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Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

I can't speak to the media/publishing side of things, but personally I stopped talking about SimCity because I stopped playing it.

Looking back at the whole fiasco, I'm positive that the always-online requirement and server overload will forever define the game, but there was a much bigger problem lurking below that issue, which is that the game sucks anyway even if you disregard the early technical issues and the politics around "always-on".

It is, IMO, by far the least fun Maxis "Sim" game I've ever played, and that holds even if you include Spore.

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I concur absolutely with you - I am the worlds great sim fan, and I've lost countless thousands of hours watching my little guys (and gals) run around in Stronghold, Settlers 7, and Caesar 3. I also got a lot of fun in previous Sim City games.

The Latest SimCity got about 6 hours out of me, before I just went, "meah." - I didn't really get the same sense of progress, or emergent features, or ownership of the process and events that I get from other sims.

But - EA scammed me out of the $60 before I discovered that the game actually sucked, so - maybe it wasn't such a bad strategy on their part after all. But, with that said - this approach (hyping a game, limiting its playtesting, not providing extensive reviewer copies) - only works so many times before people start to get wise to your ways...

> But - EA scammed me out of the $60 before...

Chargeback if you can't get a refund (like me, I bought on Origin). I called up Amex, identified the charge, told them EA misrepresented the product, and a day later I had a credit on my statement. Took three minutes.

Same here. I explained they failed on digital delivery of a service. I also told the rep that the company had threatened me and other customers with a refusal of service if any such chargebacks were attempted.

I may have been willing to wait out the launch fiasco, but when EA reps explained to me and others that our Origin account would be BANNED if we issued any chargebacks...that was the last straw for me.

I'm sort of hoping EA does ban my account. I'm sure my AG would love to hear about how they no longer provide me access to games I purchased in the past but they now no longer think I should be allowed to use.

I'm guessing their TOU covers this, and that the AG won't be able to do jack about it.

There's a big difference between what's in a contract (and I'm not sure TOU even count as contracts, even though they may call themselves such) and what's actually considered "binding". IANAL but as I understand it, the more unilateral a contract is (see just about any TOU) the more likely it is to be thrown out.

I'm aware of that, but this kind of provision (chargebacks cancel access to service) have been around for quite some time. I think I'd have heard about it if they'd been challenged successfully.

A conglomerate refusing their customers as a retaliation for exercising their rights to consumer protection is exactly why we have class action lawsuits in the first place (I think). The TOU may have clauses in there that reserve their right to cancel your Origin account, but I think the situation gets murky when you prevent paying customers from using products they may have purchased at brick & mortar retailers, etc.

Someone, someday, is going to challenge this. Its one of the many unanswered legal questions we have with licensing and ownership rights.

I'd assume the sort of organization that would write in a chargeback=cancel policy would also work strenuously to avoid an actual test of that policy in the courts...

EA made it quite clear if you were to do a chargeback they would cancel your Origin account. Fine if you only have SimCity on there but you could end up losing a lot more than $60 if you had a few of their games via Origin.

If I were in that situation, this by itself would be enough to make me do a chargeback.

Possibly over-reacting, but I hate it when people use underhanded tactics like this, and I'd be ok with losing my other games just to spite them.

Sadly, I don't own any EA games, so I can't do this.

Nice. Blackmailing your customers.

I smell a class action lawsuit.

Personally, I burnt out after Molyneux's Black & White, but recently GoG.com helped me rediscover the classics. If you don't care about fancy 3D graphics, the fun/buck is hard to beat.

Yes! I ended up spending 3x a much time in the last two months with Empire Earth, Gold Edition, than I did with SimCity. My major challenge is armwrestling with compatibility modes/video drivers to get the older games playing. I couldn't get EE running on either Windows 7, or my VMware instances of Windows XP, so I finally ended up installing it on my work system (A Dell Precision 650, still running windows XP) - Works Great.

Are you referring to the GOG.com versions, or originals? GOG will actually fix the games so they work in newer windows versions[1] For games where that's not feasible (older DOS games, for example), they wrap it a small GUI config and some sane defaults for dosbox.

I've actually taken to buying games I bought in the past (and in some cases still own the media for) specifically because it's supported better, and their digital game shelf allows me to download and install what I want, when I want (and it's cheap, I'll pick up 4-5 games for less than $3 a piece on their weekly sales). They've definitely made a fan of me.

[1]: http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/11/26/gog-com-announces-windows-...

I'm referring to the GoG games - they provide ridiculously good tech support for $6-$10 games, and I would be more than happy to pay $30-$40 to get wrappers for the games I really love, like AoE - but, as it turns out, sometimes it's cheaper (all things considered) to just buy a Circa 2000 Windows XP system, with 2000 era video cards, and drivers, than to try and get some of the GoG games working on a Circa 2010 non-mainstream system.

I'm a huge GoG fan.

<strikethrough> TESTING </strikethrough>

Test --test--

testing -test-

<b>testing</b>

Test --test--

test __test__ test _test_ test +test+

testing -test-

<b>testing</b>

Agreed. Bought it after they started offering a second game for free. I know that the only thing I kept thinking of when playing it was "I wish this were SC4000".

Really I would have been happy as a clam with something like SC4000, with curved roads, mixed-use zoning and an enhanced transport system. Gladly would have paid $60 for it.

The new SimCity completely failed to capture the "perfect garden" feeling that the previous Sim Cities managed to capture. Growing a city was like growing a garden, zoning was planting seeds.

The new one is just some set of administration abstractions over a social simulation. It just doesn't feel like SimCity, it feels like some totally different game.

Agreed, I really wanted to play the game when it first came out, but then the botched launch & DRM waned my interested. Then the reviews started coming in about how the game wasn't fun and quite limited that I've written it completely off.

So now I don't care, I'm not going to purchase the game.

Completely agree. I went away on holiday for a week, before I was playing it every day, when I came back I didn't even think about it until now (4 weeks later).

This game just didn't have the longevity of the previous games.. I found I outgrew my city areas quite quickly, multiplayer was completely broken (whenever I clicked to join a game, all the lots were already full, I could never find a region with a free city. So I start my own region and nobody ever joins!) and even when I had a full region to myself, which is what I wanted all along, I could only ever link up 4 cities out of 16 because of how the Highways interconnect.

On reflection, I think one of the main problems was actually that the game was too easy! Plop in a Coal mine and a Trade depot and you could be making millions without ever plopping a house.

I'm just looking forward to GTA5 now... they've delayed the launch for 4 months to get it exactly right. Perhaps EA should look to Rockstar to see how to manager a cult game franchise properly... Attention to detail!

I disagree. Best game ever actually and I will probably never get tired of it.

When I was a kid my mother "decided" I was allergic to milk, and so I wasn't allowed to drink any. Milk ended up being one of my favourite things, in no small part because it wasn't something I could have whenever I wanted.

Maybe it's the same here :) Because you can only sometimes play it you feel compelled to because who knows when it might go down again?

Just a thought.

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