  Smith6612Premium,MVM
join:2008-02-01
North Tonawanda, NY
kudos:22
 ·Verizon Online DSL
·Frontier Communi..
| Downloads and the game I don't own a copy of the new SimCity Game, but I have older versions that only required the CD to initially launch the game. A few of my buddies however ordered the game and they saw the crunch while trying to get the game on launch day. They had difficulty getting the game to even unlock (apparently Deluxe edition folks had issues) but once the game unlocked, he got around 20MB/s on the download.
Now, playing the game has been another story. Servers constantly down, and the cities seem too small. Pretty much a disappointment as always with an EA Game lately considering the older games offered huge cities off the bat, and didn't need Internet access. | |
|
 | SukunaiPremium
join:2008-05-07
kudos:1 Reviews:
·ELECTRONICBOX
·TekSavvy DSL
| Re: Downloads and the game Not surprised, not surprised at all.
Glad I have NOT fallen into the trap of wanting this.
I managed to locate a while back a title called Cities XL 2012. I think more people might want to check that out.
I can stomache a small bit of need to be online, but, with a Simcity game? No if I can't play offline, it is not worth anything at all to me. | |
|
| | | SimCity 2000 by Maxis.
That is all. | |
|
| | Smith6612Premium,MVM
join:2008-02-01
North Tonawanda, NY
kudos:22 | Re: Downloads and the game SimCity 2000 was da bomb. I found 3000 to be quite fun, too! | |
|
| | | Reviews:
·Frontier Communi..
| Re: Downloads and the game I would rate them like this:
2000, 4000, the original, 3000.
3000 was the least impressive from my vantage point. I might even rate the original higher than 4000, but that's probably my childhood nostalgia talking.  | |
|
| | | Reviews:
 ·Air Advantage
 ·HughesNet Satell..
| said by Smith6612:SimCity 2000 was da bomb. I found 3000 to be quite fun, too!
i loved playing simcity 3000 unlimited and destroying the pre-made cities with natural disasters lol | |
|
| | | | My sister has this game and the disc is actually broken all the way from outside into interior hole, but still plays!!
She's constantly leaving it in the drive drawer and I'm always cussing her out to take the stupid thing out when she's done!
Game never did interest me in the least.
--
The Firefox alternative.
»www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/ | |
|
| | | | | Re: Downloads and the game It's not cool to cuss your sister out. | |
|
| | |  r81984Fair and BalancedPremium
join:2001-11-14
Katy, TX | What is wrong with keeping a CD inside your drive??? It should be protected inside there. That is a good place for it.
--
...brought to you by Carl's Jr. | |
|
| | |
| | | I figured this would happen so I didn't buy... I'll wait 6 months for them to get their shit straight. | |
|
| | | | Re: Downloads and the game Even if you buy it 6 months from now, you're supporting a shit company's shit product. | |
|
| | | | | Re: Downloads and the game +1 | |
|
|  FBGuyPremium
join:2005-03-19
Evanston, IL | 20 MB/s !?!??! what kind of connection does your friend have? | |
|
| | Smith6612Premium,MVM
join:2008-02-01
North Tonawanda, NY
kudos:22 | Re: Downloads and the game FiOS from Verizon. They over-provision the 150Mbps tier a bit. | |
|
| | | | he probally meant 20 Megabits per second, i hit 21.7Mbps myself 5 minute average. | |
|
| | | UnnDunnPremium
join:2005-12-21
Brooklyn, NY | Re: Downloads and the game He said he's got 150/65Mbps (Megabits per second) from Verizon. So 20MB/s (Megabytes per second) is probably quite accurate. | |
|
| | | |  xdeadhead220, 221, Whatever It Takes.Premium
join:2000-11-08
Mechanicsburg, PA | Re: Downloads and the game VERY accurate | |
|
Reviews:
·Start Communicat..
·Wightman Telecom
| lost revinew For myself, If the game does not have an offline option now. I will never play it.
Ubisoft lost me as a customer after assassins creed.
Blizzard almost during wow and totally after Diablo 3.
