The only reasonable apology is to end the always-on connection DRM, and update the game to work without it. Anything less than that I see an insult to their customers.
A proportional response would be to allow users to refund the game, since this is a quality issue and is clearly out of the players' control; and to rapidly expand their server capacity until they have enough for everyone.
(I'm not an advocate for DRM, just proportionality.)
> Of course it's to do with [DRM]. If it [was a single player game], there would be no issues at all.
The two are unrelated. If it was a single player game we wouldn't be having these issues... because it wouldn't need server capacity to play, which is nothing to do with DRM. It could still have always-on DRM.
Perhaps. I had be interested in your sources for this fact though. Otherwise it feels like opinion being stated as fact.
Well, if the players still had to be connected to the servers (always-on) to play, maybe the same problems would arise even though the players wouldn't be interacting.
The strange aspect of this is that their infrastructure seems to be static. In this modern age of cloud computing, why not make the number of game servers elastic? That would bring safety to them and savings by reducing the number of idling servers when demand is low.
More saliently, it happened with the launch of Cities XL... which did more or less exactly the same things in the cloud that this new SimCity is trying to do.
It's DRM.
The game is intended to be played online. You share resources with neighbouring cities. Crime spills over into your city from others. You can work together on collaborative projects (international airports etc.). It's not MMO but it's not single player either.
I believe in some early interviews Maxis also referred to some computational work being offloaded to EA servers but I can't find these now. They might not have gone through with it, but it was certainly in the original plan.
There really is nothing to say in their defense, even if they DID design the game to be multiplayer, they could of done it in a decentralized way and let peers inter-connect. They did it this way for control. Do not defend them.
ALL simulation is done on the client, EXCEPT for interactions with neighboring cities when they are run by human players. But in the single player mode even that is not an issue. The only thing the servers are needed for is persisting (saving) game state and that's the end of it. People have been able to play the game without internet connection for hours on end before their game crashed, clearly proving that the game DOES NOT rely on the cloud for simulation.
Besides, an average gaming computer with Core i5 and 4 gigs of RAM is far more powerful than some virtualized EC2 instance with limited and shared CPU/memory. Offloading computation/simulation to the cloud for "performance reasons" is a ridiculous notion.
This is about DRM and everyone knows it.
And you conclude from that that the game does not need the servers (explicit DRM or not)?
The game depends on the servers, either for DRM or for game saves. But when they are off-line, it doesn't matter the true reason for game crash.
The fact is - the game needs the servers being ON.
Other than that though, your explanation makes the most sense.
Saved games and inter-city communication is done against the game clock, not the wall clock, so they could reduce server load (on the only two things servers were doing, saving games and providing intercity communication when multiple people were on in the same region) by disabling the fastest speed of game time.