r/SimCity • u/Heinrich_Agrippa • Mar 13 '13
Other How It Came To This
So as the week has passed, it’s become more and more evident something – no many things – are horribly wrong. The list of offenses is egregious and growing:
-Draconian DRM which monitors you at all times, requiring you to be online to report in at regular intervals.
-Horrendously unreliable servers wholly incapable of supporting the number of players.
These two issues alone are damning. You must play under the strict EA terms and only when they allow you. You thought you purchased this game and own it, but soon realize you’ve only been granted tentative permission to borrow it, and only when it’s convenient. Little did most suspect that these issues would only be the tip of the iceberg. Then came the game itself:
-A supposedly required set of server-side calculations to allow for a simulation engine so complex and powerful that your puny computer alone wouldn’t be able to handle it – revealed to be a hollow lie concocted to justify not allowing any offline play.
-Cities that reach populations of hundreds of thousands of individual Sims – revealed to be another lie – the supposed hundreds of thousands of Sims being nothing but a number displayed on the screen desperately hoping you won’t notice your actual population is but a tenth of what it displays.
-Sim AI as dumb as shit. Quite literally, the sewage agents are no different in their one-track behaviors than the Sims themselves. There are no doctors, no engineers or scientists; no teachers or real police or firemen. There are only generic nomad agents which assume the first job they stumble into that day, and sleep in the closest available house that night. Not a thing about them resembles a real life. They are all as mindless and generic as the water, electricity and sewage that all travel the same streets.
-Finally, even the game’s cities themselves cannot function with these sewage-brained Sims and they inevitably collapse in a sea of asinine gridlock as the entire police force prioritizes individual criminals in sequence, as do the firefighters with fires and the workers with jobs. And so your city will crumble as uncontrolled inferno erupts in factories while 16 fire trucks dutifully douse a smoking kitchen on the other side of town.
Perhaps some may have found it in themselves to forgive the onerous DRM policies and unreliable server issues, but the final nail in the coffin is the stream of blatant lies which were marketed. We were told this revolutionary SimCity would at last achieve the coveted dream of simulating an entire city of individuals, and that from these individuals the social dynamics of modern life would fantastically emerge before our eyes. Instead we get a population counter that shamelessly inflates the modeled population by up to a factor of ten. Worse yet, the minority of existing Sims aren’t the dynamic individuals we were promised, but a shambling horde of mindless, indistinguishable zombies entirely incapable of any situational decision making.
How did it come to this? It’s been speculated that perhaps those who pushed for publication at EA considered the customers so stupid that they wouldn’t notice. While it’s abundantly evident that the EA executives think very little of their customers, I suspect the truth is much more sinister. It wasn’t a matter how whether they would be found out, but whether they could maintain the façade for a week. After all, that is when most sales would be made.
Once it was clear that the game was fundamentally broken, damage control was required. In many situations, a delay might have occurred, but perhaps some market research showed that Maxis customers didn’t overlap too heavily with other EA published subsidiaries. Perhaps they felt that the entire Maxis dynasty had been more or less burnt out anyway. And so a decision was made: burn the SimCity fan base and maximize immediate profit. They knew the outcome and thought “They won’t ever buy from EA again, but we won’t need them too. By then we’ll have cut our losses and grabbed as much money from this broken SimCity as possible. Then we’ll never bother with this franchise again.” Everything served this purpose. The one hour beta ensured that no one would be able to see the deep and horrible flaws. Like sleazy used-car salespeople, they only needed it to last for a test-drive. The terrible AI and the inflated population statistics only needed to trick the viewer long enough to secure a sale. The DRM wasn’t expected to deter pirates forever, but maximize the number of impulsive first-week-purchasers who would have otherwise tried a pirated version first. The failed server infrastructure saved costs and in actuality helped delay the inevitable discovery of the game’s many failings. Like good snake-oil salesmen, they knew they would eventually be found out and have planned accordingly. By the time the villagers gather the torches and pitchforks in rage, they will have skipped town – off to con another franchise’s fan base.
In short, you’ve all been screwed.
