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SamIchi

macrumors 68030
Aug 1, 2004
2,716
137
There have been a lot of complaints about this game. The server, and the copious bugs that pop up. It's been over a month since release and no patching. EA screwed up pretty bad. I'll wait till this game hits sub $30.
 

618537

Guest
Sep 21, 2011
79
0
I've been playing this in Parallels since day one. It's a game which has a lot of potential, but equally a lot of bugs - some of which are game breaking. I do feel like I'm currently BETA testing it...

I also feel like the developers aren't interacting with the community enough working to identify the full extent of bugs. However, they say they're reading and working on things.

I'm holding out for patch 2.0 which is due out 'very soon', shall see what the story is then.
 

DP812

macrumors regular
Aug 13, 2009
177
1
Japan
I was really excited about this game when I first heard about it and was griping when I found out the Mac release would be dropping after the Windows.

Man, I have never been so happy to deal with a delayed OSX release. All the complaints and reviews have saved me from wasting $60 on what looks to be an absolutely crappy game.

And to people who are defending EA and always-on DRM, maybe the game works for you now, but what happens when EA decides to stop running the SimCity servers? And they will. They've done it before and there is absolutely zero reason to believe they won't do it again.

What I don't get about the defenders is why are you defending these greedy bastards? EA spits in your face, you smile and respond with, "thank you sir, may I have another?"

I'll stick with SC4. May be a bit buggy, but I can at least play it without worrying about server overloads. And for anyone really curious about SC5, a modder has found a way to run it offline. Won't be long before the piracy crowd takes notice.

Normally I don't condone piracy, but in this case, EA has it coming for making such a shoddy product.
 

618537

Guest
Sep 21, 2011
79
0
Do you have a link to the source of that and any details of what the patch may include?

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9437292.page

Currently In Development

We have an update for you, Mayors. We’re currently working on a number of fixes/improvements in our Development Test environment, the majority of which will be added to our next updates.

Once we’re ready to release these fixes, we’ll update this thread with more details.

In the meantime, we’re also working on improvements on our Public Test Server. You can see these changes right now, so we encourage you to try them out on the Test server. Here’s what’s on it right now:

Updates currently on our Public Test Server:

• Join Region Filter: Results will only show regions with available slots.
• Leaderboards: Leaderboards restored.

Updates currently in our Development Test environment:

What’s New

• Mayors Mansion: Mayor will now drive his fancy cars to work. Mayor will take his helicopter, limo, or sports car if the modules are present.
• Data maps: Now show in their normal color when a color filter is enabled (unless in a colorblind mode)
• HUD: Now color-corrects when in a colorblind mode.

Fixes and Updates
• Cities not Processing/rollbacks: Fix to mitigate the chance of future occurrences of cities not processing and rollbacks.
• Leaderboards: Restoring leaderboards to all servers.
• Invitations: Invitations to join a region should be sent and received more quickly.
• Region Filters: Now sorts regions with available cities to the top
• Tourism: Fixes for unexplained fluctuation of tourists. Tourists more smartly counted on transit.
• Casinos: Casinos tuned so that Gambling will be a more profitable specialty. Players can bulldoze and replace existing casinos to see effects of tuning.
• More Casinos: Raised module limit on Sci-Fi and Sleek Casinos to 6 modules.
• Region Play: Cash gifts can now be received in a bankrupt city.
• Education: Fixed school buses getting stuck at the high school. Existing Schools will fix themselves.
• Education: Fixed school buses picking up students at neighboring cities that didn’t have school bus stops.
• Education: Fix to more accurately track regional student population.
• Education: Fix where kids leaving the school bus stop would teleport to the nearest pedestrian path instead of walking directly into the school.
• Education: University wings now give the proper bonus.
• Recycling: Fix for the Recycling Center where it would sometimes stop working, recycling services will visit other cities.
• Air pollution: Fixed issue where air pollution would appear to come from nowhere. Fix issues where your regional air pollution would be reflected back into your box for a double penalty.
• Fire Service: Fire Trucks don’t clump, dispatch to fires more efficiently.
• Water: Water pumps are now capable of pumping water from rivers at a larger radius so they can take better advantage of the water table in a city.
• Disasters: Cooldown for random disasters: Some players were getting hit too frequently with random disasters, this introduces a cooldown where no random disasters will occur.
• Trade: Fix for trade ports that suddenly stop shipping.
• Transit: Street Cars and Buses go to high volume stops first.
• Transit: A city with residents and public transit will now provide the accurate amount of workers and shoppers to its neighbors.
• Transit: A transit vehicle stuck in a pick-up or drop off loop will now go back to a garage instead of trying to pick up more people.
• Transit: Neighbors buses will now come in lower numbers into the city and do a better job at picking up local passengers first.
• Tuning: Residential-only cities have failure state.
• Budgets: Fixed bug with monthly transactions being used to get around systems pushing back.

