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[TL]Hanabi - US West 4
[TL]Ohana - US East 4
[TL] Destination East 4 |
On March 09 2013 01:21 Jibba wrote:Show nested quote +On March 09 2013 00:19 Fzero wrote:
A big comment about city size. I don't know how many of you have actually pushed the limitations of your box, but run something like fraps or another FPS counter when the engine starts pushing 400k or so. The game would simply not function at 4k x 4k sizes given current computing power on 90% of the players. When Ocean talks about future possibilities, they're not planning on simply ignoring the need for variety in city sizes, region templates, etc... they made decisions to function within the current PC environment. Crysis 3 can push your GPU, but SimCity will punish the CPU.
The proper approach to this would be to find which ranks higher on players' needs, size of the city or complexity of the engine. If a core aspect of the Sim City experience is creating actual large cities instead of large towns, then you have to adjust and lower the complexity of the engine. Even with a less complex engine, SC could have the most complex modeling of any game. So even if someone says "I wish it covered recycling better" or something like that, it would still be leader in class in terms of modeling. In terms of design, you just need to be the best available option on the top needs. SC devs sacrificed one of the top needs (size/freedom) in order to push another top need, which was already sufficient. That's a design mistake, and product-out thinking.
But... but.. that's your opinion, maybe in their vision the size of the city wasn't too important.
Customers don't know all the details and the thinking behind a project, so they aren't entitled to demand such things. They can "speak with their wallets" as is the trend now, by not buying, but if an important sector still enjoys the game, it's still a good product, even if it doesn't meet your specific opinion on how to make the game great.
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On March 09 2013 01:06 mordk wrote:Show nested quote +On March 09 2013 01:03 AnomalySC2 wrote:On March 09 2013 00:58 MaestroSC wrote:On March 09 2013 00:56 AnomalySC2 wrote:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberstalkingThis is what I'm the victim of currently. I'll quote the corporate stalker part, as it's the exact scenario I'm in. Corporate cyberstalking Corporate cyberstalking is when a company harasses an individual online, or an individual or group of individuals harasses an organization. Motives for corporate cyberstalking are ideological, or include a desire for financial gain or revenge.[19] The reason being "revenge". As I said, I was regularly used as both balance feedback and also what makes for great games to actually watch. And they think I purposefully gave bad feedback, to like ruin the game or some such nonsense. Personally I just think they're taking their anger out on me for sc2's consistent decline in popularity. so you have advanced past the tinfoil hat stage... plz continue You can't make this shit up lol. Plus go watch my games and tell me that isn't suspicious....Regardless, I could care less if you believe me or not. Enjoy adding to the shady beast that is Blizzard, for all I care. Why not post here in TL some evidence? People could prove or disprove your point, and Blizzard certainly would care if you tarnish their public image on a major community site. I still think you should see a professional and stop playing though, sorry :/
I have stopped playing...And I did even up seeking help for my depression, but this was all over a year ago. As I said, I'm over it. I only thought to bring it up now because this online bs is a trend that is growing, obviously, and it can be used for corrupt reasons.
That said, gaming is what takes up the majority of my free time. I'm a gamer, that's what I do, sorry I'm not going to stop entirely. I certainly won't ever be touching anything Blizzard related ever again though, that's for sure. And I'm certainly not going to have anything positive to say about a company that essentially wasted 3 years of my life, and continues to harass me even though I have zero involvement with their games anymore.
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On March 09 2013 01:22 FromShouri wrote:Show nested quote +On March 09 2013 01:13 mordk wrote:On March 09 2013 01:07 FromShouri wrote:On March 09 2013 01:02 mordk wrote:On March 09 2013 01:00 FromShouri wrote:On March 09 2013 00:56 adwodon wrote:On March 09 2013 00:51 FromShouri wrote:On March 09 2013 00:33 mordk wrote:On March 09 2013 00:30 FromShouri wrote:On March 09 2013 00:19 Fzero wrote:
Again, I have no comment on whether or not the design decision was correct to go with always online. However, the decision was made and there is no other way to make this game function without it. Everything you do in the current Simcity talks asynchronously to the cloud server system because it needs to have the data from your city (and every other city in your region [and all regions]) to be able to update everyone else with what is happening in your box.
The idea is that the glasshouse engine simulates down to the individual sim level and perpetrates that simulation across the entire region for all players. This doesn't work if you take it offline and this is the experience the team wants you to have.
A big comment about city size. I don't know how many of you have actually pushed the limitations of your box, but run something like fraps or another FPS counter when the engine starts pushing 400k or so. The game would simply not function at 4k x 4k sizes given current computing power on 90% of the players. When Ocean talks about future possibilities, they're not planning on simply ignoring the need for variety in city sizes, region templates, etc... they made decisions to function within the current PC environment. Crysis 3 can push your GPU, but SimCity will punish the CPU.
