offline play. But at the same time, she said positive responses to the game's always-connected features has been numerous.

"We recognize that there are fans--people who love the original SimCity--who want that," she said. "But we're also hearing from thousands of people who are playing across regions, trading, communicating and loving the always-connected functionality."

-----
Haha that is so funny, after this release week they actually DARED to say something that bold? Almost all of these always-connected features either didn't work or were turned off altogether since launch, so how can you even try saying that?

[mckerney]

SimCity Update: Straight Answers from Lucy - EA News

Always-Connected is a big change from SimCities of the past. It didn’t come down as an order from corporate and it isn’t a clandestine strategy to control players. It’s fundamental to the vision we had for this SimCity. From the ground up, we designed this game with multiplayer in mind – using new technology to realize a vision of players connected in regions to create a SimCity that captured the dynamism of the world we live in; a global, ever-changing, social world.

I just got a blackout on my Buzzword Bingo card.

[mckerney]

Gearbox has got to be kicking themselves for not finding a way to delay A:CM a few weeks so it launched at the same time as SimCity.

[Neon_Chaos]

So I have funded the Arcology and have delivered all the supplies. Just need you guys to pitch in for the workers.

[NorvTurnerOverdrive]

Electronic Arts Inc.
NASDAQ: EA - Mar 15 4:00pm ET
18.88 -0.46‎ (-2.38%‎)



burn baby burn

[Mota]

If you guys have any room I'd like to join your region. I'm HeatseekerMota

[Shepp]

Originally Posted by mckerney

SimCity Update: Straight Answers from Lucy - EA News

Always-Connected is a big change from SimCities of the past. It didn’t come down as an order from corporate and it isn’t a clandestine strategy to control players. It’s fundamental to the vision we had for this SimCity. From the ground up, we designed this game with multiplayer in mind – using new technology to realize a vision of players connected in regions to create a SimCity that captured the dynamism of the world we live in; a global, ever-changing, social world.

I just got a blackout on my Buzzword Bingo card.

Didn't Bioware say the same crap about their "vision" when people hated the ME3 ending? EA must be using the same PR folks again.

[CleBrownsfan]

I haven't been on for a few days but plan to tonight/tomorrow... damn responsibilities

[Neon_Chaos]

CleBrowns, I'll shoot you a 1 million dollar grant tomorrow.

[CleBrownsfan]

Originally Posted by Neon_Chaos

CleBrowns, I'll shoot you a 1 million dollar grant tomorrow.

Just a cool mil?? That would be awesome!

[CleBrownsfan]

Originally Posted by Mota

If you guys have any room I'd like to join your region. I'm HeatseekerMota

sent

[Blackadar]

Get out your wallets people, it's coming...

[chadritt]

Originally Posted by Shepp

Didn't Bioware say the same crap about their "vision" when people hated the ME3 ending? EA must be using the same PR folks again.

At least that was a story decision so the term makes some sense.

[NorvTurnerOverdrive]

Originally Posted by Blackadar

Get out your wallets people, it's coming...

15 bucks? 1/4 of the retail price? for one building?

seems reasonable

[mckerney]

SimCity Modder Tells Us Offline Regional Play Easily Done | Rock, Paper, Shotgun

[mckerney]

EA would be smart to realize that offline mode is happening one way or another. The only question is if it comes from them or another group that will also be offering players wanting to play offline all the SimCity DLC at no cost as well.

[mckerney]

This is really the best bit.

So many of Maxis’s claims about how SimCity runs have come down to the importance of the information from the servers, driving the experience of players whether they’re seeking social conglomeration, or going it alone. And even in Bradshaw’s revisionist version of these claims, we’re still being told that the way it works is “innovative”. Not so, alleges Azzer.

...

But this seems to contradict the claims from Maxis that the servers are, “using new technology to realize a vision of players connected in regions to create a SimCity that captured the dynamism of the world we live in.” How does Azzer respond to that? “The server side calculations are all, frankly, rubbish.” Ah. In his opinion, clearly. “Every bit of it,” he continues. “The only ‘good’ they do at the moment is for a multiplayer region – they are just a way for my city to tell your city how much power I have spare, and update that data every few minutes while I play. A middleman of sorts.”

