EA admits SimCity could have run offline.... AFTER moder proved it

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She also says that “Always-Connected is a big change from SimCities of the past. It didn’t come down as an order from corporate and it isn’t a clandestine strategy to control players.

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Load of bullshite.

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never had a problem with EA before 2 days ago, 2 problems and i already hate them

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You must not play a lot of their games.

Hopefully EA will become the shining example of how invasive DRM tactics that punish honest customers are not the way for the future of gaming.

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She also says that “Always-Connected is a big change from SimCities of the past. It didn’t come down as an order from corporate and it isn’t a clandestine strategy to control players. It’s fundamental to the vision we had for this SimCity. From the ground up, we designed this game with multiplayer in mind – using new technology to realize a vision of players connected in regions to create a SimCity that captured the dynamism of the world we live in; a global, ever-changing, social world.”

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I found the problem.

Know testers who only tested it online. You learn a lot of hilarious /sad things from those at EA.

My Internet has been acting up. Had to call Sudden Link and get someone out there.

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Had to call Sudden Link

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i found the problem

Suddenlink has been great for me. I got my bill lowered 2 weeks ago to $40 for there 30Mbps service. I pulled 32 on speedtest the other day

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How does the game play, is it simplified or streamlined?

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its broken.
the simulation went from a statistical model to an agent simulation for each and every thing ie if a house needs power it sends a request to the power station and a power agent travels along the road to until it reaches the house. (all power/water/traffic takes place along the roads)
the engine for this (glassbox) is written to utilize only a single thread for the entire simulation. thus the city sizes are tiny and there is somewhat of a soft cap of 100k per city.
other fun frick ups include industry not working at all and pathfinding (which is now more important than ever since everything from happiness to water uses it) is actually just as bad as it was in SC4... a decade ago.

oh and a leaked mock up of the DLC store shows that EA is prepared to sell you individual buildings (not entire sets) yet still no mod tool for the community to make use of...and make you pay another $10 to remove in game advertising.

It's even more mind-boggling.

SimCity Modder Tells Us Offline Regional Play Easily Done

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So many of Maxis’s claims about how SimCity runs have come down to the importance of the information from the servers, driving the experience of players whether they’re seeking social conglomeration, or going it alone. And even in Bradshaw’s revisionist version of these claims, we’re still being told that the way it works is “innovative”. Not so, alleges Azzer.

“I’ve analyzed all of the data calls to and from EA servers – all of the APIs, every request for data, and all of the data that comes back,” explains the modder. And in doing so, he’s found some surprising results. “The SimCity servers are not doing any calculations that could not be done on your PC, even for an entire region single player offline mode, let alone just the city you are in.”

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So apparently, the servers aren't that essential for its "ground-breaking" gameplay.

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But this seems to contradict the claims from Maxis that the servers are, “using new technology to realize a vision of players connected in regions to create a SimCity that captured the dynamism of the world we live in.” How does Azzer respond to that? “The server side calculations are all, frankly, rubbish.” Ah. In his opinion, clearly. “Every bit of it,” he continues. “The only ‘good’ they do at the moment is for a multiplayer region – they are just a way for my city to tell your city how much power I have spare, and update that data every few minutes while I play. A middleman of sorts.”

In fact, Azzer thinks that even despite this, the tech isn’t nearly as good as it should be. “The servers are terrible, the MySQL set-up sloppy, and they are trying to handle all of the saving server side (“the cloud”) which is bogging them down constantly – they aren’t optimized for how many simultaneous cities are connected at once. Hell, this “cloud” saving isn’t even very clever is it – if you change servers, all your saves are gone. They don’t even “cloud” your saves between their own servers.”

Matching the information we received from our Maxis mole, Azzer explains that the only other role served by the servers – beyond the obvious “fluff and guff” as he calls it of invites, chat, leaderboards, etc. – is to prevent cheating. “Most of the processing work is probably their attempts at anti-cheat stuff, checking a city doesn’t do… something… at an unrealistic speed.”

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Everything EA/Maxis has been saying is bullshite.

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yep

SC must have an always on connection because the server handles part of the simulation:
false. its for DRM purposes only.

SC city tile sizes are small because the server is handling part of the simulation, and we built Glassbox from the ground up so this is the first iteration of the engine:
false. see above about the server calculations and then consider that Glassbox runs the agent simulation on a single thread. What engine would be designed "from the ground up" on a single thread these days? Glassbox is just code thats been borrowed and spliced from other EA intellectual properties.

Oh and now it turns out if you purchased and complained to Amazon, EA is counting it as a chargeback and disabling your key to SC!
at that point it is YOUR responsibility to initiate and actual chargeback or you will lose your money.