So yes, all these things came from the initial decision on what type of game they wanted to make and all of this information is publicly available already. The comments about DRM and fuck EA and Origin are all really outside of the scope of the game of SimCity. I realize they affect you as a consumer of a product, but I've got news for you.. the industry is moving towards analytic representation of all kinds of player statistics to help them drive revenue in future games. Every part of the industry is telling them that profits exist if you can monitor consumer trends and deliver goods to please that want. No where is that easier than via a computer. You should listen to Gabe Newell talk about economics of the industry sometime if you think it is just "EA being EA." Im not sure how you can defend such piss poor design philosophy because of "hardware" specs. They could of just as easily given you the options present in Total War games where people with lower graphics can turn down the amount of people on the screen. Do you really think that they couldn't of designed it better to where if you were zoomed out most of the people go into a CPU/Ram cycle and only appear when you zoom in on the town? But no, they went with SimTown instead of SimCity and "hope to address the issue of city sizes in the coming months". BTW-you're not releasing any ground breaking news, steam has been doing this for years with ads popping up when you close games(even more annoying because if I'm shutting my game down 99% of the time I'm done for the day so the extra clicks get annoying especially with all the garbage games they try to sell me that I'm not interested in.) Just because that is the way the "industry" is going, doesn't mean we can't get vocal about how stupid and punishing it is to legit users because 1 company makes a really shitty game because of the DRM requirement and then gives you no other options to play. BTW, did you know that these kinds of DRM didn't stop anyone from pirating D3 that wanted it? It doesn't stop pirates, it just present hassles for legit customers. Just like Starcraft 2 not having lan except in the pirated edition. Pirates got a feature that was a legitimate need for real customers. Hmmm I'm not sure where you get your data, but D3 is one of the least pirated games out of the recent releases, despite how terrible the launch was, as far as piracy comes, it seems to have worked fairly well. Cutting down pirating is not the same as eliminating it. It may of been one of the "less" pirated games, but that also has something more to do with its current state of being complete shit rather then the availability of pirated copies. I have a feeling its more or less the same with this game, people see it, read about it a little, find out it's complete shit, and don't download it. So in that regard, ya the DRM works perfectly. Noone has access to a fully functional pirated version of Diablo 3 stop talking crap. " People should just stop trying to DL this, Has it been cracked? Yes, Apparently Skidrow has cracked the Server problem and you can run your own server. Is it worth it? No, because most of the content is server side, So until someone breaks into Blizzard servers and steals content, good luck on trying to play this game pirated. " Taken from a "warez" site from December 2012. You think it really is that hard to emulate battle.net? FFS they already did it with Starcraft2 and patched lan into it. And also to respond to the comment above that most people just "download games randomly to try them out." Even though this is anecdotal evidence I don't know of a single person in my area that does that. They read up on it, watch some videos, talk about it, and then if it still seems interesting and not a shitty game, then they download it. I also have anecdotal evidence, I personally do it all the time, and most of my friends do it. Everyone knows reviewers are sold out, and opinions are horrible on most of the internet, so it's better to try out for yourself. Some games get pirated EVEN MORE because of a really bad review, like Elemental: War of Magic. It sucked so nobody wanted it, but many people wanted to know just how damn bad it was, I know I did it and had a big laugh. They don't read "reviews" from people but rather customer reviews(grain o salt) and current bugs list compared to promised features list. Some games are shit without me having to download them  I guess it's a different approach. DLing something is so fast and easy I go like "well, what the hell, I'll try it out", I've also taken some surprises, though very rarely. On point, I'd say D3 is popular enough most pirates will give it a shot, so I doubt it's a reason it's getting less pirated. The truth is it has been partially pirated and most features aren't there, so I'd say their DRM was successful, although the sacrifice made for it was a bit too large imo. I completely disagree with you, considering there are Private WoW servers that are literally 99% accurate outside of the customizations that they do to it(I currently play a Burning Crusade server that is literally release except you gain exp x14 faster. everything else is blizzlike with attunements, flying mount costs, skills, and talents, etc.) I think the only reason we haven't seen a working D3 copy is the amount of work that would go into making it work and most people have already moved onto other games. So the DRM isn't the big picture of why it's not pirated as much but rather simply because most people don't consider the game worthwhile, hell I paid for it and I haven't touched it in a long time now.
Well, BC is really, really, really fucking old, so of course the pirated version works almost like retail.
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On March 09 2013 01:22 FromShouri wrote:Show nested quote +On March 09 2013 01:13 mordk wrote:On March 09 2013 01:07 FromShouri wrote:On March 09 2013 01:02 mordk wrote:On March 09 2013 01:00 FromShouri wrote:On March 09 2013 00:56 adwodon wrote:On March 09 2013 00:51 FromShouri wrote:On March 09 2013 00:33 mordk wrote:On March 09 2013 00:30 FromShouri wrote:On March 09 2013 00:19 Fzero wrote:
Again, I have no comment on whether or not the design decision was correct to go with always online. However, the decision was made and there is no other way to make this game function without it. Everything you do in the current Simcity talks asynchronously to the cloud server system because it needs to have the data from your city (and every other city in your region [and all regions]) to be able to update everyone else with what is happening in your box.
The idea is that the glasshouse engine simulates down to the individual sim level and perpetrates that simulation across the entire region for all players. This doesn't work if you take it offline and this is the experience the team wants you to have.
A big comment about city size. I don't know how many of you have actually pushed the limitations of your box, but run something like fraps or another FPS counter when the engine starts pushing 400k or so. The game would simply not function at 4k x 4k sizes given current computing power on 90% of the players. When Ocean talks about future possibilities, they're not planning on simply ignoring the need for variety in city sizes, region templates, etc... they made decisions to function within the current PC environment. Crysis 3 can push your GPU, but SimCity will punish the CPU.
