EA Employee Chastises Company Over SimCity in Public Letter

[Manicdan]

I still can't beliece there's no Subways (until DLC probably).

-PB

or hydro-electric
or (and seriously on this one) water provided by a river/bay/ocean.
i have a town with near 200k people and it was covered completely with water, and now is well over 70% dried up. water seems to also be the only resource that you cannot just keep buying or providing, and will cause a region to inevitably become a wasteland. i guess they want people to keep making new cities only. no joke that a water pump on a beach can dry up.

[kromosto]

i have been playing sim city from the first ever game. And with what i read i think i am passing this game.

[Kallenator]

or hydro-electric
or (and seriously on this one) water provided by a river/bay/ocean.
i have a town with near 200k people and it was covered completely with water, and now is well over 70% dried up. water seems to also be the only resource that you cannot just keep buying or providing, and will cause a region to inevitably become a wasteland. i guess they want people to keep making new cities only. no joke that a water pump on a beach can dry up.

Put the water pumping station next to the sewage treatment plant. ~Infinite water, the only risk being sewage leaks.

[Manicdan]

Put the water pumping station next to the sewage treatment plant. ~Infinite water, the only risk being sewage leaks.

tried that and it didnt work.

[FischOderAal]

Got more oil for your fire:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013...not-necessary/

[god_43]

the problem with city 4 is when your city gets really big, then it starts crashing. simcity 5....is it even customizable with mods like simcity 4?

[sin0822]

IDk about that, it doesn't crash here, but it does crash at random points when the city is small and growing, so i started to save the game every like 20 minutes and then it never crashes again, its very wierd. Maybe when you save in Sim City 4, it stores a lot of stuff to the drive and frees up some memory.

[SoF]

Now playin' - SimCity



I can't loose the feeling EA sees every gamer just as a dollar note...
Now you pay 60? to get completely bound to the EA servers and if there is new content the will sell it as DLC and you spent even more money.
Subway AddOn - 5$, Purple Grass and 2 new RedLight areas 5$...and so on...

[Aberration]

1. Having a queue for what is supposed to be a single player game is a joke.
2. "Always online" DRM is a completely broken model for this type of game. Not everyone has a reliable connection (I've had a borked Fios connection for over a month before) or always has access when they want to play a game like this. Playing on a train/plane, or at the office killing some time on your own laptop between tickets; now no longer an option.
3. Steam somehow manages to have both an offline mode AND curb the "scourge of piracy."

Their model is trying to make their customer conform their lifestyle in order to play their game, rather than putting the customer first. But thanks for your condescending tone.

I would rather be condescending than a perpetual victim.

Everything you mention was known before the game was released. Don't like it? Don't buy it. I just don't understand the need for all the drama and hysteria. FFS, this is EA. If you are surprised by ANY of this, than you are being willfully ignorant. Be a big boy and move on.

You are welcome.

[Iconyu]

Nowhere do I imply that this is Valves fault, what I am trying to say is that they have responsibility for the games they distribute, attributed by their market dominance and general sales ethics. This relates to their refund policy which is granted globally in special scenarios or else is done on a case to case basis which makes it hard to refund a game on "byers remorse".
If you bought Aliens: Colonial Marines on launch or as a preorder, then you got completely screwed over. This does make Valve an "accomplice" given that they sold it to you under the false pretense they where served by the game's developer/publisher which could easily be informed to the potential buyers by simple quality control.

At what point are they an accomplice, do you blame the mail room for letter bombs too? The game has been on pre-order from various sources for years, distributors don't insure any level of enjoyment. As long as it reaches a level of quality it gets sold. This game is multi platform, I know for certain both Microsoft and Sony saw at least as much if not more (they have tighter rules for releases than Valve) and yet you single them out. What logical course of action could they take? It's an open market and no rules were broken.

[Mungri]

Apart from the server issues, I am enjoying the game.

Truth be told, theres no other recent games other than Anno 2070 that come close to the gameplay of this. Sim City 4 is too outdated now, and all the current clones (Cities XL, Cities in Motion) are no where near as good.

I've already supported the Civitas kickstarter as well.

[Kallenator]

tried that and it didnt work.

Did it yesterday while playing with a friend, worked well for both of us. Weird.

At what point are they an accomplice, do you blame the mail room for letter bombs too? The game has been on pre-order from various sources for years, distributors don't insure any level of enjoyment. As long as it reaches a level of quality it gets sold. This game is multi platform, I know for certain both Microsoft and Sony saw at least as much if not more (they have tighter rules for releases than Valve) and yet you single them out. What logical course of action could they take? It's an open market and no rules were broken.

"Accomplice", which means I do not mean it literally. However you are right, the level of fun granted from any game is entirely up to the person who plays it and is not something a distributor guarantees.
I single them out as I have mentioned because they are the biggest distributor of digital games (50-70%), and they have a history of releasing high quality video games on their own part. Like you mention they aren't tightly bound by dates(not at all really) giving them a super position in terms of being able to polish a product, lastly they have "infinite money", no pressure form stocks (Valve is private) and no bosses in the usual corporate hierarchy except for the owners Gabe and Mike.
Valve know how to make a good game and they do take customers freedom a bit more seriously than Origin by for example not giving in to DRM and under special scenarios will refund players, like what happened with WarZ because of what essentially was false advertisement.
This to me is very similar to A:CM, and given that Valve earns money through every game sold then they are responsible, not to full account, but I find it undeniable.
So what this boils down to is that I would like to see more defined lines concerning refunds in this industry, like:
-Refund space within 3 days of being available to play
-Max game time of whatever is given adequate for getting an impression (Typical Demo territory)
-You get refunded 90% of original payment equal to the cost of downloading from servers and covering transaction fees etc

TL,DR; Valve's QA on Steam needs to be improved and guide lines for refunds must be more clearly defined to protect the customer, giving them equal rights to what hard copy over the counter stores has had for years. Amazon's return policy with SimCity is great example of proper customer care.

