SimCity players to get free game from EA
EA is offering a free PC game to SimCity players as an apology for the game's bungled launch.
SimCity's launch has been a mess, nay, a disaster. With server problems plaguing the always-online simulation game, many fans are rightfully pissed.
Well, EA is trying to offer an olive branch following the game's troubled launch. No, you won't be able to get a refund. Instead, EA is offering a free game.
Maxis GM Lucy Bradshaw offered the closest thing to an apology from EA so far, admitting that not foreseeing the game's demand was "dumb" and that "we feel bad about what happened." See? Almost an apology! Stating the obvious, Bradshaw added that "if you can't get a stable connection, you're NOT having a good experience."
According to Bradshaw, SimCity players who have activated their game will receive an email describing how to get a free PC download game from EA's catalog on March 18th. There's no detail on what games you'll be able to choose from, but at least it's better than nothing. "I know that's a little contrived," she said. "Kind of like buying a present for a friend after you did something crummy."
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replyAndrew Yoon posted a new article, SimCity players to get free game from EA.
EA is offering a free PC game to SimCity players as an apology for the game's bungled launch.-
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Haha that'd be great
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Valid only for multiplayer games that they've taken the servers down for already.
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So what went wrong? The short answer is: a lot more people logged on than we expected. More people played and played in ways we never saw in the beta.
Pure ignorance. There must have been a reason they didn't have an open beta. It's their own damn fault for doing limited closed test for brief durations.-
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They knew exactly how many people would log on. It's the standard excuse companies give when they full well know that they'd need 20 times the server capacity in the first week to handle all logons and it doesn't make economic sense to actually build a datacenter this large for 1 week.
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This does seem to happen often, which is why I like that Guildwars2 actually stopped selling copies at launch for a while until they knew they could add more players without too many issues. Which worked pretty well to be honest.
People bitched about that too though, so somebody is always going to be unhappy :)-
SWTOR also had a smooth launch because the had a phased launch with preorders getting priority and then letting people in over the course of a few days.
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Also, the quote "if you can't get a stable connection, you're NOT having a good experience" needs to be engraved on a stainless steel tablet and mounted on the wall of every huge game publisher who even THINKS about changing their next single-player focused title into server-side.
Diablo 3's RMAH worked because Blizzard has spent over a decade building Battle.net to withstand this kind of load, and adapt to growing loads. EA Maxis apparently started from scratch, or from piecemeal vague knowledge from other teams like the Origin infrastructure team, who don't have that much experience either. They probably said, "Let's use EC2!", and spun up a few EC2 instances, and load tested against a simulation of hundreds or thousands of clients... and then it fell on its face when hit with well over tens of thousands of clients. -
Which is understandable and perfectly fine (to me anyway), but the main issue is that you need those servers for singeplayer. If only the multiplayer was inaccessable, I don't think there would be nearly as big of a backlash. Plus only requiring the servers for multiplayer would mean a lighter load and reduce these problems in general.
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EA you pissed me off with the new Sim City. I didnt buy the game because of your $20 off pre order bonus, that can only be used on old games and expires a week from purchase. Give me a break. Then this, im actually happy I didnt buy it. You guys have failed big time as a company and if you dont straighten up your act no one is going to put any faith in you and in the video game market, faith =$$. I bought both MOH's and they were flops, I bought Crysis 2, and it sucked 3 isnt much better.
Drop, Origin and go with Steam, stop being childish about about the whole situation. Youll make money and have less headaches. Id rather have a smaller piece of a bigger pie then a huge piece of a small pie.-
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I suspect this was related to the final code getting patched really heavily until release, so they couldn't get the retail code to the Origin team in time. The director of Origin really knows his stuff. He's a fantastic guy. It's just too bad he's stuck there.
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I think it was a bit more than that. That might explain the lack of preload (though really you can preload most of the assets and just delta the changes when it goes live) but the actual unlocking of the game seems to have been a database issue on Origins end.