So yes, all these things came from the initial decision on what type of game they wanted to make and all of this information is publicly available already. The comments about DRM and fuck EA and Origin are all really outside of the scope of the game of SimCity. I realize they affect you as a consumer of a product, but I've got news for you.. the industry is moving towards analytic representation of all kinds of player statistics to help them drive revenue in future games. Every part of the industry is telling them that profits exist if you can monitor consumer trends and deliver goods to please that want. No where is that easier than via a computer. You should listen to Gabe Newell talk about economics of the industry sometime if you think it is just "EA being EA." Im not sure how you can defend such piss poor design philosophy because of "hardware" specs. They could of just as easily given you the options present in Total War games where people with lower graphics can turn down the amount of people on the screen. Do you really think that they couldn't of designed it better to where if you were zoomed out most of the people go into a CPU/Ram cycle and only appear when you zoom in on the town? But no, they went with SimTown instead of SimCity and "hope to address the issue of city sizes in the coming months". BTW-you're not releasing any ground breaking news, steam has been doing this for years with ads popping up when you close games(even more annoying because if I'm shutting my game down 99% of the time I'm done for the day so the extra clicks get annoying especially with all the garbage games they try to sell me that I'm not interested in.) Just because that is the way the "industry" is going, doesn't mean we can't get vocal about how stupid and punishing it is to legit users because 1 company makes a really shitty game because of the DRM requirement and then gives you no other options to play. BTW, did you know that these kinds of DRM didn't stop anyone from pirating D3 that wanted it? It doesn't stop pirates, it just present hassles for legit customers. Just like Starcraft 2 not having lan except in the pirated edition. Pirates got a feature that was a legitimate need for real customers. Hmmm I'm not sure where you get your data, but D3 is one of the least pirated games out of the recent releases, despite how terrible the launch was, as far as piracy comes, it seems to have worked fairly well. Cutting down pirating is not the same as eliminating it. It may of been one of the "less" pirated games, but that also has something more to do with its current state of being complete shit rather then the availability of pirated copies. I have a feeling its more or less the same with this game, people see it, read about it a little, find out it's complete shit, and don't download it. So in that regard, ya the DRM works perfectly. Noone has access to a fully functional pirated version of Diablo 3 stop talking crap. " People should just stop trying to DL this, Has it been cracked? Yes, Apparently Skidrow has cracked the Server problem and you can run your own server. Is it worth it? No, because most of the content is server side, So until someone breaks into Blizzard servers and steals content, good luck on trying to play this game pirated. " Taken from a "warez" site from December 2012. You think it really is that hard to emulate battle.net? FFS they already did it with Starcraft2 and patched lan into it. And also to respond to the comment above that most people just "download games randomly to try them out." Even though this is anecdotal evidence I don't know of a single person in my area that does that. They read up on it, watch some videos, talk about it, and then if it still seems interesting and not a shitty game, then they download it. I also have anecdotal evidence, I personally do it all the time, and most of my friends do it. Everyone knows reviewers are sold out, and opinions are horrible on most of the internet, so it's better to try out for yourself. Some games get pirated EVEN MORE because of a really bad review, like Elemental: War of Magic. It sucked so nobody wanted it, but many people wanted to know just how damn bad it was, I know I did it and had a big laugh. They don't read "reviews" from people but rather customer reviews(grain o salt) and current bugs list compared to promised features list. Some games are shit without me having to download them I guess it's a different approach. DLing something is so fast and easy I go like "well, what the hell, I'll try it out", I've also taken some surprises, though very rarely. On point, I'd say D3 is popular enough most pirates will give it a shot, so I doubt it's a reason it's getting less pirated. The truth is it has been partially pirated and most features aren't there, so I'd say their DRM was successful, although the sacrifice made for it was a bit too large imo. I completely disagree with you, considering there are Private WoW servers that are literally 99% accurate outside of the customizations that they do to it(I currently play a Burning Crusade server that is literally release except you gain exp x14 faster. everything else is blizzlike with attunements, flying mount costs, skills, and talents, etc.) I think the only reason we haven't seen a working D3 copy is the amount of work that would go into making it work and most people have already moved onto other games. So the DRM isn't the big picture of why it's not pirated as much but rather simply because most people don't consider the game worthwhile, hell I paid for it and I haven't touched it in a long time now.
Are there accurate Mists of Pandaria WoW servers? Burning Crusade was ages ago, it really isn't a good comparison. From what I remember WoW private servers had a very hard time staying even remotely close to the oficial game, and would need to stay at least one expansion behind to be reasonably playable.
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There are WOTLK/Cata servers because most people who play on these don't like MOP, the reason why the server I play on hasn't gone to WOTLK is because of the popular consensus of the community that anything after TBC is shit. So to answer your question, nah I don't know of any 100% blizzlike mop private servers, but I did a quick google search and found many servers hosting MOP content(even if they have like instant max level crap etc.)
Edit-Reading this cata server for example:
They state that some lower level instances don't work properly and the goblin/worgen areas don't work so everyone starts at lvl 10, but other then that supposedly everything works fine.
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On March 09 2013 01:34 FromShouri wrote:
There are WOTLK/Cata servers because most people who play on these don't like MOP, the reason why the server I play on hasn't gone to WOTLK is because of the popular consensus of the community that anything after TBC is shit. So to answer your question, nah I don't know of any 100% blizzlike mop private servers, but I did a quick google search and found many servers hosting MOP content(even if they have like instant max level crap etc.)