A:CM - Aliens: Colonial Marines , getting tired of writing it ^^

[Manicdan]

Did it yesterday while playing with a friend, worked well for both of us. Weird.

at the time i tried it i might have had a massive difference between water and sewage. after hours of letting it run i could see water growing around my sewage with no water pump nearby. so i set it up again and will keep an eye on it.

[sin0822]

i also just read an article that said the people in the game don't actually do anything, they don't remember where they work, they find only the closest job, they don't take public transportation to find other jobs, so you have to basically make the town one big road.

[Kallenator]

i also just read an article that said the people in the game don't actually do anything, they don't remember where they work, they find only the closest job, they don't take public transportation to find other jobs, so you have to basically make the town one big road.

This is true, I linked and example of it on the first page in the thread. Steadily since launch the server issues have disappeared, but the game's mechanics have been under heavy attacks.

Recently a modder found out that he could put the game in "Developer mode" and set the server timeout timer to infinity. Avoiding the DRM and getting extra road construction capability.
Source:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...e-indefinitely

The game is so broken that you can build a 100% residential city... because apparently Sims can spend money in parks...
http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comm...pulation_2481/

[Mungri]

You can just plop loads of parks and residential zones and instantly get a high wealth city, no education, jobs or shops required.

I suppose that money does grow on trees in this game.

[Caparroz]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...ms-and-traffic

SimCity is built on GlassBox, which is an agent-based simulation engine. At the surface level, GlassBox is designed around the premise that "Agents" are created to carry data to various "Sinks" around the city. In SimCity, you can think of the "Agents" as Sims and vehicles. The "Sinks" are the buildings that receive money, happiness and other resources from these Agents.

So, basically a giant Lemmings game. What a effing mess...

[Manicdan]

You can just plop loads of parks and residential zones and instantly get a high wealth city, no education, jobs or shops required.

I suppose that money does grow on trees in this game.

i think they built a retirement community, lol. the idea of parks and libraries are for when shopping isnt around or when they cannot afford the shopping, however i think it was too easy to use in replacement of shopping.

i was having a really tough time getting high wealth goods. it kept making hotels so i blew them away until something popped up that had goods.

shame though that traffic is king for this game. a slight drop in traffic mobility means everything falls apart, schools, jobs, shopping, trash, freight, medical, police, and fire.

its also a shame that you get stop signs for medium density roads because maybe someone wants stop lights and lower density to keep traffic clean. and the road upgrade tool sucks until they get a quick way to show which roads are at which density.

i predict alot of balance changes coming up soon.

[demonkevy666]

i think they built a retirement community, lol. the idea of parks and libraries are for when shopping isnt around or when they cannot afford the shopping, however i think it was too easy to use in replacement of shopping.

i was having a really tough time getting high wealth goods. it kept making hotels so i blew them away until something popped up that had goods.

shame though that traffic is king for this game. a slight drop in traffic mobility means everything falls apart, schools, jobs, shopping, trash, freight, medical, police, and fire.

its also a shame that you get stop signs for medium density roads because maybe someone wants stop lights and lower density to keep traffic clean. and the road upgrade tool sucks until they get a quick way to show which roads are at which density.

i predict alot of balance changes coming up soon.

Well imo the biggest problem with traffic there is no third left turn lane, on large intersections the ones with two lanes on each side. Traffic behind that inter lane turning left, has to wait for the car to make the left turn before they get moving along. This will just keep traffic bottle-necking.

[Mungri]

An official statement has just been made from Maxis:

'No one on our current team ever studied Geography, nor know anything about how cities and roads actually work. We just took Sim City 4 and copied most of it while streamlining more of the tedious aspects of the game like far too large cities, too many transportation options, power lines and water pipes.

Our roads work how we imagined roads should work. Our vision was beautiful and executed faultlessly'.

[FischOderAal]

I don't know what is worse. The way EA reacted to the criticism (bullting their customers), that the shortcomings where not noticed during beta testing, or if they were noticed that the game was released anyway.

[Caparroz]

I know what's worse. Now that people are (sort of) managing to actually play the game, almost everybody is realizing that it's poorly designed, over-simplistic and the current state of gameplay is broken to the core.

[Hornet331]

i predict alot of balance changes coming up soon.

haha good joke.. for that they would have to rewrite the whole AI system of the sims and how it works.

The only thing you will get is things like that:


they will nickel and dime the crap out of this game.

[OmegaMerc]

haha good joke.. for that they would have to rewrite the whole AI system of the sims and how it works.

The only thing you will get is things like that:


they will nickel and dime the crap out of this game.

Damn thats an outrageous price in any language.

There are ton of deficiencies. No matter how much I try I can only pick up about 20% of my trash maxing out the trash pick up trucks(100k+ cities), therefore everyone is germy/gets sick. The recycling center only holds a max of 20tons but the processors are super slow so recycling is always halted/slow. One person getting sick in the entire city = protest for more hospitals, etc. Building anything outside your regular RCI takes masssssive amounts of space. In all as much as I want to like the game I hate it dearly just as much. EA went to take a crap in my childhood memories.

[Buckeye]

So is that for real ?