I will admit that I'm very disappointed in myself. I wasn't going to do it, but then I saw a few guys in my office doing it, so I decided I would join them.

I purchased the new SimCity game.

Things were a tad slow in the office today, so I managed to take off early to get a few things done, and this left me with free time. In theory this also meant that I would have a chance to explore the gameplay and design aspects of the latest SimCity. Bought it, got it installed in the afternoon, and sat down to play a bit. Co-workers warned me to set up on European servers as the US ones were hammered, followed their advice, and then half an hour later I was getting errors about having lost contact with the servers.

No big deal right? This is still technically a single player game, I'm not interacting with any other players, so clearly not having contact with the server isn't a huge deal. I'll miss out on a few easy achievements maybe? It isn't kicking me off and has been flashing that message for awhile, so obviously everything is fine... Wait, I was eventually kicked off.

So I take a break for supper, come back, and now I can't log in because the servers are down for maintenance, and their ETA on coming back up is <parameter string>. Great, so not only can the servers go down for an unknown length of time, but the people behind them are sloppy enough that I can see internal strings that I'm not suppose to.

And this is the trend developers are pushing for? To piss me off enough that I declare to hell with their product, and have called up a friend to see if she and her roommate wants to play Carcassonne The City with me?

(Full disclosure -- I happen to currently work at EA, but on a completely unrelated project.)


They've been having server problems. It is still launch day after all.

The game's forums they've been talking about two specific sets of issues:


First there were some rolling connectivity issues as the servers are updated with the patches. This started about three hours ago and should be done by now.

Second there are some rather common crashes in the game that can be resolved by video driver updates. Updating the drivers makes the crashes go away in almost every case. Make sure yours are current.


I played two of the betas and it was great. I also played it several hours last night without issue.

There is no single player mode that I could find. The game is entirely "multiplayer", although that doesn't quite describe it. Your city lives in a world with a bunch of others, I think it is 4-16 depending on the map. People in neighboring cities can sell you power and water and sewage space and recycling/junkyard space. Also people in neighboring cities can have their sims commute to your city for work, or yours can commute to other cities for vacationing/gambling, and so on. Also every player is somehow supposed to help build certain regional items, like a regional airport or a regional tourist trap. I haven't seen any of those complete yet.



As for it being the future of games, sadly the answer is yes, for major games.

For the projects I've worked on and the stats I have seen piracy is normally 90% to 95% for major titles. I have watched as my own work hit a 93% piracy rate on our server telemetry. Always-online requirements and SaaS are one of the best ways to combat piracy. For some reason people don't complain about it any more with Valve -- I've never been able to get Steam to allow me to play offline for any game. A few seconds on Google will find many complaints when Steam was introduced about its always-on requirements.

Why is launch day an excuse? Weren't they testing the servers beforehand? Couldn't they do a progressive roll-out to make sure they had enough capacity? Couldn't they... not make a single-player game require a permanent connection to the internet in order to work? (Shocking idea, I know.)

Couldn't they... not make a single-player game require a permanent connection to the internet in order to work?

That.

They've been having server problems. It is still launch day after all.

Which is all well and good but this isn't a purely online game and while online is part of the experience the fact that you can set a region to 'private' implies single play is possible which brings up the question of why do you have to be connected to a server?

More to the point why does the game depend on the server when they clearly haven't setup enough resources to handle the demand? It's bad enough when an MMO does it but when a game which you CAN play on your own requires it and doesn't have the resources... seriously, what the hell?

The fact the people have been liking this to an MMO launch (wut?) and have been busy defending EA over it just shows they can and will get away with this.. I just hope everyone remembers their defence when a single player game requires a server connection and they can't play it because it needs to be online and because of the costs involved the publisher hasn't brought up enough hardware to deal with the demand.

As I said in my journal about this I'm willing to bet a sizable chunk of the EA apologists have also complained about the prospect of the next consoles requiring an always-on connection to play games...

Seriously, when people are saying 'wait a week for the demand to go down...' to justify things then something has gone VERY wrong somewhere.