In fact, Azzer thinks that even despite this, the tech isn’t nearly as good as it should be. “The servers are terrible, the MySQL set-up sloppy, and they are trying to handle all of the saving server side (“the cloud”) which is bogging them down constantly – they aren’t optimized for how many simultaneous cities are connected at once. Hell, this “cloud” saving isn’t even very clever is it – if you change servers, all your saves are gone. They don’t even “cloud” your saves between their own servers.”

[CleBrownsfan]

Haven't been able to log on to our region for the past three hours...

[mckerney]

That's it, SimCity is my early front runner for game of the year. Following this has brought me more entertainment than any other game has so far.

[NorvTurnerOverdrive]

what exactly is going on there?

[mckerney]

About 40 kids returning home from school to the trailer they all live in from the look of it.

[DaddyTorgo]

Originally Posted by mckerney

About 40 kids returning home from school to the trailer they all live in from the look of it.

And none living in the apartment building next door - this game is great. HAHAHA

[Coffee Warlord]

Apparently, it's one line of code in a config file that activates the 20 minute offline timeout. Commenting it out removes the restriction.

[Apathetic Lurker]

Originally Posted by mckerney

That's it, SimCity is my early front runner for game of the year. Following this has brought me more entertainment than any other game has so far.

I see Octomom has been busy......

[fantom1979]

Well, I was extremely excited for this game.

As much as I as still desire to own this game, the following has stopped me from doing so:

1. Always online DRM. I don't have a huge problem with them trying to stop piracy, I do have a problem with unavailable servers. Whether it be during heavy traffic, or 5 years from now when they decide to shut the servers off. I still play Simcity 4 (and Tropico, Roller Coaster Tycoon, and CIV 4). The prospect of not being able to play a game that I purchase years down the road is a major turnoff.

2. Sims that do not have homes or work places. Apparently they just go to the closest home and the closest job. This is not what I was picturing when they were describing their innovative Glassbox engine. Maybe my exceptions were just too high.

3. Traffic pathfinding that takes the shortest route instead of the quickest. This was a pre-NAM quirk that was in Simcity 4, and it really takes some of the planning and fun out of the game. From what I have read, they will have a future patch address this issue.

4. Map sizes appear to be too small. 2x2km is slightly larger than a city block in my area, not a city. If this is 'fixed' in a DLC, then I am done with EA. Maxis is claiming that the map size is fixed to that size to improve performance. If they increase the map size in a DLC, that shows to me that the performance excuse is BS.

5. Removal of features that were present is previous version of the game (like subways). I was very vocal about this in Madden, OOTP, and other games.

#2 on my list concerns me the most, just because I don't think it will ever get fixed. It appears to be a design decision that the entire Glassbox engine is based on.

I am ashamed at how excited I was for this game. The mention of Simcity brings back memories of begging my parents to buy me a computer so I could play the original Simcity on Windows 3.1. I spent months building cities on Simcity 2000 on Win95. There are 4 or 5 games I remember playing a ton as a kid, and Simcity was one of them. The problems with this game do not bring me joy or anger. I am just sad and disappointed. This is Phantom Menace all over again.

[mckerney]

Perhaps not related, but probably relevant here. Especially the 4th quarter earnings when it looks like SimCity's release was scheduled around making sure it was out by the end of their fiscal 4th quarter.

Electronic Arts Announces Change in Executive Leadership (NASDAQ:EA)

Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: EA) today announced that John Riccitiello will step down as Chief Executive Officer and as a member of the Board of Directors, effective March 30.

...

Business Outlook

EA expects that its revenues and earnings per share for the current quarter will be at the low end of, or slightly below previously issued guidance provided in its press release dated January 30, 2013. Actual results may be materially different and can be affected by many factors, including the levels of usage of the Company's digital products, initial sales of new products that will be released before the end of the quarter and other factors detailed in the Company's annual and quarterly SEC filings.

