Shattered Timelines is here?

General GTG General Discussion
41

I think now were talking about 2 different things - or at least I percieve it now

 

1) Always Online being anti consumer

 

2) Not being able to play the game, being anti consumer

 

now these /sound/ like the same thing, but when you get down to it if the launch went off without a hitch, and the servers were never down, is having no offline mode a drawback? Only for a few people at a time, for reasons completely beyond EA/Maxis control. 

 

I agree that not being able to play the game you paid for is a bad thing. Especially given the current issue with the SimCity servers, where it appears a majority of players have not been able to play for more than a few hours at a time. The failure on EA/Maxis to be able to provide proper server access is inhereintly a bad for consumer, bad for business thing.

 

But in a hypothetical perfect model, i do not find that the always online requirement is a bad thing. I understand not being able to play it on a flight or when your internet goes down, but these are things beyond EA/Maxis control - in fact, you could say its like a 'recomended uses' - its against the warning to use a toaster to heat your clothes up (extreme example, but you get what I'm saying) and in this case, its EA/Maxis desire that this game only be used while playing online. That does not make it a bad business practice, that makes it a choice to restrict how their product can be used. Thats entirely within their purview, and we as gamer consumers agree to it when we agree to the ToS that everyone clicks through to get to the game.

 

Now, the other aspect - By not saying if its right or wrong i inherently say its right, i disagree. Im saying I do not have enough information to decide if its right or wrong - You have your /opinion/  that this is a wrong practice but is it wrong or is it not is a subjective thing - And I personally do not have enough information to make that call. I feel that the hypothetical perfect ideal of Always Online games is not inhereintly wrong. I feel the execution of many of the games that do this just might be.

42

You are correct that always online and not being able to play the game are two separate things. It's fair to say that I have been indulging in some crosstalk between the two, and I apologize for my imprecision. The reason I've been speaking this way is because the latter is a predictable result of the former. For one, these sorts of launch server issues are constant and predictable. For another there will definitionally be more times when the game is inaccessible under an always online model than one with an offline option.

Hypothetical perfect scenarios can be misleading. In hypothetical perfect scenarios nothing breaks and nothing ever goes wrong. Those are precisely the points where always online models are the most problematic because their faults enhance and are enhanced by other things going wrong. You might as well say that nuclear power is strictly better than other forms of power because in a hypothetical perfect scenario Fukushima never happens. Any impressions you get from this sort of hypothetical, while potentially useful, must be tempered with reality. As long as the servers are perfect, and your internet service is perfect, and the company's continued support of the game's servers is perfect, and you never want to play the game on a laptop away from home, then it makes little difference. But when those things start breaking down, always online models make your existing problems much worse.

Your last paragraph threw me for a loop. Why are you defending them if you don't agree with them? If I were arguing that Sim City is awesome and the haters are dead wrong how would you respond? If it's just a devil's advocate thing I totally get it. I do that too, and this debate has been enjoyable either way. If you're ambivalent about it and just kind of arguing towards the middle I get that too. Sometimes when I don't know what I think about a topic I will argue just because it improves my understanding and helps hone my own opinion. But if you can understand from my perspective you've been consistently arguing in favor of and in defense of these practices. Even if you maybe don't agree with it 100%, you've been taking their side in this debate.

I half agree that it's subjective. There is a subjective component, but there's also an objective component. This is why moral and ethical debates are so tricky, becuase there are underlying conceptions that we share but there's also a lot of wiggle room for subjective interpretation. Even if it were purely subjective though, that doesn't mean that we can't have a discussion about it. I like Skrillex. That's purely subjective, but I could give you a reasoned explanation for why I feel this way, and we could have a debate about the merits and faults of his music and his public persona. The more subjective the topic, the less likely we are to be able to reach a consensus. Maybe that's the case here and if we reach an impasse I'm fully willing to call it off amicably. But that doesn't make the discussion any less valuable.

43

Even a close to perfect situation - where the servers are up 90% of the time, and my internet connection is just as normal (that is, down for a few hours once a month or so) then I would still say its acceptable, and I would still say that is the price for playing this game - and for the purpose of this disucssion, i still feel is a good thing and not necessarily a bad thing - The developers have made that choice to make their product available this way.

