So, I'm imagining you might think this post should've been something music related or coding related. If so, maybe you have the wrong impression of why I started this site. This site is almost purely the actualization of random thoughts that come to me. Now while most of these are indeed about music or coding, not everything is. For example, I am a relatively avid gamer. If you give me a bunch of time to do nothing you can pretty well bet I'm gonna spend a good chunk of it playing games.
Now onto this post in particular. I'm not aware if you know but EA has released with Maxis a new SimCity game. Now while I have many things against EA, for example this, I said to myself, "I like SimCity more than I hate EA". Well...EA if you look at the article beat out AT&T, Comcast, and Bank of America to be the worst company in America last year. With the release of SimCity, we might be looking at a repeat winner for worst company in America.
I digress a bit though. Why am I angry with EA over SimCity? Well it's not really because of the gameplay which I personally find charming. It's not really about the price of $60, which I got taxed for yielding a price of $63.60. I find that price high but if I get requisite entertainment from my purchase than I think it's worth it. For example, compare movies where you pay $10 or so for maybe 2 hours of entertainment vs a game where you could get let's average maybe 25-40 hours for most games recently. No it's not the price I'm angry at. I'm angry at the simply piss poor judgment held by those in charge at EA.
What does this mean? Well, first off they require the game to be played online which in itself is a bummer. What if I want to play by myself in some random-ass shack in I don't know...the upper peninsula of Michigan? Regardless, the always online thing won't deter me too much as I do usually find myself with an internet connection. Equivalently, all data is stored on their side in terms of game data. Well, I'm ok with that as long as they properly take care and handle it.
So those are some of the whatever, I'll get over them kind of things that started to bug me. Now we get to where I really get angry and rant crazy. Well perhaps you'll share my opinions I don't know. First, they obviously don't have enough server capacity. What I mean by that is that earlier today I waited 20 minutes to play a game I paid for on a server that said it was 'Available'. I completely gave up trying to play on the US servers which are busy or full constantly. I understand that maybe you didn't think the servers would be burdened in the way they are. Sure that kind of oversight is fine. However, the game wasn't even out in Europe, it should be now, and all the US and half the European servers were full. I think you've got a hell of a problem. Given the size of EA and the shit storm that followed the Diablo 3 release, you'd think they would have done something to not have the same crap happen. I mean come on, a relatively new company, Riot Games, has a game out that while has its occasional hiccups, manages to keep around 12 million players online each day with peak of 3 million people playing at once.
Enough about server constipation. It angers me but not as much as the next point. Which is that they DON'T PROPERLY TAKE CARE OF MY DATA. Yea, the caps might be overkill, but I really am peeved greatly by this. First off, the servers are disjoint so on each server, you need to remake your cities. Second off, you have to redo the FREAKING tutorial every single time you switch servers with no option that I saw to skip it. Now this might change in the next few weeks but you can imagine my ire when these things are done the way they are. In addition, after getting a town hall you're allowed to rename your city. Guess what? It doesn't always rename properly so you end up renaming your city "bleep bloop" a hundred times hoping it'll eventually stick that yes you do intend you rename your city. Obviously there are save issues and other shits but those really stuck out to me as things that should be relatively easy to deal with.
At this point I'm just really angry and it's probably bad for my health so I'll leave it here. But others have plenty to say, often in much more...colorful language. I find the game itself to be decently thought out and reflective of realistic urban planning. However there are just way too many issues. Whether they're just launch related or not, I think if it comes down to it, I'd have to vote for EA to be the worst company in America. Stay tuned for more craziness and perhaps some music. We will see what comes in the future.
--CsMiREK
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