So Sim City has the same "always online" requirement as Diablo 3 and big surprise, opening weekend they have server problems! Not only did they get their act together within a week to provide the vast majority of players a solid, bug free experience, they are giving anyone who registers a copy of the game by the 25th a FREE GAME. Now that's service. That from a company that has a terrible history of taking care of their gamers. What do we get from Blizzard for dealing this login errors for months and doing beta testing for them?
For months? I don't remember anyone having problems after the first few days.
Also more than a million players received the game itself for free from playing WoW.
So Sim City has the same "always online" requirement as Diablo 3 and big surprise, opening weekend they have server problems! Not only did they get their act together within a week to provide the vast majority of players a solid, bug free experience, they are giving anyone who registers a copy of the game by the 25th a FREE GAME. Now that's service. That from a company that has a terrible history of taking care of their gamers. What do we get from Blizzard for dealing this login errors for months and doing beta testing for them?
I was playing D3 three hours after launch. It sounds like SimCity had much worse problems and they didn't have 7 million people trying to log in the first day.
Nah, it was more like 3-4 million the first day, but that's not of importance. Maxis actually had to cut off features and stop game distribution for some time in order to fix things.
edit:
Slight offtopic, but it really gets to me how EA is blamed for these things. Maxis made all the decisions themselves and took all the consequences as their own faults. EA is just a publisher, but the hate towards them is tremendous. We can observe the same thing with ActiBlizz even though Activision doesn't even own Blizzard, they're sister companies. But man, it really does get to me. How skewed the perception of the general audience is.
There is no "solid bug free experience" with Sim City right now, it's far worse than Blizzard's release of D3. They still haven't "gotten their act together" as game features are still missing and as far as I know there are still long wait queues. If the queues have gone down it's because people have quit because they couldn't play. They did not get their act together like the OP claims. I'm still hearing issues with the game including save rollbacks and corruption.
For the most part Blizzard had their login issues taken care of within the first couple days of launch, but that's not to say it was perfect. The reason that EA is giving away a game is because they admit this problem was the worst launch of an always-on system in current history.
As for Maxis taking the blame for this as overneathe states, this is true. They did admit to making many of the decisions, however I cannot believe that EA doesn't have a hand in this. EA gets flack because many of their games are following their unified design and that recent design is microtransactions and delivery platforms. Sim City is going to be a delivery platform for micro transactions and the always on design most likely stemed from that. Yes, Maxis made the decision to do on server calculations but that doesn't wash EA's hands. It would appears to me that Publishers have a lot of say in how these things are done, even the last Tribes: Vengence patch was cancelled because the publisher told the developers not to put it out. (curse you, Vivendi).
I think the worst part is that we as consumers are being lied to. We were told that Sim Citry had massive server side calculations that couldn't be taken away (thus they couldn't remove online only play). At first I took them at their word, but then players found out you can have offline play, the majority of the work is local, only the global settings and saves don't work. This is horrible. Rather than just admit why it's always online they circle around it and change their "stance" to make it look like this was just one big honest mistake. I can't trust EA and by association I dont' think I can trust Maxis. This thing is blowing up in their faces and giving away a game is only a fraction of the costs compared to what this whole thing could cost them without some schmoozing over of the comunity.
It's funny I feel so strongly on this when I don't even care about Sim City (haven't played or purchased one in years). I just can't stand companies trying to milk the consumer and lying about it to their faces. It saddens me, because for a little while there I thought EA was shaping up. This business of having "microtransactions in every game" really worries me, i don't trust them to do it right.
Guess I had to vent.. but yeah, OP, I wouldn't paint a picture of happinetss and ranbows about Sim City vs. Diablo 3 because they don't compare. Sim City has been nearly unanimously panned as the worst release of its kind by critics and consumer alike.
trust me - SimCity is far from being finished
there are many gamebreaking bugs and EA/Maxi told many lies in there promo videos upon release
Surely everything falling apart at 100k population because of traffic caused by their retardedly simplistic sim AI is a feature not a bug.
Sim City 5 was so bad that Amazon had to pull it from their store because of overwhelming negative reviews and EA had to stop advertising it. It was literally the worst game launch in history.
I've heard of this simplistic Sim AI. Feel free to educate me if I'm wrong but I was told that a Sim will work at a job not because it's his but because it was the nearest job available to his location. Furthermore while Sims have houses, they may take another Sim's house for the same reason (not because it's his house, but because it's the closest).