 

Again, there is a cross over here - Consumers expect to be able to do whatever they want with games, while developers are trying to provide the product they want, under the circumstances they want - its a bad situtation. You dont go into best buy and expect your dryer to do your dishes. But we expect games to be played in anyway /we/ want them to be played, not how the developers intended.  This is i think the most important point here - You expect to be able to play a game anytime you want, after youve purchased it, in anyway you want. Its software, its mutable, and its purpse can be adapted and changed by a few lines of code, so the impression is that you can use it however you want. However, we dont expect that of our washer (hardware is not mutable, to say) so why do we expect it of a (so called) finished software product? The designers have said 'This is our intened way for you to play this game' - we accept that from Maytag when they tell us 'this is how you are intended to use our device' but we're not supposed to accept it from Maxis/EA?

 

I dont disagree with them (as you have read my last paragraph) - i disagree with the execution (leading to bad launch days, such as D3, SimCity) but I /do/ agree with the always online concept . This is their product, they can present it to us however they would like to - see my above paragraph. I am defending them against an interent culture that believes it has the right to dictate how a programers game will be used. Now, in todays culture we /do/ have a lot of those - Crowd sourced games, open source games, crowd directed DLCs and so on. Do not forget the power of the crowd - the power of the crowd changed Mass Effects ending. The power of the Crowd provided the money for Shattered Timelines far beyond any expectation. Its a powerful tool. I disagree that it should use that power everywhere. I disagree that they should be able to force a bigbox company like EA/Maxis to create a game it doesnt want to create. The SimCity creators want realistic, close to the world city simulation as they can make. No city exists in a bubble, and randomly generated 'area statistics' are nothing but random noise to a simulation (as told by the developers) and they want such information to come from other players, in a true multicity world environment. So they have made this call. I defend their right to do so, and defend their right to say 'this product is ours and this is how we intend it to be used' - i denounce the crowds rule to say they want to wash dishes in their dryer.

This isnt entirely realistic - after all, the crowd still pays the bills at Maxis/EA - but i disagree with its treatment of the company because of the sense of entitlement that the crowd has on its right to do whatever it pleases.

And I thank you too for this conversation - its helped me define what I am really disliking about all the flames going up over the SimCity launch, and other always online games. The sense of /entitlement/ that they have the right to dictate to developers who want to make their game, their way, simply because they play it. Smart developers will listen to the crowd, yes, but that doesnt mean they /have/ to nor does it mean that loudly shouting to the internet is going to make such people any less obnoxious for that sense of entitlement that they have the right to dicatate how an artist creats his work (And this is not directed at you, its a general 'crowd' issue. )

44

Ooh, I'm actually really happy you brought up Mass Effect 3's ending. I caught a lot of flak for defending Bioware (and by extension EA) when that was happening. It wasn't the greatest ending, but it certainly didn't deserve anywhere near the amount of derision it got. I think a lot of the outcry stemmed from a gross misunderstanding of what they were trying to do in that series. Shepard was never your character, you never had control of his arc or his personality. Shapared was precisely two characters: Renegade Shepard and Paragon Shepard and they exist in quantum equilibrium. You make zero choices as a player, all you do is observe Shepard and thereby lock him into one of those characters in that moment. It was never about player control, and Shepard was never yours. The ending supported that and even upped the stakes by adding a THIRD OPTION (heretofore unheard of in the series).

Also, I was kind of bitter when they said they would "change" the ending becuase dangit it's their story. They get to write the story they want to. But then the execution of that was actually really good. They didn't change the ending they just fleshed it out a little bit. I was relieved that they didn't compromise their vision, even if that vision was in some ways flawed. I can definitely sympathize with how you feel here because I felt like there were a lot of players who seemed like they felt entitled to precisely the ending they wanted, regardless of the story Bioware's team of writers wanted to tell.

On the other hand, I feel like this situation is different. Feeling entitled to a game that actually functions several days after release is actually pretty reasonable. If Sim City was a washer that didn't work right after you bought it, you could return it for a refund without resorting to reporting it to your credit card as fraud and therefore losing access to your Origin account. This is why the washer analogy is flawed. The company controls your interaction with the machine by withholding service if you misuse it and it fails. You are still physically able to misuse it, you simply accept the risk that you'll damage it and won't be able to get it repaired.

