SimCity: Now With 92% Less Crashing; Maxis Walks Back from Offline Comment

SimCity Update #4 is penned by EA Maxis SVP Lucy Bradshaw, who is "happy to report that the core problem with getting in and having a great SimCity experience is almost behind us," saying they have "reduced game crashes by 92% from day one." She admits she's not able to offer the "all clear" for the game she'd hoped to, but seems optimistic that they've turned the corner from the game's rocky launch. There's also a new tweet on the SimCity account quickly walking back from this tweet they posted over the weekend which said: "We have no intention of offlining SimCity any time soon but we'll look into that as part of our earning back your trust efforts." It seems there is a disagreement among the operators of their twitter account, because the new update states this isn't actually possible: "The game was designed for MP, we sim the entire region on the server so this is just not possible."
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Re: SimCity: Now With 92% Less Crashing; Maxis Walks Back from Offline Comment
Mar 11, 2013, 12:20
34.
Re: SimCity: Now With 92% Less Crashing; Maxis Walks Back from Offline Comment Mar 11, 2013, 12:20
Mar 11, 2013, 12:20
 
It's not as simple as he's making it look but he's right about it probably being coded in way that should've been "easy" to switch offline. I'm imagining there is a region service interface on the client which is implemented on the server.

They could take that service and instead implement it on the client and I see no reason that most home machines couldn't handle simulating the traffic/commerce in a single region. The cities don't run when you aren't playing them so they essentially just become an assortment of stats that govern their interactions with the currently live city.

I'd say the reason they're doing it on EA's servers (other than DRM/DLC) is not so much for the region simulation (well they'd have to for public/MP regions) but for the "world" components like leaderboards and commodity prices.
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Mar 11, 2013Mar 11 2013
  Re: SimCity: Now With 92% Less Crashing; Maxis Walks Back from Offline Comment