MOP content is probably very far from accurate. I used to play in a WotLK pirate server aaaaand well, it was nothing like retail. So different it hardly could be thought of as the same game. I don't know how current servers are, since I haven't played in a while, but I seriously doubt the content is close to retail. BC is old, it's a different thing.
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Well of course MOP content isn't probably accurate, the only accuracy is probably the NPCs are named the same. However you also have to realize the massive depth of all the new content code alone is miles and days above what D3 would take to emulate it since all of WoW is like ~40 gigs(or at least thats what it was when I had cata installed probably closer to 50-60gigs with MOP) and Diablo 3 barely takes up 6-8gigs.
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I couldnt find any regions with open spaces, and none of the spaces on mine are filling up, if anyone is able to log on you can add me originid: insectoceanx
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United States22883 Posts
On March 09 2013 01:23 mordk wrote:Show nested quote +On March 09 2013 01:21 Jibba wrote:On March 09 2013 00:19 Fzero wrote:
A big comment about city size. I don't know how many of you have actually pushed the limitations of your box, but run something like fraps or another FPS counter when the engine starts pushing 400k or so. The game would simply not function at 4k x 4k sizes given current computing power on 90% of the players. When Ocean talks about future possibilities, they're not planning on simply ignoring the need for variety in city sizes, region templates, etc... they made decisions to function within the current PC environment. Crysis 3 can push your GPU, but SimCity will punish the CPU.
The proper approach to this would be to find which ranks higher on players' needs, size of the city or complexity of the engine. If a core aspect of the Sim City experience is creating actual large cities instead of large towns, then you have to adjust and lower the complexity of the engine. Even with a less complex engine, SC could have the most complex modeling of any game. So even if someone says "I wish it covered recycling better" or something like that, it would still be leader in class in terms of modeling. In terms of design, you just need to be the best available option on the top needs. SC devs sacrificed one of the top needs (size/freedom) in order to push another top need, which was already sufficient. That's a design mistake, and product-out thinking. But... but.. that's your opinion, maybe in their vision the size of the city wasn't too important. Customers don't know all the details and the thinking behind a project, so they aren't entitled to demand such things. They can "speak with their wallets" as is the trend now, by not buying, but if an important sector still enjoys the game, it's still a good product, even if it doesn't meet your specific opinion on how to make the game great.
No, they are entitled to demand it, or someone will do it better. That's how proper product design is done. Game development is worlds behind regular software development, auto development and everyone else, but eventually the designers' vision is going to have to reflect what customers want (and there's more complex ways to determine what they want than just asking - product surveys do not do this very well) otherwise you don't have a good product for very long. There is an artistic vision, but there also needs to be a customer focused vision, or else someone else can easily beat you in the customer focused areas - the things customers want most.
I don't know that size of the city is the key need for satisfaction of their key customer segments, you'd have to do the research to prove it. I'm saying I have a feeling they didn't do the research to prove it one way or another. I'm saying that the city model could've been worse and still have been good enough for 99% of customers, therefore you're only getting marginal overall improvement by making it X amount better. I don't know what the exact threshholds are, but it's wrong to think products should be based purely on a designer's vision. That's how product development used to work, and it means the product is hit or miss when it enters the marketplace.
If they did the research and found city size wasn't important to their top 2/3 customer segments, then they can say "modeling was Y amount more important than city size to these groups, therefore we chose to sacrifice city size." What I think is instead being said is "we made this cool model we really like and we don't want to change it, therefore we chose to sacrifice city size."
And you are right that customers don't know in the ins and outs of the product. That's up to design teams to sort out. What customers do know are what underlying needs they have for video games, such as freedom, or ability to cooperate with friends or realistic individual based simulation. Those are the things you measure, and then the design team comes up with solutions based around that. So you're right, the true need isn't "I want bigger city sizes," it's probably something more like "I want more city freedom," which could enabled in other ways, such as different city positioning or shapes or something like that.
For the time being, they can reply "well then don't buy it" or "then make your own game", but eventually that mentality catches up to you. Keep thinking that way and eventually you turn into Nokia or GM, and you go from market leader into barely holding on. Maxis was already pretty close to that before with Spore.
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On March 09 2013 01:40 FromShouri wrote:
Well of course MOP content isn't probably accurate, the only accuracy is probably the NPCs are named the same. However you also have to realize the massive depth of all the new content code alone is miles and days above what D3 would take to emulate it since all of WoW is like ~40 gigs(or at least thats what it was when I had cata installed probably closer to 50-60gigs with MOP) and Diablo 3 barely takes up 6-8gigs.
Sure, but the claim that there are WoW servers that are "literally 99% accurate" is pretty absurd if you have to go back to BC to be able to find that. D3 is probally easier to pirate, and SimCity as well, but anything more complicated than pasting a crack in the installation folder is actually a deterrent to a lot of people.
On March 09 2013 01:53 Jibba wrote:Show nested quote +On March 09 2013 01:23 mordk wrote:On March 09 2013 01:21 Jibba wrote:On March 09 2013 00:19 Fzero wrote:
A big comment about city size. I don't know how many of you have actually pushed the limitations of your box, but run something like fraps or another FPS counter when the engine starts pushing 400k or so. The game would simply not function at 4k x 4k sizes given current computing power on 90% of the players. When Ocean talks about future possibilities, they're not planning on simply ignoring the need for variety in city sizes, region templates, etc... they made decisions to function within the current PC environment. Crysis 3 can push your GPU, but SimCity will punish the CPU.
