SimCity is back, gaming is dead, RIP gaming.

[rk47]

lol i really want a RoboCop DLC for SimCity now.

[Spiff]

Someone had to ...

[Yoru]

So, played this a bit over the weekend. This game is pretty broken, and I don't just mean the online part. There's plenty of mundane bugs, like recycling centers and trade depots just randomly breaking, and all kinds of mechanics wonkiness, such as the educational system. (Hint: once you unlock a higher-tier school, you can bulldoze the lower-tier ones; SC2013 students don't discriminate by age group.)

Let's not even get into the broken traffic/commuting/regional trading system. The only thing I managed to consistently trade was sewage coverage, everything else seems to fuck up randomly.

[UnSub]

Though now that I think on it...cities where you can take out bonds, bankrupt the city, make it impossible for anyone to do anything about it, and eventually create a region that is unplayable...

You have to give EA/Maxis credit for their hardcore commitment to realism.

It's the game for our times.

[Special J]

Though now that I think on it...cities where you can take out bonds, bankrupt the city, make it impossible for anyone to do anything about it, and eventually create a region that is unplayable...

You have to give EA/Maxis credit for their hardcore commitment to realism.

Shouldn't that unlock some sort of stadium or convention centre? 

[Mrbloodworth]

I Was under the impression you could lock a region when you started it, and make it invite/friends only.

Anyway, Tropico 4 is awesome.

[Yoru]

I Was under the impression you could lock a region when you started it, and make it invite/friends only.

You can. When you start a region, there's a radio button: Public or Private. It defaults to Public and plenty of naive casual gamers are leaving their regions open.

The predictable griefpocalypse is well underway.

[schild]

I wonder how many shitty launches and undersold games need to come out before EA is like "We're sorry Valve, we're bad at fucking everything so I don't know why we decided to compete."

[Goreschach]

I wonder how many shitty launches and undersold games need to come out before EA is like "We're sorry Valve, we're bad at fucking everything so I don't know why we decided to compete."

I'd say they're pretty good at fucking everything.

[Lantyssa]

I want to see EA ask to get their games placed back on Steam and have Steam turn them down for reasons like that zombie game.

[jakonovski]

The system for buying utilities from the region is utterly broken it seems. I have my industrial city pumping out 100MW of extra power, but when I move to the buying city it shows there is 30MW available, of which it uses 17MW, and half the city is without power.

[Ingmar]

I wonder how many shitty launches and undersold games need to come out before EA is like "We're sorry Valve, we're bad at fucking everything so I don't know why we decided to compete."

The same technical failures that are evident here would be exactly the same if they sold it through Steam instead. Origin seems to be the only part of this that works - it will sell the game and install it for you just fine. 

[Mrbloodworth]

No, because steam would have pulled it by now.

[Soln]

Now sporting a jaunty 68 on Metacritic!

I genuinely wonder how it will take them to say All Clear.  Particularly when so many people are probably not even trying to log in play.


Edit: 66!

[Miasma]

Now sporting a jaunty 68 on Metacritic!

I genuinely wonder how it will take them to say All Clear.  Particularly when so many people are probably not even trying to log in play.

If the great minds at Eurogamer Sweden gave it a perfect 100 who are we to judge otherwise?

[Sir T]

Just saw an ad for Sim city on SYFY channel! 

EA stock report; EA stock price rose about 40 cents due to a massive volley of trading that started around Mar 11th 11:15 EDT

Who ever said that the stock market is divorced from reality 

[Paelos]

The DOW's up almost 500 points on the month. EA's stock is just riding the overall wave. Investors have no idea, nor do they care about the reporting on one game.

[Sir T]

Was just amusing in light of the EA stock price crashing predictions earlier.

[Hammond]

Shrug its probably going to take a few more games than SimCity tanking before it budges the stock price. One could hope though 

I saw a couple commercials for SimCity with the guy from workaholics and honestly they were pretty much meh. If Maxis patches the city size / include offline mode I MAY look at this game. Otherwise its just another series from my childhood that gets written off and ignored.