People who had pre ordered the game couldnt start the download as it showed unreleased, but if you purchased the game after the release date you could immediately start downloading it.
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I need to write a greasemonkey script that looks for any variation of 'gamer' and 'entitlement' and hides that post because it really is the most annoying and empty argument I see over and over and over.
Do people really think the only consumers to feel entitled are gamers? Does being a gamer somehow make that sense of entitlement less righteous? Or do people just like barfing out that phrase ad nauseum because it's an easy way to be all 'anti'?
Blah.-
No, entitlement from gamers is just more obvious and obnoxious. Count how many facebook groups/steam communities/review bombings are perpetrated by the gaming community vs any other consumer group. It probably has something to do with the prevalence of piracy, the ultimate form of gamer entitlement.
Gamer entitlement is when a gamer whines how "publishers have to cater to my every whim and follow every demand I make because I gave them monies!". If you have a legitimate concern the company isn't addressing which is shared by a large portion of the player base then it isn't gamer entitlement. These issues (server problems and bugs) ARE being addressed and fixed but gamers are still whining and demanding the company do more. Hence gamer entitlement.-
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If you cherry-pick out problems that are unique to video games it will be impossible to accurately compare it to other products. I am talking about any issues in general. An example of consumer entitlement in a different area is if a waiter is rude to a customer, and the customer demands reparations and a public apology. Normal consumers in that situation would choose to move on and not visit the restaurant again, but not an entitled gamer. They keep on throwing money at the company that supposedly mistreats them and expecting them to act differently every time. It's Einstein's definition of idiocy.
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Haha, what? A lot of people who go to restaurants would complain to the manager for sure, what the fuck are you talking about?
Throwing money at a multinational corporation that spent a decade strategically and systematically snapping up good, creative developers and calling the games those developers made theirs? Sometimes it's hard to avoid when it's the biggest player around, and they own a huge segment of the talent because they bought them.
The advantage to a company that size, and same with Zenimax, is that they should be able to bring large scale resources to bear on things like QA.
What other injustices do you think are just people being entitled?-
Here's a nice big pill you may have difficulty swallowing: every time you pay for a product after purchasing a previous product from the same company, you're telling them all your complaints about the old product mean squat because you're willing to pay again for the new one. As long as people keep spending money on garbage, companies will continue to produce more garbage to meet the demand. If you're actually against corporate sponsored video games you should only be purchasing indie games, and if that doesn't work and corporations still pump out games you don't like then, well, looks like you're the minority and the corporations aren't obligated to cater their games just for your disproportionate demographic.
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You're making a massive generalization. EA's profits have been falling because of the issues they've been having with 4 of the last 6 quarters showing loss: http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/30/light-on-revenue-ea-barely-squeaks-out-a-win-for-the-quarter-with-digital-up-thanks-to-battlefield-3/ and a loss in total for the last two years.
Consumers are telling them off. Their losses are coming from their major franchises, particularly their AAA console development.
I know for my sake, since ME3 I only purchased one EA game (Most Wanted) and have sworn off any future purchases, and based on their quarterly reports, it looks like this is exactly what is happening elsewhere as we see their major launches (Medal of Honor and Dead Space 3) have underperformed. Only FIFA has remained above expectation for them.-
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BC2 was good stuff :)
Still a bit buggy at launch, but at least you could play it, and could totally do SP even if the entire online portion was down.
I do recall us having some great shack games the first night. -
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Holy effin' Stockholm syndrome.
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I don't think expecting the product you purchased to work from the time you bought it is being overly entitled. I would expect it from any other purchase I made. Why wouldn't I expect to be able to play the game I bought, the day I bought it?
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I dont know about you buy spending $60+ on a video game that doesnt work and then being given a random old game that I probabbly already have for free cause they F'ed up gets me mad. If I pay for something I expect it. If you order a large coffee and they give you a cup half full wouldnt you be mad? I spend my hard earned money and I expect a level of quality in a product. Is that so wrong?