EA will announce its fourth quarter and fiscal year 2013 results on May 7, 2013 and will host a conference call at 2:00 pm PT (5:00 pm ET) to discuss the results.

[SirFozzie]

Yeah, I discuss it in my latest post on my blog. EA's really at a cross roads. Will they take the safe, cozy "release nothing but iterations of existing work rather than take a risk" or "Agressively look for new IP to push to continue to expand EA's market share"

[mckerney]

Originally Posted by SirFozzie

Yeah, I discuss it in my latest post on my blog. EA's really at a cross roads. Will they take the safe, cozy "release nothing but iterations of existing work rather than take a risk" or "Agressively look for new IP to push to continue to expand EA's market share"

After SWTOR they were probably more scared to try anything new than ever. It was supposed to be their WoW like cash cow with a budget of around $300 million while expecting 500,000 subscribers and turned out to be a complete flop when it released lacking end game content and basic MMO features. It's probably more responsible for the CEO stepping down than anything else.

My guess is in the near future they still won't do much besides continuing to try to come up with a CoD killer and try to cash in on old IPs with F2P and social games, neither one really working out.

[Neon_Chaos]

So I guess I'm picking up Mass Effect 3 for the PC as the freebie.

[sterlingice]

Originally Posted by NorvTurnerOverdrive

the corporatization of gaming, stockholders, new streams of revenue yada yada

Spoiler

Attachment 4599

I just love that this had the Botero Mona Lisa

SI

[sterlingice]

Originally Posted by Neon_Chaos

Expect more criminals to come. I am about to give up on funding my police, since we can't stop the crime anyway. I'm investing around 9k per hour on the police, with no end in sight. Might as well go for the moolah!

(to you guys playing, I mean this in jest but the point remains)

This is such a game for the 21st century: "Make mini towns where you only care about your own town and their needs". Rot the core of your main city goverened by someone else while stealing away his tax base to build your excellent schools and then blow the excess money on stupid toys like a state of the art fine arts center that's never full or a sports stadium in the suburb with limited access so you can steal a professional team away from a city who loves them but can't afford the tax breaks that won't cripple your city until you've been out of office for 10 years!

When is the privatize the profits and socialize the losses expansion pack coming out?

SI

[sterlingice]

Originally Posted by SportsDino

Their engine is not going to be fixed, they need a mass agent simulator and they do not know how to build one. They thought they could do it with a little doobob resource floating around according to a rule-set... but that will always break and NEVER scale.


The best way to build these systems (in my opinion) is to make the agents have permanence, but perform dynamic plans and adjustments on one cycle with a low frequency, and calculate the effects at real-time with a model.

What they are doing is basically dropping a sim into some sort of network model and on each iteration they are deciding where that sim goes next.

In the alternative you decide the sim's life (I live at A Street, I work at the bakery on B Street, I have a car) and you repeat the actions of that life until an event that resets the sim's life to something else. These life plans can actually be incredibly detailed and rich, as long as they can be rapidly modeled at various resolutions to provide the hard numbers that the simulation then presents to the user. It doesn't really matter that sim Bob actually traverses the traffic network from A Street to B Street every workday, all that matters is if you can calculate the effect of his daily trips from A Street to B Street and when the user is actually looking at A Street in zoomed in view you get a view of Bob's car making his daily drive with some probability.

If you play with some statistics magic you can make a world that looks extremely detailed and is perfect fidelity when the human observes it (models become concrete when you are actually viewing A Street)... but is calculated in macro via statistics to make it calculate nearly instantaneous. It is sort of like a Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, who cares where the hell the sim actually is in space as long as you can measure the cumulative effect of their passing or the position they are at when you are looking at them.

I would think we actually have the computing power to do either. I think it would be better for people who want to watch their sims have a model based on the former: just microtransact each sim with a smart set of basic rules but don't cut corner: just know the load. The latter doesn't allow you to actually see what is going on but would be just as accurate a simulation, if not moreso, but doesn't allow for micro transaction watching.

SI

[mckerney]

EA sent out an email telling people who bought the game that all major issues had been fixed, though people who are playing are having entire regions disappear.

