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Remember 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 provisionin

Remember 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 ago
One-time cost vs. ongoing cost for years to come? It's not as simple as you make it out to be.
- aviraldg 14y ago
  Best compromise: create a "local" version of the server.
  - gknoy 14y ago
    I 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 ago
      I 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 ago
        I 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.
      - jiggy2011 14y ago
        Your probably right, but maybe if you are doing all the calculations for everyone in one place you can start to make large scale use of dynamic programming techniques over time?
    - benologist 14y ago
      Right, and Diablo 3 was online-only to solve the problem of not being able to play with your friends. And I forget what the excuse was for Command & Conquer 4. It's just DRM first and foremost.
- johnward 14y ago
  yeah it. EA shuts down the servers when they are tired of paying for them. Game dies. Sim City get puts on madden schedule.
  - estel 14y ago
    Or, slightly less cynically, demand is always orders of magnitude higher for the first week or two after release, so it's only a short term investment in servers if they can be merged later.
    - johnward 14y ago
      The point is at some point they could pull the plug. I still play older version of SimCity to this day.
      - estel 14y ago
        Sure they could. But if I get £40 of value from my game before they do, I can live with that. It's not ideal, but it doesn't make it a poor purchase.
        jiggy2011 14y ago
        I think there is a broader cultural loss though. In the future years when "study of video game history" becomes a thing, people will be able to examine and analyse old games like SimCity 2000 by actually playing them as they were. Since they have been archived and preserved by wide distribution. Then as you get further into the future maybe you start to come across games where you have to say "sadly the only existing copy of the server code was lost in the great github fire of 2020, so all we can show you is this archived footage".
        mmcnickle 14y ago
        > so all we can show you is this archived footage. You mean the tens of thousands of videos that will be posted. Historians will have no shortage of source material. I'd actually argue that the videos are more valuable as they show first hand how the game was played at the time. Think a recording of a long-forgotten instrument compared to the actual instrument, which is more valuable?
johnward 14y ago
I would have fought to develop a working offline mode from the beginning
- bluedanieru 14y ago
  Fought and lost.
aiwinters 14y ago
I agree with you that adding a bunch of servers looks like the simpler (cheaper, in terms of Net Present Value) option. But I worry that however they've set it up is just not horizontally scalable. They say that a large bunch of the simulation runs on their servers. And that each city is connected (via the graph) to every other city. What if they haven't built in clean partitioning? If cities really do interact with every other city, and they've haven't already seriously planned how to horizontally scale, they're hosed. If it were just a matter of adding more hosts, wouldn't they have done that by now? Surely you over-provision for launch and then scale down once the first sales are over and people's interest dies down.
- serf 14y ago
  Everything you said is completely sane. With that said : EA's SimCity 5 (the newest release) stores towns and character profiles on a per server basis, meaning 'US West 1' and 'US West 2' are different. You must even re complete the forced tutorial if changing servers. It's unclear what parts of are being offloaded to the servers. Possibly only the 'global economy' stuff, along with other 'social' features. A client can be disconnected for 20-30 minutes and maintain a stable game until the client forces the eventual disconnection "Because a connection to Origin cannot be maintained". Strange for the gameplay to not noticeably change when disconnected from the machines that are supposedly running simulation for you..
fooey 14y ago
The answer is neither. They've already ruined their "second day" sales, and they have the money for their uninformed first day buyers already. Their best option is to ignore the pleb's while demand dies off enough that their existing infrastructure is adequate

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

pdubs 14y ago

One-time cost vs. ongoing cost for years to come? It's not as simple as you make it out to be.

aviraldg 14y ago
Best compromise: create a "local" version of the server.
- gknoy 14y ago
  I 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 ago
    I 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 ago
      I 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.
    - jiggy2011 14y ago
      Your probably right, but maybe if you are doing all the calculations for everyone in one place you can start to make large scale use of dynamic programming techniques over time?
  - benologist 14y ago
    Right, and Diablo 3 was online-only to solve the problem of not being able to play with your friends. And I forget what the excuse was for Command & Conquer 4. It's just DRM first and foremost.
johnward 14y ago
yeah it. EA shuts down the servers when they are tired of paying for them. Game dies. Sim City get puts on madden schedule.
- estel 14y ago
  Or, slightly less cynically, demand is always orders of magnitude higher for the first week or two after release, so it's only a short term investment in servers if they can be merged later.
  - johnward 14y ago
    The point is at some point they could pull the plug. I still play older version of SimCity to this day.
    - estel 14y ago
      Sure they could. But if I get £40 of value from my game before they do, I can live with that. It's not ideal, but it doesn't make it a poor purchase.
      - jiggy2011 14y ago
        I think there is a broader cultural loss though. In the future years when "study of video game history" becomes a thing, people will be able to examine and analyse old games like SimCity 2000 by actually playing them as they were. Since they have been archived and preserved by wide distribution. Then as you get further into the future maybe you start to come across games where you have to say "sadly the only existing copy of the server code was lost in the great github fire of 2020, so all we can show you is this archived footage".
        mmcnickle 14y ago
        > so all we can show you is this archived footage. You mean the tens of thousands of videos that will be posted. Historians will have no shortage of source material. I'd actually argue that the videos are more valuable as they show first hand how the game was played at the time. Think a recording of a long-forgotten instrument compared to the actual instrument, which is more valuable?

johnward 14y ago

I would have fought to develop a working offline mode from the beginning

bluedanieru 14y ago
Fought and lost.

aiwinters 14y ago

I agree with you that adding a bunch of servers looks like the simpler (cheaper, in terms of Net Present Value) option. But I worry that however they've set it up is just not horizontally scalable. They say that a large bunch of the simulation runs on their servers. And that each city is connected (via the graph) to every other city. What if they haven't built in clean partitioning? If cities really do interact with every other city, and they've haven't already seriously planned how to horizontally scale, they're hosed. If it were just a matter of adding more hosts, wouldn't they have done that by now? Surely you over-provision for launch and then scale down once the first sales are over and people's interest dies down.

serf 14y ago
Everything you said is completely sane. With that said : EA's SimCity 5 (the newest release) stores towns and character profiles on a per server basis, meaning 'US West 1' and 'US West 2' are different. You must even re complete the forced tutorial if changing servers. It's unclear what parts of are being offloaded to the servers. Possibly only the 'global economy' stuff, along with other 'social' features. A client can be disconnected for 20-30 minutes and maintain a stable game until the client forces the eventual disconnection "Because a connection to Origin cannot be maintained". Strange for the gameplay to not noticeably change when disconnected from the machines that are supposedly running simulation for you..

fooey 14y ago

The answer is neither. They've already ruined their "second day" sales, and they have the money for their uninformed first day buyers already. Their best option is to ignore the pleb's while demand dies off enough that their existing infrastructure is adequate