I heard about the always online for the new Simcity and I already did not want to buy it. So now EA has lost me as a customer. When a single player game requires a always online connection. It is DRM and nothing more. | |
|
|  elios
join:2005-11-15
Springfield, MO | Re: lost revinew even more of an insult is lack of any kind of demo.... | |
|
| | bt
join:2009-02-26
canada
kudos:1 Reviews:
·Start Communicat..
| Re: lost revinew said by elios:even more of an insult is lack of any kind of demo....
Demos actually hurt launch sales numbers. | |
|
| | | elios
join:2005-11-15
Springfield, MO | Re: lost revinew only if the game is shit | |
|
| | | |  ThalerPremium
join:2004-02-02
Los Angeles, CA
kudos:3 | Re: lost revinew Which is why if there's no demo, I just assume the game is shit.
Turds get hidden. Seldom, if ever, are amazing commercial products hidden. | |
|
| | |  Subaru1-3-2-4Premium
join:2001-05-31
Greenwich, CT | said by bt:said by elios:even more of an insult is lack of any kind of demo....
Demos actually hurt launch sales numbers. Remember the old days on dial up.. the demo would come out before the game.. and maybe 45-50MB.. Now if you get a demo it's like 900+MB and if you get a demo it's only after the game is out.
--
It's NOT Ni-kon It's NE-KON!
LG is NOT Lifes Good It's Lucky Goldstar!
| |
|
| Reviews:
·Frontier Communi..
1 edit | said by cpsycho:When a single player game requires a always online connection. It is DRM and nothing more.
It's far more obnoxious than you think. It's not just phoning home when you launch the game, you can't even save your own game to your hard drive. It's all in the cloud. Their servers don't talk to one another, a game started on Server A is only accessible on Server A, so have fun when that server is filled to capacity the next time you want to play. A loss in internet connectivity lasting more than a few minutes terminates your game and negates those few minutes of progress.
This is beyond absurd. It doesn't even make financial sense for EA to design the game like this. They'll be paying maintenance for these server farms for years to come, for a game that nets them a one time sale. At least with a game like WoW it's a technical requirement and the publisher earns ongoing revenue. What's EA going to do here? Shut the servers down when sales drop off and piss off the millions of people who bought the game? Start charging a monthly fee and piss them off even more? Release a patch to turn this into a standalone game? (Yeah right....) | |
|
| |  TimePremium
join:2003-07-05 | Re: lost revinew There's nothing more frustrating than pouring your heart and soul into a product, only for a large number of folks to steal it. I don't care for the DRM, but I can understand why EA decided to go this route.
There are some quirks. The fact their architecture doesn't load your city across vservers (I'm assuming they are using heavy virtualization, or sharding) is totally novice. At the very least, a city should be stored on a global DB that all vservers access. It would require a lot of error checking, but really, it seems like they took this route to get the game out faster. It definitely needs some work, but it should definitely improve over time.
Expect to see it more and more in the industry. | |
|
| | | Reviews:
·Frontier Communi..
| Re: lost revinew The last video game I brought prior to this one was DEFCON, designed and published by a small outfit that can ill afford losses to piracy. They designed the game without any obnoxious DRM and certainly didn't cripple it to the point that you need a constant internet connection to play by yourself against the AI.
Let's compare EA to another large corporation that deals with losses on a daily basis: Wal-Mart. They don't ignore loss prevention, in fact they invest considerable sums into it. What they don't do is take it to an extreme that utterly ruins the shopping experience for the 99.9% of their customers that aren't criminals.
Besides, this isn't just DRM. The "game" is essentially little more than a dumb terminal, with everything happening on the server. It's basically the card catalog terminal from your library in 1993. It was a stupid design decision, maintaining the servers on an going basis will cost EA money, so in the long term they'll either shut them down or start charging for a game you've already paid for. Either way they alienate all their users. Perhaps they'll release a patch but I doubt it, the whole game was built from the ground up as a dumb terminal. | |
|
| | | ThalerPremium
join:2004-02-02
Los Angeles, CA
kudos:3 Reviews:
·DSL EXTREME
| said by Time:Expect to see it more and more in the industry.
