SimCity

Cinge

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Not Surprising, big majority of people that play simcity just want to get on, play by themselves for a hour or 2, save and come back later.

Buying a game like simcity and not being able to play at all due solely to "having to be online to play" is disastrous. If they had offline mode and the option to join "online" if you wanted, they would cut their complaints by a ton.
 

Void

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Imagine what it will be like when the next The Sims game is online only and housewives have to be told why they can't play because the server is down/busy.
 

hodj

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It really doesn't make much sense not to build the design flexibly enough that a single player could play, offline, building cities in each sector of a region, setting up their trade connections and the like, and play it in that way.

The patch they put out to cut out all the non essential features basically just...removed all the multiplayer aspects of the game. So they basically made it single player to fix it, but kept the online connection.

All around a huge massive fuck up which was totally forseen by anyone who bought Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3 and KoToRMMO.

Why do we keep doing this to ourselves?

Personally I like to think I"m a masochist. you know. I'm a sucker for self mutilation of my wallet.
 

Tuco

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@Tuco...I have yet to play at all, since I just got past the tutorial before it kicked me off...but is 650k considered a lot? Just trying to gauge since I honestly have no clue at this point.
650k is huge. A typical successful city made by someone will likely get around 200k. The theoritical max is probably around 1mill. The things that limit it are:
1. how much residential zones you can have (vs roads, commercial, industrial, services, misc buildings and empty/unusable land)
2. How much low wealth residents you have(low wealth buildings are very dense)
3. How much traffic your city can handle.

I'll try it when I get home but if a single road takes care of #3 while minimizing #1's road usage then lol
 

Springbok

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I feel like they did this before on another game that had a terrible roll out. They even have a disclaimer with a link to the EA Support page about how shitty the servers have been.

edit: the reviews are brutal. And what makes it worse is they are all true...
Just saw this... thats a pretty big deal, no? I'm not sure where Amazon ranks in terms of digital distribution for video games, but I would bet they have a relatively large slice of the pie.

Seriously, fuck EA/Origin - I can't think of a single franchise, company, game that was made better after they put their stamp on it. What time I've put in to this game has been really, really fun - the small city size, the lack of subway, etc weren't a big deal to me at all after playing it a bit - but the server stuff is fucking ridiculous. I don't care how little faith you have in EA or Origin - I can't believe anyone who says they saw THIS coming to this extent. A few hiccups maybe. A patch where we lose a few hours of play time okay... but 2 full days of not being able to log in?
 

Cinge

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The one thing that wouldn't work in a offline mode is exporting. Selling oil, coal, ore, metals, plastic etc globally makes huge money for cities and wouldn't be able to exist in single-player mode. Which isn't a big deal but lowers "options" you have for your city.

Though still, if they had their infrastructure ready and able to handle the game, I don't think it would be a issue(besides the people that just hate always online but they didn't buy anway). The fact that it doesn't work atm just reminds people it wouldn't be happening if it wasn't online only.

Why are people cursing origin? Origin is working fine. I don't think origin has squat to do with simcity servers and its issues. Yes I know its "cool" to hate on origin because its not steam, but is that really the problem here?
 

Flight

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Anyone use the bonus cities DLC yet ? Sounds like French increase speed, number and efficiency of police, British give more efficient public transport via better, increased capacity buses and German gives better rail.

rrr_img_16526.jpg
 

Tuco

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The one thing that wouldn't work in a offline mode is exporting. Selling oil, coal, ore, metals, plastic etc globally makes huge money for cities and wouldn't be able to exist in single-player mode. Which isn't a big deal but lowers "options" you have for your city.

Though still, if they had their infrastructure ready and able to handle the game, I don't think it would be a issue(besides the people that just hate always online but they didn't buy anway). The fact that it doesn't work atm just reminds people it wouldn't be happening if it wasn't online only.

Why are people cursing origin? Origin is working fine. I don't think origin has squat to do with simcity servers and its issues. Yes I know its "cool" to hate on origin because its not steam, but is that really the problem here?
Seems pretty trivial to just have hard-coded rates at which you buy/sell resources like every other game ever. I have to imagine the market fluctuations won't be that sharp even if it settles at 50% away from a guessed hardcoded value.
 

Big Phoenix

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http://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Art...pr_product_top

Amazon has had to fill so many orders for refunds that they've pulled this from sale now.

I don't think it will be, but man, this may just be the straw that breaks the EA camel's back. Wow.
Should you be surprised? This is 2013 not 2003, games with major online components backed by the biggest name in the industry shouldnt have such problems at launch.
 

hodj

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Should you be surprised? This is 2013 not 2003, games with major online components backed by the biggest name in the industry shouldnt have such problems at launch.
I bought Dragon Age 2, nothing surprises me from EA anymore.
 

Springbok

Karen
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The one thing that wouldn't work in a offline mode is exporting. Selling oil, coal, ore, metals, plastic etc globally makes huge money for cities and wouldn't be able to exist in single-player mode. Which isn't a big deal but lowers "options" you have for your city.

