Is it safe to buy this yet?

I saw the news about EA boosting server capacity or some such magic techno-devil-speak.

Does that mean that if I buy the game, I'l be able to play it?

To be honest, I believe it is. I haven't had issues getting in the servers anymore and can play for hours upon hours. HOWEVER, the game is still buggy because they had to fix server issues, but I imagine the bugs will start getting fixed by the end of this coming week. None of the bugs are TOO game breaking, other than the region play is kind of borked right now.

Hell no. Don't support this shit ass DRM.

Considering they've shut off big parts of the game just to have it function, I'd say no.

haha, videogames man. just reading the thread title it sounded like you were talking about an experimental vehicle or tainted food product.

Aside from a few outages, the servers seem to be running most of the time. If I lose connection I just keep playing until it reconnects to sync.

Really? What parts have they shut off?

Cheetah speed i.e fast for a start aswell as some other things don't own it so don't know the rest i.e does trading still work?

Also achivements and leaderboards

Didn't really answer his question, but ok

I've been playing on EU east servers (although I live in EU west) and I've had no problems at all with the servers. Although I have mostly been playing at night.

On the other hand though I dunno if I'd recommend buying the game. It's fun and great on the surface, but the depth of the game is horribly broken.

no

Yea it is, been playing with a group of people for around 2 hours now. Hasn't messed up yet.

Honestly, I'd recommend waiting a bit longer. The biggest reason I've stopped playing isn't because of server issues (though I still encounter them and am not playing on the server I'd prefer to); I've actually stopped playing until they re-enable the "cheetah" speed mode.

This may sound crazy, but in a game that you spend a lot of instances waiting for the next "paycheck" to roll in, not having that fastest speed can make the game a complete snooze fest.

They announced that, but Cheetah speed plus achievements and leaderboards seem to be working for me.

Not yet.

I'd wait a few more days. It's about about 80% right now.

@truthtellah: will that go back down to 40% in the next couple days? ;)

Finally had time away from Tomb Raider to play and everything ran fine outside of the lack of Cheetah speed (the option is there but it doesn't actually make your game go faster). It's a lot of fun and I had an incredibly hard time pulling myself away. Addiction!

I'd say wait for a little bit unless you are absolutely dying to play the game. I haven't had any issues with connectivity for a while, but the game itself has some bugs that have a fairly significant impact on gameplay. The game is totally serviceable, just be warned that it isn't at 100% yet (in my opinion).

ha. Nah. It's not a Polygon review.

Today was the first day I could play uninterupted. But if I encourage more people to get the game, I might get locked out again. So I'm going to suggest you go play something else and stay off my server! :P

Just kidding. Seems like things are starting to get ironed out. Dunno if I'm ready to cry the 100% fixed battle cry yet. And since they've disabled Cheetah Speed it can take a while if you're trying to build funds. But for the most part it's finally enjoyable.

Blam this piece of crap!!!

As mentioned elsewhere, they disabled numerous features to make the game more stable. One of the major ones apparently deals with inter-region trade, specifically things like utilities, money, and workers not going cross-city properly. There is a big sticky over on the official forums about that one.

I would say wait until that problem is fixed, its a fine game actually but with that piece broken the whole idea of the game falls apart. You already have smaller cities, but having them be crippled by a lack of inter-region cooperation is really devastating right now.

Nope.

I'm trying to play right now. The answer is a resounding no. Its just impossible to play. If you do manage to get on then you might be alright, but i've been disconnected a few times as well.

They done fucked up son.

edit- I just got booted out and now the servers aren't even authenticating. Weekends eh. Not a good time to play your nerdy single player city building simulation... oh wait

So, yeah, in SimCity 4 Rush Hour you can actually drive the actual cars around the roads.

YOUR MOVE, EA.

\SimCity 4 was published by EA....

You might get a free game, so look into it!

Luffles outs loudes, I know. They've been a subsidiary of EA since 1997.

Fatbomb: A Tale of Five Cities

I just bought this game yesterday and it seemed fine to me I don't know what people were talking about. I'm joking but by the time I bought it things seem fine.

Picked up the game last night. Downloaded and installed super fast. Got into a server and a set up region on problem and played for about 3 hours. Cheetah speed seems to be working again, or at least it seems like it. No lag or any technical issues. Was pretty much perfect. Stuff with the neighboring cities/players was working as well. Obviously this is all anecdotal, but it seems pretty fine now.

I still wouldn't pick it up as yet as the issues extend well beyond problems with the servers. The AI and path finding routines are fucked. Go to RPS or eurogamer and take a look at the videos of how the sim and vehicle behaviour (actually all the path finding routines seem identical, be it for shit, sims or cars). It is fucking busted beyond belief. The shortest route is always chosen even if this is a dirt road clogged with traffic, sims will also travel to the enarest house when they finish work and then move on sequentially until they find a house that is currently unoccupied. There's a video there of a line of 20 cars driving down a road to get to a single house at the end. One pulls in and the others all reach the end of the road and do a U turn and come back up before moving on to the next unoccupied house. It's really sad to watch. The whole design of that system is just broken and lazy. If they fix all this it might be worth playing.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/24780/?snr=1_7_15__13

They didn't remove the button, you can still press it but it doesn't actually increase the speed.

