Sim City - EA are greedy *******s Thread.

RickM said:
Yeah that'll be a problem. Thankfully it's not happened to me yet, but I'm sure it will!

The origin loop hole is basically that if you go into the Indian Origin store, the prices are a lot lower. You can enter your own address, and set India to the country, and the prices get slashed. There was a thread about it on reddit - thousands of people used it. I used it myself, game was confirmed and in origin within a couple of minutes and I was charged £17.99 instead of £44.99 - no brainer! :D
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Similar to Russian Steam prices.

I stopped buying the games myself and instead have a Russian trader who is on my gaming site buy them for me. Managed to get all of the games I wanted during the Christmas sale for an additional 50-80% off.
 
His claims seem authentic.

I got some time to actually play the game today (i.e., not looking over someone's shoulder). I tried to use WireShark to capture some data, but they're using SSL for server communication. The certificates are hard coded, and do not use the system certs, so unable to use a self-signed certificate to decrypt the data (well, not easily). Doing about 5 minutes of basic network monitoring didn't return anything interesting either, but the amount of computation done can be completely uncorrelated to the number of bits sent over the network (hello, Google search).

I doubt they allocated ridiculous levels of per-player server-side CPU, though -- I'm finding that claim harder and harder to believe. There are several games and simulators that do this (but such budgets for games like WoW aren't anywhere near those that would be needed for a game like SimCity), though this doesn't seem to be one of them. For starters, it's not a real time game, as you can pause and accelerate time, so their game servers are obviously not needed to synchronize position or detect collisions with objects rendered on different machines, so it's pretty clear rendering is done client side.

The client does only save minimal game state, but not because it can't save more, so it seems. You can apparently play for longer periods offline if you change your clock.

Perhaps their strategy is to make it easier to allow mobile clients in the future, where local processing capacity is much more of an issue, but I doubt this is the case since it doesn't seem there would be much motivation to keep that secret -- it would make a much better explanation for why they keep state in the cloud.
 
He (the developer) is correct. A few mods have been released and basically when you drop offline, the game stores your progress in small 1 meg files. The second your connection to the server is restored, those files get deleted. So it has the ability of storing it locally until the server comes back online.

All that needs to be done is to either:

A) Replace the saving mechnaism to save locally, this would however also involve rewriting the game launcher and loader to load from local files instead of connect up to a server.

B) Create a 'local' server, effectivly an additional Sim city server but hosted on your own machine. Getting the game to connect to it would be trivial as all it does is pull a json data list from here, containing all servers and their status: http://worlds.simcity.com/parallelworlds.json - so you'd just override this file, or append extra stuff to it, and hey prest, your game recognised your custom server.

Now, the servers look like they use pretty standard stuff, it'd be a case of somehow listening in on what info the game is sending/recieving from the server and fudging it to effectively give the game what it wants, in return for saving the game.

Theoretically very possible, just a case of someone having enough time to do the work.



Oh, and dont let the names of the servers fool you. They are all hosted in Amazon's Ireland facility - every one of them.
 
RickM said:
He (the developer) is correct. A few mods have been released and basically when you drop offline, the game stores your progress in small 1 meg files. The second your connection to the server is restored, those files get deleted. So it has the ability of storing it locally until the server comes back online.

All that needs to be done is to either:

A) Replace the saving mechnaism to save locally, this would however also involve rewriting the game launcher and loader to load from local files instead of connect up to a server.

B) Create a 'local' server, effectivly an additional Sim city server but hosted on your own machine. Getting the game to connect to it would be trivial as all it does is pull a json data list from here, containing all servers and their status: http://worlds.simcity.com/parallelworlds.json - so you'd just override this file, or append extra stuff to it, and hey prest, your game recognised your custom server.

Now, the servers look like they use pretty standard stuff, it'd be a case of somehow listening in on what info the game is sending/recieving from the server and fudging it to effectively give the game what it wants, in return for saving the game.

Theoretically very possible, just a case of someone having enough time to do the work.



Oh, and dont let the names of the servers fool you. They are all hosted in Amazon's Ireland facility - every one of them.
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Interesting. You learn something new everyday. I wonder why the reason all their servers are based in Ireland and not dotted around in locations or is this not how gaming companies do things?
 
Shelley said:
Interesting. You learn something new everyday. I wonder why the reason all their servers are based in Ireland and not dotted around in locations or is this not how gaming companies do things?
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I guess keeping them all in one location they have to pay less people to pay to keep watch on the servers. Having them all in one place they can it makes it easier for repairs and such.
 
Ernest L. Defoe said:
I guess keeping them all in one location they have to pay less people to pay to keep watch on the servers. Having them all in one place they can it makes it easier for repairs and such.
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Ah that makes sense and constant repairing is what is needing done to them. :p

To be fair though 3 days after launch the servers ran and still run fine for me.
 
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