SimCity

[DMKA]

Wow.

Okay, I don't think I'll feel so bad if I, uh, look for a way to try before I buy.

I think you're missing the part where it requires connection to a server with an authenticated account.

And devs wonder why everyone hates DRM.

[Skyblade]

Wow.

Okay, I don't think I'll feel so bad if I, uh, look for a way to try before I buy.

I think you're missing the part where it requires connection to a server with an authenticated account.

Find a friend with the game? Y'know, if any of your friends were stupid enough to buy it?

Yeah, this launch has been a trainwreck. Man, I wish EA would die.

[Loony BoB]

I'm living in hope that 'workarounds' will be made.

[Skyblade]

I'm living in hope that 'workarounds' will be made.

Eh... I really hate piracy. If a game's not worth buying, it's not worth playing. I'm certainly not going to reinforce the need for companies to make more DRM and authentication systems.

And Penny Arcade's "good things" were given with the caveat that they had no experience with the online section (since the review version didn't have it) and were mostly extrapolating potential. Single player's fun, apparently, but it's not single player, so...

Things have changed.

[Loony BoB]

I'm not a massive proponent of piracy in the gaming industry by any means, but if it's the only way to make a game work then perhaps the developers should think very, very long and hard on such matters. I'm hearing that there are all kinds of other problems (eg. size of areas available to build on) so I'll probably just not get it at all.

[Dignified Pauper]

Size isn't a big deal. it's the broken simulation, pathfinding of traffic, and bad region play. It has all the elements of being incredible, it's just that they haven't implemented the code well. It's really really buggy.

Although, they have thrown a lot of support behind it. It literally gets better everyday I play.

[Slothy]

I'm not a massive proponent of piracy in the gaming industry by any means, but if it's the only way to make a game work then perhaps the developers should think very, very long and hard on such matters. I'm hearing that there are all kinds of other problems (eg. size of areas available to build on) so I'll probably just not get it at all.

When it comes to game releases this horrendous, or even simply cases where pirating nets you a superior product to the purchased version, I think companies deserve to have their stuff pirated. People downloading an illegal version of the game shouldn't get a better user experience than paying customers, ever. Which is why I generally don't like DRM. More often than not it punishes paying customers with a troutty experience so that it can fail to prevent piracy. And given the track record so far, always online methods of the sort used by Simcity do even more to ruin the user experience all so they can be next to impossible to pirate.

But I'd love to get an honest answer from EA about whether they feel having a disaster of a launch which has seen such wonderful things as disabling features in desperate attempts to get it to run, as well as pulling their advertising of the game and Amazon refusing to sell it for the time being were worth giving the finger to the pirates. Because I really can't see them saying it was worth it if they were going to be honest with themselves.

[Shauna]

Maxis is taking full responsibility, telling people not to blame EA for this mess. Of course, EA are quite happy for the little guy to take the blame for the whole thing.

[Slothy]

Considering Maxis is a subsidiary of EA, them telling people not to blame EA sounds a bit like if my right foot could tell someone not to blame me for kicking them in the testicles.

[Skyblade]

I'm not a massive proponent of piracy in the gaming industry by any means, but if it's the only way to make a game work then perhaps the developers should think very, very long and hard on such matters. I'm hearing that there are all kinds of other problems (eg. size of areas available to build on) so I'll probably just not get it at all.

When it comes to game releases this horrendous, or even simply cases where pirating nets you a superior product to the purchased version, I think companies deserve to have their stuff pirated. People downloading an illegal version of the game shouldn't get a better user experience than paying customers, ever. Which is why I generally don't like DRM. More often than not it punishes paying customers with a troutty experience so that it can fail to prevent piracy. And given the track record so far, always online methods of the sort used by Simcity do even more to ruin the user experience all so they can be next to impossible to pirate.

But I'd love to get an honest answer from EA about whether they feel having a disaster of a launch which has seen such wonderful things as disabling features in desperate attempts to get it to run, as well as pulling their advertising of the game and Amazon refusing to sell it for the time being were worth giving the finger to the pirates. Because I really can't see them saying it was worth it if they were going to be honest with themselves.

So, if I write a book, and someone comes and re-edits it, or adds a chapter, and then gives it away to tons of people, I deserve to have my stuff pilfered because "my" version is inferior?

