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EA needs to pivot this game, fast. Even in the best case scenario, where the servers all get fixed this evening and the game works flawlessly for everyone for
by mortenjorck 14y ago
EA needs to pivot this game, fast.
Even in the best case scenario, where the servers all get fixed this evening and the game works flawlessly for everyone for a month straight, the damage to the game's name has been done. The meme is hatched: SimCity 2013 has a highly brittle dependency on poorly-planned cloud infrastructure.
There's a private region mode in the game (that you nonetheless can't use offline in the current architecture). EA needs to have Maxis crunch for the next couple of weeks to make this work offline. Yes, I've read the nebulous quotes about "part of the sim happening in the cloud." Whatever that is, they'll have to move it to the client.
Once offline play is possible, if EA wants any chance to make back its investment on this game, they're going to have to first promote the new offline mode, and then spend the next couple of months doing some post-launch rescoping of the multiplayer aspect. They can still make it work; it could still be fantastic – but they have to move fast.
- bung 14y ago(I just have to say, to give more than just an upvote, this is a great post.)
- baddox 14y ago> The meme is hatched: SimCity 2013 has a highly brittle dependency on poorly-planned cloud infrastructure. To the tech-literate crowd, this will be the meme. But for the average gamer, the meme is different, and I might argue worse: Sim City simply doesn't work.
- dman 14y agoOnly if they havent laid off the game devs after the master copy was done.
- cnlwsu 14y agoDiablo 3 was pretty horrible at first too for the same reason. I don't know if you will call that a success or failure though.
- Bockit 14y agoAnecdotally, I still have people dismiss Diablo 3 over the connectivity issues at launch, and make error 37 comments. Even from people who played through the issues and stuck around for a bit, it's the thing that stands out most for them. Success or failure depends on your definition of success here. Successful game, sure. Successful sequel to Diablo 2, it doesn't seem to have the same popularity, and I think the connection issues at launch framed a lot of people's opinions about the game.
- gambiting 14y agoI've had Diablo 3 since day one and played successfully to level 60 with two characters, never had any problems with connection. And SimCity doesn't work sometimes - it just doesn't work at all.
- scarlson 14y agoYou weren't playing Diablo 3 at release then. Give EA time and Sim City will stabilize as well as D3 has, either because they've expanded hardware, or shrunk their user base.
- gambiting 14y agoWell I was. But my point is that it was a hit-or-miss. I managed to play without problems but I had friends who could not connect. SimCity is not like that. SimCity just does not work at all.
- degenerate 14y agoOn the flip side, I've had friends playing simcity just fine. So, yeah.
- 14y ago
- AlexDanger 14y agoRemember EA is a business, not an offshoot of Reddit/HN. Imagine you're the SimCity product manager and the choice was between a massive refactor or provisioning a bunch of new servers. Which would you choose? I'd love to agree with you, but I just dont think its plausible.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- pdubs 14y agoOne-time cost vs. ongoing cost for years to come? It's not as simple as you make it out to be.
- aviraldg 14y agoBest compromise: create a "local" version of the server.
- gknoy 14y agoI seem to recall that the reason for the cloud based server was to leverage more number crunching power to yield better AI. Running it locally might not help. (Though, it certainly is better than no server, and it'd be interesting if they let people tune the fidelity of the processing so that it could run locally, or on a private server.)
- baddox 14y agoI highly doubt they are providing server resources for every player that are more powerful than the player's desktop or laptop computer. Surely that would be extremely expensive.
- mctx 14y agoI agree - at a very low 100MHz per player that's 25 players to a 2.5GHz Xeon core, 100 per CPU, 200 per server. Assume 100,000 players, that's 500 decently spec'd servers plus redundancy, bandwidth, storage, sysadmins, etc.
- Kequc 14y agoThe game sold more than a million copies and gamers are notoriously short term memory combined with short term attention span. Not only will this game start working fine after half the people who bought this game forget about it in a week. But the people who bought it and are mad about it now, won't be in a week. The same thing has been happening for a long time. If you are a gamer, you are sharing space with petulance. You can pretend all you want that games are designed and built with an adult in mind but adults aren't the target market.
- joelmichael 14y agoThis predictably happens at the release of almost every anticipated game that requires a central server connection. There is initial downtime and lag, angry gamers write lots of horrible reviews, then things eventually get better and nobody cares anymore that it used to be broken.
- jaredmcateer 14y agoSome of us have caught onto this cycle and are learning discipline. I personally didn't buy the game because I figured something like this might happened... problem is that the window of opportunity for EA to get my money is quickly closing as I await to see them fix the issues and make things right for the people that have suffered through it.
- supercoder 14y agoAbsolutely none of this is going to happen. They'd just see this as an issue with the server infrastructure , not the game. They'll just get more servers online, people will start to play and then the complaining will die down. I dont think it will hurt their sales as much as you're implying anyway. I've just purchased it, knowing about the server issues, but also knowing it's going to come good soon enough.
- norswap 14y agoThey won't do it. It would mean being intelligent.