Maxis Apologizes for SimCity Launch Issues

@scaramoosh: I can't stand people like you, "It is the fault of you the consumer for expecting a final working product as you were explicitly told you would receive from the company that made the product."

How about a new business model scaramoosh, One in which we the consumer gets to play the game on day one but the company producing it only gets paid for their product after it actually Fu#*ing works and is the final version of the product! That sounds a lot better than the current model of "Oh wow, our expectations of how many people would purchase our game day one was drastically exceeded, oh well, we have their money, so we can be smug as#holes and count on degenerate flaming fanboys to carry our rancid water and defend the debacle we and no one else created.

An apology I can respect.

SimCity 5 - Edit freeway anywhere even outside boundary, still saves and syncs!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmce9oIxJag

EA full of shit? You bet.

@satelliteoflove said:

Maxis won't exist after a year, anyways. It matters not.

In other news: Maxis takes full responsibility for game they developed, internet pats it on the head and continues blaming EA.

Actually, these problems seem to plague still only US servers.

I played just 3-4 times in the last 5 days and I live in Italy.

First day (launch day here) I had some issues connecting, but managed to stay up for 3,5 hours.

The next day I couldn't connect.

Sunday and Monday nights I managed to connect at first try and played for about 2,5-3 hours each day, with no lost connection or queues.

Leaderboards and other stuff is disabled, but cheetah speed si working.

I coudn't say mine was a flawless experience, but havent had any serious issue with the game other than inability to play the second day.

What puzzles me is "More people played and played in ways we never saw in the beta." You stupid dumbasses! You created only THREE beta sessions and they were ONE-HOUR-LONG! Who the hell plays a game like SimCity for just ONE HOUR?? You really calculated server capacity base on 1-hour-long play sessions? No surprise your servers blew up the moment you released the game!

I did this once with Diablo III, never again. EA lost $60 (plus DLC?) because of it. If this is what gaming is coming to, goodbye.

Processing that Large File is so much fun.

Apologizing or even giving a free game is not enough. They need to get rid of the stupid always-on DRM. Single-Player must be viable offline.

I'm just kind of worried that people are saying "Hey, it's always-online, so of course the launch is going to be broken". When did that become ok? We can't start getting complacent like that. I agree that ALL of those launches are shit, but they SHOULDN'T be shit.

Hey, Maxis. If you get enough money from this you might consider buying yourselves back from EA. That might, if you are lucky, buy you back some credibility with you fans. If you don't attempt to buy yourselves back and you keep rolling over like EA's bitch-in-heat that is tacit consent that you were 'okay' with how this all went down.

They should apologize for the entire game! Sim City isn't the game they are advertising it is!

@bunny_fire: That's a good point. Stuff like this is essentially long-term rental. There might be some companies that handle it well and remove the DRM before shutting their servers down so that people can continue playing.

We just know EA isn't one of those companies.

Free game=Big Rigs reboot.

I'm really getting tired of hearing this excuse "...a lot more people logged on than we expected." Remember when this happened with the Call of Duty Elite program? Seriously, these companies spend a fortune on advertising for a highly anticipated game, and when their product falls on its face. They throw out this lame excuse. *sigh*

Sticking with SC3KU. I doubt this one runs on Wine anyway

"Sorry 'bout that launch, we're not too good with math and stuff. We heard you like SimCity, here have a free copy of some Need for Speed or FIFA game!"

I would sooner accept some rebate on my $60 purchase than a free game. As an adult gamer if I wanted some other game I probably already have it. They'll either try to give me something I already have or something I don't necessarily want. The gesture is appreciated but their mechanism to quell frustration with the launch is misplaced. The overwhelming majority of rationale customers, many of whom have said so publicly, are telling EA and Maxis how to make it right. Make the game playable offline.

Well I got back to my original server, played a bunch of it, got it to 70,000 citizens, then got frustrated and destroyed my city with meteors.

I guess I'm having SOME meteor remorse now. But what's done is done.

Oo look I still have my copy of Sim City for the SNES, great thing about these old games is that it still works, will still work, will forever work till it breaks. The issue with this Sim City is that servers don't last forever, so one day this game will no longer work, will stop working, will have an end. The Clock is ticking away.

Internet. Explained.

No, I literally just posted the first random thing to pop into my head.

don't care EA not touching this game for one I don't have a always on internet connection.

Secondly when you can change the way the game plays without any consent at all on my part that i don't like.

thirdly when you launch you new simcity in a few years im fairly sure you will turn off the servers for this one I don't like renting games especially games that should have a offline single player in the first place.

Guess I will stick to simcity 4 you cant turn of the servers for that and make it worthless.

Having wrong expectations on how many people will play is understandable from a business perspective, but it's no longer valid. This simply happens too many times for it to still be a logical fault. It happens every single time.

If you are going to force people to be online to play your game, you better be sure to invest in servers to support it. You make your expectations on what server capacity you need, then triple it to be safe. Makes no sense business wise, but I strongly believe this is just unacceptable. Apology means little when you show you have no interest in ever learning from the mistakes made in the gaming industry.

The only thing this shows to me, is the next time a always online game comes around, they'll just plan an apology ahead along with a free game that they can lose, rather than spend money on servers to make sure the game works.