But Sim City isn't actually a product that you purchase. You're paying an upfront fee to get access to a service. There are probably a lot of people who didn't understand that distinction because EA made it a point not to highlight it. It's not in their interest to be transparent about this, because once you've given them your money you have no recourse. It'll screw them long term because it kills consumer confidence, but for this release at least it's a bunch of cash in their pockets.

I respect Maxis' right to make the game they want to make. However, I find it difficult to believe that's what truly motivated the always online model here. One reason is that EA has deactivated some of the online functionality to reduce server load. If they were commited to a specific vision they wouldn't sacrifice it like that. The other reason is that EA has plausible ulterior motives for the server-based model. Neither of these is true with ME3's ending. They stand to potentially gain a lot, at least in the short term, by forcing it to be always online regardless of the developer's vision. We have no way of knowing whether this is truly what Maxis wanted for their game or if it was compromised to EA in the first place, so I'm not inclined to defend it on the grounds that it's what they wanted for their game.

The other side of that coin is that tightly controlling what players can do with your game is actually a really shortsighted way to design games. Enabling your players to have fun with your game is good design. Telling your players they have to do it a certain way is not. One really good way to play Absolute Zero is to have him recklessly nuke himself to deal damage really fast, and it seems to be Christopher's preferred way to play him. But if he was designed such that healtanking was impossible, he would be a much less interesting character to play.

Another way to look at it is I don't like it when writers tell people how to interpret their books. They have an absolute right to write the book they want to write. But then as a reader I have a right to come to my own understanding of it. Telling me I'm wrong because your book means a certain thing to me that it doesn't mean to you is lame. The weird thing about video games is that there's room for crossover there. I believe in their right to make the game they want to make. On the other hand I also think that tightly controlling the way I interact with the game is generally unwise. And trying to control the way I interact with the game because it serves a profit motive and not because it serves your vision of the game is bad.

45

Ah, but this loops right back around to earlier discussion points.

 

1) Maxis vision for an always online model is perfectly fine -  to quote you ' Feeling entitled to a game that actually functions several days after release is actually pretty reasonable. ' - Yes, yes it is! However, the sense of entitlement I was speaking of was not in related to what has happened, but what would have happened had the release gone without a hitch. I completely agree that a bad release (and sim cities was worse than most!) is not a good thing, and we /are/ entitled to have aproduct available when its released. I would not have minded waiting anothe rmonth or 2 for a final product. One reason I always like Blizzard. Their policy of 'Its done when its done' has served them well, and for the most part been adhered too. But what I was speaking against was that of players believing that, bad releases non withstanding, they can do whatever they want with a piece of software.

So my washer machine anology still holds true, in the sense that the overall purpose of the product is still the same. Now if Maytag was selling washers that needed a special kind of water hook up and they agreed to provide it and then couldnt on the day of release, then we'd be in a similiar situation.

 

2) Again, to reference an earlier post, I do not feel there is a difference (or soon there will not be a difference) between a Product and a Service - you have a good argument in that, but to my ears its going to fall short because i see the line between such blurred to the point of indistinction already. Yes, SimCity is a service, given how they have chosen to run it. But in my view, Product vrs Service is quickly becoming the same thing - you buy something, and you get something for a time period down the road as well. Its becoming one thing. In both games, and hte real world - Best Buy tech support, warrenties that include being able to call in for tech support, road side assitance when you buy a car, ect. The world is quickly loosing the distinction.

 

3) Services disabled - Ah, but this loops back to point 1 - It /is/ perfectly reasonable to be able to expect to play a game once its released. In trying to meet that they disable non critical to the core of their game functions - theyve disabled achievements, leaderboards, and challenges - all things that have nothing to do with their game, but eveyrtime they ping they put load on the server. They also disabled cheeta speed, and my only guess i think is because of the majority of the simulation being done server side.