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Thanks! I spent a lot of time carefully pressing the "generate random password" button to craft this username. I'll be back again to comment on articles I take interest in from the Shacknews twitter feed I've been following for the past year or so.
99% of the entitled gamers whining probably preordered it. They've already been "unable to use the product they paid for" for weeks/months. Waiting a tiny bit longer for the developers to fix unforeseen bugs that all online games tend to encounter won't kill them. In fact, I've already read reports from players being able to use the game without problems.-
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Unforseen bugs like playing the game? Please. If this was a browser or an Office program people couldn't use it would be a way bigger melt down. Would you call those people entitled? It's less of a big deal because it's a game.
Pre orders are irrelevant, and you pulled that stat out of your ass.
I can't figure out why you'd want to defend this type of behavior.-
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I could cite hundreds, if not thousands of cases where a popular program was rendered inoperable by an update and people had to live with it till it was fixed. The company apologized, developers quickly fixed it, and everyone moved on with their lives.
This may come as a shock to you, but video games are in fact developed and produced by real live human beings. Yes, that's right, the kind who makes mistakes. I'm not defending some negative type of behavior the companies are using on purpose, I'm defending the irrefutable fact that accidents and oversights are bound to happen and criticizing companies for factors that are inevitably beyond their control is stupid.-
Thousands, really? Please list them, I would like that.
What fucking planet are you on?
QA is a basic part of the process, and should be done very well for a company that size. Or for a smaller company, a cost effective solution would have been a larger beta, or open beta.
Their absolutely draconian DRM was definitely a factor within their control. They have completely manufactured their crisis by way of their odd orwelian obsession with DRM. They blamed this on people playing their game more and for longer than they expected. That IS something within their control, there were a thousand things they could have done to set themselves up for success here, even if they did want to have this retarded DRM.
Or just drop the DRM. On the whole, is that DRM scheme cost effective, or not? Is that something they set out to do on purpose, or was it somehow a factor beyond their control?
You sound like an insane person.-
I'm not talking about DRM, I'm talking about server issues and bugs. Complaining about DRM is not gamer entitlement because it's a valid objection that's shared by most of the player base.
Quality assurance is not infallible, errors can still slip through. You don't know if these issues are the result of poor quality assurance or excusable mistakes.-
They made a city simulator always online as DRM. News flash.
This is a giant QA failure that would have been largely avoided by things like an open beta.
Their form of DRM caused this issue. Otherwise you'd be able to play single player and things would be fine. That's why this is an inexcusable mistake.
We can't agree on reality, you must be a republican.
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Did PS+ even exist at the time?
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Please name a few for us. I know of, for example, AWS East EC2 failing for a number of days do to a bug in their fall-over protection, which they apologized for and since that time has never occurred again.
I recall a few hour or more outages for gmail over the past five years. I do not recall 'thousands' of cases of 'popular' programs rendered inoperable. So please name some for us.-
For example:
EC2 failure in one East EBS for 1 hour 55 minutes: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/10/amazon-web-services-outage-once-again-shows-reality-behind-the-cloud/
In 2011 they had an EBS API failure in one Availability Zone in the East Region which was restored after 11 hours for all but 2.2% of customers: https://aws.amazon.com/message/65648/
That's it. -
After 30+ years of software development do you really think it's inconceivable that thousands of software programs ran into similar issues to this one? Programming is not an exact science, half the time you spend involves proofreading your script and testing it out for bugs. Bugs of all kinds can be extremely easy overlook, and no matter how hard you try to get rid of them it's impossible to publish a game that's 100% bug free.
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You're the one who mentioned thousands of cases. I asked for specifics, so please provide.
To assist you, I've mentioned the two major cases I'm aware of. You're aware of thousands, so please elaborate.-
Off the top of my head I can think of Diablo 3 as well as various WoW patches. Both of those games had issues similar to this one and if you picked it up now you're bound to enjoy it the way the developers meant you to.
