SimCity

If can get free premium battlefield 3 out of this I will call it even

Dabamf_sl said:

I played 40 hours. Most of my play time was trying to figure out how to design a good city, with a balanced economy, good road design, etc. As most people, the fun was in the challenge. When I discovered it was all bullshit, because the optimal road design is a single curvy road, RCI demand is irrelevant, and the AI is beyond dumb, I felt defrauded. It's like starting to play chess and spending all this time trying to learn the optimal play, then find out 40 hours later somehow that 4 move checkmate is ideal. It may not quite reach the legal definition, but it's fraud. I've never returned a game I don't like. This is different. The game is a piece of shit at its core. And if I can give a $45 middle finger to EA, that's a bonus.

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This is exactly how I feel...

In other news, my refund came in about 3 hrs ago. I did it via email.

response from amazon to my email:

Hello,

Thank you for understanding us in regards with the download issue of the title " SimCity - Limited Edition [Download]".

There has been an error from the side of EA and we couldn't resolve the issue with them in respect to this title and hence to compensate the trouble experienced we've issued refunds for the orders.

Please be informed that as a standard policy, Games, Game Items, and Software Downloads are not returnable after purchase. However, because of the circumstances, I've issued a refund in the amount to your account.

Your refund should be completed within the next 2-3 business days and will be applied to the payment method used for the original purchase. Once processed, you'll be able to see the refund request here:

-link to my order-

I appreciate you understanding the situation and contacting us regarding the issue. If you need any other help, please contact us so that we can help you accordingly. You can contact us from the below link:

www.amazon.com/contact-us

We can also be reached by phone directly and toll free by clicking "Contact Us" in the right-hand column of our Game/Software Downloads Help pages at:

http://www.amazon.com/help/gamesandsoftwaredownloads

We look forward to seeing you again soon.

Best regards,
Venkata D.

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Also about 45min ago I got an email saying the refund went through.

Game looks great visually, but its a heaping pile, of unfinished, DRM laden shit. Avoid.

Vandyn_sl said:

I'm usually against open box game refunds too since the retailer has no gauge on how much that product was 'consumed' before they took it back. For example, if you went to the restaurant and wanted a refund for shitty food, would the restaurant still give you a refund even though you ate most of it already? That's easy to measure, something like a game is not.

That being said, in this case the game is fundamentally broken. The various videos and threads all over the internet highlight this in glaring detail. It's not a case not liking a feature or wanting a feature to be different. It's about features that don't work whether you like them or not. Folks should have every right to ask for a refund, the product is defective.

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It'd be nice if, between this an Aliens: Colonial Marines, people would learn not to pre-order games.

Just sent my email to amazon requesting a refund. Usually im one of those types that says fuck it - if it sucks my fault. But this is broke and simply doesn't work as intended if at all.

Up to 900k pop with 100% R zoning..zero traffic..all happy sims. -http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comm...ternal_leader/

Hmm , I suppose I am in the wrong here if I were to tell you I enjoy denying people returns on open software/dvds/cds/video games?

Boobietastles_sl said:

Up to 900k pop with 100% R zoning..zero traffic..all happy sims. -http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comm...ternal_leader/

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How does that even work? In previous Sim Cities, if you didn't have areas zoned for commercial and industrial, your residential areas wouldn't build up.

So the only way to fix this is for Maxis to rewrite the game from scratch. The pathfinding AI isn't bugged, it's working perfectly to spec. The problem is the spec. isshit

House spawns sim* at 9am, sim finds shortest route to nearest workplace, reaches it and despawns while flagging it as occupied. Repeat in reverse for leaving work. That design works with one house, one workplace, one sim. Start scaling it up and shit irrevocably breaks. You end up with, say, twenty sims spawned all target-locked on the same factory, which is already full. But there's no mid-route recalculation so they have to get there before they go "Okay, move to next-nearest factory". And then therealfun begins. Got gridlock? Well, looks like there's empty spaces in houses/factories/etc. Time to spawn some commuters in! This obviously makes things worse, and you have a positive feedback cycle where more sims get spawned in to 'replace' those still stuck in traffic.

*Using 'sim' in a very loose manner, natch. They're notreallysimulations to the extent of other sim-type games, they're effectively router packets with names stapled on.


tl;dr - The game design is fundamentally flawed at the most basic level andcannotbe fixed. Go buy Tropico 4, Anno whatever or Sim City 4 Deluxe.

I fucking bought this game through Origin. I could have put up with shity traffic that needed to be fixed but RCI that has no relation to realty in a SIM based game is just insane. I could even work with (with much rustling) the small city sizes if regional sharing/trading worked but the idea that you can have 900k pop cities with zero commercial or industry? ....

I. Want. A. Refund.

I find it sad that it is so broken because the underlying premise and ideas behind simulating the entire populace is brilliant.

I've sent in a request to refund it to amazon. I've had two of my cities bug out and become unloadable for no apparent reason, after 8+ hours of time invested in each. This is after giving up on a couple cities during the "learning" process when traffic or worker demand ruined the cities. I chalked it up to lack of experience and started over again. Since then I've learned that it wasn't anything I was doing wrong, but instead of an entirely flawed system. I thought I'd give it one last shot and try something new on the RR server, a tourism city taking into account the inherent problems and trying to work around them, then spent an hour trying to place a ferry. How the fuck the ferry terrain interaction got through any sort of testing blows my mind. 4 hours on that city to find out it will never really work because I'm blocked from one of the major sources of tourists due to shitty design and terrible play-testing was the last straw.

Its worse now than ever, not only do people pre-order, they kickstart shit where you aren't even guaranteed a broken piece of software at the end. You might get zero. Might as well just throw your money in the toilet in some cases.