 

4) Controling a game - I too believe that letting a game be open and used however a player wants is a good thing. If Skyrim had come with ModAPI from the start, man that owuld have been the coupdetat of gaming. However! I fully defend the right of a developer to control how they want the game to be played. They have a mission, a belief, and a desire to show something, and if they feel that it is best to restrict usage to a certain method to do what they want to do , then I give them my 100% support for that. I beleive that its always better to let players experiment - the crowd, as much as i hate its sense of entitlement, can do some amazing things - but its still their right for their product to do with it as they see fit, and not to 

 

And i think we're reaching an end to the debate, because now we're looping back around into already discussed talking points. :P 

And remember, the true point to a debate is never to really persuade the other person in it - becaues the two people usually have very firm believes. Its to sway those listening one way or another... ;)

46

As one of those listening, my opinion (cautiously on the side of Cosmonaut) remains unswayed, but I've gained a lot of understanding of the situation and it's been lovely to see an intelligent, civillised debate here :D

47

As a side note - a model of a good release that depends on servers would be Star Wars The Old Republic Mmo. depending on when you pre ordered, you got to start into the game early, anywhere from a few days to a week in advance. This really stretched out the influx of people heading onto their servers and excepting for a few queues on official launch day (and those weren’t any longer than 20mins or so) it went off perfectly.

which in itself defends your point that you can provide an excellent launch day and it’s not above consumers to expect it. which I agree with. But it also defends my point, in a way, that should simcity have done something similar than the cry for offline play and no drm would be a true sense of entitlement and unwarranted. does the bad launch give that cry some weight and possibly justification? In a way, yes. However, I still argue the point that maxis is allowed to develop the game the way they want, present it and expect us to play in that way. Just because an event happened that gives credence to the naysayers, doesn’t mean that in the end, once such hiccups and bugs have been worked out and things are running the way they were intended to run, that those naysayers are any more correct then they were in the first place.

48

Have to agree with Meerkat. I have been reading this discussion as it has progressed and it has been so refreshing to see such a civilized exchange of ideas on the Internet from two people who obviously hold different points of view. 

 

49

I'm certainly not believing that my side is the popular one, or an easy to accept one - or even that my passioned arguments will sway many people (though I can hope) - fact is we live in a world where entitlment on what you want to do with what you have (be that a car, a computer game, or a house, or whatever) is expected that once money changes hands its yours to do as you please. For the most part thats true. I can wish it was elsewise for the sake of the good people who make games that recieve all this flack,

 

 

On a side note, EA anounced today that its giving a free origins game to anyone who has bought SimCity up to this point, in a partial attempt to make up for the very crappy launch, and that they admit 'The amount of servers we had was just plain dumb' - aparently the beta didnt show anywhere near this amount of numbers that they got in their opening days. As I read, ove 700,000 cities were founded in the opening 12 hours.

 

given the vocal amount of people who couldnt get in... thats an astounding number of people.

50

The EA mess has come up on another forum I visit, and on there it's been mentioned how apparently EA said that people are free to request a refund if they're unhappy with how the new SimCity game has turned out. In the same post, there was a link to a chat log in which someone attempted exactly that - asking an EA help person for a refund. Turns out, apparently, that while you can request a refund, it isn't in their policy to actually let you have one. And apparently you can get your Origin (presumably some sub-company of EA?) account banned if you attempt to pursue the matter.

51

origin is a service via EA that is like Steam (when steam was only a few years old) - it is there attempt to get a piece of the online game distribution market. Its not so bad, but no where near the popularity of steam.

 

As for requesting a refund/not getting one - i always am warry of chat logs. I dont know if any of you MUSH, but I do and there is a site called WORA... which is famous for showing the worse of the MUSHing world, and chat logs are frequent there... and frequently edited to show only what a person wnats them to see.

52

No, I've never heard of either MUSH or WORA.

53

i doubted so :P Anyways those 'posts' were supposedly debunked by the Maxis project Director, Lucy, in her twitter interview the other night. Didnt see one way or another, but apparently she completely denied that

54

Your Maytag analogy actually works pretty well with respect to the special water hookups. I would be pissed at Maytag for eschewing the standard hookups and requiring special Maytag-branded ones as well. There the bald profit motive is clear. For one there's no intersection of art and craft so you can't chalk it up to artistic vision. For another the processes at work are simple enough that we can all understand exactly what they're trying to do: charge you for an extra thing that they themselves get to tightly control.

I agree this is close to its end, but it has been fun. What it really comes down to is you believe that they required an online connection because that's the way they wanted to make their game, and I believe they did so because they're greedy and shortsighted. There's not really a lot to say past that anymore.

