SimCity 2013

[sted]

in that case there is 0 chance of my buying it. I like being able to get out an old game and replay. At the moment my dreamcast is hooked up again and im playing crazy taxi and msr and other old games i dont want to not be able to play a game in teh future if i still have a machine capable of it because someones worried about it being copied. Yes games get copied and its "wrong" but if you charge £40+ for it what do you expect esp as i cant remember the last time i got a game that diddnt then need patches downloading (nfs on my xbox requires a 2gb patch but as my internet is 1mb (granted i have a 3g dongle thats faster but only get 15gb allowance)it will take a long time)

[CHR1S]

SimCity: EA Refuses Refunds, Threatens Customer With Origin bans

 

<3 EA - Feel the love!

[CAM]

To be fair, they are threatening a chargeback which is different to a refund. It's very common with games companies to ban or heavily restrict accounts that initiate chargebacks as they cause a lot of headaches and in some cases are carried out fraudulently. NCSoft banned a COH player after he did a chargeback when it shut down and as angry as the playerbase was with the company, they still supported the ban as he basically stole 6 months of sub time!

 

But I do agree that games companies are pulling a music company attitude and showing considerably less and less respect to their customers. I foresee another mass market crash if they keep it up.

[featured_spectre]

Bring on the crash. I have given up buying EA sports games as I cannot complete the online content as and when I want too, however their battlefield games, they're still going strong. Not sure how long I have left to get 20 destruction kills, but I am certainly trying!

[benjie]

What are people thinking of the game so far?

 

I have played on it for a couple of hours so far. Thankfully I haven't had to wait for much longer than a couple of minutes to join a server. This doesn't mean that it has been plain sailing either. The game has crashed on me a couple of times. It keeps on loosing connection to the servers when playing

 

My origin gamer tag is:benjie500

 

Does anyone want to start a region.

 

P.s. I have been using the European west 4 server.

[localzuk]

If anyone does want it, Gamestop have the standard edition for £32.97 which includes a free mouse mat. SimCity for PC at GameStop

 

Or GamesLoad have the Limited Edition download for £39.99. http://www.gamesload.co.uk/game/simcity-limited-edition-753918.html

 

Seems the worst place to buy it is Origin!

Edited March 9, 2013 by localzuk

[oxide54]

Any attempt to reverse engineer the server will likely be shot down in the courts, as Blizzard did with bnetd. And even though it would be reverse-engineering solely so people could continue to enjoy the product and not for profit, I can guarantee you 100% that EA would still sue the backside off it, just as a corporate knee-jerk and to avoid setting a precedent. These are companies that fight abandonware, after all; products they have actively taken off sale so cannot possibly be losing money from, yet still they will threaten with takedowns.

 

 

opensource version of the game server released as source code will fair just fine,

[Arthur]

EA Employee Chastises Company Over Sim City in Public Letter

 

To the executives at EA, from one of your employees

 

I am deeply embarrassed by the troubled launch of Sim City and I hope you are too. When I walk around our campus and look at the kind of talent we've collected, the amenities we have access to and the opportunities working at such a big company affords us, I can’t imagine how for release after release, EA continues to make the same embarrassing, anti-consumer mistakes. We should be better than this. You should not be failing us so badly.

 

Another thing I see when I walk around our campus are massive banners that display what are said to be our company values. They are on posters on every floor, included in company-wide emails and hanging above the cafeteria in bright colors. You even print them on our coffee mugs so we see them every day. But somehow when planning the launch of Sim City, you threw them all out the window.

 

Most important of the values you are ignoring is Think Consumers First. What part of the Sim City DRM scheme, which has rendered the game unplayable for hundreds of thousands of fans across the globe, demonstrates that you are thinking about consumers before you are thinking about yourselves? Does “first” mean something different in boardrooms than it does to the rest of us? Does the meaning of that word change when you get the word “executive” in front of your title?