Expect a loss in sales for me. If the DRM is at the point it prevents me from accessing the game I purchased, I'm either not buying the thing, or pirating it if I really, really feel compelled to play it.
Is it wrong? Is it stealing? Possibly. However, when the legal route is more a pain in the ass than pirating, I stop giving a shit. | |
|
| | | jimhsu
join:2001-06-26
Sugar Land, TX
4 edits | By far the most effective way to prevent piracy, IMO, is by making the non-pirated product superior to the pirated one. And the most effective way to do this? Implement a community that all players, whether single or multi-player, want to participate in. Not the "EA social community" which largely consists of Facebook spam, obtrusive promotions to other games, and celebrity appearances, but a genuine, non-commercial (as much as possible) endeavor. Just to name some examples: Battle.net, the Garry's Mod community, Supreme Commander's modding community, etc etc. Let the community (and associated user contributions, modding support, patches, expansions) reside behind online access validation. In turn, strip all that validation from the game itself. Bingo, pirates now have an inferior product that they can't rectify by "releasing cracks" or all that other business. And would be users that download the (totally working) pirated copy play, but then realize all the stuff that they're missing, giving even more incentive to buy the actual game.
The only con, of course, is dealing with idiots posting in forums with "HELP I PIRATED (insert your game), WHY CAN'T I PLAY MOD X?" But that can be entertaining, at times. Bonus points if they get banned 5 minutes later.
People are simply following the laws of economics, after all. | |
|
| | | | After enough time goes by, they'll simply drop support for the game. This happened to me many years ago (1997 when online only games were fairly rare - Ultima Online being one of the other few) with the game Sole Survivor (from the C&C universe). It was simple but fun and one day Westwood Studios decided to shut down their servers (after only a couple years I think) and I haven't been able to play it since. | |
|
| | I will not purchase any EA game with this technology... The last and only EA game I purchased with this technology was the last Command & Conquer. I got halfway through a mission and lost all progress because connectivity to EA failed. I stopped playing and took it back for in store credit then bought a non-EA game without that tech.
It also sucks not being able to play a single player game when travelling just because you dont have internet. This is rediculous and should have a law against preventing customers who legitimately purchased the game from playing it anytime they want. | |
|
me1212
join:2008-11-20
Pleasant Hill, MO | I've said it before and I'll say it again. Everyone buys the new sim city is basically telling EA:
"I approve of invasive DRM.
I approve of always online connection requirements, even to play single-player.
I approve of not having access to the game I paid for after release.
I approve of how EA treats its customers.
Here's my money, please continue to do ALL OF THIS. " | |
|
|
See 8 replies to this post |
|
| | Stopped Buying EA Games I stopped buying EA games back when they started to install a rootkit on your PC. I never looked back after that. Now I try to buy most of my games from the small independent publishers. | |
|
| FBGuyPremium
join:2005-03-19
Evanston, IL | Re: Stopped Buying EA Games I knew Sony did the rootkit thing, I've never heard of EA doing that. | |
|
 Duramax08Win8 sucksPremium
join:2008-08-03
San Antonio, TX | steam or nothin If its not on steam, im out. I dont need to keep track of different sources for my vidyagames.
--
»mc-buildville.enjin.com/ | |
|
|
See 7 replies to this post |
|
| | Lame game companies... To begin with, people who pirate the games will not intend to buy it in the first place, so why the heck the implement this ways to screw the paying customer? Same thing with movies, people who pirate them will not go to theaters.
Also, it will probably cost them more in the end to pay to keep these servers up and running. | |
|
|
See 8 replies to this post |
|
|
| | | Re: Happy It would probably eat quite a bit of your cap too. These games are almost always unnecessarily high on the data consumption. | |
|
| |  diablo1892Say hello to my little friend
join:2011-04-21
Friendly, WV
·HughesNet Satell..
·Dialup USA, Inc.
·EarthLink
| Re: Happy said by silbaco:It would probably eat quite a bit of your cap too. These games are almost always unnecessarily high on the data consumption.