The proper approach to this would be to find which ranks higher on players' needs, size of the city or complexity of the engine. If a core aspect of the Sim City experience is creating actual large cities instead of large towns, then you have to adjust and lower the complexity of the engine. Even with a less complex engine, SC could have the most complex modeling of any game. So even if someone says "I wish it covered recycling better" or something like that, it would still be leader in class in terms of modeling. In terms of design, you just need to be the best available option on the top needs. SC devs sacrificed one of the top needs (size/freedom) in order to push another top need, which was already sufficient. That's a design mistake, and product-out thinking. But... but.. that's your opinion, maybe in their vision the size of the city wasn't too important. Customers don't know all the details and the thinking behind a project, so they aren't entitled to demand such things. They can "speak with their wallets" as is the trend now, by not buying, but if an important sector still enjoys the game, it's still a good product, even if it doesn't meet your specific opinion on how to make the game great. No, they are entitled to demand it, or someone will do it better. That's how proper product design is done. Game development is worlds behind regular software development, auto development and everyone else, but eventually the designers' vision is going to have to reflect what customers want (and there's more complex ways to determine what they want than just asking - product surveys do not do this very well) otherwise you don't have a good product for very long. There is an artistic vision, but there also needs to be a customer focused vision, or else someone else can easily beat you in the customer focused areas - the things customers want most. I don't know that size of the city is the key need for satisfaction of their key customer segments, you'd have to do the research to prove it. I'm saying I have a feeling they didn't do the research to prove it one way or another. I'm saying that the city model could've been worse and still have been good enough for 99% of customers, therefore you're only getting marginal overall improvement by making it X amount better. When you make products purely on a designer's vision, it's hit or miss whether it actually succeeds in the marketplace. If they did the research and found city size wasn't important to their top 2/3 customer segments, then they can say "modeling was Y amount more important than city size to these groups, therefore we chose to sacrifice city size." What I think is instead being said is "we made this cool model we really like and we don't want to change it, therefore we chose to sacrifice city size."
I mostly agree, but I think there is an issue on applying this to gaming that doesn't really exist in other industries. Consumers may require cars to have a feature other cars have, or that a TV has a specific feature that other TVs have, but game are a much more unique product.
A consumer can't really say how much "city modelling" is important to him without actually playing a game with city modelling, or how the game can work with a smaller city size. Just reading about a feature can be misleading. Sometimes an idea looks really cool on paper, but when the developers implement it ingame it just doesn't work as well as they thought it would, or brought diferent issues that can't be easily explained.
SimCity may not be the best example for this, but I do feel it's not that simple to compare games to other products, some times you have to stick to your beliefs or please a specific target audience that may not be the biggest or loudest of them. Some games seem to try to please everyone and fail because of that. It's just harder to know what costumers really want, of if what they really want actually benefits them.
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@SKC you must of missed the part where I said I found 99% accurate(or at least claiming to be) WOTLK/Cata servers too. Which cata is only 1 expansion behind MOP and if MOP was as successful as it claims to be  you can bet that by mid-way through MOP that people will have decently working MOP servers.
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On March 09 2013 01:53 Jibba wrote:Show nested quote +On March 09 2013 01:23 mordk wrote:On March 09 2013 01:21 Jibba wrote:On March 09 2013 00:19 Fzero wrote:
A big comment about city size. I don't know how many of you have actually pushed the limitations of your box, but run something like fraps or another FPS counter when the engine starts pushing 400k or so. The game would simply not function at 4k x 4k sizes given current computing power on 90% of the players. When Ocean talks about future possibilities, they're not planning on simply ignoring the need for variety in city sizes, region templates, etc... they made decisions to function within the current PC environment. Crysis 3 can push your GPU, but SimCity will punish the CPU.
The proper approach to this would be to find which ranks higher on players' needs, size of the city or complexity of the engine. If a core aspect of the Sim City experience is creating actual large cities instead of large towns, then you have to adjust and lower the complexity of the engine. Even with a less complex engine, SC could have the most complex modeling of any game. So even if someone says "I wish it covered recycling better" or something like that, it would still be leader in class in terms of modeling. In terms of design, you just need to be the best available option on the top needs. SC devs sacrificed one of the top needs (size/freedom) in order to push another top need, which was already sufficient. That's a design mistake, and product-out thinking. But... but.. that's your opinion, maybe in their vision the size of the city wasn't too important. Customers don't know all the details and the thinking behind a project, so they aren't entitled to demand such things. They can "speak with their wallets" as is the trend now, by not buying, but if an important sector still enjoys the game, it's still a good product, even if it doesn't meet your specific opinion on how to make the game great. No, they are entitled to demand it, or someone will do it better. That's how proper product design is done. Game development is worlds behind regular software development, auto development and everyone else, but eventually the designers' vision is going to have to reflect what customers want (and there's more complex ways to determine what they want than just asking - product surveys do not do this very well) otherwise you don't have a good product for very long. There is an artistic vision, but there also needs to be a customer focused vision, or else someone else can easily beat you in the customer focused areas - the things customers want most. I don't know that size of the city is the key need for satisfaction of their key customer segments, you'd have to do the research to prove it. I'm saying I have a feeling they didn't do the research to prove it one way or another. I'm saying that the city model could've been worse and still have been good enough for 99% of customers, therefore you're only getting marginal overall improvement by making it X amount better. I don't know what the exact threshholds are, but it's wrong to think products should be based purely on a designer's vision. That's how product development used to work, and it means the product is hit or miss when it enters the marketplace. If they did the research and found city size wasn't important to their top 2/3 customer segments, then they can say "modeling was Y amount more important than city size to these groups, therefore we chose to sacrifice city size." What I think is instead being said is "we made this cool model we really like and we don't want to change it, therefore we chose to sacrifice city size." And you are right that customers don't know in the ins and outs of the product. That's up to design teams to sort out. What customers do know are what underlying needs they have for video games, such as freedom, or ability to cooperate with friends or realistic individual based simulation. Those are the things you measure, and then the design team comes up with solutions based around that. So you're right, the true need isn't "I want bigger city sizes," it's probably something more like "I want more city freedom," which could enabled in other ways, such as different city positioning or shapes or something like that. For the time being, they can reply "well then don't buy it" or "then make your own game", but eventually that mentality catches up to you. Keep thinking that way and eventually you turn into Nokia or GM.