[Paelos]

Shrug its probably going to take a few more games than SimCity tanking before it budges the stock price. One could hope though 

You're right. It would take a few more. Thing is, their releases in Q1 2013 were Dead Space 3, Crysis 3, and this. I'm not seeing any huge totals coming in their earnings report from those releases. When that happens? Likely investors will start to get worried. The only thing that may save them is a Tiger Woods 2014 game, or an Army of Two sequel. However, the last Tiger Woods game got hammered for their RMT bullshit.

It could get ugly real fast if the numbers over the next two quarters suck.

[rk47]

RMT in golf game...
hmmm...

[Ingmar]

That's just realism at work. 

(Seriously though, golf is fucking expensive.)

[Khaldun]

Also judging from Tiger Woods' career, it's expensive fucking.

[Merusk]

Only if you're dumb enough to get married and think you can continue shagging everything tossing itself at you.

If he'd only pulled a Clooney...

[Yoru]

The system for buying utilities from the region is utterly broken it seems. I have my industrial city pumping out 100MW of extra power, but when I move to the buying city it shows there is 30MW available, of which it uses 17MW, and half the city is without power.

Pretty much anything involving regional trade is utterly broken. Power, water and sewage are less broken than commuters, shoppers, tourists and students, and those are even less broken than services.

Do not ever try to run a city larger than about 5000 people on borrowed services. It will end in tears. And flames. Lots of flames.

If you're playing with a buddy, you can force Origin to update your local copy of the buddy's city by going to the region and "visiting" that city. This seems to get you a more-recent snapshot of the city. I tried playing with a buddy over the weekend and managed to successfully sell him about 50MW of power while sending him all my sewage.

I tried a bit more last night and realized that the game is really, really predicated on its traffic system. Also, the RCI meters are useless and broken, don't use them. Instead, use the population panel and do your best to balance out your vacant jobs, unsold goods, and unemployed people. By growing slowly and keeping a close eye on services, I've gotten up to 90k population, and without any serious traffic issues until about 60k. I'm transitioning the city from being based on

Freight deliveries are utterly broken; you generate effectively infinite freight demand by having any power plant in the city, at all. A small (5-7 midsize factory) industrial sector will gladly employ an entire town of low/mid-density residents.

Upgrade to high-density slowly, one street at a time. When you pop a high-density street in an area that's ready to upgrade, you'll temporarily lose a shitton of revenue as high-density buildings take forever to build and, while they're under construction, they generate no revenue. I had sudden giant holes in my budget that I covered with buffer cash when I upgraded a long street and had a quarter of my population temporarily disappear. Also, let the immigrant traffic jam disperse before doing more, or else you'll have days of gridlock.

Also, for education, you only need either a high school or a college/university in your city. Students aren't graded into educational bands, so you don't need to pass them up the chain from grade school to high school to college. If you're not going for high-tech industry, it's way cheaper to just have an expanded high school, which will still educate your sims up to 3 mortarboards - enough for a nuclear power plant, reduced resource usage (solar roofs) and recycling.

But all of this is just working around weird quirks and flaws in the game itself. Half of it wouldn't be necessary if RCI demand made sense, if the various production/consumption values were balanced, and if the traffic system weren't so heavily flawed. Oh, and if their online systems weren't such a huge pile of garbage.

[palmer_eldritch]

I'm getting very rich making electronic goods. This involves buying alloy and plastic, using these to manufacture processors and using the processors and more alloy and plastic to manufacture TVs and computers.

I did have lower level industry (mines and smelting) in my city, but I have deleted them and just ship in all my raw materials from the global market, and then sell the final products back to the global market at a profit.

I have no idea if the global market is at all related to anything any other player is doing or if the game simply generates raw materials, and demand for new TVs, for my benefit.

[Yoru]

I have no idea if the global market is at all related to anything any other player is doing or if the game simply generates raw materials, and demand for new TVs, for my benefit.

As with everything else involving multiplayer, the global market is currently fucked. Prices aren't fluctuating at all.

Don't forget to build a recycling center; you can get a lot of plastic and alloy out of your city and reduce your reliance on garbage dumps/incinerators with a recycling center in the right location.

[HaemishM]

Shrug its probably going to take a few more games than SimCity tanking before it budges the stock price. One could hope though 

You're right. It would take a few more. Thing is, their releases in Q1 2013 were Dead Space 3, Crysis 3, and this. I'm not seeing any huge totals coming in their earnings report from those releases. When that happens? Likely investors will start to get worried. The only thing that may save them is a Tiger Woods 2014 game, or an Army of Two sequel. However, the last Tiger Woods game got hammered for their RMT bullshit.

