EA Needs to F*** off and die
- Thread starter HowDroll
- Start date
Yes, you are in the minority of people that are not bothered by this or the Diablo 3 issue.
Of course it is. My point is the restaurant analogy doesn't work. People don't really make choices about restaurants on the basis of service unless it's particularly bad or particularly good. They make choices based on the quality of the actual meal they get. Most people will happily go to a restaurant with lame service if they know the food is spectacular. This is not really true of video games anymore, because service is tied so tightly into the actual delivery of the game that the minimum level of acceptable service is actually supposed to be relatively seamless (which is very reasonable in this context).
If you're hellbent on using the restaurant analogy, then a modern service-oriented video game would have to be a fast-food restaurant. There's really only one thing on the menu, the additions are optional, and nothing actually matters about how the servers/cashiers talk to you, as long as you get you food exactly on time.
I already made a very accurate analogy using restaurants like 4 posts back.
Shannow
Staff member
Strange, right? For tall the bitching, I actually just played the damned things, and enjoyed them. its been nice.
Because again, the game itself is not the issue. That's not why it's getting all the negative reviews.
If you have a good quality, always-on internet connection; manage to play on "good" hours when other people can't, and perhaps you just like multiplayer options/possibilities, I'm sure you can enjoy it.
Tell me, would your game experience be the same if you had a dial-up, or perhaps a wonky sattelite connection or whatever, that crapped out once day, causing you to randomly lose progress? Would you have liked it equally if you had been ejected from the servers or unable to log on several times?
The point isn't "this is a bad game" - I'm sure a lot of people have enjoyed it, and will. The point is that your gameplay experience is also very heavily tinted by the quality of the service - to go back to the analogy, it can be the very best steak in the whole wide world, if I get it when it's stone cold and with a sauce over it I don't like, I won't be happy. The fact that you happen to like that sauce, and that your steak was still warm, doesn't excuse the restaurant for fucking up half the orders. Saying "I had no problems, so there is no problem" is selfish. Some of the problems you can discuss - I don't really like multiplayer, they made TOR an MMO, I didn't play it because it's not my game. Even though it can be a tellar game, it's their choice to make a game single player or multiplayer or whatever and mine not to buy. But even if it was a game I ought to love, and I didn't mind, other service related issues would still make it impossible to enjoy.
figmentPez
Staff member
You must hang out with very different people than I do. I know quite a few who focus on service at a restaurant above food quality. They search out restaurants with particularly good service, and go there because it makes for a better dining experience. I don't go back to restaurants that give bad service, because I really don't like being treated like crap by a waiter. I can put up with slow service from a smiling, but inexperienced, waiter, but I will not tolerate being served by someone who shows every indication of not wanting me for a customer.
And this is part of what's wrong with fast food culture. It really does matter how servers/cashiers talk to people, and I have gotten good service at fast food restaurants. The KFC not far from me has excellent staff, who were very helpful in suggesting that I could get the same food for cheaper by getting a different mix of combo and ala carte options than I had chosen. I will be going back there because I got good service. I also have a favored Smashburger, where the staff are fantastic and a real pleasure to order from. Service matters to me, and I'm glad that it's not as dead as you seem to think it is.
Shannow
Staff member
You are right, I would probably have issues with that. but then again, knowing what the game was, and my own capabilities, before I bought it, helped a great deal. Another thing is, as always, after the intial rush, server crushes do die down after launch.
Sim City is in no way shape or form the same game of old.
Fundamentally, SimCity has always been a 'sandbox'. That means that there's no real end state, no way to win. It's just a thing that you play and experiment with. You build, tinker and mess around. It's a toy, not a game; it's a sandbox, not baseball.
So, in this iteration of the game, you don't even get to buy your toy. Rather, you rent a toy from EA, who lets you play with it only in very limited, circumscribed ways, only on their servers. So you have to have a live Internet connection at all times and their servers have to be up and have to have space for you. The rules for play are draconian. If you want to, say, build a city, save it, blow it up with something terrible and then restore from save... you can't do that anymore.
That's an unauthorized usage of their toy. And if you figure out ways of using their toy that they don't like, they'll ban you forever.
All third-party modding is shut out. One of the best parts of SimCity 4 and The Sims is that users can create and share content among themselves for free. You will no longer be able to do this. You will be required to run only Official Authorized Content.
Further, you're not getting the whole game for your $60 or $80, depending on what version you're buying. EA's plan is to sell you Simcity 5 over and over and over. They've directly admitted that they already have it running with larger cities, but they're not releasing that now. They claim it's because it "won't run on Dad's PC", but the real reason is so they can sell it to you again later. Want subways? That's gonna be $15. Want railroads? Another $15. Bigger cities? Oh, that's in the $30 expansion. DLC madness.
