> And to get us back in your good graces, we’re going to offer you a free PC download game from the EA portfolio.
> I know that’s a little contrived – kind of like buying a present for a friend after you did something crummy. But we feel bad about what happened. We’re hoping you won’t stay mad and that we’ll be friends again when SimCity is running at 100 percent.
To me, this seems insulting. They know most of their upset customers want a refund -- for now -- to feel like they've not quite been screwed over as much vs. forcing them to keep a broken product, and offering them a consolation prize.
I don't know why Maxis doesn't realize that if SimCity is really as great as critics claim, then the best way to redeem themselves is to offer full refunds, no questions asked, knowing that customers will return once the game is back up and running.
Not only would this show a little bit of class, but it may restore a little confidence and credibility to Maxis/EA, and their poor choices up to this point.
And again, if SimCity is really that great -- and aside from the DRM/always online aspect, and the current broken state, the fundamental game sounds solid -- then customer will come back. These early adopters are the true enthusiasts, and ultimately just want to play a functional SimCity.
So the net results will be the same -- and EA/Maxis redeems a little of what is left of their credibility.
Maybe Maxis would refund them and EA won't let them?
EA's TOS allows for binding arbitration.
You can send them a notice of dispute, argue for 30 days (They require informal negotiation), then request binding arbitration. They will pay all expenses and fees. If you win more than EA offers to settle for, they'll even pay you 150%.
If you really want to fuck with EA and help people simultaneously, set up a web site that walks people through the process their TOS requires.
Since their own terms require individual arbitration, help individuals start 1.5+ million individual arbitrations. You are, at the very least, guaranteed they will end up paying the fees.
Watch as they discover class action lawsuits weren't so bad a way to resolve mass disputes ...
Yes, I suspect the last line of your comment is at the heart of this issue and the doublespeak surrounding it coming from EA. SimCity is, to be sure, a great game. The problem seems to be that the people who control the strings (which, from our vantage point, we can only presume to be EA rather than Maxis) don't care about the reputation of the game and this PR disaster... only about their bottom line. And like so many other things, if money can be thrown at an issue, it's worth it to such a company.
What I mean by that is that I bet EA made this decision not with the intention of "how can we win back the good faith of our loyal customers", but "how can we ensure we make as much money (or lose the least) from this". You know, there is a reason why certain companies involved in pollution-creating waste disposal actually factor in the cost of simply accepting (or challenging) the legal fines for improper disposal into their decision making... if the cost of simply dumping improperly and paying the price (literally) outweighs the cost of properly disposing and cleaning up their business (literally and figuratively), their choice is, unfortunately, usually pretty clear.
Even without DIII's always-on DRM it was always going to have a bumpy launch. People's expectations were just insane by the time the game actually hit and they were bound to be left disappointed no matter what. The always-on DRM and downtime just added insult to injury.
I think in retrospect, instead of going the refund route, Blizzard could have listened to people and then set out a plan for the game in the first few months (i.e. how they'll address a lot of the issues).
But frankly if they were going to do that they would have done so during the extended "beta" where most of the same issue were brought up.
Multi still isn't better than D2, one year later. I don't think expectations were that high. I think they actually sold less than planned and went into low-activity maintenance mode after a few month. Not buying again from them. Game may sucks or not, but empty promises, I can't give money for that.
D2's multiplayer sucked. It wasn't until LOD (a year to the day later) plus patches that the mutliplayer was decent. And I think you're misinformed, I know plenty of people (myself included) that still play D3 and enjoy it.
"To me, this seems insulting. They know most of their upset customers want a refund -- for now -- to feel like they've not quite been screwed over as much vs. forcing them to keep a broken product, and offering them a consolation prize."
Not necessarily.
Earlier this morning I was ready to do whatever it took for a refund. 80 minutes in a queue, only to get kicked out mid tutorial, to have to wait 20 minutes in a queue again...
Whatever they did (well, add more servers), has made the 'server busy' issues basically non existent (I see a status update mid game saying 'Connection Lost', but it has always been restored within moments, and I haven't lost a saved game since).