Sure, but right now there is no evidence that backs up what people here are saying. Maybe most people in this thread liked the bigger city sizes and AI overhauls, but that doesn't speak as to the majority of people. So what if most hardcore SC4 people don't like the new one, maybe there's a higher amount of people that thoroughly enjoy the new experience, nobody knows right now, and maybe Maxis is okay with that.
I insist in this problem being exactly the same as BW hardcore community has with SC2. They may not like it, but that doesn't make it a bad game, and now there's ample evidence that points to the game being liked by a majority of people who tried it, despite all the things that BW had that "made the game better". Objectively, removing those things didn't make a worse product.
Of course in the case of SimCity it's pure speculation, since the game was just released.
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United States22883 Posts
Well, you're jumping ahead to features. Customers don't deal with features very well, they deal with needs/desires. It doesn't seem like it initially, but I think there's a number of ways companies could conduct customer research to figure out these things. The companies with the best product design systems don't just throw out features and see what sticks, they figure out what problems, opportunities or image concerns customers have and build features around that. That's what game development should eventually get to. The core of the game stays the same, but it helps you decide how many resources you should actually dedicate to X item, if it only gives you Y benefit.
And you're not going after everyone. That's a mistake. You choose key segments, and they don't have to be key because of numbers, they could be key because of longevity or because they're the most hardcore or because other gamers look up to them (as is the case for ESPORTS.)
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United States22883 Posts
On March 09 2013 02:11 mordk wrote:Show nested quote +On March 09 2013 01:53 Jibba wrote:On March 09 2013 01:23 mordk wrote:On March 09 2013 01:21 Jibba wrote:On March 09 2013 00:19 Fzero wrote:
A big comment about city size. I don't know how many of you have actually pushed the limitations of your box, but run something like fraps or another FPS counter when the engine starts pushing 400k or so. The game would simply not function at 4k x 4k sizes given current computing power on 90% of the players. When Ocean talks about future possibilities, they're not planning on simply ignoring the need for variety in city sizes, region templates, etc... they made decisions to function within the current PC environment. Crysis 3 can push your GPU, but SimCity will punish the CPU.
The proper approach to this would be to find which ranks higher on players' needs, size of the city or complexity of the engine. If a core aspect of the Sim City experience is creating actual large cities instead of large towns, then you have to adjust and lower the complexity of the engine. Even with a less complex engine, SC could have the most complex modeling of any game. So even if someone says "I wish it covered recycling better" or something like that, it would still be leader in class in terms of modeling. In terms of design, you just need to be the best available option on the top needs. SC devs sacrificed one of the top needs (size/freedom) in order to push another top need, which was already sufficient. That's a design mistake, and product-out thinking. But... but.. that's your opinion, maybe in their vision the size of the city wasn't too important. Customers don't know all the details and the thinking behind a project, so they aren't entitled to demand such things. They can "speak with their wallets" as is the trend now, by not buying, but if an important sector still enjoys the game, it's still a good product, even if it doesn't meet your specific opinion on how to make the game great. No, they are entitled to demand it, or someone will do it better. That's how proper product design is done. Game development is worlds behind regular software development, auto development and everyone else, but eventually the designers' vision is going to have to reflect what customers want (and there's more complex ways to determine what they want than just asking - product surveys do not do this very well) otherwise you don't have a good product for very long. There is an artistic vision, but there also needs to be a customer focused vision, or else someone else can easily beat you in the customer focused areas - the things customers want most. I don't know that size of the city is the key need for satisfaction of their key customer segments, you'd have to do the research to prove it. I'm saying I have a feeling they didn't do the research to prove it one way or another. I'm saying that the city model could've been worse and still have been good enough for 99% of customers, therefore you're only getting marginal overall improvement by making it X amount better. I don't know what the exact threshholds are, but it's wrong to think products should be based purely on a designer's vision. That's how product development used to work, and it means the product is hit or miss when it enters the marketplace. If they did the research and found city size wasn't important to their top 2/3 customer segments, then they can say "modeling was Y amount more important than city size to these groups, therefore we chose to sacrifice city size." What I think is instead being said is "we made this cool model we really like and we don't want to change it, therefore we chose to sacrifice city size." And you are right that customers don't know in the ins and outs of the product. That's up to design teams to sort out. What customers do know are what underlying needs they have for video games, such as freedom, or ability to cooperate with friends or realistic individual based simulation. Those are the things you measure, and then the design team comes up with solutions based around that. So you're right, the true need isn't "I want bigger city sizes," it's probably something more like "I want more city freedom," which could enabled in other ways, such as different city positioning or shapes or something like that. For the time being, they can reply "well then don't buy it" or "then make your own game", but eventually that mentality catches up to you. Keep thinking that way and eventually you turn into Nokia or GM. Sure, but right now there is no evidence that backs up what people here are saying. Maybe most people in this thread liked the bigger city sizes and AI overhauls, but that doesn't speak as to the majority of people. So what if most hardcore SC4 people don't like the new one, maybe there's a higher amount of people that thoroughly enjoy the new experience, nobody knows right now, and maybe Maxis is okay with that. I insist in this problem being exactly the same as BW hardcore community has with SC2. They may not like it, but that doesn't make it a bad game, and now there's ample evidence that points to the game being liked by a majority of people who tried it, despite all the things that BW had that "made the game better". Objectively, removing those things didn't make a worse product. Of course in the case of SimCity it's pure speculation, since the game was just released.
