I'm Victor, but I don't talk like that.

I do think Jay Wilson really fucked up with a lot of the decisions he either made or let go into full development, but the things people are saying to this poor bastard is absurd. It may be because of his outstanding lack of understanding on what people wanted from Diablo 3, he just kept kicking the game further and further down a hole. Now that Wilson is gone, I can't imagine what it's like for the current staff trying to pull that mess out and clean it up.

That makes it even less excusable from a business and customer relationship standpoint.

I and no one else should care that it's tough to have enough servers to handle the initial rush, that's EA's problem to solve. They put themselves entirely into this situation with the always on DRM an mandatory server connection. If you are going to do that you better damn well make sure you have the servers to handle it.

Or if they refuse to budge on that then stagger the release. Let ppl who download it from origin get a week earlier before the physical copies are available and then problem solved (or vice versa). Not a great solution but it has to better than this.

They have should not be shipping broken product, especially deliberately. No excuses. Every other industry in this country understands this including most other tech businesses, Video game industry should not get a free pass.

Blame gamers for not giving a shit. They're the ones buying DLC in droves, preordering everything because it has a map or skin, or just accepting shit for pure bias or fanboyism.

No other industry is this fucked up. If Apple or Google did a percentage of the shit game publishers did, Apple and Google wouldn't hear the end of it from the news outlets or consumers.

my own desire for bioshock infinite is forcing me, i wouldn't even have the patience to wait a day. im like 90% confident i'm going to think it's amazing, regardless.

@kaosangel: I know what you mean but I'm not sure it's the gamers who are entirely responsible. I think it's more society as a whole.

If Apple were to ship an iphone whose screen flickered in and out every two minutes, every mass media outlet would cover it and Apple would probably issue an emergency recall. Or if Microsoft shipped a version of Office that had a glitch preventing you from being able to save your work, the same thing would happen (well maybe a patch instead of a recall).

Of course in cars or consumer products this is taken to the next level.

But they never do that for games. Whether that's because of the demographic who plays them, or maybe even moreso the demo that consumes Mainstream News, that crucial forcing agent of accountability (Negative press) does not seem to be present.

If I was a news agency, I would think a game that does not work at all out of the box for meaningful % of consumers due to deliberate developer choice despite marketing that implied otherwisewould make an interesting story, but I guess they don't feel the same way.

I like games, I'm sympathetic to developer issues, but one thing I have zero sympathy for is deliberate anti-consumer actions like what EA did here. I really wanted to buy Simcity, I love the series, but I likely won't be getting this one ever.

From what I understand, in the case of D3 the server cost of dealing with 6 million eager players were exponentially bigger than a shoulder shrug (think of the soon-to-be-useless hardware, the extra room, the extra staff). The concurrent player count settled on 1-2 million within half a week, problem solved. WoW tended to have the same issue whenever a new expansion came out. People like to rage and call them unprepared and not able to anticipate the player count. But I believe they have all the numbers figured out and they know exactly what they can sacrifice and not.

And no, most industries are NOT always on the side as the consumer. Balancing service level against cost is kind of everything a business is all about (in a crude description).

But still, I don't know if that's the issue with Sim City, it just kind of sounds the same. And again, I'm not trying to defend them. Sim City shouldn't need to be online all the time.

Been this way for over an hour... my city crashed 3 times last night too... great way to spend $60...

Mostly because most other tech industries don't have a choice.

"Oh, that washer you bought? Yeah, it doesn't work for a while when you first get it." doesn't make any sense. Either it works, or it doesn't work. No middle ground.

Thankfully we live in a world where patches exist, and where server infrastructure can be scaled up and down over time.

He's right, though. You guys should've seen this coming. When it comes to EA, it's basically a GUARANTEE that they're gonna fuck something up and cause shitstorms like this. If everyone had waited and read up on it beforehand, we wouldn't be in this mess. Of course that didn't happen, though, because people just want to play their precious game on launch day, malfunctions be damned.

@majinace: <parameter: string> GMT. That's just so beautiful.

That in no way excuses EA. People should be able to buy a game on launch day with confidence that it works the day it's released. It's not gamers at fault. It's EA. They released a game, and the players have a right to have a product that works as intended when it's released. Blaming the gamers for EA's lack of forethought is a laughable concept. No matter what EA's history with servers, they are the only ones to blame when shit goes wrong. To try and pass blame onto the customer for expecting their product to work is pretty pitiful and sad.