Assuming you agree with CD Projekt's approach to gathering piracy statistics, the community rewarded them by pirating the game in extraordinarily large numbers, despite the gesture of good faith http://gamespot.com/news/the-witcher-2-pirated-45-million-ti...
First of all, what is this monolithic "community" you're talking about? Secondly, the question is not if more people will pirate without DRM, but if the company can increase their revenues - in the long term - by making that move.
I'm basically referring to the fervent anti-DRM crowd (most gaming sites communities), and I would have expected at least a lower than average piracy rate for a game where the developer basically "gave in" to this group, in an attempt to placate them.
Apparently this group is group is not actually that big/influential and/or there is a significant group of people who pirate regardless of developer goodwill, etc.
1) In the case of CD Projekt you're ignoring the part about how their DRM was cracked in about 48 hours. If I remember correctly, that's one of the major reasons they abandoned it.
2) Most of the "fervent anti-DRM crowd" are actually the people who pay for the games. Real pirates could care less about traditional DRM schemes; they could always circumvent them until now.
3) As algorias already mentioned there are multiple communities in gaming. I'm sure video game piracy stats also greatly vary by country. I'm going to take a wild guess that it's the worst in Asia (excluding Japan) due to the culture.
This falls prey to the classic fallacy of "piracy" critics, that all instances of piracy are effectively lost sales.
In fact, there's little evidence this is so for most games. It makes sense that a game that can be pirated will be so by a higher number of people than those who pay for it, but this alone does not support the conclusion that the rates of purchase for a game that is extensively pirated are necessarily lower than if that wasn't the case.
In the case of The Witcher 2, after the patch that removed the onerous SecuROM DRM fully 4 million additional copies of the game have been purchased to date, compared to around 1 million copies total purchased during the few months after release while the DRM was still in place.
Obviously in no way does each instance of piracy equate to a lost sale, but even a moderate percentage of instances of piracy that actually lost a sale would be a disappointing total sum lost by the developer, considering the enormous overall rate of piracy.
Also, the 4 million figure is total sales of the first and second games on all released platforms, not solely PC nor following the removal of the DRM, unless you have a source that wildly disagrees with mine. It would certainly be an impressive vote of no confidence in DRM if 4 PC million sales had occurred subsequent to the removal of the DRM, however that appears not to be the case. http://gamespot.com/news/the-witcher-series-sales-hit-4-mill...
Considering how vastly pirated copies usually outnumber purchased copies, I hope you don't consider "a moderate percentage" to be something high, like 30% would be.
I always thought I was not the crazy one that wouldn't buy a game because of the DRM, but I'm finally that guy. I love the Sim City games and remember playing them since the 90's, but I can't pay into a company which preferred the DRM over playability and kept the DRM even when it meant making people wait instead of releasing a patch with more responsible DRM to truly fix the problem.
It only appears crazy to those who find themselves desperate to play said games. Others, who aren't, or have created boycotts, can make decisions based on DRM.
Don't get me wrong, I would love to play that game. The company EA, to me, just has a lot less reputation than Amazon where I buy plenty of DRM'd books. Although, Amazon has a workable DRM model at the moment that doesn't break-down when you are offline or when Amazon servers are offline.
Is there any hope that this game will ever be pirated? I understand that there is some type of online-only DRM, but aren't some games like WoW played on private servers? I liked the old SimCity games, but probably won't even bother looking into this one for a while.
It's a bit of a different type of game, Diablo 2-esque, but if anyone hasn't tried Path of Exile, I suggest it. A small, independent studio just launched much more smoothly than EA can, is pretty good about how they treat players and is adding content weekly.
Starcraft 2 got its always-online cracked, as did most of the Ubisoft titles forcing it like Assassins Creed 2. I think the only example without good cracks is Diablo 3, and I know if I was a game cracker I wouldn't even bother, just because D3 sucked for me.
I imagine SimCity has enough publicity the warez crowd is jumping all over the opportunity to be first to crack it. People I know that have played it called BS on all the allegations that anything critical to the game running is server side, because the servers can go down while they are playing and they only lose saves and achievements.
Eventually someone will get around to reverse-engineering it. One good recent example is Diablo III, which had a semi-working emulator (most of the content was not yet implemented) by the time retail was released, but was shutdown following a C&D from Blizzard.
