Maxis Insider Tells RPS: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

[Red eye Green]

Sources:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/12/simcity-server-not-necessary/

http://www.ausgamers.com/news/read/3281529/rumour-alleged-maxis-insider-claims-simcity-offline-singleplayer-would-require-minimal-effort

Some information -

"Maxis’ studio head, Lucy Bradshaw, has told both Polygon and Kotaku that they “offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers”, and that it would take “a significant amount of engineering work from our team to rewrite the game” for single player.

A SimCity developer has got in touch with RPS to tell us that at least the first of these statements is not true. He claimed that the server is not handling calculations for non-social aspects of running the game, and that engineering a single-player mode would require minimal effort"

The inside source a knowen dev of the game says -

“The servers are not handling any of the computation done to simulate the city you are playing. They are still acting as servers, doing some amount of computation to route messages of various types between both players and cities. As well, they’re doing cloud storage of save games, interfacing with Origin, and all of that. But for the game itself? No, they’re not doing anything. I have no idea why they’re claiming otherwise. It’s possible that Bradshaw misunderstood or was misinformed, but otherwise I’m clueless.”


So how long until EA comes out and says otherwise or comes up with some lame way of denying it and if they do deny it why then can players dissconect from the net and continue to play it as described below?

People were already perplexed by EA’s explanation of the impossibility of offline play. Kotaku ran a series of tests today, seeing how the game could run without an internet connection, finding it was happy for around 20 minutes before it realised it wasn’t syncing to the servers. Something which would surely be impossible were the servers co-running the game itself. Markus “Notch” Persson just tweeted to his million followers that he managed to play offline too, despite EA’s claims. And now with the information from our source, it would seem the claims just don’t hold water.

http://kotaku.com/5990165/my-simcity-city-thrived-offline-for-19-minutes

Markus PerssonVerified account ‏@notch

I like how you can keep playing Sim City even when it notifies you that the servers are down. (But I thought it REALLY needed them?)

More reading in the links and sub links in those posts, EA caught red handed in a lie - well atleast Ubisoft when they use Draconic DRM told the truth and said it was for anti piracy (for the most part), Like all ubifail games that have or had always online DRM i will continue to skip buying them regardless of how much i wanted them.

[Red eye Green]

Here is my thoughts on it:

EA / Maxis demanding that their customers always be online and then not having the common decency to return the favor and now (reading the above post) EA / maxis are caught out allegedly lying to their customers.

[The doctor is in]

worse the game is a sham

here is why. the engine is not there! is fake! glassbox has turned out to be nothing but smoke and mirrors to hide the drm thats little more than recording a summary of your gameplay! like in the sims online mode where they record, who knows why your gameplay. i guess demographics, learn about their customers, sell the information, make future games and products for them to buy. ect. they dont even feed the servers realtime they feed them later a summary, again lime sims. didnt ea trie this originally with like bf2142 where they recorded where people looked and for how long to sell ingame ads!

ea caught lieing about how much population a city single can grow to.

original they said 500k and even 1m

but in reality is phantom population! they can't even hit 100k! they have a limit about 10k and most cities will hit just over 5,000! the rest faketo make it look like something is going on.

here read details on riddit
http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a5pof/did_ea_lie_about_theoretical_population_sizes/

and see what some developer leaked snipet of code showing how its all fake, not a simulation at all.

http://i.imgur.com/GyCr1Im.jpg
http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a6cia/if_this_isnt_a_bug_i_have_no_idea_what_im_doing/

http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a6m17/maxis_removed_freight_and_industry_from_glassbox/

http://answers.ea.com/t5/Miscellaneous-Issues/PROOF-THAT-THE-GAME-IS-MISLEADING-REGARDING-POPULATION-COUNT/td-p/745038

see the damning video showing its all fake what is happening has no relationship to what your doing or the city your building
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACdu1ho2Ic4&feature=youtu.be
http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=WH-CdkSqDSs

so that stuff you seeing and that is happening, its all fake. and so is what is happening. its not based on population, the homes uve build, business, ect. and worse its all running on our computers yet we are forced to be online even in sandbox mode. so glassbox is not doing of it

http://answers.ea.com/t5/Miscellaneous-Issues/Traffic-Agent-path-finding-quot-AI-quot-Why-so-much-of-the-game/m-p/737060#U737060

http://answers.ea.com/t5/Miscellaneous-Issues/Traffic-quot-AI-quot-This-is-why-services-and-traffic-are-broken/m-p/737060#U737060

http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a7vzj/sims_agents_observation/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2X4aGR-G17A

