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[miauw62]

Why does my friend dismiss some of the obvious faults  by this game (eg all-residential city) with "You're not supposed to play it like that".

Agh god. Somebody should clean up my brain, it's on the wall behind me.

[10ebbor10]

To be fair, dwarves in DF just crouch under eachother whenever they take the same path. It'd be a total disaster if there was "traffic".

Actually, if they can they try to walk around each other*. And since all simcity roads are 2 way, and hence cars can pass each other without problems putting a DF like pathing engine in charge wouldn't result in many problems. After all, the current system is pretty similair already.

*Which can send them on hilariously long detours, but anyway...

[alway]

Comparing DF's pathfinding to SimCity's pathfinding isn't fair.  DF has many more paths and much fewer actors while Sim City has far fewer paths and many more actors.  In any pathfinding algorithm, the more paths you add, you exponentially increase the complexity of the algorithm.  As you add actors to it, you increase it much more linearly.  Therefore 2000 paths with 100 actors is much much harder than 100 paths with 2000 actors.

Not completely lineary though, as each pather has to account for other pathers as well. (Or what they should do in an ideal situation)

It's sub-linear, approaching O(1) as increases in numbers results in batching of agents being increasingly efficient, to the point where adding more has no effect on time. Traffic only affects pathfinding weights, and due to the obvious fact that it is being computed anyway for the data visualization, we can call it O(1). Modifying the pathfinding weights with that data has a complexity only dependent on number of intersections.

[Spitfire]

alway I'm starting to become your fan.^^

It already more then made back its money for Sim city 5.

That's the thing that bugs me the most. The most revenue is made in the first week of realease. They sold their copies and made their money. And all the talk about flaws, bad PR and straight up lying won't affect anything. And I'm not really talking about EA 'paying for this mistake', more about games in general. Ruining franchises seems to work, and they still have many franchise licences to ruin.

The same thing will happen again, we will see plenty more willfully flawed games in the future.


What do you think about your purchasing choices affecting the industry? As money is the only language companies understand, if we stop buying games with bad quality, will the future of videogames change to the better?

[Neonivek]

I think I hate Sim City 5 without playing it now.

Any game that gets me in a heated arguement with my father is a game I am mad at!

We were having an arguement where he was basically saying "if the game has these problems why is it so popular and why do review sites give it such great scores?" basically.

DANG YOU SIM CITY 5!!! I mean say what you will about a broken but still very enjoyable game... but to stoop so low as to, through no fault of your own, come between the love of a father and child? How dare you!

[lordcooper]

What do you think about your purchasing choices affecting the industry? As money is the only language companies understand, if we stop buying games with bad quality, will the future of videogames change to the better?

Recent events have put me off the concept or preordering in it's entirety.  Other than Kickstarter campaigns (different kettle of fish there) I'm not paying for anything that doesn't have at least a well received alpha version out.  I will make exceptions for thatgamecompany, Freebird Games and Ice-Pick Lodge because even if they ripped me off on a terrible game (which I don't see happening at any point in the foreseeable future) I'd count it as a fair trade for the brilliance they've enabled me to experience.

[sluissa]

alway I'm starting to become your fan.^^

It already more then made back its money for Sim city 5.

That's the thing that bugs me the most. The most revenue is made in the first week of realease. They sold their copies and made their money. And all the talk about flaws, bad PR and straight up lying won't affect anything. And I'm not really talking about EA 'paying for this mistake', more about games in general. Ruining franchises seems to work, and they still have many franchise licences to ruin.

The same thing will happen again, we will see plenty more willfully flawed games in the future.


What do you think about your purchasing choices affecting the industry? As money is the only language companies understand, if we stop buying games with bad quality, will the future of videogames change to the better?

There's an old saying.

"There's a sucker born every minute."
Original source often attributed to P. T. Barnum, but that's disputed.

In any case, it doesn't matter how many customers they piss off because there's a near endless line of them coming down the pipe. All that matters is that the right people are happy. Game reviewers get their good experience/cut to keep those customers seeing the pretty lights and hearing the pretty sounds as they queue up. Government gets their cut, so they don't get dragged into court. Stockholders get their cut so the company gets to continue to run as it does.