About the chat log, that has been mostly debunked. The main implication of that log was that you'd get your account banned if you disputed the charge with your credit card, not that you'd get banned if you asked for a refund. Last I heard, they refuse all refunds on digital copies, despite publicly offering refunds in their apology. Also, EA has since claimed that they will not ban your account for disputing the charge with your credit card. I can give them the benefit of the doubt since I haven't acutally heard any reports of accounts getting banned for disputing the charges. It's possible the log was falsified, but it's also possible that one CS rep strayed from the actual policy, and it's also possible that EA's being really coy about their wording when claiming they won't ban you for disputing the charge as I haven't seen it response verbatim.

55

its far more likely the person was demanding and beligerant with the rep, and was warned not to be, with consequences up to and including banning their origins account... they probably just left those bits out of the log. I feel really bad for all the customer service reps who had to man the phones. 

 

On another note, a week later now and ive had no problems logging in for the last few days. Great gameplay, having a blast.

56

Interesting article with some insider info about what the servers are actually doing: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/12/simcity-server-not-necessary

57

http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/simcity-update-straight-answers-from-lucy

 

even more interesting

 

So,in the end, my argument stands strong and true - I support the right of developers to make the game they want to make. its their work, their art, their creation, and I have nothing against them doing so.

58

Are you unconcerned that they have flat-out lied at times throughout this process?

A year ago they were claiming that you would only need to connect once when you start the game. Still onerous, but if they would only require you to connect at the beginning then contant feeds of info from other cities would not be strictly necessary for their vision of the game. Now they are claiming it was conceived as always-on. Either this is a lie, or their description of the game's DRM was a lie in the past.

Even more damningly, they were claiming up until a couple days ago that a significant amount of the simulation is done server-side. This is false: you can play for upwards of 20 minutes with no noticeable problems. It connects to the server only for the multiplayer component. Their claim that GlassBox requires server-side processing to function was a lie.

The funny thing is if they had just called this Sim City Online and ACTUALLY launched it as an MMO (free-to-play, microtransaction-based if they're smart) this would not be a problem. The problem is I feel like they tried to dupe us, and I trust them even less than I did before this started.

59

the development of a game is a fluid monster - what was stated a year ago has no bearing on what the finished progress is.

 

What they were stating a few days ago, about the calculations... thats PR speak bud. Signifigant calculations could mean whatever. The players took it to mean simulation. They obviousl occluded themselves a little bit to make it look better for them, but everyone does that. All the aspects that they wrote about happening online are signifigant amount of calculations.

 

Seriously - companies do that all the time. Is it right? No - do I mind? No because i expect it. They came clean, and thats enough for me. 

 

as for being an MMO from the start - yeah that would have stopped a lot of it. But you know what? I read between the lines that it was basically simcity the mmo. :p

60

I understand that development changes. It's not so much that it's different now, it's that they're still trying to claim that it was conceived as an always connected game and that was their vision for the game from the beginning. This cannot be true. They didn't come clean at all because they are still pressing this despite its blatant falsehood.

Also, the thing with the servers oversteps the bounds of PR speak. The post on the blog that you linked is PR speak. As far as we know they're not saying anything that's flat-out false, but they're also clearly trying to spin it to put it in the best possible light. I expect that. PR speak includes trying to turn weaknesses into strengths, playing up strengths, and downplaying weaknesses. It does not extend protection to complete fabrications and falsehoods. They went beyond saying a significant amount of calculations happen server-side. They actually stated that the game offloads processing from the local computer to the cloud, and they specified that this extends to core simulation as something separate from the economics and the trading. That was a lie. They talked about it with enough specificity that you can't weasel out of it and say that they didn't TECHNICALLY lie, they just spoke in a blatantly manipulative way. They actually lied.

Their marketing message is not one of contrition. They did not come clean, they got busted. And still, they're repeating the same talking points as before but with the point about cloud processing removed, hoping that we don't notice and that we'll believe this was their line all along. A week ago they were saying they couldn't make an offline mode right now, even if they wanted to. Now they say they can, but refuse to because it's not in line with their vision. There's no "I'm sorry we lied to you," no coming clean. Just relentless spin.

Do I expect corporations to lie to me? Sadly, yes. However, that doesn't mean I need to continue to support them and defend them when they think they can play me for a fool. You admit that it's wrong, but you're uninterested in holding them accountable? I don't understand this position.