Intuit removed the DRM from TurboTax after one release in 2003 after public outcry and financial analysts questioned them about it. All you gamers have to do is stick to your position and not buy the product. Unless you hit them where it counts, they will continue to do this. Imagine, if the sales didn't meet expectations and analysts questioned EA.
The lack of detail is almost a guarantee that they will limit the 'free PC download game from the EA portfolio' to whatever they feel is the minimum necessary to calm the masses. If they were giving away anything more than the bottom of the barrel you know they would be proclaiming how amazing they are for giving away another "full price game" or something similar. Also, 10 days gives them enough time to say "We fixed it! SC works great _now_. You should be happy to get anything on top of the full game you already have."
Who wants to bet that the free game will be limited to 2+ year old titles?
And still no acknowledgment for the people that either don't care to play online or can't maintain a stable internet connection. Want to play while travelling? Want to play while in the military & deployed? Fuck you!
Doubtful, since most of the EA games I see on origin are either old or are "buy the game cheap, buy lots of expensive expansion packs" model.
Giving SimCity buyers who bought on pre-order or release day a copy of Battlefield or The Sims is probably a great economic choice for Maxis/EA; they're the same people who will likely buy lots of expansions.
The exception is what, Mass Effect (old now)? I guess there's Far Cry 3 and Assassins's Creed III (although AC has expansions and the Season Pass model, too)?
Oops; I was assuming all the games on Origin were EA-owned-studios. They probably will only allow EA studio games.
The Sims is the obvious one; if they give away Sims base games to everyone who bought SimCity, they'll probably see something like $30/user lifetime purchases.
Why would you buy a game you know before hand must be played online if you don't have a good Internet connection or would want to play while in an airplane? You shouldn't be mad at EA you should pissed at yourself for letting that happen.
How clearly is this advertised? I poked around online on stores that sell it and saw no mention that an Internet connection is required to play. It's not even mentioned in the system requirements.
People are upset with the game -- sounds like it is unplayable Most of those people paid with credit card. I understand the desire to want to play the game, but if EA is being a sh*t, why not go the charge dispute route?
"Keep back 500 feet, not responsible for damage" on trucks carrying gravel or other debris / detritus.
Absolutely not the case, and non-enforceable. You just have to be ready to show that the civil balance of probabilities is that the truck ahead of you on the road did damage to your vehicle by way of an unsecured load.
I've done quite a few charge disputes, and had several kicked back at me by Wells Fargo visa. I don't know If this Is a 'visa' policy, or a 'wells Fargo' policy, but as long as the vendor provides evidence that this was an actual purchase by an authorized cardholder, and they delivered the product, then there is no grounds for charge dispute. You cannot (successfully) dispute a charge just because the product does not work as advertised with Wells Fargo visa.
I wonder. In a previous post here on HN, somebody said in a comment, that the Sim City infrastructure runs in Amazon's infrastructure.
Isn't one of the big advantages of cloud computing the ability to scale your hardware with demand? Why only scale up by 130% when there's still people having problems? Why not scale until everybody has a good experience?
I don't even think it's going to cost all that much: after the initial onrush, the number of concurrent sessions is likely going to drop rapidly, at which point, they can easily scale down the infrastructure (maybe forcing regions to be consolidated, but as a player I'd rather suddenly have a new neighbor city than a ghost town because my neighbor stopped playing).
If you can scale up by 130% in one week, you can also scale up by 500%. Or however much it takes.
Them not doing this, leads to twoconclusions: 1) they don't care about the current ire among gamers. If the game is good, the rocky start will be forgiven when in two weeks time load normalizes and it will be forgotten within a month. And 2) having overloaded servers due to "unanticipated demand" is in the long run good news to give, increasing the perceived value and quality of the game.
I'm certainly aware of what you are saying. But: if you can scale up the infrastructure by 130% in one week, then you have certainly baked the notion of scalability into your initial design. The fact that scaling to 130% helped makes me think that adding more capacity will help more.
As such, it is potentially also possible to scale up to 200 or 500%, giving even more users a chance to play. I don't expect it to scale linearly with the added hardware, but it will help a bit.
