i don't have a lot of experience with Simcity outside of the really really older ones (and games like SimTower), but this looks interesting with its multiplayer/always-on thing. I could see getting this if there is room and all. So is everyone here linking up and is anything setup yet? I would be pretty newbie if I join up as I haven't played a simcity in a while.
Im playing on EU west 1, becuase the east servers are always full. when the east servers start working for me, we should setup a region.
We might get something going once the servers are stable and people can get on consistently. Right now 90% of the time you cant get a city to load and the 10% you can it's on a different server from regions you started on the last time you managed to get it running.
I never understood why people play Sim City. There's no reward. You just do "work" building a city and you don't get anything out of it. No end game. No ending. But it seems to be popular so maybe I'm missing something. @Meemo: LOL, that's golden.
free ea game...so yea REWARD!! (looks up) The good news is that SimCity is a solid hit in all major markets. The consensus among critics and players is that this is fundamentally a great game. But this SimCity is made to be played online, and if you can’t get a stable connection, you’re NOT having a good experience. So we’re not going to rest until we’ve fixed the remaining server issues. And to get us back in your good graces, we’re going to offer you a free PC download game from the EA portfolio. On March 18, SimCity players who have activated their game will receive an email telling them how to redeem their free game. hhhmmm crysis 3 or assasins creed 3?
EA doesn't say you will be able to chose from any game in their catalog. So wait till you see what your choices are before deciding. Chances are the games on offer will all be games with lots of DLC either released or planned. Just so EA can profit directly from this apology. In saying that, all anyone should have been expecting is that the issues get fixed. So EA is being more generous than they need to be here.
It isnt a stable connection issue from users, it is a EA is fucking stupid issue. Also, not a hit. Critics rate it a bit above average, users have it rated as one of the worst games in history. And the reddit AMA was an absolute disgrace. Wasnt even an AMA since the dev's ignored most of the questions http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/simcity http://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Ar...dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1 The fact that EA has to bribe people with other games to either apologize for a game they made or try and get people to buy the new one just proves how bad it is.
Reviews don't tell you if a game is a hit or not. Sales figures do. Preorders mean a game can be a hit before anyone has played it. But lets talk about the reviews for a moment. How many of the people rating it badly are doing so because of the connection issues ? While the launch issues persist, those bad reviews are valid. A game that can't be played is a piece of shit. Once the launch issues are fixed, every single one of those reviews needs to be updated because the facts have changed. Failing to change the review to account for the facts changing is blatant dishonesty. But there are very few professional reviewers who will update their review. Metacritic has a policy of only ever taking the first score from any reviewer. If the reviewer changes their score for any reason, Metacritic will ignore the new score. Metacritic also weights each reviewer differently, keeping the exact weighting secret. Even worse, the whole concept of Metacritic is questionable. If reviewers are all putting out identical scores, Metacritic is redundant. If the reviewers are putting out different scores, the aggregate score at Metacritic is a number that doesn't reflect any of them. Either way, Metacritic doesn't provide any useful information and you should ignore it. Sim City should be a good test of the quality of the reviewers you are paying attention to. If they don't change their review as the facts change, stop paying attention to that reviewer. As for player written reviews, they are updated even less than professional reviews and whenever something big like this happens, they get flooded with reviews written by people who have never played the game. They have never been worth paying attention to.
Gameplay reviews are high across the board from press/professional reviewers who were given access to hours of playtime pre-launch on private servers. User-generated review sites like Metacritic and Amazon are FLOODED with people mad they couldn't play on the first day or two and people simply trolling the latest screw-up by EA, but these aren't reviews of the game itself. A few other sites like Gamespot are rating the game based on the first 3 days of server stability and I personally think that is a weak move and does a disservice to those looking for reviews now. Now the people over at Machinima I can respect. They wanted to review the game based on the retail version/multiplayer features. Since they couldn't right away, they held on assigning it a number and issued a pre-review with what they experienced in the press build. As their editor puts it: "When you give a game a score, that's the score it gets and we want to make sure we get it right." Basically they are what Gamespot SHOULD be doing. The Machinima news guys are still critical of a few things and aren't holding punches on the launch issues... but they aren't rating an online game based on launch server status either. Most online games have bad launches like this, most online-games have to add servers (of course they usually have backup servers ready and don't wait a day and a half to add new ones...). There are a lot of people who just aren't used to online games and that effects how people view this. A lot of other people are just having fun with how EA screwed something else up. And the free game thing isn't a bribe. It is an apology. We just don't know how good an apology it is yet.
I enjoy the game and see nothing wrong with the game.....the servers..thats another story. They will fix it. if you dont want to buy the game because it has server problems..well.. its your dime.
What about the limited city space? What I really liked about the previous SimCity games, and the Cities XL games for that matter, was that you could build really, really big cities. From what I've seen, you're very limited with space, and a lot of people are complaining about very quickly filling up their space and then just sitting there, watching time go by.
This is indeed the case alot of times. Takes me about 30 minutes to use up all my space. They did this for a reason tho, you gotta work the city to get the density increases. The lack of space makes the game quite difficult alot of the time.
That is another reasonable way of doing things. Hold off the review until the problems are fixed. Polygon has another method: Update the review when things change. They gave it a score of 9.5 based on their pre-release access. Then dropped that to 8 when problems started. Then dropped it to 4 when problems got worse. If they are consistent, they should be raising the score back up to 9.5 once the problems are all fixed. While Sim City does have an MMO-like backend, Sim City is not an MMO. Sim City is a 1-16 player game. So you should not be comparing it to your experiences of MMO launches, you should be comparing it to your experiences with the launches of 1-16 player games.
*Key words I'm comparing it with multiplayer games where you choose a server and the work load is done by said server. MMOs typically fit this description, but they aren't exclusive to it either. D3's launch was very bad as well. The launch problems SimCity experienced were typical of games that try to do what it is doing, MMO or not. Things like: server-side processing, server-side save states, multiplayer gameplay (which actually extends to more then just 16 people in how the Global Market works, similar to an Auction House). In one way or another, you are connected to everyone on the server. I don't say this to excuse them, they could have done more to avoid it: I truly believe the only way developers are going to avoid launch issues like this is to push out massive open betas where people can push the full game on a large scale. As least there if your server crashes all you have to say "thank you for maxing the server guys, we got a lot of important information from it." Too many game publishers are scared to allow this though for fear of it having a negative impact on sales. If Maxis brought up the idea of an open beta, I'm sure EA had a hand in denying it.