If any one is still on the fence about picking this up, DON'T DO IT unless you are really hard up to play. The server/installer issues have been ironed out but there are number of game breaking bugs. Aside from the disabled Cheetah speed and pathfinding problems. I've also had many issues sending resources/gifts between regions. My gambling city is also broken as there's no way to consistently bring in profit. The trading system as a whole doesn't work consistently and I often have random brown outs with coal generators even though they are placed directly on top sources. I've put in around 40 hours and its definitely fun but get ready for some angry rage quits.

Nope. The mid/late game is broken. Give it four weeks and try again.

Its buggy as shit. Everytime you think you are getting somewhere a game breaking bug rears its head and everything falls apart.

Usually its resources or services not working properly. Water not getting to houses for no reason, or power. Or sewage not being disposed off for no reason. traffic and pedestrians just going round in circles. roads not going where you want. factory's/houses building on top of roads. cars parking up and not moving ever. EVER. cars just stack behind them until deadlock on every road.

erm. transferring money and resources between cities in region is a gamble. could just go "poof" missing.

Can only build mass transit on single line loops. God help you if you put an intersection in. everything just randomly picks a direction to go at each and every intersection. Therefore nobody gets to anywhere ever.

Road tool is just broken.

Cars take shortest route to destination regardless of traffic or road density consideration. Queues of traffic on dirt roads instead of using high density avenue right next door to it.

Game revolves around managing low, mid and high density residential, commercial and industry. You need densities for all three eventually. This is not fun to manage, but this is the entire game.

police, fire and ambulances are just fucked. You only need one of each. They all respond to each event in sequence. they dont split like they should.

@thedeadcomedian: I 'vent had any problems with servers, however it is sad the whole discussion is around servers... the whole game design is inherently broken, check Eurogamer review if you like a in deep explanation of how much fail this game possess.

Yes, no amount of servers can make this a good game for me

Traded in Madden 13, Dishonored and Forza Horizon for $59 at Gamestop today and bought Sim City. Not going to lie the only reason I bought it was to support EA. Everyone is trash talking this game, but honestly it says it requires a persistent internet connection right on the box so right there it makes 90% of the complaints invalid.

fuck the haters, long live EA.

(this post made possible by two Four Lokos and Red Bulls.....Happy St Patrick's night everyone!)

The servers are good again. They can still do some bug fixes but it is fine.

I bought it after I heard there were new servers. The game works fine, but if you like SimCity, don't buy this game. It is crippled.

The city plot size is the same on every "region map." There's always only one "highway entrance" into this plot, and even though modders have already figured out how to scripthack it so that you can actually modify highways OUTSIDE OF YOUR PLOT and save the region to the server, Maxis/EA refuse to comment on the plot size or any of the other curiosities (idiotic traffic AI, fudged population numbers such that when you hit 500k sims, you actually only have 60k agents. Graph if curious: http://i.imgur.com/L8BPMiD.jpg

Do not buy the game. It's fun for 10-20 hours, but then the fun dies. There's nothing to do after that. The small plot areas and the completely non-random regions kill replayability.

Just to let y'all know, you can now pick up the game a little bit cheaper by using the Mexican or Russian versions of the Origin store. Beware of the fact that the Russian version contains no English language option, the sweet sweet Mexican version does, though.

Prices for the standard digital download edition are as follows:

• 499 Mexican monies = £26.61 / $40.12
• 1199 Russian monies = £25.94 / $39.10

Prices for the deluxe digital download edition are as follows:

• 799 Mexican monies = £42.61 / $64.24
• 1499 Russian monies = £32.42 / $48.89

You can buy and run the game, but now that I've been able to play it for an extended period of time, I don't know that I would recommend it to anyone; hard-core fans of the series or genre, newcomers, people who don't like things that seem counter-intuitive and completely broken, cats, etc...

Well I bought it. Had a bunch of fun with it. Now my city that I put 12 hours into, is being "processed" and "rolled back." So fuck me basically.

@fattony12000: 'Park a good mood' > 'Park Plummet'

Haven't had any server issues at all for over a week, personally. And I've built cities on like four different servers.

My only real issues with the game now, are a few serious gameplay issues - particularly the traffic pathing, and the braindead behaviour of the public services (both of which they have said they are working to patch). The small city size is still a massive bummer, but when you're focused on building and maintaining your city, you eventually don't really think about it any more.

@razielcuts:

Updated prices as of 17:44 on 18/03/13:

Standard

• 536.92 MXN = £28.59 / $43.01
• 1199 RUB = £25.75 / $38.89

Deluxe

• 858.64 MXN = £45.72 / $69.07
• 1498 RUB = £32.17 / $48.60