From a technical standpoint, I've learned somethings (from which I'm drawing my conclusions. Bear with me) about their problem:
0) the architecture is hosted on Amazons infrastructure
1) as part of their mitigation, they have turned off the ability to increase simulation speed. This points to a lack of CPU resources on the application servers or a lack of io resources on the backend database to keep up with the increased rate of changes to the data model. However, I've heard from various comments that they might not actually be storing all that state on-the-fly but syncing it at the end of the session at which point the db load would be independent of simulation speed.
I'm inclined to think that CPU starvation on the app servers was likely the reason why they disabled cheetah speed.
Adding more frontend CPU power is quite trivially done by adding more app servers and having each of them deal with fewer concurrent users. In the end, they could use one app server per region (= 10ish cities. Not all of them necessarily being played concurrently) without having to do a lot of additional work in synchronizing region state between machines.
2) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5347611 was talking about database io issues. This is of course a problem you can't just solve by adding more machines as many databases can't easily scale horizontally.
The way how sim city works though lends itself very well to sharding: run regions independently and balance them across multiple machines. Add more machines and rebalance shards (with downtime if you have to, but people weren't able to play anyways)
This is all the information I had to build my opinion on. I did however reflect upon these facts before posting my opinion by which I stand even now.
Being able to scale 130% in a week, having an easily shardable problem and having frontend server CPU starvation tells me personally, that adding more machines could be possible (but maybe not economically feasible).
Of course it's guesswork in the end. But writing these half-technical articles like the submission I linked above do invite guesswork. As long as one has at least some facts to start with, a discussion is still warranted. I have no problem in being proven wrong by additional facts, a different interpretation of the facts or just one article that goes beyond trying to convert PR speech into technical facts (above linked article)
"Being able to scale 130% in a week, having an easily shardable problem and having frontend server CPU starvation tells me personally, that adding more machines could be possible (but maybe not economically feasible)."
I strongly feel that this is the real problem, especially since Amazon as extra large instances available now.
The faux candor is cute. The upside is that these troubles will hopefully provide a good case study for future games of this sort. The reviews of Sim City are extremely positive about the gameplay, if the value the server based experience provides to Sim City can be utilised in other games without the issues that Sim City has had the future could be very promising.
> And to get us back in your good graces, we’re going to offer you a free PC download game from the EA portfolio.
I can't help but think of the "20$ off your next purchase" pre-order bonus. Which, if you read the fine print, must be used within 2 weeks, and from a select list of really old games, and only applies to a purchase of 30$.
This is a great opportunity for them to turn a shitty situation into one that will awe their customers. They should go overboard in terms of making their existing and potential new customers happy. While this is a good gesture, I don't think it's enough.
That it's now accepted to pay $60 for a service instead of a product in gaming. A service they can shut down whenever they want (e.g. when the customer refuses to be ripped off by the DLC anymore). The cities created by the players could (or probably will) be lost. For some games like MMOs this is normal. For simulation games it was not.
There's a few for you, all by EA, one of which after only 15 months - except in those cases the single player was at least still playable. Unlike SimCity.
> I know that’s a little contrived – kind of like buying a present for a friend after you did something crummy. But we feel bad about what happened. We’re hoping you won’t stay mad and that we’ll be friends again when SimCity is running at 100 percent.
To me, this seems insulting. They know most of their upset customers want a refund -- for now -- to feel like they've not quite been screwed over as much vs. forcing them to keep a broken product, and offering them a consolation prize.
I don't know why Maxis doesn't realize that if SimCity is really as great as critics claim, then the best way to redeem themselves is to offer full refunds, no questions asked, knowing that customers will return once the game is back up and running.
Not only would this show a little bit of class, but it may restore a little confidence and credibility to Maxis/EA, and their poor choices up to this point.
And again, if SimCity is really that great -- and aside from the DRM/always online aspect, and the current broken state, the fundamental game sounds solid -- then customer will come back. These early adopters are the true enthusiasts, and ultimately just want to play a functional SimCity.
So the net results will be the same -- and EA/Maxis redeems a little of what is left of their credibility.
Maybe Maxis would refund them and EA won't let them?