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Comment by georgespencer | Hacker News Reader

This isn't to do with the always-on DRM. EA drastically underestimated the number of players who would want to play the game, and they don't have sufficient server capacity. (This has happened in the past at peak times with games like World of Warcraft, EVE, etc.)

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.)

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Of course it's to do with it. If it had a traditional single-player architecture, there would be no issues at all.

Are you suggesting it has to do with the technical implications of always-on DRM or the ethical considerations?

You're failing to draw a distinction between always-on DRM and multiplayer server capacity. Look at what you just said:

> 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.

Could you play single player games while they were having server issues?

Fact is that DRM is the real reason why the game is heavily multiplayer. Older versions were always single player and there is no reason they couldn't at least have implemented this mode in the new game other than having an excuse to put some of the logic on a server to thwart piracy. And that is what is causing the current problems.

> Fact is that DRM is the real reason why the game is heavily multiplayer

Perhaps. I had be interested in your sources for this fact though. Otherwise it feels like opinion being stated as fact.

> 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.

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.

"(This has happened in the past at peak times with games like World of Warcraft, EVE, etc.)"

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.

This is not an online game like WOW or EVE.

It's DRM.

You can repeat this until you're blue in the face, but it simply isn't true.

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.

sim city 4 had exactly the same mechanics in single player.

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.

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