The number was conjecture. It's not like there's a database somewhere of developer snafus I can consult, and even if there was I doubt I could fit 1000+ programs and their issues in this chat forum.-
Diablo 3 was resolved in under 24 hours (specifically 11:50PM PST on May 15th was the final fix)
Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2012/05/17/blizzard-apologizes-for-diablo-3-launch-debacle/
WoW downtime has never exceeded 24 hours in any source I can find. At worst certain major patches like 4.0.3 had 8 hours of downtime before the patches were successfully completed (2:30PST for 4.0.3a, 4.0.1 was down for 12 hours).
The launch of WoW had a number of issues, specifically loot pickups were taking up to 10 minutes, but not client crashes or major downtime. There were server queues, but availability was there on day 1.
So both of your examples are incorrect.-
4.0.3a downtime: http://www.wowhead.com/news=174605/the-shattering-patch-4-0-3a-the-official-extended-downtime-thread
4.0.1 came up around 7PM PST: http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/2010-Patch-4.0.1-on-live-servers-this-week
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Now it's theoretically, mathematically conceivable. Over 30 years before online only DRM.
Walked that back from you being able to cite thousands of examples.
And now it's not so much entitlement as it is enabling?
Do you like these kinds of discussions? This is how you get your kicks?
You're not even a good troll.-
I think he switched from 'waiting a week for the game to work' to 'any update which causes a product to be unusable' cloud or not.
Now as I recall from the product I support, if this were to happen, we inform our customer to downgrade while we escalate a patch. Our customer is able to continue using the older version of the product while we work on the patch and provide it to them. In this case, there is no downgrade, there is no alternative. It either works or it does not, but either way, customers paid $60 for it.
He's mocking people for expecting something they paid for to work within 'an extra week or less' and complaining about that fact.
I will say that even though EA offered a consolation prize, the offer is irrelevant to the discussion as the point of the discussion is that a product legally paid for is completely unavailable for usage.-
Lets ease up on the guy a little, he's a frontpager but at least he is getting involved and having a discussion here.
His opinion is kind of weird for me, but hell, I feel that way about most of you :)
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There is a huge difference between bugs and what EA did/is doing with Sim City. You are correct, all software has bugs and it is nearly impossible to squash them all. However, the problem plaguing Sim City isn't bugs. It's the DRM always online crap that caused such an uproar. That is completely and totally within their control and could have been avoided by either keeping single player as single player (which they should have done) or by paying attention to the world around them. Honestly, companies are beyond stupid. Apparently Blizzard and D3 taught them nothing.
I'm sorry, but your argument has nothing to do with the problem folks are pissed about. -
no. this is beyond bugs. this is their architecture, their design. this was flawed before development began. they needed help at the whiteboard/dry erase marker stages and didn't get it.
this is WAY beyond "always on" problems... because that isn't the problem. all the customers are ONLINE and ready to go. this isn't shaky wireless B PCMCIA cards on a laptop running on battery at the maximum distance of being connected. that isn't even part of the discussion.
the discussion needs to be about vision, and execution. things that can't be programmed. and with the resources EA has, this should have been a leap forward in gaming. it's just a city simulation game. and they managed to COMPLETELY fuck it up on this release, and going forward.
what happened to "keep it simple, stupid" ? so many bugs can be PREVENTED if people would just stop fucking up before the coding even begins.
they had to disable the fastest speed ? on a simulation game? because the BACK end couldn't handle it? and one of the most frustrating things from folks is still in the design of forcing small cities and regional integration... so then the regional stuff doesn't work either? holy shit.
back to the whiteboard and dry erase pens with this one. it's not "testing it out for bugs". they royally fucked up at the conceptual phase. and then couldn't even develop properly for their own internal plan. -
I know I'm feeding a single-serving troll poster but here goes: none of the issues they're having would have been a been a big deal if they had just made the online mode optional. And they're doing this with a game that until now has been more or less synonymous with single player. And unlike Diablo 3, it's a game series that is much more popular with the average person who had no idea this would be an issue. And while their free game capitulation is nice, their explanation of the issues comes across about as self serving as that female virgin athlete who said her biggest issue in life is that she struggles with the fact that everybody wants to fuck her.