 

You can’t even pretend that you didn't know consumers would be angry about this. Common sense aside, consumers complained about this during your public betas. In fact, when one of them posted his criticisms on the forums, he was banned! You tried to silence your critics. The same thing is happening now as users write in to demand refunds. What part of this behaviour aligns with our company value to Be Accountable?

 

What you've demonstrated with this launch is that our corporate management does not believe in our core values. They are for the unwashed masses, not for the important people who forced this anti-consumer DRM onto the Sim City team. This DRM scheme is not about the consumers or even about piracy. It’s about covering your own asses. It allows you to hand-wave weak sales or bad reviews and blame outside factors like pirates or server failures in the event the game struggles. You are protecting your own jobs at the expense of consumers. I think this violates the Act With Integrity value I'm looking at on my own coffee mug right now.

 

On behalf of your other employees, I’d like to ask you to fix this. Allow the Sim City team to patch the game to run offline. If Create Quality and Innovation is still a core value that you believe in, then this shouldn't be a hard decision. Games that gamers can’t play because of server overload or ISP issues are NOT quality. Be Bold by giving the consumers what they want and take accountability for the mistake.

 

Finally I’d like to ask you to follow the last company value on the list in the future: Learn and Grow. When you made this mistake with Spore, the company and all your employees suffered for it. You didn't learn from that mistake and you are making it again with Sim City.

 

So please, learn from this debacle. Don’t do this again. Grow into better leaders and actually apply our company values when you make decisions. Don’t just use them as tools to motivate your staff. With the money, talent and intellectual property available to EA, we should be leading the industry into a golden age of consumer-focused game publishing. Instead we’re the most reviled game publisher in the world. That’s your fault. Things can only change if you actually start following the company values and apply them to every title we launch.

 

Sincerely,

A Disappointed But Hopeful Artist at EARS

[localzuk]

They're not wrong! EA Games should be seen as the best games company around, but they are nearly universally hated. They really need to fix that.

[SYNACK]

They're not wrong! EA Games should be seen as the best games company around, but they are nearly universally hated. They really need to fix that.

 

+1 they must actively be trying to sabotage it given the talent and resources at their disposal.

[rich_tech]

It doesnt suprise me with EA and their attitude to DRM and support of games, they have always had the attitude "We have your money, now f*** off"

 

All the BF games have been popular, but its had large documented periods of support being absolutely terrible on those games and patching them, they may make some truly great games but their attitude as a company really is awful when it comes to their customers, I think from the various games of theirs I have played over the years. The whole issue of DRM has put me completely off Simcity here and I used to enjoy the games in the series.

[jonnykewell1]

never played the SIM CITY games. Only just decided to have a read and they sound brilliant I don't know where I have been the last god knows how many years. Was looking at the new one but i've decided to hold back buying it at the minute and I have bought Sim City 4 to have a play and get used to the whole concept. The graphics look amazing on the 2013 version. Just looking online and they charge up to £10 more for a digital download? How do they justify that?

[localzuk]

As someone else said to me - convenience tax.

 

Also, you can get it cheaper from Amazon (or Game, Gamestop or basically any other retailer) than Origin.

[jonnykewell1]

yeah I was look at either game or blockbuster website. Have amazon started selling it again yet? I heard they stopped it due to the problems.

[TechMonkey]

Last I heard Amazon were still not selling it in the UK. US they had started digital download sales again.

[Ghostgame]

Last I heard Amazon were still not selling it in the UK. US they had started digital download sales again.

 

Now comes with a disclaimer

[Bromcom_John]

It is a great game, but bear in mind that they are currently patching it "aggressively" to deal with various issues.

Currently the issue that is most annoying me is that in order to deal with server stability they essentially disabled some of the region play functionality. Seemingly however this is only affecting people intermittently.

So you can start a city and then, when you get to the point that you need to buy your waste coverage from a neighbour, try to do so and nothing happens.

 

I am sure they'll sort it out though.

To give "some" of the EA staff their dues, since the EU servers came online it seems like they are actually reacting to issues now rather than just appearing to sit back and count the money.