@christoffer said:

FWIW I'm much more sympathetic to Blizzard's woes than EA's. For one it happened in the past so EA is likely more aware of the problem than Blizzard was (or I guess has less excuse to be) and two while I don't necessarily agree with it there is a better justification in terms of adding value to the player for always connected D3 than SimCity.

I hear exactly what you are saying re:cost vs customer service and I think you are right that this was a calculated move on EA's part. Still I think my point remains that a staggered release would prevent a lot of these problems. Or here's another possibility, rent extra servers for a week-month. There's places that do that. No one says they have to be permanent hires and equipment. I just think there are fairly low cost ways around this that would improve customer experience dramatically if EA cared at all.

Either way doing this deliberately is gross and consumers shouldn't accept it. And frankly I think it's bad for EA as well in the long run. It's hard to calculate things like Brand damage, but EA has a pretty negative customer service image with gamers. Maybe that will never be an issue for them, but I think that could eventually cause them a lot of problems.

I know Origin and their various business practices this gen serve as a tiebreaker for me when deciding what to buy. Maybe not enough people feel the same way to matter to the bottom line, but I can't help but feel this provides an opportunity for one of their competitors.

And no, most industries are NOT always on the side as the consumer. Balancing service level against cost is kind of everything a business is all about (in a crude description).

You're absolutely right they really aren't and like to test the limits with how far they can go, however consumers put a lot more pressure on them to get it right. That's the difference. And this huge potential future problem as industries continue to consolidate reducing choice for consumers (putting more leverage in producers hands). But that's a different conversation.

btw I appreciate the even-handed discussion. Nobody wins in this.

I'm glad we live in a world where patches exist, and of all the various problems this gen, that one bothers me the least.

But that doesn't excuse releasing a game that doesn't work on day one solely due to deliberate anti-consumer design decisions. If people could play at all offline, this wouldn't be a big deal. EA created this problem for themselves.

We should appreciate how many technical pieces that movie in concert to make a game like SimCity work. The issue isn't that there is enough server hardware lying around but that the "network interconnects" are strained under a surge like this. Do we blame EA? Maybe but more often than not it doesn't matter how much the biggest company begs and pleads and throws money at their ISP/upstream provider when surges like this happen.

I do believe there is better planning that could have been done for games that feature such a heavy online feature. It sucks but we might have to do a queue system where depending on when someone pre-ordered/buy they are placed in a "queue" where they can't activate and login until the people ahead of them have completed and the system is stable.

If EA is worth half a shit they'll give out some free content after this shit is fixed to make up for it. If it gets fixed. If EA were worth half a shit.

@majinace said:

Been this way for over an hour... my city crashed 3 times last night too... great way to spend $60...

But <parameter:string> is only @Time@. Shouldn't be more than @EstimatedTime@ away.

Just a heads up, I was refused a refund by Origin Support

Really? Thought they said they would allow refunds if people wanted them. EA is digging a hole for there selves.

I'm sorry, but at this point in time, given EA's history the past 4-5 years or so, the people who bought the game are as much at fault as EA. They should know by now not to trust anything EA says or does. Take The Sims 3 for example. That game came out in 2009 and it STILL has problems, put in there on purpose by the devs just so you could go and buy the next expansion or stuff pack which has the fix, but the new game itself has a problem, and the cycle starts again. If the people haven't learned by now not to trust EA's bullshit, they deserve to get fucked over. As much as I love Simcity, I will not be getting this game, ever, at least not as long as EA owns the brand.

Surprise, surprise.

wow...i was actually really pumped for this game but stayed my hand on purchasing a copy. Glad i did now. I remember the diablo launch last year. It was a bummer then. Once more, it's still a bummer to not be able to have the option to play D3 for most of the day tuesdays because of Blizzard's "server maintenance". I keep hoping somebody comes up with a more elegant style of DRM. People will always figure out new ways to pirate games and i don't feel like putting paying customers through this kinda of service is a great solution at all.

How about no DRM? I think it has been proven that it doesn't work at all at this point at all.