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Your username is as memorable as your posts. i.e., not very.
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horrible post is horrible
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I like that paying up front for a product that is then defective/broken, and being mad about that fact, is "entitlement". You are what's wrong with games today.
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^^This
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You know what you're entitled to when something you buy doesn't work? YOUR MONEY BACK, not some product from the same company. But nope, can't do that with video games (or most other digital media) because fuck you. Your mentality is exactly what's wrong with digital sales and the lack of consumer rights.
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thats pretty cool of them.... I was never really to concerned with the server issues. Iv come to expect problems with new online games at launch. I experienced 3 days of random issues and it kinda sucked but a free game no matter what it is makes up for all of it. If they really want to right the real wrong they will upgrade my BF3 to the premium game.
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I guess it's cool that they're doing something to try and make it right. Honestly, I wouldn't have been upset had they been much more upfront about what was happening in the first 3 days. Rather than having their twitter account spewing canned shit replies to everyone, they should have been doing periodic updates every couple hours.
They should have explained why (or at least confirmed that we would see) weird behavior would happen when the launcher couldn't connect or whatever.
Basically, they just should have been a lot more transparent with an "oh god, we fucked up majorly, we're sorry and we're working our asses off to fix this as soon as possible" attitude rather than "No one wants to stop playing, this game is awesome lolz!"
Also, if we're complaining about free stuff, I'd rather have content for SimCity than anything else, but whatever.-
Businesses almost never apologize. They'll bargain, they'll give away free stuff, they'll even feign transparency... but unless you have a business LITERALLY cornered, waiting for a true apology is a fool's errand.
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Exactly! I only saw a mention of the issues they were having, but never an apology for them.
Free game is a lame excuse for an apology. -
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Well that's something at least.
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Ooooooo EA giving away free games ???? I never saw that in the common.
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Everyone gets a free copy of darkspore
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"I know that’s a little contrived -- kind of like buying a present for a friend after you did something crummy."
From a business perspective, it's well-timed: the story of SimCity's problems JUST started filtering into business news feeds yesterday, and the level of consumer outrage was approaching that of a class action lawsuit being filed. Those probably factored into EA Corporate authorizing Lucy Bradshaw to make this post, and for EA's marketing wing to send out redemption codes within 2 weeks.-
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The developers WILL feel bad about this, nobody wants to spend years working on a game that is then poorly thought of by fans, or so buggy its almost unplayable (and believe me I've worked on games like this)
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Hey Blizzard. Take a note.
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Anyone else not able to claim other cities in their region?
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advanced glassbox simulation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g418BSF6XBQ
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Blech.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHdyzx_ecbQ
Even if they fix all the server issues there is still this horrible AI.-
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If you know how A* pathing works it's 10x more stupid. The way to fix this is part of the basic algorithm, instead of using the same cost value everywhere you just assign a higher cost to worse roads and (debatable, it might be too effective) congested roads. That's it, the algorithm will now prefer the longer, faster path. I don't think it's even possible to read any A* turorial as a programming newbie and not learn this.
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I have little doubt the simulations in the older games were just as weak or weaker but were harder to inspect. I mean, they came out with an entire expansion pack to try to fix transportation in SC4...
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I haven't seen anyone throwing around the words revolutionary. And they're the ones who talked about city size and performance issues, which is an obvious inference to draw anyway. Stop being stupid. I know how much you and a few others are enjoying reveling in its failure though.
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have you seen me in a single Simcity thread this week defending this debacle? I didn't buy it and now I won't be for awhile at best.
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it's a Maxis game. if people expected any solid gameplay systems or AI... I wonder if they've played any other Maxis games.
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Interesting discussion on their twitter: https://twitter.com/simcity/status/310482745732259844
I'm curious what 6UnJ9Wn would think about this. They're saying that they feel a need to earn back our trust. -
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