Right now, if you look at The Sims 3, the game costs $30. But if also you buy all the DLC for it, it's *four hundred and seventy dollars*. This is what they are doing with SimCity 5; locking you into their server infrastructure, and then exploiting the heck out of your wallet.
This is a lousy deal, and you would be stupid to take it. Always-on DRM, and a deliberately crippled game, so that they can slowly uncripple it, charging you for every restored feature from prior versions.
It's vintage EA douch-baggery and something I thankfully didn't touch with a 10 foot pole.
Fundamentally, SimCity has always been a 'sandbox'. That means that there's no real end state, no way to win. It's just a thing that you play and experiment with. You build, tinker and mess around. It's a toy, not a game; it's a sandbox, not baseball.
So, in this iteration of the game, you don't even get to buy your toy. Rather, you rent a toy from EA, who lets you play with it only in very limited, circumscribed ways, only on their servers. So you have to have a live Internet connection at all times and their servers have to be up and have to have space for you. The rules for play are draconian. If you want to, say, build a city, save it, blow it up with something terrible and then restore from save... you can't do that anymore.
That's an unauthorized usage of their toy. And if you figure out ways of using their toy that they don't like, they'll ban you forever.
All third-party modding is shut out. One of the best parts of SimCity 4 and The Sims is that users can create and share content among themselves for free. You will no longer be able to do this. You will be required to run only Official Authorized Content.
Further, you're not getting the whole game for your $60 or $80, depending on what version you're buying. EA's plan is to sell you Simcity 5 over and over and over. They've directly admitted that they already have it running with larger cities, but they're not releasing that now. They claim it's because it "won't run on Dad's PC", but the real reason is so they can sell it to you again later. Want subways? That's gonna be $15. Want railroads? Another $15. Bigger cities? Oh, that's in the $30 expansion. DLC madness.
Right now, if you look at The Sims 3, the game costs $30. But if also you buy all the DLC for it, it's *four hundred and seventy dollars*. This is what they are doing with SimCity 5; locking you into their server infrastructure, and then exploiting the heck out of your wallet.
This is a lousy deal, and you would be stupid to take it. Always-on DRM, and a deliberately crippled game, so that they can slowly uncripple it, charging you for every restored feature from prior versions.
It's vintage EA douch-baggery and something I thankfully didn't touch with a 10 foot pole.
Hooters doesn't count. (just messin' with you
)That's fine. Personally, I don't care how friendly the server at a fast food place is as long as I get my food quickly and in good order. The only times I care even remotely more about the service than the food is when I'm on a date, and that's because it's a nice place, I'm trying to impress, and it's not about the food.
Back to the point, though. I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense to rate gameplay and service in the same score (but as you probably noticed, I'm kind of against score ratings in the first place), even for a service-oriented game, because then people have to dive into your review anyway to figure out why you scored the way you did, and if EA (or whomever) is supposed to draw conclusions about a game's performance from reviews, they also need to know.
More practically, we've already seen how publishers base their treatment of developers on how the game itself performed. Some pubs (EA, Activision *cough*) even base continued employment on that. If a game gets a low score because Origin sucks and how EA forced into the game sucks, but everyone thinks the gameplay itself is awesome, I'd prefer that devs take as little of the crap as possible.[DOUBLEPOST=1362760033][/DOUBLEPOST]
That's actually worse than what I was expecting. Yeesh.
figmentPez
Staff member
This joke will never die. And I like it better as ice cream. Mmmm ice Cream.
Also: relevant
http://www.gucomics.com/comic/?cdate=20130306
Correct. At that point it is just City*.
--Patrick
*and if you can't hear the joke, then I'm sorry.
That was great.
Apparently Kluwe's a pretty avid gamer, too. He's big into Pokemon, SimCity, Path of Exile, and even MMOs when he has time. He said in a reddit post that he spent a big chunk of his "fun money" on the Shadowrun Kickstarter.
Welp, there goes his ratings in Madden '13.
I do not, in fact, own Tropico 3. I've heard that 4 is basically an EASports style re-release of 3, but since I've never played 3 I don't think that'd affect me much.
Hmm... tempting, tempting.
Oh, no no no, I'm not falling for that again. That's the attitude that led to me being labeled a subway groper.
At first I thought "Couldn't you just play one of the older SimCity games?"
Then I kept reading and saw the scope of it.