Though still, if they had their infrastructure ready and able to handle the game, I don't think it would be a issue(besides the people that just hate always online but they didn't buy anway). The fact that it doesn't work atm just reminds people it wouldn't be happening if it wasn't online only.

Why are people cursing origin? Origin is working fine. I don't think origin has squat to do with simcity servers and its issues. Yes I know its "cool" to hate on origin because its not steam, but is that really the problem here?
My "Origin friendslist" has been broken/out of sync since the second I downloaded the game (a big deal to me as it fucks up region invites - the reason the game is "online" to begin with).

Also regarding not being able to export things offline - Huh? You don't think you're selling your oil to "Charlie down the road" do you? You're not. Hence the game giving you a pre-generated price that it "buys" materials at. I've made 3 towns in 3 different regions and sold Oil/Metal/Alloy in them all, getting the same price everytime. If this is in place, why wouldn't it work offline? The content we'd miss playing offline is the ability to send services next door, building great works w/ friends, etc... but to code your exporting to single player would be pretty simple, as that is essentially what is happening anyways.
 

Cinge

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Seems pretty trivial to just have hard-coded rates at which you buy/sell resources like every other game ever. I have to imagine the market fluctuations won't be that sharp even if it settles at 50% away from a guessed hardcoded value.
True, that just slipped my mind.

My "Origin friendslist" has been broken/out of sync since the second I downloaded the game (a big deal to me as it fucks up region invites - the reason the game is "online" to begin with).
My friend list works great through origin itself. Where I have issues is the friend list inside the game. It wont show friends, invites can't be sent or received etc. Must be some issue with the game servers talking with the origin stuff. It will show no friends playing simcity from the in-game menu, but if I tab out the friend list from the origin client shows them. The invites thing is horrid. Me and buddy had to make a public region to get to play and 3 of the 6 plots get claimed by johnny noname but never built in.
 

Friday

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I might have bought this 2 years ago but I told myself I would never pay full price for a game unless it was absolutely unavoidable. I paid full price for Dragon Age 2 because I enjoyed DA1 so much. It was a scam / rip-off for that price. Also paid full price for Portal 2. Which was semi fun but over in a matter of hours.

In my day you bought a game and you could play it.

Now you buy a game and ask for a refund because you can't play it.
 

Springbok

Karen
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True, that just slipped my mind.



My friend list works great through origin itself. Where I have issues is the friend list inside the game. It wont show friends, invites can't be sent or received etc. Must be some issue with the game servers talking with the origin stuff. It will show no friends playing simcity from the in-game menu, but if I tab out the friend list from the origin client shows them. The invites thing is horrid. Me and buddy had to make a public region to get to play and 3 of the 6 plots get claimed by johnny noname but never built in.
I've just gotten to the point where I associate it all with Origin/EA after BF3 and now this. I wasn't even mad really until this afternoon, reading all the stuff on Twitter and seeing EA's terrible PR. It would be refreshing to see a company come out and flat out admit they fucked up and roll w/ it, but their pseudo-denial/bullshit is grating on me. At this point I'd be shocked if it was fixed/running stable before the weekend, knowing that Europe is getting it imminently.
 

Dabamf_sl

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If cheetah is permanently disabled, I'm returning the game based on that alone. You need times to make sure your shit is in order, deal with a power or water shortage, etc, but when things are going smoothly, not being able to use cheetah speed is preposterous. "I know the next 10 things I need to do, but I just need to wait for the cash." Might as well go to the fuckin store with it running.

Also, the roads in this game are 10x worse than SimCity 4. If you have any hills on your map whatsoever, fucking forget about using half of that land. The smallest of god damn hills and your roads suddenly won't connect. You can run it to within a millimeter of the road you wanna connect to, with a negligable height different, yet they can't be connected. In the event you pull some voodoo and find some magical way to get them connected after 5 minutes, you likely can't zone or put buildings on half the god damn road. Hilly maps could be really cool for aesthetics. I played on this one and had a dirt road up the hill with wind farms and mining, an industrial zone in the valley, etc. It was looking really cool and I thought "oh this is worth the less efficient use of land." ...except I couldn't build shit on the god damn hills. Horizontal, vertical, doesn't matter the road layout. It's the most obnoxious aspect of this game.

The rest of it is generally fun if not for the fact that the cities are tiny and anything less than pure perfect 100% efficient use of land for RCI zoning entails massive sacrifices.

Question: can someone explain or link to an explanation for how some of the more advanced industry stuff works? Like manufacturing processors, etc. The only thing I've done with the specialization tab is mine, drill, and sell via trade depot. What sources plastics, for example? If I wanted a city dedicated to mining and manufacturing tech, what sort of building structures do I need (city hall upgrades, etc)? Someone earlier talked a little bit about it, but I haven't the slightest understanding of how it all works.
 

Balroc

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rofl i can already imagine the number of review sites suckling at EA's teet ready to roll out their 9.5/10 review now have to scramble back and bring out those forbidden numbers. "review in progress" indeed.
 

Agraza

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Plastic comes from oil drilling hierarchy and recycling. Oil drilling -> Refinery -> Plastic and Fuel.