For a game that advertises that you can follow a single citizen's life, this is pretty bad.
The game still has some kinks but the issues with the launch servers were largely over exaggerated in my opinion. Maybe I wasn't as rabid to play it though. I was really irritated the first day or two but after that I just gave it some time and then the servers seemed to get better as they opened more and more servers.
The traffic congestion is so damn irritating though. They don't pick a job because it's close to them, not that I've noticed at least. They pick jobs based on their wealth and the wealth of the job. It seems basically anyone in low-mid class will work a industrial job, low class workers work in low class commercial jobs, mid to mid, etc. That part doesn't bother me. The main issue my city right now is having (with 140k people) is no matter how many avenues I seem to add I have traffic issues of people getting in and out of my city on the one highway connected to it. I even have fully upgraded streetcars and bus services along with a ferry and a train station but the highway still gets backed up so bad it goes off my screen.
Also more than a million players received the game itself for free from playing WoW.
Ha. Bagstone.
I was playing D3 three hours after launch. It sounds like SimCity had much worse problems and they didn't have 7 million people trying to log in the first day.
edit:
Slight offtopic, but it really gets to me how EA is blamed for these things. Maxis made all the decisions themselves and took all the consequences as their own faults. EA is just a publisher, but the hate towards them is tremendous. We can observe the same thing with ActiBlizz even though Activision doesn't even own Blizzard, they're sister companies. But man, it really does get to me. How skewed the perception of the general audience is.
Ha. Bagstone.
For the most part Blizzard had their login issues taken care of within the first couple days of launch, but that's not to say it was perfect. The reason that EA is giving away a game is because they admit this problem was the worst launch of an always-on system in current history.
As for Maxis taking the blame for this as overneathe states, this is true. They did admit to making many of the decisions, however I cannot believe that EA doesn't have a hand in this. EA gets flack because many of their games are following their unified design and that recent design is microtransactions and delivery platforms. Sim City is going to be a delivery platform for micro transactions and the always on design most likely stemed from that. Yes, Maxis made the decision to do on server calculations but that doesn't wash EA's hands. It would appears to me that Publishers have a lot of say in how these things are done, even the last Tribes: Vengence patch was cancelled because the publisher told the developers not to put it out. (curse you, Vivendi).
I think the worst part is that we as consumers are being lied to. We were told that Sim Citry had massive server side calculations that couldn't be taken away (thus they couldn't remove online only play). At first I took them at their word, but then players found out you can have offline play, the majority of the work is local, only the global settings and saves don't work. This is horrible. Rather than just admit why it's always online they circle around it and change their "stance" to make it look like this was just one big honest mistake. I can't trust EA and by association I dont' think I can trust Maxis. This thing is blowing up in their faces and giving away a game is only a fraction of the costs compared to what this whole thing could cost them without some schmoozing over of the comunity.
It's funny I feel so strongly on this when I don't even care about Sim City (haven't played or purchased one in years). I just can't stand companies trying to milk the consumer and lying about it to their faces. It saddens me, because for a little while there I thought EA was shaping up. This business of having "microtransactions in every game" really worries me, i don't trust them to do it right.
Guess I had to vent.. but yeah, OP, I wouldn't paint a picture of happinetss and ranbows about Sim City vs. Diablo 3 because they don't compare. Sim City has been nearly unanimously panned as the worst release of its kind by critics and consumer alike.
Sim City 5 was so bad that Amazon had to pull it from their store because of overwhelming negative reviews and EA had to stop advertising it. It was literally the worst game launch in history.
For a game that advertises that you can follow a single citizen's life, this is pretty bad.
The traffic congestion is so damn irritating though. They don't pick a job because it's close to them, not that I've noticed at least. They pick jobs based on their wealth and the wealth of the job. It seems basically anyone in low-mid class will work a industrial job, low class workers work in low class commercial jobs, mid to mid, etc. That part doesn't bother me. The main issue my city right now is having (with 140k people) is no matter how many avenues I seem to add I have traffic issues of people getting in and out of my city on the one highway connected to it. I even have fully upgraded streetcars and bus services along with a ferry and a train station but the highway still gets backed up so bad it goes off my screen.
I love the merry-go-round intersection the most: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-d0b41H-Lnk