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Ask HN: What could possibly be wrong with SimCity?

11 points by Lewisham ↗ HN
SimCity has been having a miserable launch, where they're now at the point where they are turning off basic features like leaderboards in order to manage traffic.

Naively, my assumption would be that they would have built the system in an elastic manner, allowing for horizontal growth and throwing more hardware at the problem. That they're turning off features indicate that they didn't.

As we're unlikely to ever get a post-mortem from them, what might they have done wrong? What gotchas are there when building high-traffic web services like these? I'd like to try and avoid whatever has happened to them.

8 comments

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[dead] vicks711
I don't know. I have never played this game. But the question you are asking is something like asking if programmers masturbate more than average people, which though is an interesting question (like the question you are asking) but we will never know the answer! RIP
username111
Maybe they had a budget set for servers then now that that budget wasn't enough they are running through the hoops to get that budget increased and trying to work with what they have in the mean time.

That or they don't have an easy way to add more hardware to the mix and they weren't set to scale like you said.

notahacker
They claim they simply didn't provision enough servers. Turning features off is probably just a stopgap.

It's difficult not to feel schadenfreude towards EA for taking the remarkably user-hostile decision to force online play of a game whose previous incarnations were famed for longevity, modding and introverted, sandbox-style gameplay. I hope the miscalculation is expensive enough to encourage them to rethink.

johnward
The problem is that they made some bad architecture decisions based on protecting the game from being copied instead of basing those on user experience.

Why wouldn't a modern machine be able to run a city simulator? Sim City 3000 and Sim City 4 will still run on a single core AthlonXP. Cities XL runs on modern hardward. As do other simulation games.

Also, what will happen when EA decides they don't want to pay for the servers anymore? The game won't work. I can still play all of the old games and frequently play SC4. The cloud ruins that. Imagine not being able to play all of your favorite classic games. The ones you paid good money for.

This was an EA business decision that didn't consider the consequences. To make up for it they decided to start denying refund request. When customer said they would start doing credit card charge backs Origin support said they would ban their account. That means you would lose access to any EA game you've ever bought! It's like they are trying to drive you away from Origin.

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sgloutnikov
This game will get pirated (like any other game), it might just take a little longer. Not sure how they still believe they can stop piracy/reverse engineering.

I do not think it was worth it, given what has happened. Very sad that it happened to one of my most favorite games.

johnward
People will have to steal the server side code or reimplement the parts of the gaming engine. I don't see this one getting cracked. EA will probably see that as a win even thought all of the paying customers can't play.
devonbarrett
It seems all you would have to do is mimic the save and load functionality as the majority of the game logic is offline. I doubt it will take that long before we see things pop up.