SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM

Re:SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers o... by mikeash on Friday March 08, 2013 @02:22PM (#5345187)

Is this actually the case? I've seen a lot of people say it, but then I've also seen some people say that they were able to keep playing for considerable periods of time even while the servers were offline. It sounds like one of those things where marketing-speak got misinterpreted as a technical design that isn't actually how it's built, but I really haven't investigated besides reading comments.

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Re:SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers o... by potatolicious on Friday March 08, 2013 @02:28PM (#5345228)

It's tricky because of the lack of concrete information. IMO the claim is substantiated by the fact that they turned off the highest simulation speed in an effort to increase server capacity - so clearly the server is tied into the basic simulation to some degree. How deep the ties go is hard to tell. If this was purely a DRM maneuver I highly doubt server capacity would be in any way tied to game speed.

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Re:SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers o... by ChrisLTD on Friday March 08, 2013 @03:17PM (#5345492)

My theory is that the game speed was reduced because at regular intervals your PC needs to check in with the server to: a) transfer resources between cities in a region, b) update leader boards, c) save your city.

The slower the game, the less often they have these hits to their servers.

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Re:SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers o... by mikeash on Friday March 08, 2013 @03:00PM (#5345404)

That sounds to me like they're doing regular checkins (DRM-related, or stats, or autosaves, or something) whose frequency depend on the game speed. I just saw a review[1] which indicated that the game ran fastest when it couldn't talk to the servers.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/chris-kluwes-simcity-5-review...

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Re:SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers o... by hrwl on Friday March 08, 2013 @03:30PM (#5345565)

I think it's very hard to say how much of the simulation is happening online. When I was playing last night I repeatedly got messages saying I'd been disconnected and then a few minutes later that I was reconnected. The game played fine between those messages. That said, I did notice some weirdness. For example, sewage and electricity and water would be perfectly fine one moment and then the next they would be way overloaded. I could interpret this as meaning the that part of the sim was happening online, or I could chalk it up to just being how the game goes.

I also ran into what many others have seen in the first few days. I built up a large city over a few hours and then quit. When I started back up, nothing was there. The city was claimed but it was a clean slate. You might see this from any number of things. Maybe the sim is all on the computer. Maybe the saves are just borked. Maybe the saves are fine on one node but haven't been replicated to whatever node I my request got load balanced to when i reconnected.

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