SimCity 5

[Weatherman]

I just started playing SimCity 2000 again.

[Caliga]

I'm Commander Shepherd, and this is my least favorite game in the galaxy

[Kleves]

SimCity has had its fair share of problems since launch. EA knows this, and they have made the decision to temporarily stop actively promoting the city-building game, at least online.

In a memo sent to affiliates (and obtained by IGN), EA asks for active promotion for SimCity to cease. The company has deactivated all links in Origin's LinkShare program, which a lot of companies use to promote EA games.

The full memo can be seen below:

"Hello Affiliates,

EA Origin has requested to pause all SimCity marketing campaigns temporarily, until further notice. We have deactivated all SimCity text links and creative and we ask you to please remove any copy promoting SimCity from your website for the time-being. To be clear we are continuing to payout commissions on all SimCity sales that are referred, however we are requesting that you please stop actively promoting the game. We will notify you as soon as the SimCity marketing campaigns have been resumed and our promotional links are once again live in the Linkshare interface. We apologize for any inconveniences that this may cause, and we thank you for your cooperation.

Sincerely,

Origin.com Affiliate Team"

[DontSayBanana]

I'm gonna go ahead and blame EA for this one, not Maxis.  I picked up University Life for Sims 3, which happens to be the first Sims 3 expansion developed by Maxis, and it's been nothing but good.

[Syt]

Another review:

http://www.destructoid.com/review-simcity-248039.phtml

Excerpt:

I tried to see how well things worked across cities by trying to run two cities at once, and I found that it wasn't a reliable way to play the game. Things seemed to break. Workers failed to show up at their jobs in the city next door, water flow stopped at times, police didn't show up, and my city's education went downhill as they stopped getting on the bus to travel across the region. This could all be due to the server issues, or the game could actually be broken in this regard. Either way it's flawed.

I felt like I should have been playing with other people, and it's difficult to play with one city alone. A single city is tiny and it can't do a lot. Eventually you run out of space and you can't upgrade any more without depending on resources coming from another city. Things like achievements, leader boards, and friend's lists are pushed to the foreground to try and convince me to play online.

It seems like more of an issue to play alone than with others, and SimCity doesn't really need that. It could be cool, sure, but don't force it on me. I haven't come across anyone that wants this from the series, and the fact that the online portion of the game is broken makes it a complete nightmare.

[Syt]

http://www.destructoid.com/ea-to-offer-free-pc-game-for-simcity-players-248223.phtml

After a disastrous launch week for SimCity, Maxis and Electronic Arts are going to offer a free PC game via download to players as an apology. "On March 18, SimCity players who have activated their game will receive an email telling them how to redeem their free game," wrote general manager Lucy Bradshaw in a blog post.

"I know that's a little contrived -- kind of like buying a present for a friend after you did something crummy. But we feel bad about what happened. We're hoping you won't stay mad and that we'll be friends again when SimCity is running at 100 percent."

That may win over some of the affected players, but I don't suspect it'll do a whole lot for people who read blogs such as this one and would've rather just spent the week playing the game they purchased. To some extent, I suppose it depends on the restrictions for this make-good offer. More importantly, Bradshaw says that server capacity has been increased by 120 percent, and that "The number of disrupted experiences has dropped by roughly 80 percent." Shame the number of disruptions couldn't have been zero.

[Phillip V]

Any hackers planning to attack EA/Maxis?

[Warspite]

Look on the bright side: this utter shambles might persuade fewer companies to go down the always-online multiplayer-at-all-costs route.

[FunkMonk]

After seeing this SimCity fiasco and then reading through the HUGOCHAVEZ BADMAN thread I've been inspired to duplicate the great achievements of the Tribune of the People, Hugo Chavez, in a city builder that actually works: Tropico 4.

Steam sale right now too: $7.50 for the base game and $10 for the game plus all the DLC. 

[CountDeMoney]

You know you botched a game when it's the 3rd most viewed story in the WashPost Business section today.