[jeff061]

Did the restore the features they had removed to improve performance?

[mckerney]

Well, we may out of business because we don't have enough shoppers, but on the bright side at least we have plenty of shoppers!

[SportsDino]

For lack of a better term I am going to call Glassbox the 'network agent model'. Essentially everything is modeled as a network, agents arrive at a node as a resource (of varying types) and then go through some sort of routing to another node. These routing and transit through nodes are the transactions of the system which provide the statistics that power the macro and micro observations made by the player.

Such a system can work and be computationally possible (and certainly done better than what we are seeing in this game with some really basic improvements a modder will likely make in a month or two), but I think it is hard to optimize for large loads. I've built a similar simulator in the past, in mine I think I did it slightly better and it still ends up being too predictable. The simulation will inevitably form in patterns based on the rules and structure of the simulation itself... namely, that resources flow through nodes until they hit sinks, and consequently you might see very rare transit beyond nearest node of a type scenarios.

The simulation I propose gives the agent a life (job at IT Co. as an engineer, live on Baker Street in the tenement) and models each day as a probabilistic variation on the concept of an average life in the day of Joe Sim. That is on Mondays he tends to drive to work, drive home, end of story. Maybe with some probability he brings his lunch to work, maybe he goes to Burger King. Sometimes he changes his plan up and drives out to the store for the week's groceries. Maybe he comes home and takes his wife to a movie. Perhaps he loves to see football games on Sunday... and so on.

For the purposes of a good macro-simulation it turns out that the actual logging of each step in the process mentioned above is unnecessary (although computable). You get savings in the detailed processing of each sim by modeling agents in aggregate, so instead of tracking Joe sim as they go from node to node in the network, you track that 100 people leave that tenement each day, that on average 50 visit that Burger King at lunch, that 50,000 go to football on Sunday... with the numbers being calculated based on your probability model. With some clever tricks you can even manage to do this in a very detailed manner that makes sure each number matches to a concrete agent (that is every dollar spent in the sim is deterministically matched to its source and destination for instance)... but that is not exactly necessary unless you want to do some micro-simulation as well.

For the purposes of the micro-simulator, if you just want to fake it (basically what Maxis is doing anyway), you simply make the model concrete when someone clicks on Average Joe. They see him drive to work on Monday, with probability X they see him eat at Burger King, if they keep watching they see all the little things that happens in an average life according to the sim, and only because they are watching do we go to the trouble to follow it along exactly.

There is a point where the developers will tell you all this math slows things down, ironically, it is good and somewhat complex math that makes all of it run at real-time speeds. You just need to break into the entire concept of the model before you can code it.

Nevertheless, for what Glassbox is, it could be much better. Put in a little more intelligence in the routing. Or even do a simplified version of what I just said (have every agent have a base flow and be a concrete agent, and use the network model to perform permutations on the average state, it won't be as rich as intelligent permutations, but it would look pretty slick, and even random permutation would get rid of some of the ridiculous shortest path idiot loops you can see the AI performing at the moment). In short, I think they got it to 'looks like it is working' and told whoever was smart in the room to work on something else and not tinker beyond that point, we need to work on cheesy art DLCs we can pay a graphic artist 1/10th as much to create.

[NorvTurnerOverdrive]

the good news: by the 9th or tenth patch they should have this thing dialed in

the bad news: you'll only have a week to play it before simcity 6 is announced and they shut down the servers

[Blackadar]

I present to you, Megabumtopia One, 1,801,800 population city! [Image Album!] : SimCity

No more evidence is needed to show that this game is fundamentally broken.

For those who don't want to click on a reddit link - 1.8m people. No water. No power. No sewer. No garbage. No fire. No police. No parks. And yet...

...no problem. No one gets sick. No crimes. No fires. And no one is leaving the city.

[mckerney]

Originally Posted by Blackadar

I present to you, Megabumtopia One, 1,801,800 population city! [Image Album!] : SimCity

No more evidence is needed to show that this game is fundamentally broken.

For those who don't want to click on a reddit link - 1.8m people. No water. No power. No sewer. No garbage. No fire. No police. No parks. And yet...