Well lets find out just for shits and giggles shall we(:
I have a monthly DL CAP of 20GB, fastest this modem will go for DL-ing is 1.5mb/s and UL- 245kb/s as for ping, 600ms
I was able to play D3 with alright lag on a good day but when the servers get busy I get lots of disconnections and in the end I only end up with frustration instead of fun and having a good time with friends and family.
--
HT1000/ BeamID 32/ Power Max plan/ 4 pcs on a D-Link wired switch/ wireless D-Link router with password
Support only the gaming company's that matter the most, pay for something that actually is worth buying
or has a good reason for how much it's worth. | |
|
slckusrPremium
join:2003-03-17
Maumee, OH
kudos:1 Reviews:
 ·AT&T U-Verse
| I bought it I got the game yesterday, Didnt get an email to download the game until after 4am (midnight release). Got off work 9a, downloaded it while i ran some errands got home played for 3 hours and the servers went down.
Ill let you know how today goes. | |
|
1 edit | SimCity To think the original SimCity needed to be installed with the disc and then never needed the disc again... wow. How we have progressed.
I personally would never buy an always online game. What happens when EA decides to no longer support those game servers because SimCity 10 gets released? You no longer have a game. You are basically renting access to play the game.
Besides the map size is too small. It should be named SimVillage. You can't even create a town. | |
|
| Rekrul
join:2007-04-21
Milford, CT Reviews:
·AT&T U-Verse
| Re: SimCity said by silbaco:I personally would never buy an always online game. What happens when EA decides to no longer support those game servers because SimCity 10 gets released? You no longer have a game. You are basically renting access to play the game. Exactly! All of these online only games will just cease to function when the company stops supporting them.
Know how people into 'retro' games still play stuff from 20+ years ago? How many of these games do you think will still be playable even a decade from now? | |
|
| |  SnakeoilIgnore Button. The coward's feature.Premium
join:2000-08-05
Mentor, OH
kudos:1
 ·RoadRunner Cable
 ·magicjack.com
| Re: SimCity said by Rekrul:said by silbaco:I personally would never buy an always online game. What happens when EA decides to no longer support those game servers because SimCity 10 gets released? You no longer have a game. You are basically renting access to play the game. Exactly! All of these online only games will just cease to function when the company stops supporting them. Know how people into 'retro' games still play stuff from 20+ years ago? How many of these games do you think will still be playable even a decade from now? I recently purchased a new PC, and have been looking at games from 10+ years ago. I dunno why, but the older games seem more appealing then the new ones. I guess because back then they went for story and not eye candy. Todays games seem all about eye candy and little story. Mainly because the players seem to want/demand online play with their friends.
--
Is a person a failure for doing nothing? Or is he a failure for trying, and not succeeding at what he is attempting to do? What did you fail at today?. | |
|
 JeffreyConnoisseur of leisurely thingsPremium
join:2002-12-24
Long Island
kudos:3
·Verizon FiOS
·Vonage
|  Tried from Noon till 8PM to install, gave up
I don't mind the DRM so much, but if you 're going to have it, at least have it work properly. Oh well, no time to play now until the weekend. Such is life.
--
He used to say that soul shine, is better than sunshine, better than moonshine, damn sure better than rain.
I take direction from one person under protest. | |
|
 imtim83I hate those people so muchPremium
join:2001-06-03
Kenner, LA |  This is untrue
| |
|
|
See 8 replies to this post |
|
 jester121Premium
join:2003-08-09
Lake Zurich, IL | Had fun with it. No problems downloading on release night, though it was delayed about 25 minutes (I wasn't going to drive to a store at midnight so no biggie). Played for 2 hours, lots of fun.
Snow day yesterday, stayed home from work, put in a good 8 hours. They took down the server I was on so I changed to another one and created a couple other types of cities. No huge outages, no mayhem, and only a minor inconvenience on launch day (that was probably exacerbated by raging vandals trying to DDOS the game servers once they had a target).
It'll be nice not having to copy save game files back and forth if I decide to play on a laptop while traveling.