Electronic Arts apologizes for 'SimCity' launch woes; offers free PC game
By Associated Press, Updated: Sunday, March 10, 4:23 PM

LOS ANGELES — The creators of "SimCity" are hoping players don't move on after connectivity issues plagued the game's launch last week.

The updated edition of the 24-year-old metropolis-building franchise released last Tuesday requires players to be online — even if they're constructing virtual cities in the single-player mode. Several gamers weren't able to log on after "SimCity" launched, prompting some retailers to stop selling the Electronic Arts Inc. game.

Lucy Bradshaw, general manager at "SimCity" developer Maxis, said Friday more wannabe mayors logged on than they anticipated and that the developers have been increasing server capacity since the snafu.

"More people played and played in ways we never saw in the beta," said Bradshaw. "OK, we agree, that was dumb, but we are committed to fixing it. In the last 48 hours, we increased server capacity by 120 percent. It's working — the number of people who have gotten in and built cities has improved dramatically."

Bradshaw said EA would give players a free PC game to compensate for the hassles. Players who registered copies of "SimCity" will receive details on how to download the free game March 18.

"I know that's a little contrived — kind of like buying a present for a friend after you did something crummy," she said. "But we feel bad about what happened. We're hoping you won't stay mad and that we'll be friends again when 'SimCity' is running at 100 percent."

[Josquius]

Well, hopefully some good will come of this, shows there's a nice demand for city building games.

[Syt]

http://news.yahoo.com/simcity-pr-nightmare-escalates-150021213.html

Over the past couple of days, "SimCity" has eclipsed "Pope" in global search volume. Electronic Arts has finally created something that has captivated the world with an intoxicating melange of drama, tragedy and sick humor. Too bad all of these elements emerge from EA's project management, not the game itself. The first stage of the SimCity fiasco stemmed from how EA's servers spectacularly failed to cope with the entirely predictable launch week traffic. But the next stage is potentially even more damaging. On EA's Answer HQ website, one of the most heated discussion threads is now about whether the entire pathfinding and traffic management systems of the game are badly broken.

Several players have noted that the characters in the game don't actually have any permanent jobs or homes. They simply walk to the nearest available open job or a suitable home at certain times, a simplification that creates major headaches in city planning. Sims that start walking don't switch to mass transit if they don't find a job nearby; kids don't get to schools easily; all cops go to a single crime scene even if police stations are carefully spread in different parts of the city. School buses, fire trucks and tourist hordes all seem to have trouble finding obvious routes to their goals. As a result, designing a functional city may mean planning a street grid and placement of different facilities in a deeply counterintuitive way. Players have to design their cities to suit bad algorithms, not realistic goals.

One popular emerging strategy is to construct a city with one long, single street winding back and forth like a snake. This enables players to reduce the problems of having school buses that cannot find students and fire trucks that refuse to go where they are supposed to. One way to avoid suffocating traffic jams is to fill the city with wide avenues, resulting in weird maps where normal streets are used as sparsely as possible.

The lame pathfinding algorithms may explain one of the biggest mysteries surrounding this new SimCity iteration; why is the city size limited so drastically? Many early reviews cited claustrophobia as the number one complaint even before the server problems surfaced, including the exhaustive Ars Technica piece. It now seems likely that the strict size limitation may have been necessary to avoid complete gridlock.

The ambitious goal of having SimCity populated by "real people" may thus be backfiring quite spectacularly — partly because the Sims don't act rationally, but also because of the complications of trying to find the shortest route to nearest job, home or school in the most rudimentary way. This can translate to inability to deal with a traffic jam by opting for a parallel street. It's also backfiring because populating the cities with foolish agents with no memory or permanent roles has capped the city size to a level that deeply annoys most franchise fans.

The SimCity saga is evolving into a mesmerizing example of mismanaging a highly ambitious project in several ways. Forcing consumers to opt for an always-on internet connection; underestimating server loads; insisting on the unnecessary and destructive goal of having "real people" populating the simulation; capping the size of the cities at a level that obviously alienates long-time fans; and deciding to go ahead with the game launch even with clearly inadequate pathfinding algorithms.