...no problem. No one gets sick. No crimes. No fires. And no one is leaving the city.

From what I've seen residential only is the way to eliminate crime. Crime only occurs at commercial locations so if you don't have any you can have thousands of criminals around with no where to commit crimes. And better yet, commercial isn't needed anyway!

[fantom1979]

This game has been an complete disappointment. I continue to check out the Reddit, but it is probably just about time for me to forget about the game and come back in a couple of months and see if things have improved.

Some of the bugs probably wouldn't be game breaking if it wasn't a Simcity title. 20+ years of Maxis making great city simulators has been crapped on, put in a bag, and lit on fire.

[NorvTurnerOverdrive]

Originally Posted by Blackadar

I present to you, Megabumtopia One, 1,801,800 population city! [Image Album!] : SimCity

No more evidence is needed to show that this game is fundamentally broken.

For those who don't want to click on a reddit link - 1.8m people. No water. No power. No sewer. No garbage. No fire. No police. No parks. And yet...

...no problem. No one gets sick. No crimes. No fires. And no one is leaving the city.

[Ryan S]

Has anyone tried Cities in Motion 2? Any thoughts from Sim City fans?

[chinaski]

Originally Posted by Ryan S

Has anyone tried Cities in Motion 2? Any thoughts from Sim City fans?

I picked it up. Its very overwhelming for a 1st time player of the series. The tutorial mission is pretty horrible and they need to improve a lot of the UI. I really want to like the game, but right now it makes me feel dumb trying to play it. I think if I stick with it, i'll end up liking it quite a bit. From what i've read about Sim City 5, CiM2 is much better.

[Draft Dodger]

I spent about an hour with the first CiM before giving up.

[kcchief19]

This is the real reason we're moving in this "always on" direction:

Microsoft's Latest Social Media Headache | Social Media Today

The attitude with having an "always on" game is that every device is always connected. The suits and the designers of the games that live in major metro areas and probably have wireless cards as part of their employment assume that's true everywhere ... and if it's now, who cares?

If the next Xbox requires and "always on" connection, I doubt I'd touch it with a 10-foot pole.

[bhlloy]

Originally Posted by Draft Dodger

I spent about an hour with the first CiM before giving up.

I hung with it a bit longer but essentially it was a nice looking game with a cool concept that was completely broken in terms of implementation. Bizarre mashup of micro and macro - e.g. you'd have a bus route and buy buses individually and each bus would only carry x number of passengers, but it would take the bus weeks to travel through the city and you'd have hundreds of pissed off passengers at each stop. You couldn't do anything except buy more buses and they could only start at the first stop in your route, so customers from stop 3 onwards could never get on a bus.

Wonder if they fixed any of that for v2. It was a very intriguing game except for the fact it was maddeningly broken.

[Young Drachma]

Originally Posted by Ryan S

Has anyone tried Cities in Motion 2? Any thoughts from Sim City fans?

Bought it last night. So far, I'm liking it. I like that you can play in sandbox mode and that they have unlimited cash mode so I can just tinker and do what I want without having to meet ridiculous benchmarks. I had to look at an online tutorial to get the idea of how to really build bus lines, because it wasn't clear from the initial in-game one that you needed to click on each stop (after the depot) to make the route real and need to bring it back to the original depot for it to really count.

Otherwise yeah. It's not bad at all, especially for an indie studio having put it together. Just getting immersed still, but...it's got a lot of promise and I'm find it has the potential of a "sit for hours and play" type game and I haven't had that in a while.

We'll see as I spend more time with it.

[heybrad]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA....

EA won the Golden Poo award for the second year running.

Electronic Arts named the worst company in America – again | Games Blog - Yahoo! Games

[Mizzou B-ball fan]

Originally Posted by heybrad

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA....

EA won the Golden Poo award for the second year running.

Electronic Arts named the worst company in America – again | Games Blog - Yahoo! Games

Wow. Beating out Bank of America by that margin is no small feat.

[sterlingice]

Or Comcast or Ticketmaster

SI