It's still their intellectual property. Yes, others can improve upon it. Heck, that's why modding communities exist for PC games and have done since the dawn of the internet. That doesn't change the fact that they didn't make the game, and it's not their property.

Justify it however you want, it's just an excuse to steal from the companies. If you decide to play their game, they should get paid for it. There is nothing forcing you to play it. There are tons of other games out there, heck, even free ones. If you decide to use their property, you should pay them for it. Buy the game and then crack or pirate it, and I won't care. But to play it without paying the company is theft, and I won't support it. If you want to punish the company, don't buy it and don't pirate it. Just realize that they made a crappy, extremely sub-par product, but it is still their product, and find something else to play.

[Slothy]

So, if I write a book, and someone comes and re-edits it, or adds a chapter, and then gives it away to tons of people, I deserve to have my stuff pilfered because "my" version is inferior?

Your analogy isn't even close to the same thing as a game with DRM. Now if you released a novel where the last chapter was written in a language you made up and you had to go online with a code which came with the book to get a translation guide which let you translate that last chapter so you could actually read it, then it might be a comparable analogy. Or if you needed to go online to even get the last few chapters of the book, and tough luck for you if the publishers servers are down.

We're not talking about people going and simply adding something to a game to improve it and releasing it free to the whole internet. We're talking about cases where the DRM free pirated copy actually runs better than the purchased version. There is no excuse for that. When it comes to something as completely basic as a game actually running, if the people who download it for free get a copy that runs better than the purchased copy because the DRM has been stripped out then there is something fundamentally wrong, and if nothing else, that company doesn't deserve your business. Because in such circumstances, that would mean they deliberately sold an inferior product to you to try and prevent people from pirating it. But since they failed at preventing that anyway, it just means they knowingly sold you an inferior product to keep investors happy.

Make up any bulltrout analogy or misinterpret my argument anyway you please, but my point stands: any company which knowingly sells you an inferior product doesn't deserve your business, and I have no sympathy for them when their game gets cracked and anyone can play it in the way it should have been released to begin with.

And in the case of Simcity that's exactly what EA did: they sold a product they knew wasn't going to be up to snuff. Jim Sterling just recently did a video on the whole debacle which makes the point quite clear in fact. Because some people look at the Simcity release and defend it saying things like "oh, well we knew it was going to have some server problems at launch." And we did. Anyone with half a brain who has seen games release with major always online components like this has seen this happen repeatedly. And that includes EA. Yet they still put it out there without the net code being up to snuff and without enough servers. I find it very unlikely that they didn't see this coming, and yet they were still totally unprepared for it. Sorry, but there is no excuse for selling a troutty product to consumers, and saying you'll make it better at some indeterminate time in the future doesn't make it okay.

The last thing companies that release titles like this deserve is to be paid for it. Whether that means simply not buying it or pirating it, I could care less. The end result to their bottom line is the same. But perhaps the biggest travesty in all of this is that in the long run this might still be a financial success for EA, and the next time they release a game, the majority of people will simply forget this whole mess and jump in with both feet again.

[Loony BoB]

From what I understand, you are buying a book which...

- Requires you to be sitting in a chair in order to read it - you can't lie down and read it, you must be sitting in a chair.
- May on occasion drop out of your hands at certain points of you reading it. If this happens, it also wipes your memory of what you have recently read, forcing you to re-read up to that point and hope that it does not drop out of your hands again.
- Has had some entire (good) chapters removed because they were inconsistent with the other chapters - well, certain sentences were, anyway.
- Is a rather small book compared to similar books you got from this author, yet is the same price. One could argue that the content is better, when you are able to read the content.
- May have some sentences of the book coated in black ink. This is quite accidental, but that's the way it is.
- Most of the issues could potentially be avoided if you were to be able to read it while lying down, however when you lie down the book knows and removes all content from it's pages.

Again, I'm not a big proponent of piracy of video games at all. I pay good money for pretty much every game I play, and I rarely buy pre-owned let alone pirate games. But if it's an option between not being able to play the game and being able to play the game, I would prefer to be able to play the game. I might even pay the money to the company anyway. Lord knows I just spent £9.99 on SimCity 4 Deluxe and it just crashed on me and I lost a lot of progress. =|

[XxSephirothxX]

I got the game cause it came with a $20 credit on Amazon. The launch has, obviously, been a trainwreck, and I didn't try to play it until Friday. And I don't think everything is quite working right yet, so it's hard to tell exactly what elements of the game work on a mechanical level.

