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[TweakTown] SimCity won't be going offline as Maxis have 'no intentions' of doing so

7K views 98 replies 57 participants last post by  Vagrant Storm 
#1 ·
Quote:
Even with SimCity being the most failed launch of recent times, developer Maxis won't be taking the game offline, but they'll be look into it as a way of "earning back [buyers'] trust efforts". This is all from a tweet from the game's official Twitter account.
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Searched and didn't find anything related. A new, rather important development in the SimCity debacle.

First time so let me know if I should never do it again
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#3 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Vonnis View Post

"It wouldn't be possible to make the game offline without a significant amount of engineering work by our team."

I love that quote. They're basically saying "Sure we can make an offline mode! We just can't be bothered". This does not really help with earning back my trust.
rolleyes.gif
Actually it's like saying, it's a lot of damn programming and there's no real reason to do it.
 
#5 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Vonnis View Post

"It wouldn't be possible to make the game offline without a significant amount of engineering work by our team."

I love that quote. They're basically saying "Sure we can make an offline mode! We just can't be bothered". This does not really help with earning back my trust.
rolleyes.gif
It's stupid that they say they can't make it offline but crackers does it eventually. Such a fail game with its current DRM.
 
#6 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by OwnedINC View Post

Actually it's like saying, it's a lot of damn programming and there's no real reason to do it.
Furious customers isnt reason to do something?

Last time I checked even BioWare(Also EA in case you forget) is willing to do that to try and make amends with their fanbase.

I know how much programming would be involved, and its still something that is perfectly doable.
 
#8 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Vonnis View Post

"It wouldn't be possible to make the game offline without a significant amount of engineering work by our team."

I love that quote. They're basically saying "Sure we can make an offline mode! We just can't be bothered". This does not really help with earning back my trust.
rolleyes.gif
Exactly, by saying this they are admitting that there is no problem with CPU power on the client side, this was a business decision. Also, how much effort is it really ? Just grab the single player on-line server code and turn it into a local server hosted on your machine that the game can interact with. Possibly not the most elegant solution, but I bet it doesn't require all that effort. Do I have a point ?
 
#11 ·
To be fair, it seems like an awful lot of the game mechanics and such are handled in the cloud which would make reprogramming it that much harder. Obviously it can be done but clearly EA doesn't think the benefit of such a move would outweigh the cost. They might be right at this point, seems like the damage has already been dealt.
 
#12 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sylence View Post

To be fair, it seems like an awful lot of the game mechanics and such are handled in the cloud which would make reprogramming it that much harder. Obviously it can be done but clearly EA doesn't think the benefit of such a move would outweigh the cost. They might be right at this point, seems like the damage has already been dealt.
Indeed, it's far from a small undertaking and by the time it would be completed the servers will have nearly 100% uptime.
 
#13 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sylence View Post

To be fair, it seems like an awful lot of the game mechanics and such are handled in the cloud which would make reprogramming it that much harder. Obviously it can be done but clearly EA doesn't think the benefit of such a move would outweigh the cost. They might be right at this point, seems like the damage has already been dealt.
The cloud is an abstraction of the server sphere. What EA has implemented is more akin to onlive where the servers compute individual games. If their solution was indeed a cloud computing environment, then you would NOT have to join specific servers and instead would join one single maxis online game arena. MBAs who don't understand a thing about computing have made the decision to do processing away from the client for the sole purpose of protecting their simulation intellectual property. Computers are extremely fast and if an individual server can compute multiple (thousands) of games at a time, then is is asinine to think that a dual core computer cannot do the same with an individual offline region.

EDIT: I would like to clarify that I know onlive is a true cloud computing platform.
 
#15 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by MahiMahiMahi View Post

The cloud is an abstraction of the server sphere. What EA has implemented is more akin to onlive where the servers compute individual games. If their solution was indeed a cloud computing environment, then you would NOT have to join specific servers and instead would join one single maxis online game arena. MBAs who don't understand a thing about computing have made the decision to do processing away from the client for the sole purpose of protecting their simulation intellectual property. Computers are extremely fast and if an individual server can compute multiple (thousands) of games at a time, then is is asinine to think that a dual core computer cannot do the same with an individual offline region.
You're right I meant server-side when I said cloud. From my understanding the servers compute a particular 'region' that multiple player can access at any given time rather than an individual game. I never tried to imply that local computers couldn't handle the game but only that the programming to transition an onlive type game to an offline game is seen as too costly by EA.
 
#16 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by PhilWrir View Post

Furious customers isnt reason to do something?

Last time I checked even BioWare(Also EA in case you forget) is willing to do that to try and make amends with their fanbase.

I know how much programming would be involved, and its still something that is perfectly doable.
Oh I'm sorry I forgot all the customers were upset it didn't have offline mode.

Oh wait... no they're not, they're upset the ONLINE mode isn't working as advertised.
 
#19 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Vonnis View Post

"It wouldn't be possible to make the game offline without a significant amount of engineering work by our team."

I love that quote. They're basically saying "Sure we can make an offline mode! We just can't be bothered". This does not really help with earning back my trust.
rolleyes.gif
Quote:
Originally Posted by OwnedINC View Post

Actually it's like saying, it's a lot of damn programming and there's no real reason to do it.
It's really like saying, "We could have made the game with all the same functionality and yet offline in the first place, but, since we've followed this route so far and invested so much time already, we're too deep to back-pedal and rewrite what would need to be changed in order to make this happen. It would require too much effort, and EA wouldn't approve of it financially or logistically anyway."

The short of it: this proves the whole server thing is first and foremost, and perhaps entirely, just a DRM scheme. If making it an offline game is possible at this point with concerted effort, as suggested in the tweet, then it was obviously capable of being that way from the beginning.
 
#20 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by OwnedINC View Post

Actually it's like saying, it's a lot of damn programming and there's no real reason to do it.
It means I would purchase a copy. And many other people would.

Meanwhile, I'm talking a look at Cities XL. And playing SC4
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@Kaldari: Take for granted it was a DRM scheme from the very beginning. If the pirated version gets offline play, I'll send a letter to EA about their 'engineering team'.
 
#21 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Artikbot View Post

It means I would purchase a copy. And many other people would.

Meanwhile, I'm talking a look at Cities XL. And playing SC4
thumb.gif


@Kaldari: Take for granted it was a DRM scheme from the very beginning. If the pirated version gets offline play, I'll send a letter to EA about their 'engineering team'.
Just out of interest I had alook around for diablo 3 which is again online play and I haven't found anything that gets it working without bugs or gliches, and this seems more online based
 
#22 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by squall325 View Post

It's stupid that they say they can't make it offline but crackers does it eventually. Such a fail game with its current DRM.
Have you seen an pirated copies of Diablo 3 yet?
 
#23 ·
The only way I think that they can win back the fans is to increase the map sizes. If they do that, I believe that people will forget this happened for the most part.
 
#26 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by bruflot View Post

Yes.
Was just about to say. The server has been pretty much emulated with the majority of the content working.
 
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