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It has been out for three days, and SimCity is broken. Seriously, unplayably broken. As a long-time fan who's been looking forward to this week for many years, this is a huge, frustrating disappointment. The worst part? The main issue isn't with the game itself, but an entirely unnecessary and completely avoidable always-online Digital Rights Management (DRM) system that's keeping millions of fans from playing the game they paid for, when they were told they'd be able to play it. Here's what the past 10 years of online DRM has taught anybody who's paid the slightest bit of attention.
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Wow. They make it seem like the only reason to have a constant connection is solely for DRM. Obviously, they haven't played the game.
DRM is just a small bonus that adds very little traffic to the games communication. The much larger reason for the constant connection is the multi-city play with people all over the world working on common goals, a.k.a: Great Works. Having multiple people playing the same game means you also need cloud saves to protect the integrity of the game so people just don't hex-edit their way to success.
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Are the multi-city play features interactive with other players?
Do both players have to be online at the same time to interactively build?
or
Is it more like a set of cities in the cloud that you connect to and build at your leisure?
The disappoint in a model like this, is for people that have no interest in playing connected to others and simply want to play offline.
A mix of both worlds would be nice.
Software Engineering is different from the traditional forms of engineering that are bound by the laws of physics. Software Engineering is only bound by the laws of stupidity.
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Paul Watt wrote: Are the multi-city play features interactive with other players?
Yes. You can communicate with everyone else via the regions "Wall".
Paul Watt wrote: Do both players have to be online at the same time to interactively build?
Nope. Everyone, up to 16 people, can be come and go as they please with no ill effects on your part of the game.
Paul Watt wrote: The disappoint in a model like this, is for people that have no interest in
playing connected to others and simply want to play offline.
True, but you can also play up to 16 cities at the same time in the same region. You can have up to 10 games, each in their own region going at once.
But, you'd still have to be connected to the net to play at all. That's the down side...
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It's crazy that such a simple use of network access fails so hard.
The iracing.com racing simulation service has required an internet connection to race from the start - even for practice. There's a DRM angle to it, I'm sure, but the service was built from the ground up to focus on real-time, person-versus-person racing. The iracing folks have had extremely robust network racing code for ages - going back to the Papyrus incarnation of the company (Grand Prix Legends, Nascar Racing). It's not always perfect - I've seen glitches and even dropped connections during races - but it mostly works well. I'm still pretty amazed to be racing wheel-to-wheel with someone half-way around the world.
When your company depends on something, it pays to build it well.
But this is also true: many people try to build software. Not everyone builds it well.
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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In EA's case, they grossly underestimated both capacity at launch and the performance of the backend database servers. They've fixed a bunch of problems with the performance side and have just about doubled the number of servers to handle the high load.
In my huimble opinion, they should have had three times the number of servers up and running on day one and then fixed the performance issues. It would have been a better launch and they could have retired servers as the problems with the code were worked out.
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