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Comment by res0nat0r | Hacker News Reader

So there was a big server meltdown during the Diablo 3 launch, is this the same thing? I'm not sure how long the Sim City servers have been down but is this just initial launch problems? I'm surprised Amazon has done this as they didn't do the same for D3. How long have logins been totall down for now?

Also I think it would be helpful for reviews like this on Amazon and Spore to restrict the reviews to only verified purchases. People submitting 1 star reviews because they require you to be online just because they don't like it shouldn't be allowed to submit a rating.

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I played Diablo 3 quite soon after launch and while there were "hiccups" (my character would occasionally jump around due to lag) I could connect fairly quickly to a server. From the reviews the Sim City servers seem to be overloaded much more than D3 servers were.

The always connected to the internet aspect was bad for D3 and it seems it is even worse for Sim City. If I remember correctly, Blizzard had legal problems in South Korea because of connectivity. My hopes is that incidents like this force companies to move away from the online only single player design.

I think that aside from the philosophical problems with DRM in general, the required internet connection aspect means that once EA shuts down the server the game could be lost forever. When making these games (good or bad) a team adds something to the cultural record of our time. Old movies may not be as good as modern movies in terms of technical execution, but they are interesting because they contain within them an aspect of a lost culture. Games should aspire to do the same.

I agree with you in principle but I will suggest that titles which are overly-burdened with bullshit DRM will tend to be less important to the cultural record. I think that's the case here.

I don't disagree with you :)

SimCity's problems were much like Diablo 3's character creation problems at launch.

With Diablo you had a hell of a time just getting a connection to a server - but once you were in you got to play (laggy though it may be).

With SimCity you'd bash your head against your computer connecting to a server, but even after you do that every step could possibly fail because it was doing something substantial to an internal database (presumably) that doesn't scale - creating a city, taking over a city, joining a region, etc etc.

See even once you're past the dreaded "wait 30 minutes for your turn", there's still no guarantee your game will even be functional.

The short version is that the server performance for SC was so bad that EA took them down for maintenance. The maintenance message also had an error in it, something to the effect of "Servers will return at <string>"

IIRC with DIIIs error 37, it was just the authentication servers so once you actually got past them and into the game the game-play servers were mostly ok (albeit laggy)

With SC5 its the actual game play servers that seem to be full, and also fairly buggy (saved game corruption, unable to create regions/cities or join, losing hours of work)

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