https://twitter.com/MaxisGuillaume/status/322754288281612288

Here are the patch notes for the @simcity Update 2.0, coming out soon:

Guillaume Pierre @MaxisGuillaume
The Lead Gameplay Scripter and a Designer on SimCity. Occasional DJ on KALX 90.7FM
Emeryville · http://www.simcity.com

2.0 update notes were "accidentally" leaked on the czech republic simcity blog last week, the blog hinted at a Tuesday release (possibly tomorrow, the 16th, by process of elimination (however, unconfirmed)).

Discussion thread at: http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9431948.page

----------

I'll torrent it and probably wont play it, EA can die tomorrow for all I care. Evil evil company.
Game requires origin integration, even when you do have origin it complains about no origin in-game sometimes.

Even if this could be overcome you'd still need to authenticate with EA's servers to load your maps, unless someone developed a server infrastructure like EA's to support it and there's other aspects to consider.

All that said in it's current state it's not worth the bother to try and pirate. If they sort the game out then I'd recommend buying it just to avoid the hassle of an unofficial setup.
 
Last edited:

steve-p

macrumors 68000
Oct 14, 2008
1,740
42
Newbury, UK
I thought I would try a different game in the meantime, Cities in Motion 2 which just came out (on Steam). Unfortunately I can't really recommend it. It looks nice and has a lot of potential, but the UI is frustrating which makes it hard work. Hopefully there will be a sensible update sometime to make it more playable.
 

618537

Guest
Sep 21, 2011
79
0
I thought I would try a different game in the meantime, Cities in Motion 2 which just came out (on Steam). Unfortunately I can't really recommend it. It looks nice and has a lot of potential, but the UI is frustrating which makes it hard work. Hopefully there will be a sensible update sometime to make it more playable.
Ditto; purchased the other day and disappointed with UI.
 

618537

Guest
Sep 21, 2011
79
0
This news broke on Friday regarding 2.0 release:

Update 2.0 is going live Monday, April 22 at 1pm PST.

What’s New

• Mayors Mansion: Mayors will now drive their fancy cars to work. Mayors will take their helicopter, limo, or sports car if the modules are present.
• HUD: Now color-corrects when in a colorblind mode.
• Data map: Data maps show the filtered color when a color filter is enabled (unless in a colorblind mode)