Just so we all have this straight.....everything about the game is being worked on except for the one problem that is holding it back. Always online, with cities that are locked away on servers that will inevitably be turned off someday.

I can't think of anything better than a functioning offline single player experience. Please give me that in lieu of this free PC game....

This was my impression from how the game works--which is, by the way, different from what was originally explained by the dev team. If the calculations aren't done on the server, then they've been very misleading about what the servers actually are doing. I didn't want to be categorical about it because, well, I'm not on the team that built the game. But from the way the game actually functions, it doesn't seem like it would be difficult to patch the game to work from locally-saved data.

What I liked about my old simcity games was that it didn't rely on a server, I relied on me having a system that either gave me middle to high performance of it. So I feel for those who had poor experiences with this. I won't be there for the bad or good times or at least the current times.

Have not touched it since launch day. I'm too worried I'll lose progress, plus I haven't even been able to log on the few times I've tried. Such a shame, I love the game!

I need someone to point out to me where in this statement they apologize, because I'm not seeing it.

@giovanni: .....Really?

EA is the parent company. Any issues regarding refunds, billing, etc. goes to their customer support, not Maxis'. Maxis doesn't even have customer support.

Apologize to my opened copy that Amazon is giving me a full refund for!

@likeassur: Maxis is EA.

That's not Maxis, though, that's EA.

2 things:

A) Monster Hunter for the PS2 was released in 2004, the servers in Japan are still up to this day. I think if that can survive, so can SimCity.

2) You're assuming that when the servers do go down for this, people won't have moved on to the sequel.

The calculation aren't actually done on the server. You can play the game for time after being disconnected, and the server just essentially syncs to your game. I don't doubt it would take a lot of restructuring to make it an offline game, but it's not like Diablo 3 where literally everything is done server-side.

What happens when they pull down the servers for this in 2-3 years?

The only way to apologize is to remove the DRM.

But keep refusing to offer refunds for a non-functioning game that the user is in no way responsible for the game not working though.

'pologize

See, this is how you apologize.

Admit your mistake, take responsibility, then work to fix it and do something for inconvenience.

Yet, people still aren't happy.

It's tooooo late to apologize.

so much wasted potential, this game is the definition of disappointment.

Spore and now this, maybe time for Maxis to pack it in.

I'm interested in playing this game. can someone let me know when it's not on fire any more, cheers :-)

@reelife: that is brilliant

@fisk0: Not sure about the others you mentioned, but I was able to play Far Cry 3 on 360 even when uPlay was down for a weekend. Regardless, DRM is real annoying. Nintendo is horrible at letting you keep the things you buy. Even license transfers between purchased hardware is limited. As weird as it is to say, I think MicroSoft has handled the licensing issues for consoles really well. hope Sony learned a lot this get, for PS4's sake.

@scaramoosh said:

Anything can be patched, even if calculations are done on the server. They could just do the calculations locally. We don't know, exactly, how many calculations are done remotely so it's hard to know how much of a burden that would place on local systems. At worst, it might require turning off some data reporting and dealing with sluggish local performance. I think some would prefer that at this point to not being able to play at all. At least people could make the choice for themselves.

As far as I've seen, they've been denying that it's an MMO. It's really somewhere in-between. The game includes single-player regions, for instance, so it was always part of the design to develop cities and regions without other players interacting. It all depends on whether the server-side data processing has more to do with alleviating local calculation burdens in general, or if it has more to do with city interactions between multiple players. I'm not sure we know that much detail at this point.

Admittedly, a patch would be easier if the reality is the later rather than the former. If they could simply patch the game to keep the data local (since it wouldn't be needed to pass on to other players) it would be easy. If they're really performing specialized, high-processing requirement calculations on the data, then it would be harder (but not impossible).

We are pretty lucky that her boss is affected by this.

The situation is good, but not good enough. And since my boss is one of the negatively affected (!) - we’re still driving hard to get everyone online, playing together, and no hitches.

Bought the game yesterday and have had zero problems, sucks for all those affected early in the launch. Really enjoying it so far though...

If they know that typically in the first few weeks they have twice or even three times the number of players that they expect to have a month from now, does the cost of setting up all those extra servers at launch outweigh the benefit of, well, saving that money instead and possibly dealing with a negative backlash for short time. How much money do they stand to save if they just run PR interference for a week instead of spending tens of thousands on servers they may only need for a week or so?

Obviously this problem turned out to be a lot worse than anyone at EA or Maxis coupled with the fact that this game and it's networks issues are getting major exposure. Couple that with some reviewers taking an axe to their scores as well as online retailers straight-up pulling your product off their website and you have a public relations clusterfuck of epic proportions.

The thing is, this sort of cost/benefit analysis isn't some sort of shady practice exclusive to EA/Maxis, it is a boilerplate question that every business launching a new product must ask itself. It's just disappointing that a company as big as EA didn't feel the need to spare the money and effort to adequately support their launch. Instead they played it very conservative and decided to just eat a few negative articles which in retrospect, looks pretty bad on them considering the current state of the game.

I refuse to buy broken games, so I'll keep waiting.