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Comment by ryusage | Hacker News Reader

It's an interesting case study. This happens with nearly every MMO and people grumble but accept it. Within a couple weeks, the server issues are mostly resolved and people don't think about it anymore.

And yet, people are pissed about this. The fact that people see the game as single player seems to make a huge difference. It seems the lesson is that, if you want to do the always-on thing, you need to design your game so that it doesn't even make sense to play it alone.

I'm really curious to see what SimCity's sales are like in a month though. I wouldn't be too terribly shocked if people just sucked it up and bought it anyway as long as the servers are stable. If that happens, then maybe EA didn't make such a mistake after all?

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Server woes are a necessary evil with MMOs, and people buy the game knowing they'll have to deal with some amount of downtime due to maintenance, overcrowding or just plain growing pains.

Try telling FPS players that their game will be unavailable every Tuesday morning for 6-12 hours and they'll probably riot -- that's standard downtime in the MMO world though.

No, that's actually standard WOW downtime. Check out Eve Online. They've been gradually decreasing downtime.

Last time I played, it was like 30 minutes every day, with 15 minutes just for the cluster to reboot (the client has a nice server status, with a countdown and ETA). Their goal was to reduce it to zero (it was 1 hour when I first started playing).

WoW has similarly minor downtime most weeks, but the point still stands: MMO players are willing to tolerate significantly longer and more frequent interruptions due to the nature of the games and the architecture necessary to support them.

I don't know how much simulation is being done server-side or how resource intensive it is, but if the Sim City of 10+ years ago was possible without it, I'm pretty sure EA could've done this one without it as well. Smells like an excuse to me.

AFAIK, Guild Wars 2 has essentially zero downtime for updates. There was a talk posted online a while ago about their backend tools and architecture. It's really very impressive actually.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/13u1mz/watch_thi...

"Server woes are a necessary evil with MMOs"

I am not sure that is true. What other than DRM stops people from setting up their own competing servers? What other than a lack of incentive for the game makers prevents community-run servers from interoperating, creating an enormous peer-to-peer universe?

As far as interoperating community-run servers: cheating is the first thing that comes to mind. A lot of restrictions in MMO's are not so much for DRM as they are for maintaining fairness in the game, or preventing people from destroying the in-game economy.

What other than DRM?

There is no DRM in an MMO. What stops you is the lack of them giving you the server software.

Facebook doesn't give you their server software either, would you call that DRM?

This is absolutely no different. Considering that a huge proportion of Hacker News is devoted to web based startups, you would think that this would be fairly obvious.

"There is no DRM in an MMO"

Thus explaining why people need to do things like patch the game and/or modify their hosts file in order to connect to third-party servers. If trying to authenticate the server you connect to and leaving you with no options for connecting to third party servers is not DRM, what would you call it?

"What stops you is the lack of them giving you the server software."

Nope, the protocols are reverse engineered and people create their own server software.

> Nope, the protocols are reverse engineered and people create their own server software.

Which is one of two reasons (the other being anti-cheating) that newer games withhold a large part of the game logic on the server side. It is possible to reverse engineer game logic but impractical: you might as well rewrite the game.

If you have a look at efforts to reverse engineer Diablo 3, you'll see that most of the game is missing without the server. You can run around but you can't do anything.

People are pissed because it's an artificial restriction. People understand that talking to a server is necessary for an MMO to work, and they also understand it is not necessary for SimCity to work.

When an MMO talks to a server. it's in the user's best interest. When SimCity tries to talk to a server, it's against the user's best interest, who might want to play in a place without an internet connection, but is prevented to do so by a system that does nothing for him or her to begin with. It's weird that this is not obvious.

I'm skeptical about EA doing this because they are scary and evil (although I won't argue with that specifically).

I am open to the idea that there is much more to the simulation than users are able to replicate on their own computers at home. I wish EA/Maxis would address specifically why an always on connection is required, so we don't have an abnormal amount of unfounded nerdrage opinions floating around about DRM.

DRM sucks, for sure, but I doubt that's the only reason this game requires a connection.

I am not open to the idea that there is that much more to the simulation. If there was, there wouldn't be reports of people being able to play without connection for extended periods as long as they don't try to interact with the region.

As far as I can determine, and others (I frequent /r/simcity, this seems the consensus) agree, the requirement for the connection boils down to two things:

1. Maxis thought that the interaction between various cities in a region and the global marketplace for resources was good multiplayer gameplay.

2. DRM.

Which reason is actually primary will probably only ever be known by insiders of EA/Maxis.

If the simulation is more complex than a gaming PC can handle, wouldn't that mean that EA needed to (if at capacity) provide a better machine (that they have to maintain) for every copy sold? That doesn't seem sane.

I think EA's reputation was the fuel to the fire in the case. Kind of a perfect storm.

> The fact that people see the game as single player seems to make a huge difference.

Indeed. And there's also the fact that MMO are — for the most part — "long term" experiences. Now single-player games can be as well, but for the most part are not, the majority of Diablo III buyers have probably moved on already to some other games, where a WoW player will be in it for years, so the rough few first weeks aren't much of an issue.

  I wouldn't be too terribly shocked if people just sucked it 
  up and bought it anyway as long as the servers are stable.

Agreed. I have a couple of friends who are avoiding it, but I have colleagues that are going to get the game anyway despite whinging about EA being terrible.

(The above is anecdotal at best, but my gut feeling is that this will hurt EA in more than the very short term. See also: Blizzard with Diablo 3.)

I think they would be able to survive except they broke the cardinal rule of online anything. Never destroy your customers data.

Players are losing save games, either getting reverted or forced to start from scratch.

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