A SimCity Update
ea.com
ea.com
> 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?
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.
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.
But Blizzard has been "always online" for a while now. It's not really new to them. And they have a fuck ton of servers.
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 ...
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).
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
I guess every time a customer buys a game, they are basically signing a contract to keep that infrastructure runing for an unlimited amount of time...
Is not like Xbox that you have to pay your membership every month...
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!
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)?
Could EA give away Ubisoft title? I expect they'd have to pay Ubisoft for each redemption if they did.
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.
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?
Parenthetically, this move by them also ensures that everyone who purchased it will lose two games if they charge back the purchase...
Like the signs you see in parking lots that say "not responsible for lost or stolen items" or "not responsible for damage to your car".
They often are, it just says that to cut down on lawsuits.
(This used to be universally true, though it's become less true over time that they are responsible)
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 forget what it was, but a fairly large business was noted for this - I want to say a motel chain or something.
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.
Question: If it takes 1 server to handle 1,000 clients, how many servers does it take to handle 1,000,000 clients?
Answer: Between 1 and infinity. It might not even be physically possible to serve 1,000,000 clients, depending on the application.
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)
I strongly feel that this is the real problem, especially since Amazon as extra large instances available now.
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$.
Well, yay for DRM all the way.
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.