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9360189.page

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9358082.page

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9359265.page

http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a6rj0/its_not_pathfinding_its_glassbox/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDeSRdHvefw&feature=youtu.be

worse simcity developer saying that its minimal effort for them to do single player offline mode

that the game doesn't really need online, only for drm, multiplayer gaming, but not things like trading between cities, thats basically mostly fake, and for saves. and people have been playing offline for as much as 20 minutes! they eventually have to go online for drm and to save!

here read about it

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/12/simcity-server-not-necessary/
http://kotaku.com/5990165/my-simcity-city-thrived-offline-for-19-minutes

letter form ea employee about always on drm and about features being removed in order to make it run better.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2013/03/08/ea-employee-chastizes-company-over-simcity-in-public-letter/


worse the smoking gun look at this video from where they showeed of the glassbox engine. notice at the end of the video the fine print. it basically says what you just saw is not representative of any actual gameplay. so the game does not use the glassbox engine u saw and heard so much about.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mbzb1rU7xE&NR=1&feature=endscreen

http://www.dayonepatch.com/index.php?/topic/79391-thought-this-was-an-interesting-discovery-the-whole-sim-city-glassbox-simulation-is-a-fraud/

[Red eye Green]

Seriously not sure why EA / Maxis just didnt make a face book only Simcity 5 game i mean it woulda been the same effort and atleast they could blame crap code on limitations of web based programming.

EA even asked suppliers not to promote Sim City 5 last week due too the servers, i dont understand how they did not forecast the demand - imho they (EA) are just being tight with spending money on servers and if servers cost so much why are they using them when they dont need to? Oh that's right because we are all pirates and steal off them..

[The doctor is in]

the server demand is fake. as glassbox is fake

do u play the sims. its the sims without the rich simulation

they turned it off, they didnt complete it, ect

what is killing the server is the data they are collecting about our gameplay to check up on us make sure we have rights to play the game, make sure we are not cheating, ect. but since leader boards turned off they also turned of checking for cheating

and glassbox is basically also turned off, people can play game offline for like 20 minutes

its basically now for authentication, authorization and saves, and the saves not working and oh yeah capturing a summary of our game play

what killing them is the constantly authorization!

plus they logging, not realtime, a summary of the gameplay, like they do in the sims for what purposed well to learn more about us, so that they can make better games, sell it to others, ect.

in sims u can go in offline mode u can also tell the game not to send the stuff to ea, in this game u cant. plus in sims u can save locally, here u cant

the servers appear to be running hava which if not coded properly because is disaster that does not scale very well and eats memory.

just think most of server stuff is off, this is proven by ability to play normal for 20 min.

what is left is what i said, authentication, authorization, game saves and gameplay logs all this is done periodically, im guessing 20 minutes and that why he had to get on. also explains the bandwidth used.

look at the sims 2/3 for what they log, they keep a copy on the file system. here they most likely do same and intermitternly upload it.


basically what we are seeing on client is 100% fake, not need to be online, all the stuff with other cities also fake. did u see the source code that got leaked. it hows them tweaking the data to make population larger than it is. so they couldnt deliver a game that would support 100k, 1m np we will make up the data ;)

most likely if they had glassbox up and running like they showed it would have bankrupted them. can u imagine the server load for one kid with 90m population. multiply that by millions of kids, the bandwidth it would have consumes and the processing power. so they thought it up, probably implemented a good part of it, the it hit them, oh ♥♥♥♥ and so they had to start removing, adding random / hardcoded events like monsters / disasters, ect coming out when population exceeded some amount to keep population down, make little maps only, ect

sure inhouse they can have it working and even large map, but they cant scale it and keep the cost reasonable.

remember they have to make lots of money off this thing.