Simcity

duggan1

Anyone else playing?

Got it last night for £33 as I was bored and didn't go out to the rugby club (gave the money to EA instead )

Game is clearly broken in parts, but still fun. Really difficult finding a region to join and play with others though....

Lum

I haven't played the game, though it's been providing me hours of entertainment just reading about the huge fiasco that's going on.

That's not my reason for posting though. Right now, Sim City owners can get a free game as an apology from EA, you'll need to register in the next few hours though as it expires March 25th USA time.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/18/simcity_giveaway_includes_simcity4/

Thought you might like to know that.

almillar

Just getting an old Sim City 3000 game 'finished' before moving onto SC4. I'm a bit behind. Maybe Sim City (5 but don't call it 5!) will be usable by the time I get round to it!

duggan1

Lum wrote: »

I haven't played the game, though it's been providing me hours of entertainment just reading about the huge fiasco that's going on.

That's not my reason for posting though. Right now, Sim City owners can get a free game as an apology from EA, you'll need to register in the next few hours though as it expires March 25th USA time.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/18/simcity_giveaway_includes_simcity4/

Thought you might like to know that.

It's part of the reason I bought it, though looking through the games I'll probably just get another copy of SC4 (and give the other one away)

S0litaire

One thing I can suggest is you take a look round the darker areas of the googleshpere for the "Offline Mod"

Basically you don't need to be contacted to EA's servers every time you decide to play a game!

You need to connect to save games though. For some reason EA forced all saves to be held on their servers not your PC.

Number29

I got this just over a week ago and it's indeed an excellent game. Absolutely no issues with connectivity experienced in over 30 hours of gameplay.

Lum

S0litaire wrote: »

You need to connect to save games though. For some reason EA forced all saves to be held on their servers not your PC.

It's an anti piracy thing. Inconveniencing paying customers to try and stop people who probably wouldn't have bought the game anyway.

Instead of pirate copies, they annoyed many people who were prepared to pay, and got a whole load of chargebacks for their (initially) unusable product.

mdt1988

Might consider this in the future, all the fuss over the offline/online mode puts me off though.

Number29

mdt1988 wrote: »

Might consider this in the future, all the fuss over the offline/online mode puts me off though.

It's not really a big deal unless you don't have a steady Internet connection. The big plus is you can login and install the game on any other computer, and continue you playing the same cities! I did this at the weekend using my partner's laptop.

Handsome90

Number29 wrote: »

It's not really a big deal unless you don't have a steady Internet connection. The big plus is you can login and install the game on any other computer, and continue you playing the same cities! I did this at the weekend using my partner's laptop.

It's a big deal because the game will be unplayable when EA decides to shutdown the servers.


Here is a list of game servers that they already turned off http://www.ea.com/1/service-updates

duggan1

Handsome90 wrote: »

It's a big deal because the game will be unplayable when EA decides to shutdown the servers.

Here is a list of game servers that they already turned off http://www.ea.com/1/service-updates

Not necessarily a big deal for someone used to playing MMOs. £33 represents around 4 months of WOW for instance. I'm not all that concerned to be honest. I highly doubt I'll be playing it in 2 years time anyway.

I'm more interested in them fixing it in the meantime to make finding a region to play in easier.

That list is fairly subjective as a lot of those services are ancilliary and not necessary to play the game. Also some were games cancelled during beta test, so noone lost money.

Hopefully this is the game that EA learn from though, and put a bit more care and consideration into things from now on. Won't hold my breath though...