Who's playing Sim City 5?

[Scott Tortorice]

Ouch!

http://www.bluesnews.com/s/139712/am...igital-simcity

Amazon Stops Selling Digital SimCity

[Mar 07, 2013, 5:27 pm ET]

Amazon.com has suspended sales of the downloadable version of SimCity due to connectivity issues with the game. The page carries the following note: "Many customers are having issues connecting to the "SimCity" servers. EA is actively working to resolve these issues, but at this time we do not know when the issue will be fixed. Please visit https://help.ea.com/en/simcity/simcity for more information." This note is also on the page for the boxed version, but this remains available for purchase. EA has announced they are adding servers to address connectivity and authentication issues that have plagued the game since launch, and the downloadable version currently has a one-star rating on Amazon based on 929 customer reviews. Thanks Ant via Geek.com via Slashdot.

[Dr Zaius]

How many people think EA will learn a lesson from this? I'll bet if they do, it won't be the lesson we might like them to learn.

[Dr Zaius]

An Open Letter to EA on SimCity: You Could Have Prevented This

[Yang]

Sure they could have prevented it, but always on is the future in the corporate minds. Actually now that i played it i´m not even sure if it really was planned as always-on game from the start. Because it doesn´t really feel like a full fledged multiplayer title more like a game where a half-hearted multiplayer was added to a mainly solo-focused game. Just that there is no satisfying solo play in this case. :/ Everything falls short and in the end the game still feels like a beta with many disabled features just to push it out at the end of EAs fiscal year. Anyway here are some of my thoughts:

1. Regional Play

In the large Regions with 16 slots for cities those cities are actually not connected but divided in 4 clusters of 4 cities. I think originally they planned to have them all connected but severed the ties because of the insane traffic problems that happened then. For example in one of my former cities (which is lost to me now because the region bugged out and became inaccessible - its not just cities that get rolled back or become inaccessible) i had constant traffic jams at the city entrance from traffic coming from my eastern and a western neighbour cities. And you can´t do **** about that. So all there is to regional play is sharing some service vehicles (as i understand for every vehicle you have at your disposal in your city you get one "clone" to share with your neighbours), the occassional money gift to help bankrupt neighbours and the great works. Interacting together with different specialisations doesn´t do anything either. There is no point for someone to specialise for example in oil and producing plastics because you have to sell it on the global market anyway. You can´t sell it to your neighbour who makes processors out of plastics and alloys. There really lacks some meta game like decrees where the players can vote on specifc things that impact the whole region. Right now its rather bland.

2. Specialisations

One of SimCity´s advertised core features. Turns out they are horribly balanced. There are 6 of them: Mining, Oil, Trade, Culture, Gambling and Electronics. Of those 6 only Electronics is really profitable. Mining and Oil profits are neglible, Culture (Tourism) kinda works for some of its buildings but since you will have traffic problems making them worse with having more tourists in your city is downright undesirable. Trade is a joke, it is meant to work that you import large quantities of a certain good and sell them later for profit. Just that the global market is afaik not activated right now, at least i havent noticed any price changes to the goods since i started playing. Even if it worked, would you really like to buy something and then wait a week of real time and hope for better rates?

3. Zone dependencies

Another thing that is broken are the Zone dependencies. Obviously Residential needs Commercial for shopping and Industrial for jobs. Industrial produces goods and sends them to Commercial to sell them to shoppers. Well that was the plan at least, the depency of C on I was removed and shops have always stuff to sell. Sometimes Factories send trucks out to freight depots or commercial zones but mainly their goods just pile up and they complain about having nowhere to ship their goods to. I think they mostly disabled that aspect because of traffic again. There are cities that are 100% residential and still have happy, jobless inhabitants thanks to a few parks . It is really ridiculous.

4. Player influence

Well SimCity really often makes me feel like an idiot by having me work around broken game mechanics and then being totally inconsistant. One minute people are leaving a building because there apparently is no school around despite there being one right over the street and having 100% school bus coverage in the city as well having enough capacity in the schools. Then they are happy again. Same with industry. They complain of having nowhere to ship their goods. The next minute they are happy because they make big profits with their exports. One commercial building complains about not haveing enough customers, the one next to it is happy about all the customers. The traffic jams at the entry of the city; you can´t do much about them even if you build ferries and trains. They simply don´t seem to make a difference. Heck i improved traffic in my city by getting rid of all buses, because the idiotic AI was always sending all the buses around in a horde and eventually the lead bus kinda got stuck at a bus stop. SimCity is full of having to do stuff in a totally counterproductive/intuitive way.

The thing is i really had my fun at the beginning but the more you learn how the mechanics work it goes down the drain quick. All that´s left is a feeling of "meh" and occasionally booting it up for the pretty graphics. It will take a long time to get the simulation fixed to be worthy of getting called one.

Some links for further reading:

http://tommyrefenes.tumblr.com/post/...us-than-piracy

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013...ay-easily-done

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013...pretty-wiggly/

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013...city-5-buyers/

[Dr Zaius]

And that's what really annoys me about this game. In previous versions, the city mechanics actually seemed to function in a logical and intuitive fashion. If people were complaining or leaving, there was usually an explanation that made sense. For instance, you couldn't tax people to death in order to stuff the city's coffers as that would just crush businesses and kill job growth. If traffic congestion was such that people couldn't get where they needed to go, they would eventually move elsewhere.

In short, things made sense and the city mechanics functioned just like you think they would.

This version plays like it was designed by people who know absolutely nothing about how a city actually grows and functions. It's like a flight simulator game that was designed by, I don't know, scuba divers rather than pilots. And not only are the mechanics just plain stupid, the gameplay isn't any fun.

How do you take a series with PROVEN mechanics and gameplay formulas and turn it into something that doesn't work, has fewer options, and manages to restrict gameplay in just about every possible way?

It never ceases to amaze me how great franchises can be morphed into utter suckage by entities like EA.

[wrinkle]

I recently bought it (at http://www.go2arena.com/simcity.html ). I think it's great, but it would be better if the cities would be bigger.