Sim City Release

[Martin]

Bought the game earlier and me and @Chris; are working on a region Been on it for the past 3 hours and its actually really addictive haha! I LOVE IT SO MUCH!

[zombies]

seems interesting! maybe a future purchase

[Neil]

I got it on Saturday, I've logged about 10 hours so far and I have to say, it's far better than previous SimCity games as far as I'm concerned, although there is no apparent need for always on DRM, the online features are really cool and I feel it was the point that the game was to be played online with other people rather than solo, not really enough to justify forcing always online but either way, it's a great game and certainly worth the money I paid for it

[Paige.]

I'm going to buy it when I have enough spare money

[GommeInc]

I'm refusing to buy it until they have removed the always on DRM - which seems unlikely given the recent news from EA/Maxis hints that they are just going to get more servers to handle the game, when they could just do themselves and everyone else a favour and disable this feature altogether.

Link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21741528

EDIT: Quite an interesting article about how always on DRM shouldn't be allowed in gaming, whether or not it works.

Link: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013...t-let-this-go/

[xxMATTGxx]

We're being sold this lie that SimCity is 100% dependent on "online" for play, which is crap. After logging in (authenticating that you own the game), selecting a regional server and game to play (so it knows which "city" data to send you) and entering your city, you can disconnect your computer from the internet and play perfectly for 10 minutes.

At the 10 minute mark the game gives you an error about being offline, and closes. This is enforced in the game's code as, literally, an "always on DRM". Ironically, or coincidentally, your city with all changes that you made in this time will be synced to their servers the next time you are online (so it's basically saved offline anyway), and can then be resumed.

If it weren't for the (forced) disconnection after 10 minutes, and the loss of "multiplayer" features (like viewing other cities and trading with them), this game would run just fine singleplayer/offline.

Maxis general manager Lucy Bradshaw said to Polygon that "we've identified that many of our issues were related to how [SimCity's] GlassBox [engine] managed the vast amount of simulation data through its database" (http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/9/4081...-lucy-bradshaw) - the problem with this, apart from everything I've mentioned above, is that if you run a traffic sniffer on your computer hardly any data is sent back to EA at all... where are these "vast amounts of simulation data"? All this GlassBox simulation happens locally, on your machine, as it could/would if you were playing offline.

Don't let EA get away with this. They're screwing us on purpose, and they can easily give us what we want.

/rant

http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comm..._to_be_online/
@GommeInc;

[Meanies]

Does anyone know where to find the Heroes and Villains buildings to place, looked in every section and cannot find them

[Oleh]

MaxisMan HQ is in the Police section as well as VU HQ

[GommeInc]

http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comm..._to_be_online/
@GommeInc;

There seems to be a lot of articles about how the always-online isn't necessary, with confirmation from a Maxis employee coming from one source (rockpapershotgun?)

It does make you wonder what they have done to code it so weirdly. It can last for 20 minutes without a connection, and then terminate the game automatically on the client side. It's as if they thought half way through development that always-online should be the key ingredient, resulting in a game that has a background that doesn't quite know what it is.

They should just update the game with a patch to make it work offline, then after 10 or 20 minutes send off a connection request to update surrounding regions with it's multiplayer functionality OR the city itself for the cloud based functionality, if the player wants it or allows it.

Does the game save anything of the city to the computer? Because it ought to, it's your game afterall, not a EA based city development project.

[dbgtz]

Just thought I'd post my most successful city so far.

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