SimCity Message Board older than one year ago

In light of the AI wonkiness of the new SimCity, the same guy who accurately modeled his hometown's traffic problems during the SimCity Beta has made an attempt to do the same thing in SimCity 2000. The results are... pretty interesting.

#simcity Their message is clear: What happened with SimCity is not okay. More »

#watchthis Everyone likes to talk about Game of Thrones. And everyone likes to talk about SimCity. So combining the two seems only logical, right? More »

#simcitydisasterwatch Misinformation. Server errors. Fan backlash. Since EA launched SimCity two weeks ago, the online city-builder has been nothing short of a catastrophe for everyone involved. More »

#simcitydisasterwatch If you register a copy of SimCity by March 25, you get a free copy of one of eight PC games from EA's catalog, including Mass Effect 3 and Battlefield 3. More »

#watchthis Oh, so this is what they meant when they said you could follow a Sim throughout their entire day. Either this is some awful AI, or the Sims are really just that effing boring. I lean toward the former. More »

#simcity I live in New York City. Everyday I ride the subway to work; most people here do. I haven't owned a car in 10 years. I live the densest large city in America, one full of massive skyscrapers, immense culture and people of every race, culture and creed. More »

#simcity With more and more players able to connect to and consistently play SimCity now, they're seeing what GlassBox, the game's simulation engine, has to offer. GlassBox has been pitched as an enormously sophisticated engine that supposedly requires the game's servers to supply some computing power, necessitating the game's notorious always-online connection. But a lot of forum threads, comments and YouTube videos show behavior unworthy of such a claim. More »

Though EA's official stance on SimCity's persistent Internet connection has been that it's absolutely required for the core game to function, a report from Rock, Paper, Shotgun claims that is not the case. An inside source who asked to remain anonymous told RPS the online servers are "not handling any of the computation done to simulate the city you are playing."

According to the source, the servers are coordinating social messages between cities in a region, as well as "cloud storage of save games, interfacing with Origin, and all of that. But for the game itself? No, they're not doing anything."

Even when the servers go down, certain cities have stayed online and playable for a period of time, suggesting off-site computation is not entangled in the main gameplay loop. The RPS source claims servers are also being used to repeatedly check for instances of hacking and cheating - and the game's verification messages to servers are creating queues and hampering responsiveness.

Finally, the source casts doubt on EA's claims that a single-player version of this SimCity would be impossible to produce. "It wouldn't take very much engineering to give you a limited single-player game without all the nifty region stuff." EA's current public reasoning about why the game needs to stay online has done little to quell frustration voiced over the game's tremendous launch issues.

Joystiq has contacted EA for comment regarding the source's claims.

EA's official stance on SimCity's persistent Internet connection has been that it's absolutely required for the core game to function; however, a report from Rock, Paper, Shotgun claims that is not the case. An inside source that asked to remain anonymous told RPS that the online servers are "not handling any of the computation done to simulate the city you are playing." According to the source, the servers are coordinating social messages between cities in a region, as well as "cloud storage of save games, interfacing with Origin, and all of that. But for the game itself? No, they're not doing anything."

There are other indications that's true: Even when the servers go down, cities have stayed online and playable, suggesting that the servers are working in the background rather than directly on the main gameplay loop. In fact, says the source to RPS, this is why Cheetah mode was disabled when EA was having such issues. Messages are collected as the game plays, and then passed out in one big package to the servers and back, and losing the fastest play mode was able "to reduce by half the number of updates coming into the queue."

So could SimCity be single-player? The source claims it undoubtedly could be. "It wouldn't take very much engineering to give you a limited single-player game without all the nifty region stuff." If that's indeed true, it throws a lot of doubt on EA's current public reasoning about why the game needs to stay online and adds to the frustration regarding the game's launch issues.

#simcity It's hard not to feel a little bit sorry for SimCity's menu music. The jaunty theme plays every time I start (or attempt to start) the game. It accompanies the loading window that precedes the game's proper main menu. More »

#simcity I ran a test yesterday. I loaded the always-online SimCity—the game that EA says just can't be easily made to run offline—and then pulled the proverbial cord. More »

#simcity No, I'm not making a joke about how SimCity's makers doubtless wish they could hit "undo" on last week's embarrassing, disastrous launch. (Though I don't doubt that's the case.) I'm saying I think SimCity actually needs an undo button. You know, Control+Z. A shake of the smartphone. A little button with a backwards-curving arrow on it. More »

The SimCity servers may still be having problems, but good news: NMA's video rendering servers are working just fine.

#simcitydisasterwatch NMA, the wacko Taiwanese animation studio, has become a kind of grim reaper in the world of Internet scandal. If you end up in an NMA video, it ain't good—although I am sure Francis, the YouTube comedian who rants about video games, is happy to cameo here on behalf of the outraged. More »

#simcitydisasterwatch SimCity may have gotten more stable over the weekend as the game's creators at Maxis have added more servers, but the game isn't quite out of the woods yet. More »

#simcitydisasterwatch Providing a little more detail than was briefly offered yesterday in a series of Twitter exchanges, Maxis' Lucy Bradshaw has written a blog post outlining the progress that continues to be made fixing SimCity's back-end woes. More »

#simcitydisasterwatch After fielding some 1900 questions in a 45-minute Twitter Q&A, Maxis, the maker of SimCity, directly answered about eight regarding the game, which has been inaccessible to many since it released on Tuesday. More »

#simcitydisasterwatch Later this afternoon, Lucy Bradshaw, the general manager of SimCity maker Maxis, is going to take over the studio's official account to answer questions from gamers who, four days after the game's release, are still unable to play the thing they purchased. She's already given a preview answer to the question most of them likely have: Why can't this game simply be played offline? More »

#simcitydisasterwatch Anyone who bought SimCity will get a free video game, publisher EA said tonight. More »

#simcitydisasterwatch Looking back on this week's SimCity launch debacle, it isn't just remarkable that the game's servers failed, it's remarkable how many different ways they failed. More »

#simcitydisasterwatch In light of SimCity's disastrous launch week, publisher Electronic Arts has suspended the marketing campaign for the game, according to an internal email obtained by Polygon. More »

#nsfw The city in the above image was created in the beta for the new SimCity and demonstrated that, as always, if gamers can draw some male genitalia into a game, they will. Really, they will. More »

#civitas A team of developers is looking to make a single-player city-building game that seems like the anti-SimCity—and they're asking for $250,000 on Kickstarter to make it happen. More »

#simcitydisasterwatch Upset about the rocky SimCity rollout? Take heart. You are not alone. Gamers in South Korea are also not happy campers. But it's not just due to the inability to play. More »

#simcitydisasterwatch The head of the studio behind the troubled new SimCity told Kotaku today that efforts to solve the game's server woes will continue aggressively into the weekend. More »

#simcitydisasterwatch Everybody's sick of this SimCity disaster. Everybody! More »

#origin Lately, a rumor has spread about how EA might ban users who request for refunds on SimCity. It's bunk. More »

#simcitydisasterwatch As the disastrous SimCity launch lurches toward the end of the week, it feels like it's been one catastrophe after another. More »