GS News - SimCity Broken?

Blah blah blah. That's all this statement is. The root of the statement belies all of EA's problems, EA thinks very little of their customers to lie about what went wrong, they think they can issue a statement to make everything okay without really admitting fault and ask us, the consumers to be patient.

Being a leader in digital media and having assets in excess of 250 million creates responsibility for EA to provide an industry leading experience in regards to support, and quality. EA constantly fails to deliver, they fail in their responsibilities, they worry less about ensuring the satisfaction their customer then they do about creating dividends for their share-holders.

If a consumer goes to a store to buy a product that doesn't work, they can return it for a working one. When a consumer buys a product that doesn't work and find that they can't exchange it for a working one because the product is of poor design then the product is recalled and the company who made that product loses a ton of money. This is why companies have stringent quality control standards in place. EA doesn't NEED to have stringent quality control standards because they stand to make money regardless of a broken product or not. If the product is defective they just put-out some updates and react to the issue at their leisure. They WILL make millions from this game in spite of their consumer. Well this type of business model should be in violation of every major trade treaty and regulation. Follow the link below to complain and hopefully encourage EA to fix their business model.

https://www.bbb.org/consumer-complaints/file-a-complaint/nature-of-complaint/

Let me read what some of the marketing from the jacket of SimCity 4 says "The Biggest Simcity Ever!" ... "Create a Massive Metropolitan Area!". The game used to be marketed and sold on the principle of creating huge cities and now for absolutely no reason other then to facilitate a mulit-player game that no one asked for they've gone in the complete opposite direction

Weren't they confident about the domestic release?  If so then what happened and clearly them feeling confident doesn't actually mean anything and if not then why was it released?  Would love to hear the answer to those questions.

hahaha DRM

go on - abuse D3 if you will but 1 year on and this fiasco....hash-tag-EA-Ashamed

a small percentage lol

In response to their massive server issues and the virtual unplayable state of the game the developers of simcity said the following:

"This has been an exciting and challenging week for the team here at Maxis, the culmination years of planning and development," "We have been overwhelmed by the outpouring of support and enthusiasm from our fans which has made it even more upsetting for us that technical issues have become more prominent in the last 24 hours. We are hitting a number of problems with our server architecture which has seen players encountering bugs and long wait times to enter servers. This is, obviously, not the situation we wanted for our launch week and we want you to know that we are putting everything we have at resolving these issues."

If this is the culmination of years of planning and development, maybe you need to change your strategy. If you launch a game, it is unplayable for 2 days and counting, then you have failed. Online games have been standard for a decade now and you(Maxis) are backed by EA, one of the biggest game production companies ever, and you can't get it right. After a decade? We don't hear your apologies we want to see you fix it, then apologize and tell us what you will do to compensate people for the money they have spent on your broken product.

"We're making changes to prevent further issues, and are confident that Origin will be stable for international launches later this week"

They did deliver on that end, Origin is running very smoothly. The actual game servers is a completely different story however....

Got to love those Metacritic reviewers, most of the "resident" reviewers there give all games high scores.

Well, we all know whos going to review the game here on GS, he spoke alot yesterday about Simcity and hes review will be just.

I've been playing off and on for last two days now.  It's true, the servers have buckled from likely the demand and it shows poor preparation by EA.

On the other hand, this Simcity (and I've played them all) - knocks it out of the ballpark.  It is the best Simcity ever made IMO and will be a massive seller for EA - once they fix their screw up. 

Yeah - you got the naysayers (and I suspect some of them are just trashing the game because of corporate competition and nothing else.)   DRM - bleh, just whiners for what is the inevitable future for all computer games.

Maxis and EA (despite itself) has put out a damn good game this time round.

Surprised ? Nope, it's EA, I was expecting just that.
Congratulations, now put the next franchise destroyed trophy in your showcase.

EA's investors must be so proud of them, instead of selling products with longevity, which their customers would be more than happy to buy they continue with the same shady business practices of using a good franchises' name for making some quick cash of unaware people.

If SimCity would've been playable offline, completely DRM free and would allow private server hosting (and LAN mode / direct IP join) for the multiplayer aspect (and perhaps an EA hosted global multiplayer additionally AS AN ENTIRELY SEPARATE OPTION), I'd have probably bought it, despite all the dumbing down that Maxis did.

But as it turned out to be the mess everybody could see coming a mile away from the previews and interviews I simply don't care and will never buy this or any other product with similar restrictions - I'll never make my entertainment dependant on a 3rd party, which in the end is only their loss

Let's wait and see how they justify their failing this time around because piracy cannot be blamed for this fuck-up. (and don't even start with "a different market" or "gamer fatigue", it's blatantly obvious that their chosen business model of always online requirement, dumbing down features, already planned DLCs and microtransactions and Origin DRM ruined this game)

EA sucks. 

Oh yeah, I can't see any issues designing a single-player game requiring an always-on internet connection.   This is why I won't buy this one.  It's a shame too, I absolutely love SimCity.

I regret buying this game...

BULLSHIT !!! considering to cancel pre-order !!

This is why always on DRM is a stupid idea, among many reasons.

It's broken. They're not doing shit. They keep posting on twitter that they've "finished patching <insert server>" but they're all still down and we're all still stuck authenticating. Also WHY THE HELL DO I HAVE TO PLAY THE TUTORIAL ON EVERY SERVER JUST TO START PLAYING THE GAME?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is extremely dishearting. Was going to buy this game today glad I read of what's happening to save me the time and money. May still buy but will wait till they have fixed it.