Fixes and Updates

• Cities not Processing: Mitigates some of the issues that were causing cities not to process. We are continuing to work on and improve this issue.
• Region Filters: Now sorts regions with available cities to the top
• Invitations: Invitations to join a region should be sent and received more quickly.
• Tourism: Fixes for unexplained fluctuation of tourists. Tourists more smartly counted on transit.
- Cruise ships are now more effective at bringing medium and high wealth tourists in coastal cities.
- New tourists will now decide to come into a city once leaving tourists reach train stations, bus depots, or cruise ship docs instead of waiting for those tourists to go out to the region first.
- This change will reduce the downtime of tourist buildings.
• Casinos: Casinos tuned so that Gambling will be a more profitable specialty. Players can bulldoze and replace existing casinos to see effects of tuning.
- The larger casinos now invite more tourists into the city which helps keep them full.
- Note that existing casinos will need to be replaced to take advantage of this change.
• More Casinos: Raised module limit on Sci-Fi and Sleek Casinos to 6 modules.
• Region Play: Cash gifts can now be received in a bankrupt city.
• Education: Fixed school buses getting stuck at the high school. Existing Schools will fix themselves.
• Education: Fixed school buses picking up students at neighboring cities that didn’t have school bus stops.
• Education: Fix to more accurately track regional student population.
• Education: Fix where kids leaving the school bus stop would teleport to the nearest pedestrian path instead of walking directly into the school.
• Education: University wings now give the proper bonus.
• Recycling: Fix for the Recycling Center where it would sometimes stop working, recycling services will visit other cities.
• Air pollution: Fixed issue where air pollution would appear to come from nowhere. Fix issues where your regional air pollution would be reflected back into your box for a double penalty.
• Fire Service: Fire Trucks don’t clump, dispatch to fires more efficiently.
• Water: Water pumps are now capable of pumping water from rivers at a larger radius so they can take better advantage of the water table in a city.
• Disasters: Cooldown for random disasters: Some players were getting hit too frequently with random disasters, this introduces a cooldown where no random disasters will occur.
• Trade: Fix for trade ports that suddenly stop shipping.
• Transit: Street Cars and Buses go to high volume stops first.
• Transit: A city with residents and public transit will now provide the accurate amount of workers and shoppers to its neighbors.
• Transit: A transit vehicle stuck in a pick-up or drop off loop will now go back to a garage instead of trying to pick up more people.
- Transit vehicles should recover automatically after the update. If players want to force the recovery, turn off the stops that are having looping issues, wait a few game hours, then turn them back on.
• Transit: Neighbors buses will now come in lower numbers into the city and do a better job at picking up local passengers first.
• Residential Tuning: Residential-only cities have failure state.
- Buildings are prevented from going up in density when they don’t have power or water.
- The amount of happiness gained from low taxes, police, fire, and health outreach has been lowered.
- Fixed some cases where buildings would not go abandoned when they should have.
- Higher density residential buildings are no longer blocked from going abandoned due to not having enough money.
- Happiness from low taxes does not double up every time it is given.
- Losing happiness due to not having a job is more impactful.
• Budgets: Fixed bug that prevented systems like fire, abandonment, garbage, and sewage from turning on when they were supposed to.
• Audio: Fixes issue where audio will stop working after creating a large city or where phantom audio sounds play in a city.
• Demolish: Fixes issue that occurred when players demolished buildings that had service vehicles, delivery vehicles, or agents out in the city or region. Previously, the agents would be in a state of limbo and would not recover when new buildings of that type were placed. This will no longer happen.

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9453150.page
 

618537

Guest
Sep 21, 2011
79
0
Patch landed, still buggy as anything. Shall check back in a few months, and maybe repurchase if decent.

On the phone at the moment with Halifax to do a chargeback. I'd highly recommend that no one purchases this game at the moment.
 

SandboxGeneral

Moderator emeritus
Sep 8, 2010
26,482
10,051
Detroit
Patch landed, still buggy as anything. Shall check back in a few months, and maybe repurchase if decent.

On the phone at the moment with Halifax to do a chargeback. I'd highly recommend that no one purchases this game at the moment.

I bought it last week and am enjoying it quite a lot. I downloaded the update yesterday, but haven't played it yet since.

With the update, what bugs did you notice that are still occurring?
 

618537

Guest
Sep 21, 2011
79
0
I bought it last week and am enjoying it quite a lot. I downloaded the update yesterday, but haven't played it yet since.

With the update, what bugs did you notice that are still occurring?
Just a few (& this ignores the major game breaking bugs which weren't even considered to be addressed in 2.0 - RCI, etc).

Also completely disregards lack of communication with Maxis in "official" forums and the fact that EA is now promoting the "things are good line".