On the upside it just means EA won't be getting yet more money off me (BF3, Deadspace 3, SimCiy to name but 3 games) as between the over pricing on Origin ('we are doing it for competition!'), their inability to learn from Valve (no pre-load, and apparently for this game the 'pre-load' is only part of it and it patches up several gigs once you launch!) and stupidity like this means I have no desire for this game either and it just makes me less likely to buy things in future.

The annoying thing is that when this all crashes and burns it won't be the people making these big calls that suffer, it'll be yet another studio being shuttered and people just trying to do a good job out on their ear... *sigh*

On the plus side the new Tomb Raider has been getting some good reviews so I think I'll pick that up next week instead...

Yeah, I've lost count of the number of games that have shit me to tears on their launch day now.

Even going back as far as Half-Life 2 -- I bought the retail 5-CD copy, and it still took 5 hours to install thanks to Steam being hammered....

It's sad that this is the norm.

Oh, and all of Oceania apparently only has one Sim City server... balls.

Why is launch day an excuse?

I spoke to the people behind Battlefield 3's master server, and they seemed very proud of the fact that they didn't have any launch capacity issues, due to... you know... actually testing their software!

They wrote a fake user client that they could run from the Amazon cloud, so they could simulate the actual load caused by a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million users, all the way through development and find all the weak links. They'd also set themselves up so they could scale up or down capacity almost instantly.

You'd think giants like EA (who bought these people recently) and Acti-lizzard would be able to handle this...

^ I agree with everyone except frob. And seriously OP, you didn't knew the new SimCity would require an always on connection and its a pure (more or less) multiplayer game?

Even going back as far as Half-Life 2 -- I bought the retail 5-CD copy, and it still took 5 hours to install thanks to Steam being hammered....

Half-Life 2, while no less annoying I'm sure (I wouldn't know, I'm like one of 12 gamers in the world who don't like the HL series it seems ), does get a semi-pass as it was 8 years ago and this kind of activation was very new.

The fact that 8 years on this is still happening however is laughable - heck if Valve released HL3 tomorrow and it had the same problems I'd be laying into them too... (as I'm apparently one of about 6 gamers in the world who doesn't think they are perfect and that the large ball of yellow in the sky shines out of their rear areas... ;))

^ I agree with everyone except frob. And seriously OP, you didn't knew the new SimCity would require an always on connection and its a pure (more or less) multiplayer game?

I didn't know. In all the history of SimCity has it ever been online-always and mulitplayer? I mean sure it's a feature, but I'm surprised that the game itself is a MMO. WTH? It's always been a single-player experience. I don't think I'd rag on someone for assuming the thing.

For some reason people don't complain about it any more with Valve -- I've never been able to get Steam to allow me to play offline for any game. A few seconds on Google will find many complaints when Steam was introduced about its always-on requirements.

I think people do complain about it, mostly those in internet poor countries, but the difference is that when a big game releases on Steam you have generally a) been able to pre-load 99% of the content already and b) don't end up with hours waiting to 'sign in' to get at the game itself.

Mix in crashes and no local saves (so if the remote server is down there is no way to save nor get at your saves!) and is it any surprise this is a problem?

The expectation is that when you PRE-ORDER a game that when that game goes live you can play, not sit in a queue for hours waiting to get on (anecdotal but I did read of someone who played for a bit, had to quit, came back a few minutes later and was greeted with 'servers are full; your wait time is X' where X was a few hundred minutes!).

If you want to make your game depend on servers then fine but you'd better test the shit out of it and not leave people hanging or that game will get panned and future sales of games by other teams! are likely to get hurt as well.

As noted I've already got issues with EA's software delivery system but releases like this just sour me even further. Why do I want to give them my cash when there is a good chance I won't be able to play the game? I'm sorry but if you want to charge me £45 for a game (most Steam game retail between £29.99 and £39.99, so that already puts your 'limited' (aka 'standard') edition over the odds price wise) then I'd better be able to get on from Day 1 - anything else is frankly inexcusable.

(I've done with with an MMO as well; pre-ordered Aion, played beta, game was released, couldn't get on AT ALL for 2 days, cancelled subscription right away and never went back to it.)