Server numbers have tripled since Friday morning.

[localzuk]

I know of a streamer who was streaming to 9k+ people every day playing it. He developed city after city, and each time he got anywhere, the servers would go down and he'd lose his cities.

 

He has now uninstalled the game and advised everyone to do the same.

 

Not exactly a good advert to those 9k people watching!!!

[Bromcom_John]

Not exactly a good advert to those 9k people watching!!!

 

I believe the term "PR Catastrophe" has been bandied around as a fair summation.

[Theblacksheep]

Friend got it last week, still unable to play it.

[Ghostgame]

Hmm.

I was planning on getting it today.

I may get it but hold off installing it (shame )

From what I have seen it looks like an outstanding game and I do like city builders (ever since Ceaser 3)

Just a crying shame its being let down by technical issues.

[jonnykewell1]

I've just bought it! but i'm going to hold on for a week or two see if the system improves.

[Ghostgame]

They are now saying its nearly fixed.

 

SimCity Makers Say Crashes Dramatically Reduced, No 'All-Clear' Yet

[Garacesh]

Nobody crashes anymore! because nobody can login...

 

I don't own SimCity 2013, I used to own.. I think it was SimCity 2000? It was a nice time-killer, but not something I'd spend big bucks on. Glad I didn't, given this always-on DRM lark (I really hoped after the Diablo3 fiasco this would be the last we'd see of it, but game companies never learn, do they? I'm sure Blizzard will give always-on DRM another try sometime down the line and bork it up just as badly then, too, just like EA didn't learn from Spore..)

 

Seems like EA had these problems during the beta and didn't bother to fix them, and, in my opinion, are being nothing short of entirely unreasonable in not issuing immediate refunds to players requesting them. You have been sold a product, and that product has not lived up to its end of the bargain, and that's EA's fault. EA have promised a service they are now not issuing. If it was 'Our servers fell over, because too many users fried the network cards. We've got new ones on the way, sit tight!' that might have been different, but this is something they were previously aware of and chose to ignore. People reported these problems during the beta, and EA didn't think to add more server capacity before launching? That is grossly unacceptable.

 

It's a rotten shame that people who didn't buy direct from EA can get refunds (Amazon etc) but others can't. I'm not one to jump on the 'HurrDurr Boycott' brigade, as that never lasts and just sounds silly, but I'm very much one to agree with 'Vote with your wallet.' Demand that refund in any and every way possible. Enough people adamant they will settle for nothing less (no, none of this 15% off or 'store credit' lark!) and they'll have to fall in line. Maybe it'll take a few people to issue chargebacks and get their Origin banned before the ball starts rolling, but it needs to. We, as gamers, have the power to demand that this sort of thing stops. But we, as gamers, are collectively too damn lazy to stick to our guns. "No, I hate always-on DRM!" we cried, but still bought the game anyway. Stop doing it, it only teaches companies like EA and Blizzard that you'll just buy it anyway and grumble a little. I very much enjoyed Diablo and Diablo 2, but the always-on DRM was one of the deciding factors of me not purchasing Diablo 3. I'm not saying that makes me 'better' than anybody else, not by a long shot, I just don't see why gamers don't put their foot down more.

 

EA are currently being incompetent, irresponsible and down-right immoral douchewaffles - but we keep allowing them to be, so we really can't complain too much.

 

(Related: The same applies for buying games without demos for their pre-order bonuses. Stop it. Stop it now. It hurts the gaming industry and it promotes building your game, then removing part of it for use as a 'bonus', instead of keeping it in for everybody and fleshing out the game more. But I've completely veered off on a different tangent now, so I'm going to hush. TotalBiscuit did a vid about it, I'd recommend people watch it.)

[Guest Guest]

Friend bought it. Built a city. Crashed. Logged in again on another server and had to start from scratch.

 

Xbox / ps take note. The "Internet" just isn't ready for always on connections for games. Be that the servers or people's home connections.