I think it's similar, but the city size thing seems much more universal than any complaint regarding BW->SC2. Maxis and EA are the only ones that can figure out what the right balance should be, but I don't think the complaint is limited to just the hardcore communities like TL. It's in literally every review, which are generally not catered towards hardcore players.
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On March 09 2013 02:15 Jibba wrote:
Well, you're jumping ahead to features. Customers don't deal with features very well, they deal with needs/desires. It doesn't seem like it initially, but I think there's a number of ways companies could conduct customer research to figure out these things. The companies with the best product design systems don't just throw out features and see what sticks, they figure out what problems, opportunities or image concerns customers have and build features around that. That's what game development should eventually get to. The core of the game stays the same, but it helps you decide how many resources you should actually dedicate to X item, if it only gives you Y benefit.
And you're not going after everyone. That's a mistake. You choose key segments, and they don't have to be key because of numbers, they could be key because of longevity or because they're the most hardcore or because other gamers look up to them (as is the case for ESPORTS.)
The problem with this is the mass of customers do not envision new things in games, only a small segment of the gamer base does. Going with this philosophy basically means Call of Duty for everyone. The same game rehashed over and over again, because publishers and developers know it's a sure sale. It means vanguard projects that push the industry forward actually stay at kickstarter area, which is actually a godsend, otherwise these projects would NEVER see light.
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On March 09 2013 02:17 Jibba wrote:Show nested quote +On March 09 2013 02:11 mordk wrote:On March 09 2013 01:53 Jibba wrote:On March 09 2013 01:23 mordk wrote:On March 09 2013 01:21 Jibba wrote:On March 09 2013 00:19 Fzero wrote:
A big comment about city size. I don't know how many of you have actually pushed the limitations of your box, but run something like fraps or another FPS counter when the engine starts pushing 400k or so. The game would simply not function at 4k x 4k sizes given current computing power on 90% of the players. When Ocean talks about future possibilities, they're not planning on simply ignoring the need for variety in city sizes, region templates, etc... they made decisions to function within the current PC environment. Crysis 3 can push your GPU, but SimCity will punish the CPU.
The proper approach to this would be to find which ranks higher on players' needs, size of the city or complexity of the engine. If a core aspect of the Sim City experience is creating actual large cities instead of large towns, then you have to adjust and lower the complexity of the engine. Even with a less complex engine, SC could have the most complex modeling of any game. So even if someone says "I wish it covered recycling better" or something like that, it would still be leader in class in terms of modeling. In terms of design, you just need to be the best available option on the top needs. SC devs sacrificed one of the top needs (size/freedom) in order to push another top need, which was already sufficient. That's a design mistake, and product-out thinking. But... but.. that's your opinion, maybe in their vision the size of the city wasn't too important. Customers don't know all the details and the thinking behind a project, so they aren't entitled to demand such things. They can "speak with their wallets" as is the trend now, by not buying, but if an important sector still enjoys the game, it's still a good product, even if it doesn't meet your specific opinion on how to make the game great. No, they are entitled to demand it, or someone will do it better. That's how proper product design is done. Game development is worlds behind regular software development, auto development and everyone else, but eventually the designers' vision is going to have to reflect what customers want (and there's more complex ways to determine what they want than just asking - product surveys do not do this very well) otherwise you don't have a good product for very long. There is an artistic vision, but there also needs to be a customer focused vision, or else someone else can easily beat you in the customer focused areas - the things customers want most. I don't know that size of the city is the key need for satisfaction of their key customer segments, you'd have to do the research to prove it. I'm saying I have a feeling they didn't do the research to prove it one way or another. I'm saying that the city model could've been worse and still have been good enough for 99% of customers, therefore you're only getting marginal overall improvement by making it X amount better. I don't know what the exact threshholds are, but it's wrong to think products should be based purely on a designer's vision. That's how product development used to work, and it means the product is hit or miss when it enters the marketplace. If they did the research and found city size wasn't important to their top 2/3 customer segments, then they can say "modeling was Y amount more important than city size to these groups, therefore we chose to sacrifice city size." What I think is instead being said is "we made this cool model we really like and we don't want to change it, therefore we chose to sacrifice city size." And you are right that customers don't know in the ins and outs of the product. That's up to design teams to sort out. What customers do know are what underlying needs they have for video games, such as freedom, or ability to cooperate with friends or realistic individual based simulation. Those are the things you measure, and then the design team comes up with solutions based around that. So you're right, the true need isn't "I want bigger city sizes," it's probably something more like "I want more city freedom," which could enabled in other ways, such as different city positioning or shapes or something like that. For the time being, they can reply "well then don't buy it" or "then make your own