How to Fuck Up a Beloved Franchise

[mjrpes]

Well done EA, well done.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/s ... -for-this/

[Whiskey 7]

Good read

Like this bit

Peter: Damn. My schools are overfull. So now my nuclear power plant is being run by morons. Which means it might blow up. Shit. Melted down.
Fucking hell, it's going to blow up again.
I don't understand. They have stopped enrolling in high school. So my education level is falling. So my nuclear power station keeps blowing up. But nothing is telling me WHY they're not enrolled at school. I have plenty of school buses. Well placed bus stops.
Man. Once things start going wrong, they go seriously wrong.

[MKJ]

third day now; servers down yet again.
http://kotaku.com/5988784/hope-you-were ... ty-tonight

[Eraser]

Are they seriously requiring people to log in to play a single player game? Or are the online features an integral part of the gameplay?

[Transient]

Cities are stored on the EA cloud; you have to ping their servers to launch the game, load saves, or change regions.

[MKJ]

that and online features are an integral part of the gameplay.
griefercity.

[GONNAFISTYA]

I've been saying for years that City Life is a nicer looking and better balanced game, particularly with managing the different society classes. There's no zombie invasions or meteorite strikes, but it's much better looking and more free-form city planning than SimCity ever was. And it comes with a building editor to create your own skyscrapers with the ability to tweak every small detail about it, including who can work/live there.

[MKJ]

http://www.jonathancresswell.co.uk/2013 ... w-simcity/
olo

[Eraser]

rofl, look at the dumbwits posting that the review doesn't load for them

[Captain]

excellent

[Don Carlos]

[plained]

Kentucky fried chicken used to be good and now its total shit!

[GONNAFISTYA]

lol

[mjrpes]

When amazon stops selling your product you know you have fucked up in some fundamental way

http://www.geek.com/articles/games/foll ... y-2013037/

LOL

[Transient]

EB Games in Australia is accepting refunds for SimCity. So much for that Beta stress testing they did.

I feel bad for Maxis.

[Captain]

lol yeah, Will Wright must really be having a bad time with his millions of dollars.

[MKJ]

Lol, EA now disabled some online game features in hopes of relieving the servers of stress.
Hey guys this shit is not working, let's turn off some advertised options and tell the public they were not meant to be in the final code anyway.

[mjrpes]

Me 10 years ago:

http://www.simphoni.net/forums/lofivers ... t4135.html

What was once a joke

[MKJ]

(fyi, the autoroad feature was something you could always turn off.. holding shift or ctrl while zoning I tihnk. noobs mad)

[Ryoki]

Lols, friend of mine has been talking about how he was going to play the shit out of the new Sim City for the last couple of months - can't wait to hear his lengthy bitter complaints

[Transient]

Lol, EA now disabled some online game features in hopes of relieving the servers of stress.
Hey guys this shit is not working, let's turn off some advertised options and tell the public they were not meant to be in the final code anyway.

Which includes achievements, leaderboards, and... the fastest of the 3 speed settings? WTF?

Also, this: http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/03/08/ ... online-drm

[MKJ]

well at least something good will come out of this.

hey remember when EA slagged off Blizzard for the Diablo3 launch debacle? lollings

[Don Carlos]

Yeah fingers crossed other publishers and developers make sure all the games they produce can be played offline

[Eraser]

lol, and here's EA Korea's community manager making things worse:

[...]a commenter wrote, "Asia has one of the highest populations. Why aren't there any servers?"

The EA Korea Facebook manager replied: "There is a lot of piracy in Asia, so it would be difficult for the time being."

This, of course, set Korean gamers off.

The EA rep has apologized for the comments, saying this was just an unfortunate result of trying to be more proactive as Facebook users were complaining about the lack of communication from EA.

What's more, the Facebook page manager admitted ignorance on how EA's Origin service worked

What a mong

http://kotaku.com/5989385/why-south-kor ... ut-simcity

[obsidian]

I really feel sorry for Maxis, they're going to lose a shitton of money (maybe even land in financial trouble) because their publisher are complete morons.

My hope is that this is the end of traditional video game publishing companies. With digital distribution, alternative solutions might prove more valuable: self publishing, crowd funding, etc.