The game looks really awesome and it's super fun and satisfying to see your city grow. The big concept is to have lots of cities within a region working interdependently, but that only seemed to kinda be working this weekend. And that causes a lot of frustration, because the city plots aren't big enough for you to build everything in them. But when it's unclear how much you can rely on your neighbors, you can't easily make a city that's just dedicated to tourism, or just focused on industry, or whatever. It's also a design issue that this stuff is so unclear and opaque--I should be able to tell if these systems aren't working cause the servers are off, or if they are working and I just don't understand them.

I had a lot of fun with it over the weekend, and I honestly love all the ideas behind the game in theory. But it seems like the way traffic works--the pathfinding Marick mentioned--is pretty garbage, and there are a lot of frustrating elements that will wreck your city while you're sitting there going "what did I do wrong?" I hope it improves in the next couple weeks.

[Madame Adequate]

I'm not a massive proponent of piracy in the gaming industry by any means, but if it's the only way to make a game work then perhaps the developers should think very, very long and hard on such matters. I'm hearing that there are all kinds of other problems (eg. size of areas available to build on) so I'll probably just not get it at all.

When it comes to game releases this horrendous, or even simply cases where pirating nets you a superior product to the purchased version, I think companies deserve to have their stuff pirated. People downloading an illegal version of the game shouldn't get a better user experience than paying customers, ever. Which is why I generally don't like DRM. More often than not it punishes paying customers with a troutty experience so that it can fail to prevent piracy. And given the track record so far, always online methods of the sort used by Simcity do even more to ruin the user experience all so they can be next to impossible to pirate.

But I'd love to get an honest answer from EA about whether they feel having a disaster of a launch which has seen such wonderful things as disabling features in desperate attempts to get it to run, as well as pulling their advertising of the game and Amazon refusing to sell it for the time being were worth giving the finger to the pirates. Because I really can't see them saying it was worth it if they were going to be honest with themselves.

So, if I write a book, and someone comes and re-edits it, or adds a chapter, and then gives it away to tons of people, I deserve to have my stuff pilfered because "my" version is inferior?

But that's not even close to an analogous situation? It's more like if you release a book that you can only read between 6 and 9 am, only in your back yard, and you have to pay for the last three chapters. And for half the people the words keep sliding off the page when they try to read it even when they meet all those conditions.

And yeah I agree 100% with Vivi. If buying the game is more of a hassle than pirating it, then you've smurfed up and deserve the inevitable pirating, because you are punishing paying customers for it. Now look at something like Steam or GoG where you can buy games with a couple of mouse clicks and get them downloaded, installed, and playing with a couple more - I not only happily buy games on services like that but I even repurchase games I already own because it's so much more convenient than finding my old CDs. People will pay for convenience.

[Skyblade]

So, if I write a book, and someone comes and re-edits it, or adds a chapter, and then gives it away to tons of people, I deserve to have my stuff pilfered because "my" version is inferior?

Your analogy isn't even close to the same thing as a game with DRM. Now if you released a novel where the last chapter was written in a language you made up and you had to go online with a code which came with the book to get a translation guide which let you translate that last chapter so you could actually read it, then it might be a comparable analogy. Or if you needed to go online to even get the last few chapters of the book, and tough luck for you if the publishers servers are down.

We're not talking about people going and simply adding something to a game to improve it and releasing it free to the whole internet. We're talking about cases where the DRM free pirated copy actually runs better than the purchased version. There is no excuse for that. When it comes to something as completely basic as a game actually running, if the people who download it for free get a copy that runs better than the purchased copy because the DRM has been stripped out then there is something fundamentally wrong, and if nothing else, that company doesn't deserve your business. Because in such circumstances, that would mean they deliberately sold an inferior product to you to try and prevent people from pirating it. But since they failed at preventing that anyway, it just means they knowingly sold you an inferior product to keep investors happy.

Make up any bulltrout analogy or misinterpret my argument anyway you please, but my point stands: any company which knowingly sells you an inferior product doesn't deserve your business, and I have no sympathy for them when their game gets cracked and anyone can play it in the way it should have been released to begin with.

