Am I the only one who finds it funny that gamers are using an online petition to get SimCity offline play? That's exactly what's happening. There are over 60,000 signatures on the change.org petition calling to "Remove 'Always Online' DRM from SimCity and future games." The sentiment among signees — and the whole gaming community — is that you shouldn't have to experience server problems and connect online to play a single-player game, which is how most people want to play SimCity.
Despite the petition, EA Maxis' Lucy Bradshaw tweeted:
We have no intention of offlining SimCity any time soon but we'll look into that as part of our earning back your trust efforts.
— SimCity (@simcity) March 9, 2013
This comes after yesterday's blog post by Lucy, apologizing to fans for SimCity's launch problems while saying those problems are mostly behind us. Lucy wrote, "I’m happy to report that the core problem with getting in and having a great SimCity experience is almost behind us. Our players have been able to connect to their cities in the game for nearly 8 million hours of gameplay time and we’ve reduced game crashes by 92% from day one.
"A combination of optimizing our server architecture and response times, deploying these enhancements on both a series of new and the original servers and issuing a few critical client updates has achieved getting virtually everyone into the game and, once in, having a great time building cities and sharing regions."
The experience is improving, but it's still far from where it should be. A lot of features were removed to help server stability, like Cheetah speed, while there's still a lot of bugs and features that are broken. For example, I wouldn't build a gambling city any time soon…
No one actually thinks that the bigwigs at EA would change their minds on always-on DRM, right? They've already said in the past that they learned from Diablo 3's launch fiasco, and we saw how that turned out. For a company that wants ever-increasing control over how gamers play their games, odds are EA won't be deterred in the future from using DRM. If anything, they'll say they've perfected it. The funny thing is, while always-on DRM sucks, we wouldn't be complaining as much if Origin's servers held up on launch day.
You can follow Senior Editor Lance Liebl on Twitter @Lance_GZ. He likes talking sports, video games, movies, and the stupidity of celebrities. Email at [email protected]