It was bad enough they launched on PC in it's original state, now a major launch to Mac? great article http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/04/22/the-power-of-silence-why-the-simcity-story-went-away/ worth a read.

Bugs - Feedback Pending (to rule out Pre 2.0 scripting factor)

Casinos
Losses/Lack of Tourism
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/0/9462210.page (Checked: 04/23 1209 BST)
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9462239.page (Checked: 04/23 1209 BST)

Education
Attendance/Level Drop
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9462096.page#28314464 (Checked: 04/23 1210 BST)
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9462218.page#28315181 (Checked: 04/23 1210 BST)
Bus Drop Off Time
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9462218.page (Checked: 04/23 1210 BST)

Garbage
Not Collected
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9462003.page (Checked: 04/23 1214 BST)

Medical
Wellness Vehicles
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9462301.page#28315615 (Checked: 04/23 1215 BST)

Pollution
From Nowhere
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/15/9461878.page (Checked: 04/23 1225 BST)

Power
Post Disaster Loss
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/0/9462115.page (Checked: 04/23 1232 BST)

Bugs - Post 2.0 Clarified/Confirmed (where bulldozed and recreated to take 2.0 scripting/simulation into account, or new 2.0 region)

Disasters
Frequency (Too Frequent)
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9462327.page

Fire
Trucks Don't Leave Station
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9462214.page
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/30/9461689.page#28315664
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/45/9461689.page#28316357

Join Game Filters
Only Allows Titan Gorge
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9462204.page
vidoardes Findings: Believed Partially Fixed - http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9462333.page

Patch Application
Doesn't Fix Existing Buildings / Cities
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9462210.page#28315298

Police
Crimewaves
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9462327.page

Pollution
Exceeds Viable PPM
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9461878.page
From Nowhere
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9462301
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/30/9461878.page#28316105
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/30/9461689.page#28315693
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/45/9461689.page#28316421
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9462280.page


Recycling
Not Processing
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9462003.page#28314493
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/45/9461689.page#28316503

Rollbacks
Same Old
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9461758.page#28314646

Transport
Buses Clumping
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/30/9461689.page#28315693
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9462327.page
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9462346.page#28315942
Less Visitors
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/30/9461689.page#28315700
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9462301.page#28315761
Train Station Not Connected
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9462215.page
Tram Not Connected
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/30/9461689.page#28315664

Tourism
Lack of Shopping
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9462289.page

Lack of Tourism
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9462290.page#28315529

Unable To Process
Old Cities
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9462285.page#28315502

Water
Flow Issues
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9461827.page

Table Drying
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9462168.page
vidoardes Findings: Believed Fixed - http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9462333.page

Should also point out the above includes things which were supposed to be fix, and isn't the full list of issues.
 

tigress666

macrumors 68040
Apr 14, 2010
3,288
17
Washington State
As a fan of the SimCity games of past, I still may buy this despite the DRM and always on connection requirements and other issues pointed out by other users. I still want to play it and make a judgment of my own on it.

Well, don't complain when more games pull this crap off. If people give them money, regardless of if they like the game afterward, they'll realize they can pull this crap off and get money. They'll only stop if they realize that doing online only DRM will prevent sales.

I for one refuse to give money to any game requiring that crap that doesn't need it for gameplay (like a game such as WoW).

----------

Than expect them to keep releasing DRM heavy and bug ridden software. Oh and you can't play the game after you've bought it until they get their **** straight. :rolleyes:

And once they release their next Sim City expect them to suddenly no longer support the servers for the old Sim City and you no longer able to play your game. You didn't buy it, you rented it until they decide to no longer support it (since you need their servers to play).
 

DocNYz

macrumors 6502a
Jun 9, 2008
625
40
East Coast, USA
Am i the only one who thinks it is BS to have to have your games online?

What about us who are traveling, on go or such and just want to play on their laptop, where no internet is available???

Seems like EA's zeal for copyprotection and DRM has overridden the basic needs of their customers

According to Adobe ... Yes.
 
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