Since launch night (Monday night) I have managed to play for all of 20 minutes. I played the tutorial and lost connection when trying to visit the casino city. Then, after some time, I was able to connect, only to be unable to see any active games to join nor could I create my own private game, getting a "Server is currently unavailable. Try Again" message. Now, I am unable to see any servers to join and it just says "Checking for Updates". Checking up on EA's support page shows that they patched the servers, which has seemed to do more harm than good and now they are saying it's basically under repair for the next 45 hours. I know I sound like I'm bitching a lot, but I'm really just frustrated. Whenever people have had these big debates about always-on DRM or DRM in general, I'm usually not bothered by the whole thing because until this game I have not been burned by these issues. I hope they can get it together sooner rather than later so I can at least play the game I spent $80 on. Until then, I guess I'll go play Tomb Raider. #firstworldproblems

EDIT: 4-5 not 45.

I've been luckier than a lot of people (I've racked up 16 hours according to Origin but I think at least 3 of them consist of me having the launcher open trying to connect to a server) and I really am enjoying the game when it lets me play. Like many others, however, it really annoys me that this game is forcing me to be connected to EA's servers at all times - I don't care about the always online thing to the extent that it requires an internet connection to play because I only play games on my home PC which is always hooked up to the internet (barring some kind of outage) but when the problem is on EA's end, that's garbage.

If it wasn't EA, I'd hope to maybe get some kind of DLC content for free (or maybe even a few bucks credit in the Origin store) for not being able to play a brand new game, but it is EA so I'm not holding my breath since EA doesn't really care about consumers unless it involves squeezing more money out of them.

I should have done what I did with Diablo 3 and waited for the kinks to be worked out before buying.

The SimCity solution should have been a temporary offline city building mode until EA could get some idea of sales numbers and what they were dealing with in terms of server load.

From what I've heard the game's un-crackable. All the data is on their server.

Seems like it's already been cracked. Somebody was able to crack it faster than the entirety of EA was able to fix their own servers.

What's wrong with people, i must wait at least one month for Mac version.

Oh wow, really? Didn't Diablo III take a year to get Act I unlocked?

@magzine said:

We are paying them for a product. If they are not willing to compromise or understand why many want refunds, then why expect the consumer to understand the difficulty of launching a game in which requires all these connections in the first place? Treat customers with respect. It was THEIR decision to go this route and we expect a working product on Day 1.

@jay4321:I honestly don't know why you'd expect that. Not a recent giant online game in memory has launched without server issues. I don't know why they aren't issuing refunds, my guess is probably because they'd prefer customers just to wait until they have the issue under control and try to discourage people from making knee-jerking reactions.

It's not like the value of a game evaporates after the first week.

@magzine: No, you just wait a few years until EA shuts down the servers and forces everyone to buy SimCity 2015 Edition.

@andrewb: I agree, however this is difficult in two ways:

1. I'm no game designer, but making a game in the way they did that is so dependent on online connectivity, I would think it would be difficult to just up and make an offline mode while they fix shit.

2. If they made the single player mode, fans would get EVEN MORE pissed because they will ask why it wasn't included in the first place and will further dig their grave down to the core

In this case it actually has as they have come out and said that they were going to disable some features to try to fix their mess. As far as your argument with giant online games are concerned? I would be inclined to agree with you if this was SimCity MMO. Its not...this is just a case of EA getting a bit overzealous with their DRM that has proven to cripple the game for those who want to play it on their own. I bet they were salivating about all the potential revenue from a 100% controlled experience, thousands of micro-transaction dlc packs and expansion packs. You take away options from the player and you better damn well know 100% that your product is going to work or you are going to get rightfully blasted from people who work hard for their money. This is now a customer service issue and EA is proving once again that they are lacking in that department.

Bottom line: there is no way around this issue - EA fucked up.

@familyphotoshoot: And I'll probably be ok with that. The servers will only shut off after 99% of all of EA's online players stop playing a game. As in, when the game is mostly dead, EA doesn't support it anymore. It's not limited by time, just popularity.

Actually, EA disabled features so that they can reduce load while they add more servers. So that more people can play the game at one time. Sure, they could've not, but the alternative is less people playing the game. This functionality is expected to return, of course.

And it is an MMO. It's massive, it's multiplayer, it's online. It's not just an MMORPG, (WoW, Guild Wars, Aion, Eve), or an MMOFPS (PlanetSide). LOTS of the actual game logic appears to be processed on the servers. In actuality, it's more of a technical issue then a "DRM" issue. In fact, calling this a DRM issue is a category mistake. "DRM"-like-sideffects is just a consequence of the route that they choose to take.