And in the case of Simcity that's exactly what EA did: they sold a product they knew wasn't going to be up to snuff. Jim Sterling just recently did a video on the whole debacle which makes the point quite clear in fact. Because some people look at the Simcity release and defend it saying things like "oh, well we knew it was going to have some server problems at launch." And we did. Anyone with half a brain who has seen games release with major always online components like this has seen this happen repeatedly. And that includes EA. Yet they still put it out there without the net code being up to snuff and without enough servers. I find it very unlikely that they didn't see this coming, and yet they were still totally unprepared for it. Sorry, but there is no excuse for selling a troutty product to consumers, and saying you'll make it better at some indeterminate time in the future doesn't make it okay.

The last thing companies that release titles like this deserve is to be paid for it. Whether that means simply not buying it or pirating it, I could care less. The end result to their bottom line is the same. But perhaps the biggest travesty in all of this is that in the long run this might still be a financial success for EA, and the next time they release a game, the majority of people will simply forget this whole mess and jump in with both feet again.

Oh, absolutely. I completely agree that EA doesn't deserve our business. If I was talking to EA, I'd be pointing out that if a single person spending a few weeks or a few days with reverse engineered, unfamiliar code can produce a product that runs better than their mutlimillion dollar project involving thousands of workers, they may need to rethink their lives.

I am not, at all, advocating giving EA money.

I'm simply not advocating pirating their products. SimCity is a poor, buggy, extremely broken game produced by a heartless corporation. Don't buy it, by any means.

However, since you don't buy it, you shouldn't be playing it, and that's where the analogy fits. Regardless of how bad a product they release, regardless of what insane restrictions they put on it, it's their property to do with as they please. If I did release a book which required you to be standing up, in an unlit room on Sunday in order to read it, would any of you read it? Would you even bother to find a pirated copy?

I don't agree with their practices, and I don't want them to be rewarded for them. I don't want them to make any money off this game (or any other they release, for that matter). But I still feel that as long as it is their product, they are entitled to monetary compensation from those who buy/use it. If you did buy it, and it doesn't work, by all means, take them to court, or crack/pirate it until you get what you paid for.

But if you haven't paid for the product, you don't get to play it. Otherwise it's theft. It's why we have copyright laws, heck, it's the basis for pretty much all property laws we have. It's not yours. It's not the worlds, it's not the guy who hacks it, it's EA's. They own it, and they can do what they want with it.

Ever anti-piracy feature I've seen in games can be traced back directly to people pirating the game to play it without paying for it. I've seen them all my life, from passwords from the original Civilization's manual to the always-online-DRM that is plaguing current releases. If people didn't pirate these games, these features would be unnecessary.


It's a game. You want to play it. You guys love SimCity and you want to see another installment of it. That's wonderful, and I understand that. But it's not your game unless you pay for it. It's EA's. Hackers may make a better version, and there have been games in the past that have been nigh-unplayable without unofficial patches. But you should still buy the game if you're going to play it, or you're just hurting the industry.

Electronic technology has pushed far beyond the bounds of the law, and it's been in a legal grey area for a long time. The legality of EULA's is largely ambiguous. The rights to resell or return digital property is up in the air. The ability of companies to hamper promised services with thinks like these DRMs is still questionable. These laws are being written and shaped by our actions, as we go forward. When companies can simply point to hundreds of thousands of people pirating their property, it doesn't make our claims of their crippling services look any better.

I like my property to be my property. I don't want DRM or always-online requirements in my games. I don't want companies to be allowed to void accounts and services at a whim. And I don't endorse or agree with behaviour that strengthens their positions. Clearly, if people are pirating their property, steps need to be taken to stop that, and the law will (and should) side with that.

A pirate is a thief. Until and unless you pay for the game, you're stealing it from EA. Sure, EA crippled the game, made it virtually unplayable, and has tormented and harassed users of their services (users who should file for harassment, denial of service, and fraud charges against EA, by the way). But SimCity is still their property. Pay for it or don't play it.



There's got to be an indie developer out there making a similar game. Fund them and hit them up for a SimCity style game. Or go back and play the old ones, or find a similar genre. But don't steal it.