game", but eventually that mentality catches up to you. Keep thinking that way and eventually you turn into Nokia or GM. Sure, but right now there is no evidence that backs up what people here are saying. Maybe most people in this thread liked the bigger city sizes and AI overhauls, but that doesn't speak as to the majority of people. So what if most hardcore SC4 people don't like the new one, maybe there's a higher amount of people that thoroughly enjoy the new experience, nobody knows right now, and maybe Maxis is okay with that. I insist in this problem being exactly the same as BW hardcore community has with SC2. They may not like it, but that doesn't make it a bad game, and now there's ample evidence that points to the game being liked by a majority of people who tried it, despite all the things that BW had that "made the game better". Objectively, removing those things didn't make a worse product. Of course in the case of SimCity it's pure speculation, since the game was just released. I think it's similar, but the city size thing seems much more universal than any complaint regarding BW->SC2. Maxis and EA are the only ones that can figure out what the right balance should be, but I don't think the complaint is limited to just the hardcore communities like TL. It's in literally every review, which are generally not catered towards hardcore players.
There is also the argument to be made that the city sizes are so small because everything is being done server side. If this is the case, then it just furthers adds to the whole, "greed is killing game quality" argument. The greed of course comes in because they want to reduce piracy (which is a legit concern) by making it online only, and even more worrying is because they want to have access to all the data on gamers trends etc etc like Blizzard has been doing since WoW. Let's be blunt here, that is essentially spying on your customers, even if they only do it in game (which there is no guarantee they will do that).
Imo, just get back to making great games and forget all this other bullshit. If they had just made Sim City 4 but with all the upgrades you would expect out of a modern sequel, then the game would have been far better off because of it. Just my thoughts on it anyways.
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One easy pseudo-fix for the city size issue would be: dont make is a square, it feels so forced. Make it a shape that fits in to the landscape. Like a long but rahter narrow area along a river, or a valley inbetween mountains.
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United States22883 Posts
On March 09 2013 02:20 mordk wrote:Show nested quote +On March 09 2013 02:15 Jibba wrote:
Well, you're jumping ahead to features. Customers don't deal with features very well, they deal with needs/desires. It doesn't seem like it initially, but I think there's a number of ways companies could conduct customer research to figure out these things. The companies with the best product design systems don't just throw out features and see what sticks, they figure out what problems, opportunities or image concerns customers have and build features around that. That's what game development should eventually get to. The core of the game stays the same, but it helps you decide how many resources you should actually dedicate to X item, if it only gives you Y benefit.
And you're not going after everyone. That's a mistake. You choose key segments, and they don't have to be key because of numbers, they could be key because of longevity or because they're the most hardcore or because other gamers look up to them (as is the case for ESPORTS.) The problem with this is the mass of customers do not envision new things in games, only a small segment of the gamer base does. Going with this philosophy basically means Call of Duty for everyone. The same game rehashed over and over again, because publishers and developers know it's a sure sale. It means vanguard projects that push the industry forward actually stay at kickstarter area, which is actually a godsend, otherwise these projects would NEVER see light.
No, you're stuck in features. Needs are underlying characteristics of features - the reason that feature is desired, what it provides, what it solves, what it makes you feel. CoD clones are everyone copying everyone else's features. You can extract needs from those features and find an entirely new way to deliver them. No one has done it yet in gaming so I can't really give you an example, but it's used in a lot of other product development circles.
Like if you looked at WoW, some of the underlying needs would be in terms of social connections, gradual progression towards feeling more powerful, etc. Raids and boss loot and chat rooms are features that fulfill those needs, but there's other ways you could meet them. Likewise, it would be possible to implement raids and loot, yet fail to meet those needs.
On March 09 2013 02:25 Snotling wrote:
One easy pseudo-fix for the city size issue would be: dont make is a square, it feels so forced. Make it a shape that fits in to the landscape. Like a long but rahter narrow area along a river, or a valley inbetween mountains.
This is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. 4sqkm is your limitation, I believe, but there's probably other shapes/settings (still existing within 4sqkm) that better convey freedom than a 2x2 square.
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If only the sims AI was actually realistic, then I wouldn't mind the small town size... Don't get me wrong, this is still an impressive technology, unfortunately, so far, it looks like it has some weaknesses. Do I really need a server in order to calculate a convoy of 10 garbage trucks all collecting garbage at the same house while ignoring other areas? A convoy of 10 police cars en route to apprehend 1 criminal is not exactly what I call a strong AI, especially when these kind of wacky situations can lead to the destruction of your city.
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okay so I'm not familiar with the whole thread, but from what I see (just bought the game) I can't login for another 20 mins...
Is this happening often? Can't we just play offline, I'm pretty sure my computer can handle the "calculations"
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EPT
