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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93.
 
Re: SimCity: Now With 92% Less Crashing; Maxis Walks Back from Offline Comment
Mar 11, 2013, 21:00
Quboid
 
93.
Re: SimCity: Now With 92% Less Crashing; Maxis Walks Back from Offline Comment Mar 11, 2013, 21:00
Mar 11, 2013, 21:00
 Quboid
 
I get the impression that the region system is server side, going by the lag as much as anything, and I've no doubt creating an offline version wouldn't be simple. It's not just a switch. It's probably not even Windows code.

However, it's nothing that couldn't be done better offline. The amount of processing per region is minute, individually it would barely register on a computer. Of course, if you have thousands running at once on the same computer, then it might slow down.

I believe that a large part of the simulation runs server side, however this is only because they deliberately made it that way. Apparently there's some sort of economy going on ... I haven't noticed any thing.

The only parts which actually need to be run on a central server? Leaderboards ... a pointless feature they switched off to save their servers. Fucktards.

I'm sorry I bought this game. I should have checked properly, I thought the reports of the always-on requirement were FUD, and then I forgot about them.
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Mar 11, 2013Mar 11 2013
  Re: SimCity: Now With 92% Less Crashing; Maxis Walks Back from Offline Comment