All that matters is that first purchase. They may give lip service to customer appreciation. But they don't give a damn about repeat business. Once they've got their money, they don't care. They know they'll have a fully new crop of people when the next iteration comes down the line.

Just think for a moment how many people have gotten into gaming in the 10 years between Sim City 4 and Sim City 5? You have a whole generation that's grown up in that time that's completely new market for EA to go after. Even if they bomb this one. They can wait another 10 years while they continue milking The Sims and their sports franchises and they'll still make a profit on Sim City 6 because there'll be a whole new market out there once more.

There is a question as to whether this is the most efficient way of making a profit. I'd argue it isn't, but if it helps to scare away the boogy man that is piracy, they're probably willing to try it. Of course, now that they've likely failed at that as well... well, more DRM for next time. That's obviously what they did wrong! They didn't stick ENOUGH DRM INTO IT!.

[alway]

"if the game has these problems why is it so popular and why do review sites give it such great scores?" basically.

What good reviews. http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/simcity

I mean, a 67. Considering most places' rating scale consists of the numbers between 7/10 and 10/10... that's really bad. I mean, it's only a mere 4 points above the abysmal SimCity Socities.

[Neonivek]

He went to EAs site and they only have good reviews apperantly >_<

[Putnam]

Send him to Metacritic, then.

[timferius]

“We understand that when cars always take the shortest route between point A and point B there will be unavoidable (and illogical) traffic jams, so we are retuning these values it to make the traffic flow more realistically,” writes Librande. “To dig a little deeper our roads will have a weighting system based on 25%, 50% and 75% capacity. As a road hits those marks it will become less and less appealing for other cars, increasing the likelihood of them taking an alternate path if one exists.”

Well, that's a bit better at least! Nabbed it from this article:
http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/03/14/simcity-traffic-patc/

Edit: (should read the full article before posting).
And this is a bit more depressing:

Additionally, the designer acknowledges that players have been asking about the non-persistence of Sims—why they don’t keep the same houses and jobs. This isn’t all new information—Maxis gave me the approximately the same answer when I asked about it last year—but it may be the clearest explanation:

“The Sims in the game are persistent in many respects. They go from a home to a workplace or to a shop and back each day. Their happiness, money, sickness, education level, etc. are also persistent and are carried around the city with each Sim as the simulation unfolds. But many aspects of the Sims are not persistent. They don’t own a particular house or have permanent employment. We also don’t track their names, their clothing, gender, or skin color. We did this as in attempt to increase performance so that we could have more Sims in the city. Ultimately we didn’t feel that the cost of adding in that extra layer of micro detail made the macro game play richer. Game design is filled with tradeoffs and compromises like this and we are constantly evaluating these (and many other) decisions.”

[forsaken1111]

That gives me hope at least that these things will be patched and fixed eventually.

[MrWiggles]

Wouldnt it be incredibly pissy and short sighted for game reviewers to give Sim City 5 a shit review because, what would ultimately be a very short term disruption in service in the game lifespan? Under a week, and server issues, the /world/ over, are largely if not ultimately fixed.

[forsaken1111]

Wouldnt it be incredibly pissy and short sighted for game reviewers to give Sim City 5 a shit review because, what would ultimately be a very short term disruption in service in the game lifespan? Under a week, and server issues, the /world/ over, are largely if not ultimately fixed.

Wouldn't it be incredibly pissy and shortsighted for people to take to the internet and raeg and whine about what was ultimately a very short term disruption in service, etc etc? Yes, it was incredibly petty and silly for both the reviewers and the people the world over.

[timferius]

Wouldnt it be incredibly pissy and short sighted for game reviewers to give Sim City 5 a shit review because, what would ultimately be a very short term disruption in service in the game lifespan? Under a week, and server issues, the /world/ over, are largely if not ultimately fixed.

Wouldn't it be incredibly pissy and shortsighted for people to take to the internet and raeg and whine about what was ultimately a very short term disruption in service, etc etc? Yes, it was incredibly petty and silly for both the reviewers and the people the world over.

Ridiculous! No one is that petty or shortsighted on the internet, right?
Anyway, I'm curious how big a deal this would be if it weren't EA.