I'll be interested to see how hard of a time the crack guys have getting things to work reliably with all the inter-city data that's being handled on EA's servers. | |
|
| | I got in fine. At around 10:00PM I had the game installed and running. No problems getting into the server. My population is already at 75,000 and making most of my money exporting coal and having local casino's. | |
|
| | crap servers i was about to buy the game also but after reading about the servers and the always on internet being required I'm out. i'll wait for ea to fix it or a 3rd party to .
the ea server problem has been going on for a long time and should of been fixed months ago before the release of another server required title | |
|
bt
join:2009-02-26
canada
kudos:1 | Just going to get worse too, in the short term Game hasn't even launched in all regions yet. Load on the servers is going to go up big time when it launches in Europe tomorrow. | |
|
decifal
join:2007-03-10
Bon Aqua, TN
kudos:1 | ? constant connection required? As in its always transmitting data? If so, what the hell are they thinking? Data caps and overages people! Even if its not much data per packet, that crap adds up! | |
|
|  XiodenPremium
join:2008-06-10
Monticello, NY
kudos:1 | Re: ? But those caps are enough to send fifty bajillion emails! | |
|
| | | said by decifal:constant connection required? As in its always transmitting data? If so, what the hell are they thinking? Data caps and overages people! Even if its not much data per packet, that crap adds up!
From what I've played so far, the game takes up about 75 MB an hour. | |
|
| |  Simba7I Void Warranties
join:2003-03-24
Billings, MT | Re: ? So, if you're on satellite or LTE, you'd eat through your entire monthly cap in a week or two. | |
|
Reviews:
·Verizon FiOS
| When a person purchases a game They should have all rights to it. If the game is located on a server and one only play that game on their server, Piracy or not, I am not interested. Also, like somebody mentioned, when the company Decommissioning that game, you are out of luck.
Regarding piracy issues, I am certain they are tons of hackers attempting to recode this as an offline game right now. Since most of the graphics are on the server, the game itself will be limited it is scope but it can be accomplished nevertheless. | |
|
| | | Re: When a person purchases a game We should ask EA about the time they had killing Motor City online. They basically opened up the servers sold a ton of games, then decided 18 months later there wasn't enough profit and killed it 3 months after that.
Small cycle for an online game, and not a person was able to use it after they nuked the servers.
--
"It's always funny until someone gets hurt......and then it's absolutely friggin' hysterical!" | |
|
etaadmin
join:2002-01-17
Dallas, TX
kudos:1 | In a post-apocalyptic world... I remember the good ol' days of Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem' 3D DOS, WFW and window 95/98 not to forget my Commodore 64/128 (still going strong).
If civilization goes to hell who is going to be there to activate your windows or games? After all if civilization goes to hell playing (or not playing) server authenticated games will be the least of our problems
In a few thousand/million years when we all are gone and aliens uncover one of this cd's out of the ruins of our once vibrant cities they are not going to know what it was used for 
Just a thought | |
|
|
See 8 replies to this post |
|
Reviews:
·Frontier Communi..
| requested and received refund..... .... long time fan of Sim City, have played it since I was ten years old and got the SNES copy for Christmas. Met a lot of great people through an old majordomo mailing list that I found in a book about SC2K. Stayed through 3000 and 4000 even though they never quite hooked me like SC2K did.
Bought this game against my better judgment, considering the always on DRM. Should have done my homework better, because it's way more obnoxious than simply DRM that phones home at launch. I can't even save my single player game to my hard drive? It has to go to the cloud and I lose it if the server I started it on is too busy and I have to connect to a different one?
Jesus Christ, I'm a software developer and can really appreciate how much piracy stinks when you pour your sweat equity into something, but this is so far over the top it's not even funny. They purposefully moved into the cloud something that is essentially a single player game, all in the name of preventing piracy. The thought that someone might want to play the game on an airplane, train ride, cabin in the woods, etc, apparently never occurred to them. Or more likely they just didn't care.
Disappointment does not even begin to describe it. They gave me a refund without any hassle, though I had to wait over two hours to get an agent in their online chat. I highly encourage everybody who is likewise disappointed to pursue a refund now, before they change their mind and stop offering them. | |
|
|
See 16 replies to this post |
|
|
