Maxis Insider Says Taking SimCity Offline Not Too Difficult

[Guest]

According to a Maxis insider, taking SimCity offline isn't quite as difficult as Maxis and EA have made it out to be.

Maxis Insider Says Taking SimCity Offline Not Too Difficult : Read more

 

[MaXimus421]

Must be Obvious Day at Camp Stupid. *rolls eyes*

 

[rantoc]

Ofc not, all it does currently is to handle the save files for singleplayer... ty EA for your pooooooor choice in drm, hope it bite the company in the ass - HARD!

 

[mauller07]

Toms is behind, the entire simulation runs offline and a modder has activated debug mode to show that what ea is sprouting is just FUD.

http://uk.gamespot.com/news/modders-find-way-to-play-simcity-offline-6405296

 

[d_kuhn]

Their servers can't handle game saving and 'social' crap... how exactly are they going to perform realtime game computation. Sounds like another of those "we can't raise the borderlands 2 level cap without breaking the game" throwaway statements.

 

[Chairman Ray]

If their servers are only saving games and doing minor message routing, how in the heck did they get overflooded on the first day?

 

[shikamaru31789]

Just cave in to our demands already EA. I want to play this game but I won't be buying it until I can play it offline.

 

[dextermat]

The great thing about the internet and forum is this: companies cannot BS as much as they want to and have to comply if they want to make profit !!!!

Way to go normal people !

 

[RADIO_ACTIVE]

This video shows someone in debug mode enjoy! Shows that changes can be made fairly easy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Bmce9oIxJag

 

[janetonly42]

On another site I read EA said they had to keep constant online connection running for single players so their servers could do complex calculations. This lying hack at EA has a job waiting for him in the Obama regime. Last time I checked Sim City is played on a computer and that is what computers are really good at.

 

[pxl9190]

anyone with a BS degree in computer science, any sort of engineering, or even a high school kid who know how to program, could tell this "always on connnection needed for single player" is total BS.

These people amounts to at least 1/3 of the simcity's target audience. For EA to claim otherwise is an insult to the technical intelligence of the gaming community.

 

[wildkitten]

[citation][nom]Chairman Ray[/nom]If their servers are only saving games and doing minor message routing, how in the heck did they get overflooded on the first day?[/citation]
Because it's not what the server are doing but rather the sheer number of people accessing it. Regardless of what the server has to do for the game, it's still switching from user to user.

Now one thing about it, this employee took a major risk. Odds are he/she would get fired for saying something so contradictory that their bosses are saying UNLESS this was meant to float the idea that a single player offline patch may be in the works. I'm not holding my breath, but I could easily see the Maxis people, especially Will Wright, applying pressure of such a thing.

 

[bigdragon]

What I find really interesting is that a single city could easily span an entire region now that we've seen what debug mode is capable of doing. THAT"S the game I want to play! Huge maps, huge cities, full access to highway and rail networks, and so on. That's the game they should have made. It looks like SimCity 5 could have easily been a 3D version of SimCity 3000 Unlimited in which they could have simply sold expansion content on top of. Instead they took the DRM to the extreme. Tons of people today are reporting that they are getting errors about not owning content found in regions. What a mess. EA demonstrates again how to screw things up.

 

[ibjeepr]

I could have told you that. Whlie playing, it is constantly telling me that the connection to the server has been lost, but it never stops me from playing. Obviously the calculations are being done by my PC, not the server.

 

[icepick314]

there is an article and video that a modder changed timeout on the game from 20 minutes to even longer so he was able to play it offline indefinitely...

http://www.geek.com/articles/games/modder-proves-simcity-can-run-offline-indefinitely-20130314/

yeah EA and Maxis added online for DRM ONLY and no significant calculations are done on the server like they said...

 

[hate machine]

[citation][nom]mauller07[/nom]Toms is behind, the entire simulation runs offline and a modder has activated debug mode to show that what ea is sprouting is just FUD.http://uk.gamespot.com/news/modder [...] ne-6405296[/citation]

EA is spouting Fear Uncertainty and Doom?

 

[hate machine]

[citation][nom]Chairman Ray[/nom]If their servers are only saving games and doing minor message routing, how in the heck did they get overflooded on the first day?[/citation]

They are cheap and spent the least amount of money possible to get their farm going. Even then they waited quite a while to upscale due to demand which just shows you they aren't willing to put anymore money in besides the cost of bandwidth. I would even be willing to wager they didn't scale up server operations much but instead relied on less people hammering it and disgruntled people giving up and claimed that the lower usage was "increased capacity".

 

[uuicked]

Simply put, it is to control video game piracy. Anyone who doesn't see that is blind

 

[shafe88]

[citation][nom]ibjeepr[/nom]I could have told you that. Whlie playing, it is constantly telling me that the connection to the server has been lost, but it never stops me from playing. Obviously the calculations are being done by my PC, not the server.[/citation]See right their is some proof you can play without being connected to the server/internet. The only problem is they can't, the problem is they don't want to.

 

[noblerabbit]

Sin City

 

[shafe88]

[citation][nom]uuicked[/nom]Simply put, it is to control video game piracy. Anyone who doesn't see that is blind[/citation]It's not that people don't see it, people just see it as a stupid way of controlling piracy.

 

[ddpruitt]

[citation][nom]Chairman Ray[/nom]If their servers are only saving games and doing minor message routing, how in the heck did they get overflooded on the first day?[/citation]

Too few servers, no load balancing, and poorly configured systems. They went the cheap route. For whatever reason EA doesn't know how to properly configure servers or set up a proper dynamic load balancing system across all of it's services.

 

[sot010174]

What pisses me the most as a paying customer: I have to put up with this and everyone torrenting the pirated version most probably won't encounter any nags.

 

[amoralman]

So... always-online prevents cheating? WTF do I care if Joe cheats in his single player game?!?! Man I can't wait for this trend to be over. As soon as people realize that once the company goes bankrupt, is sold, or the servers are not profitable anymore, they will just shut them down and you will not be able to play your game. Ever. How does this make sense in single player? Really... It beats me how people can buy these games anyways.

 

[tomfreak]

People need to stop buying these kind DRM and complain at the login queue. Didnt Diablo 3 thought u anything? why still wanna jump in and pre-order & expect it to run flawlessly? Are these guy retard?