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[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.

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.

Considering that Blizzard had as worse issues with D3, and didnt have their game removed from Amazon. I'm gonna say, some of it, a moderate amount of it, is because its just EA.

[ank]

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.

You gotta review games as they are right now, and not on what they might become in the future.
And this being the instant internet, there is nothing preventing a reviewer from re-reviewing the game later, when the servers are more stable.
I for one will simply not buy a single-player* game that has server issues, so the reviews are relevant to me, and my purchasing decisions right now

*I intend to play this game at least 90% as singleplayer, so it might as well be.

Also the D3 fiasco was just that, with these online only games they are turning the launch, which should be a happy time, when you play the game for the very first time, into rage-filled hours waiting for server.

and the thing is: when counting downtime on SC5 it will likely be a very small fraction of the total lifespan of the game, but you will never get those hours back, when you just wanted to play your damn game.
You might say "just relax and play something else while you wait" but that's just not how humans work, in reality this is a very frustrating experience.


And the D3 rage was just as bad as this, but they solved the server issues in a couple of days.

[Shades]

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.”

That makes no sense at all, the hold location density thing is heavily tied into happiness, yet happiness is held with an entity that moves to a new location each day? Surely you track both or neither (and in the case of neither tie happiness to location).

Secondly the amount of information required to tack this for the 10k or so agents that actually move around the map when you have 200k+ population is trivial. Assuming the names are generated from lookup tables your talking 4 bytes for home & work, 2 for names, 1 for clothing, 1 for both gender & skin colour, so 8 bytes per agent so ~80k of memory. Memory that has to be there for when agents are actually moving anyway (because it's shown). And for performance? surely regenerating all that is much longer than the lookup you'd require otherwise.

I'm betting it wasn't a developer that gave that response.

[Spitfire]

Their happiness, money, sickness, education level, etc.

I find it suspicous that only attributes a gamer cannot easily verify are named.

[dennislp3]

From what I can see the happiness and everything is carried by the sims as they travel...so while their actual home and destination are not the same they have the same properties (educated worker of middle class coming from random house X traveling to middle class educated job at work place Z) which means the start and end point shouldn't matter...in thoery...

Such specific tracking isn't "needed"...but it obviously messes with accuracy, "immersion", and realism of the simulation aspect.

[timferius]

when you think about it, none of the info was tracked for sims in Sim city 4, so this is a huge leap forward still. It's not the perfect world situation, but what is?

[Silent_Thunder]

when you think about it, none of the info was tracked for sims in Sim city 4, so this is a huge leap forward still. It's not the perfect world situation, but what is?

The problem is the old adage, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. It wasn't broke, and they tried to fix it by using agent based simulation, despite the fact that it clearly wasn't a well designed concept.

[timferius]

when you think about it, none of the info was tracked for sims in Sim city 4, so this is a huge leap forward still. It's not the perfect world situation, but what is?

The problem is the old adage, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. It wasn't broke, and they tried to fix it by using agent based simulation, despite the fact that it clearly wasn't a well designed concept.

I'd argue that. 1) it seems to work fairly well, there are a few hiccups, but it's the first time, so that's understandable.
2) that's a stupid adage, I'm not even going to explain why it's stupid. I call very few things stupid, but that adage is one of them.

[miauw62]

when you think about it, none of the info was tracked for sims in Sim city 4, so this is a huge leap forward still. It's not the perfect world situation, but what is?

The problem is the old adage, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. It wasn't broke, and they tried to fix it by using agent based simulation, despite the fact that it clearly wasn't a well designed concept.

I'd argue that. 1) it seems to work fairly well, there are a few hiccups, but it's the first time, so that's understandable.
2) that's a stupid adage, I'm not even going to explain why it's stupid. I call very few things stupid, but that adage is one of them.

Well, I'm not against innovation and this agent system has a lot of potential and could be really fun, but they shouldn't have took this many shortcuts and go against the entire POINT of the agent system. (By this I mean agents not having a static appearance/job/home)

[Neonivek]

It is more that Silent Thunder that: Broken is broken, it may be impressive but it is impressively broken too.

Games have always balanced innovation and giving out a broken game. It is not a leap forward or even a step forward to give new gameplay that does not work.

It is two steps forward and ten paces back.

[Mr. Boh]

The server issues can be forgiven—aside from yesterday I haven't had problems playing in about a week. I think the real problem with the game is that two of the most fundamental aspects of the game are horribly broken. When you start out it looks like the game is working but it has just sort of been fudged together.

Traffic AI is busted and tracking is partially to blame for it. Sims fill up available jobs at the beginning of every day, but more sims will head to a particular jobsite than is required. This creates needless traffic and when you combine this with broken pathfinding—cars will go for the closest route regardless of traffic capacity and busses/trucks will all go to the same spots in a big convoy instead of spreading out to deliver services—it leads to disaster even with pretty careful planning of roads and public transportation. Emergency services wait at stoplights.

The other fundamental issue is that the RCI dynamic has been bypassed. Sims don't need jobs/shopping (with parks) so it's entirely possible to have a city full of residential zones with no jobs in the region. Commercial zones don't need freight from industrial and industrial zones don't need shops to sell their goods.

I think this can all be fixed thankfully, but the question is will they do it?

[Neonivek]

Well with The Sims 3 and how broken it was... it is because of two things
1) Their engine was bad and wasn't modular enough for what they wanted to do so fixing their issues was difficult-impossible
and
2) Their current remaining Sims 3 fanbase is sigificiantly smaller.

So if Simcity's fanbase is larger and the engine allows these problems to be fixed. It could happen.

[draconisokami8504]

And... for the past 5 days I have been trying to get on the Bay 2 V2 Region and can't. Keeps saying it can't connect. Looks like I might be out of that region. Damn and I was so looking forwards to trying to revamp my city.

On another note, I've been reading on How EA/Maxis has been testing out patches for the traffic issues. That's good. Provided they actually deliver and aren't spoonfeeding us shit.

[jocan2003]

Holy molly o.O Check that!! and EA cry those are hacks, THOSE ARE FRIGGING FIX YOU CANT PROVIDE DUH!

http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a9n5j/you_can_edit_highways_outside_of_city_boundaries/c8vbw6k

[pilgrimboy]

My spiral city's (more like a snake) population won't pass 92,000 (phantom pop). So I have decided to put an intersection in to cause traffic jams. I'm wondering if that (for some unknown, illogical reason) will cause my city to grow.

Immediately upon putting the intersection and having my first traffic backup, three buildings near the intersection transformed. That made no sense.