There is little doubt that many an MBA program will mine this episode for course material in coming years.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/fans-press-uncover-massive-holes-in-simcitys-ai-server-connection/

Now that SimCity's initial server problems are almost completely fixed, players and press are taking a deep dive into the game's much-vaunted simulation features and are reporting some major problems with the game as it had been promoted before and after launch.

The controversy started yesterday when Kotaku noticed that its SimCity game managed to run just fine for nearly 20 minutes after the Internet connection was cut, before eventually complaining about a bad connection to the servers and quitting. Markus "Notch" Persson later reported the same offline play. EA and Maxis have claimed that the game's GlassBox engine requires an Internet connection to offload complex calculations to the cloud in order to improve local performance. Such lengthy offline play flies in the face of the main public justification for the game's always-online requirement.

As if that weren't enough, Rock Paper Shotgun managed to snag an anonymous EA employee who they verified "worked directly on the [SimCity] project." That employee confirmed to the site that the SimCity servers don't do anything more than a normal multiplayer server in any other game and don't aid directly in the local simulation within a city. "They are still acting as servers, doing some amount of computation to route messages of various types between both players and cities... but for the game itself? No, they're not doing anything," the source said, in part.

Together, these reports poke quite a few holes in EA's official story that it would take "significant engineering work" to make a single-player version of the new SimCity. It also suggests that the game's forced online requirement may have indeed been driven more by concerns about piracy rather than concerns about gameplay.

Meanwhile, players going over SimCity's low-level simulation with a fine-toothed comb have found some distressing simplifications in the game's much-vaunted "Sim level" simulation. A player in EA's help forums lays out in detail how Sims basically act as memory-free "agents" that will simply travel to the nearest job/home/shopping option as needed, rather than actually acting as individuals with distinct jobs, homes, needs, and desires. If you don't want to wade through all that text, take a look at this short video of commuting Sims filtering into every home on a block one by one as they march down the street.

That's actually not that different from the way EA described the game's simulation nearly a year ago when Lead Designer Stone Librande told Rock Paper Shotgun, "it's not like each Sim has a specific job that's his, and a specific house that's his." That said, residences named after specific families and job sites with specific industries and responsibilities certainly suggest a level of specificity that the simulation itself lacks.

It also seems that SimCity may be taking shortcuts in reporting how many actual Sims it's modeling inside a city. One Reddit poster has laid out a detailed experiment that seems to show EA increasing the density of each house as a city gets larger but failing to add actual simulated citizens for each new member of the population count. A SimCity interface Javascript file (originally posted on Reddit and explained in detail here) purportedly ripped from the game is even more damning, showing how a "GetFudgedPopulation" function appears to deliberately inflate the actual simulated population by up to eight times in reporting a population number to a player.

Other videos posted online show how easily the game's AI can be broken. One timelapse video shows a city thriving with 200,000 residents, despite those people having no places to shop or work in the entire region (at least they have nice parks and low taxes...). Another shows Sims clogging a small street despite having access to a large empty avenue travelling the same route (here's another take on the same problem). Still others show Sims getting caught walking back and forth over a single crosswalk for hours, cities full of recycling trucks that still leave recycling uncollected, and commuters who take ridiculously circuitous routes through their day.

Altogether, these significant gameplay and simulation issues, combined with the early server woes, seem to point to a game that was rushed out to meet an announced release date despite numerous unaddressed problems. We will be updating our initial impressions of the game with a comprehensive review of the post-release version soon.

[Josquius]

The pirates will tell.

[Syt]

According to RPS, one guy has managed to run a city offline (and edit roads outside the city limits). However, saving and the inter-city calculations are done serverside, so unless pirates can emulate those . . .

[Pedrito]

From good to better: EA is offering a free game to everyone buying SimCity before March 25, and one of the choice games is... SimCity 4 

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/18/a-sorry-tale-ea-offering-simcity-4-to-simcity-5-buyers/#more-146249

L.