SimCity Followup

Given the events of the last week, I felt a followup to my last post was required, regarding the now-released SimCity game.

If you're not up to speed, the gist of the argument is that EA/Maxis was apparently unprepared for the initial rush of gamers on the first few days of launch, resulting in a large number of people being unable to play the game due to the EA servers being inaccessible. This was mostly limited to login issues, and once logged in, gameplay was usually okay. But a few people, myself included, experienced certain issues in-game as well, such as lag, being unable to share resources between cities, or being unable to start a new city or region (even though I was playing in "Private" mode).

Now, the first response to my last post, wherein I essentially said that always-online was okay, is the old "I told you so". But is that really the case? At no point in my previous post did I mention launch problems, and I even mentioned Diablo III (D3) as an example of an always-online game that I was okay with, noting that D3 itself had a huge number of issues at launch.

But I just mentioned general-purpose gameplay. "I just want to play single player", or "I want to be able to play on the train without internet". That's what everyone was complaining about before launch, not a fear that the game would be unplayable.

Unfortunately, EA's reaction to this has been less than stellar. They knew how many pre-orders were done, they knew how much load was going to be on the servers, but they didn't prepare for it. After the fact, they just said pointless things like "We're working on it", without providing any clear information on what the problem was or what they were doing. At one point even going so far as to say that it was the gamers' fault, that the game was so awesome that people just kept playing, taking up valuable server space and preventing new players from joining. And then, worst of all, actually disabling in-game features to reduce the hammering that their servers were getting. I haven't talked to a single person  yet who's okay with that part of it.

They've since announced that they'll be offering a free game from their library as an apology to anyone who owns SimCity. That's all well and good, but I have the sneaking suspicion the selection will be pretty poor, that I'll end up picking something from the list that I don't really have all that much interest in (the fact that it will play exclusively through Origin is not a selling point, either, as I like that service far less than Steam or Uplay).

Anyway, I just wanted to clarify my stance from earlier, and that I do still stick to those ideas, in spite of the launch issues that SimCity suffered.