It could get ugly real fast if the numbers over the next two quarters suck.

You're forgetting the buckets of revenue they'll get from this year's release of Madden, FIFA and NCAA Football. Those fucking games if not profitable at the very least are "keep the lights on" money.

[Paelos]

You're forgetting the buckets of revenue they'll get from this year's release of Madden, FIFA and NCAA Football. Those fucking games if not profitable at the very least are "keep the lights on" money.

Those are Q3 or Q4 releases. The panic will have already set in by then if the earnings are shit.

[Mrbloodworth]

Quite sure EA is "To big to fail" in that...what ever, they are EA.

[Outlawedprod]

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/12/simcity-server-not-necessary/

“Because of the way Glassbox was designed, simulation data had to go through a different pathway. The game would regularly pass updates to the server, and then the server would stick those messages in a huge queue along with the messages from everyone else playing. The server pulls messages off the queue, farms them out to other servers to be processed and then those servers send you a package of updates back. The amount of time it could take for you to get a server update responding to something you’ve just done in the game could be as long as a few minutes. This is why they disabled Cheetah mode, by the way, to reduce by half the number of updates coming into the queue.”

Sounds like their DBAs and backend code are atrocious.

[Trippy]

No that's actually a good design (but poor capacity planning). Do as much as possible asynchronously -- keeps the client from being bogged down by slow synchronous requests to the server.

[Outlawedprod]

No that's actually a good design (but poor capacity planning). Do as much as possible asynchronously -- keeps the client from being bogged down by slow synchronous requests to the server.

I will not disagree with that.  Sorry I should be more specific.  What makes no sense is that they couldn't predict that it wouldn't scale well on what they allocated when it went live.  Their transaction backend code must be poorly optimized.  Wonder how they index the databases and what the performance hit is when stuff is looked back up online.  If the transaction code was good one would think they should have just been able to allocate more infrastructure and alleviate the problem in a shorter time window.  Wonder how much bad Origin infrastructure design is at fault here that they had to tie in with.  Wouldn't the fact they turned off this Cheetah mode and cut the queue updates in half seems to indicate some type of major infrastructure/design fault beyond not enough servers. Performance issues on server transactions generally shouldn't be off by 50%.

Also doesn't help that a lot of general stuff seems to be broken from numerous gamers reporting glitches or traffic/population problems.  Game should have had more time before release and better beta testing.

[palmer_eldritch]

I won't pretend to know anything about server infrastructure but it might be worth noting that the servers are not exactly live and are only supposed to update every three minutes (see http://www.simcity.com/en_US/game/info/live-service).

Which - I would have thought - means they only need to receive data from each city every three minutes too (more often would be a waste?). I mean, the server may collect information from the client more often because I guess it may get one bit of data at a time (eg population, wealth) rather than a snapshot of the entire city in one go, but then it would still only need to grab each bit of data from each city once every three minutes - regardless of whether that data had changed a lot or a little in that period (ie regardless of the speed the game is running client side)?

[Outlawedprod]

Sims are broken.

http://answers.ea.com/t5/Miscellaneous-Issues/Traffic-quot-AI-quot-This-is-why-services-and-traffic-are-broken/m-p/737060

Now, here is where it gets really good... In the evening, when work and school lets out, they all leave and proceed to the absolute closest "open" house. They don't "own" their houses. The "people" you see are actually just mindless agents (much like the utilities agents, as I said earlier) making the whole idea of "being able to follow a 'Sim' through their entire day" utterly POINTLESS!!"

The reason traffic problems cause so many other side-effects, is because EVERYTHING relies on those "people" who are stuck in herds trying to go to whatever closest "slot" they can fill. Casinos go bust because "tourists" are just "shopper agents" from out of town. You MUST put casinos RIGHT next to the entrance to your city if you want them to succeed. Placing street-car stops by the casinos can actually cause more harm than good! Why? Because the "shoppers" will board the streetcar stop (because it's the closest open slot) and be shuttled to a shopping district instead.