At least on Amazon.de there were a couple of comments to the effect of, "Well, they couldn't have guessed that all the idiots who paid a lot of money for a game actually intend to play it." :p

It's not even just the personal attacks. It was also a combination of both annoying and amusing to see the fanboys come up with stuff like:

- Well, they said it would be online and have DRM, whoever is complaining can only blame themselves, bla, bla, bla, I'm giving it 5 stars out of principle!

(Really? Did they also say it would be impossible to play because the servers crash all the time? And what principle would that be? Fanboy devotion?)

- I don't believe any of the 1 star reviews, such a complex game can't be judged in just a couple of hours!

(Which part of "can't even start the tutorial" is too complex to judge? Would, say, 8 hours of servers crashing and being unable to even 'claim' an empty spot to build on, reveal some subtle nuances of experiencing a server crash, or what?)

- The game is pure genius and incredibly much fun, I'm giving it only 4 stars because I can't actually start it.

(Then how the eff would you know first hand if it's fun to play or not?)

- I didn't play it myself, I bought it for my kid and he seems happy with it, so I'm giving it 5 stars.

(Way to confess in public that you're paying exactly zero attention to your kid. Plus, if you have no personal experience with it, shouldn't the kid be writing the review?)

Loosely translated from German from Amazon.de, for what it's worth.

Really, it's the... faith-based giving top ratings or objecting to vad reviews for something they didn't even play that was disheartening at times.

Nobody claimed that their servers were handling the number crunching. And even if they did, you'd have to be a moron to believe it. GPUs exist for a reason -- because CPUs are too slow for the job. The bus between your CPU and video memory is what, about a million times faster than an Internet server to your video memory?

However, that doesn't mean that critical logic to play the game doesn't reside on the server. The random things that happen in the game could very well be generated by the server. Certain mechanics, no matter how dull, simplywdon't exist in the game client. That makes it difficult to pirate -- you can remove the logic that prevents it from needing to connect to a server, but nothing would work. Want to place something? Well, the server dictates whether it's a valid location or not. Could someone "crack" that logic, effectively making it okay to place anything anywhere? Sure. But now it's not the same game.

The parent was 100% correct. The game is tied to logic on the server. It might be trivial (for EA) to such logic to the client, and you can dislike EA for not putting the logic on the client. But, it doesn't change the fact that the current design makes it very hard to pirate.

Bullshit. Stop just imagining what fantasy details might keep you trusting your corporate idol.

I can tell you first hand -- thanks to servers going up and down like a yoyo today -- that the game continues doing everything just fine, for extended periods of time, even while it has a message in the upper left corner that the connection is lost. People still move in and out, houses and businesses grow or shrink and merge adjacent lots when growing into something physically larger, cops still respond to crimes and firemen to fires, oil and water deposits run out, and the city responded just like I expected to stuff like my demolishing a power plant (which made the trade depot stop too, which stalled the factories) and then building a new one (which reversed those effects.)

It's not just that such code COULD be in the client, it's that it obviously IS in the client. The client continued doing all that just fine without a server connection.

If you know anything that doesn't, please do list it. Just asserting that EA's lie is true, won't cut it, no matter how hard your fanboy brain just wants to have faith in your corporate idol.

For a start, ok, let's look at the server load issues. Other games had server load issues too. E.g., WoW at launch, EA's own TOR, etc. They just had a login queue, but the servers continued working, and whoever got a connection, actually kept having it.

In SimCity's case they supposedly had a "login queue"... except it wasn't actually a queue. It didn't keep an order or adjust its predictions based on how many quit in front of you. It was just an enormous time (20 minutes!) being blocked from trying again. The clue that it wasn't really a queue was that it didn't change or even start differently if you tried different servers. You always got blocked for the same time, and there is no indication that someone who wasn't blocked and tried at the right time wouldn't skip in ahead of you. So, yeah, in 20 minutes you'd just get blocked again for another 20 minutes.

Not that it mattered for most servers, because they just were down and weren't accepting connections at all. So you wouldn't even get that joke of a "queue", you'd just get a network error.

And not that it mattered if you actually managed to connect, the server would die and nix your connection before you even managed to actually claim a city, or while trying to claim a city. (I.e., get your empty map to start a city on.)

I'm sorry, making a server that can only take a finite number of connections is ok and natural. You don't have infinite memory, nor CPU power, nor bandwidth. Making a server that crashes and burns if too many people attempt to connect, though, is just bad quality.

Not that it's the only case of bad coding. The game for example seems to have serious trouble even remembering the fucking settings. E.g., I keep deactivating the option to publish my achievements, but it seems to randomly pop back on. Especially it seems that a server crash makes it forget that option, which is to say, they fail to persist it. (And on top of that, when they pester me with it at the main screen, the game can't seem to tell if it's on or off anyway.)

Really, how stupid and incompetent does one have to be to botch saving the options, e.g., as some simple key/value pairs? I'm pretty sure even complete novices would find it hard to screw that up.

And really, what did they need multiplayer for, anyway? Reading their blog makes it sound like it being multiplayer opens so many oportunities and, werily I say unto you, make it a whole new game... except it doesn't.

The game is multiplayer in the same sense as publishing your minesweeper score makes minesweeper multiplayer. I.e., I can't even imagine how much brain damage someone would need to think that.

You can't actually be in the same city with a friend or anything. At most you can have your cities in the same zone and have a look at each other's city.

Plus, the sad part is right on the main menu screen, where it pesters you with that publishing your city events. The game tells you something to the tune of "Playing is more fun with friends! We can publish your game events in the GameLog for your friends!" Not an exact quote, but close enough and the meaning is that.

I'm sorry, but that's not "playing with friends", it's just putting a frikken log on the web. It's no more "playing with friends" than keeping a list of your Minesweeper scores on a blog page is.

I can't even imagine what kind of sad moron are they aiming for as a target demographic, that actually thinks publishing a list of events from an essentially single player game, is anything like actually playing a game together with some friends. Where the heck is the "playing together" part, ffs?

Even skipping after that, who the heck even cares to read such drivel on a web page as, basically, "PigBenis City reached 50,000 people?" Seriously, if some marketroid moron from EA is reading this, trust me, even if I were your BFF, I still wouldn't give a flying fuck about mundane events from your single player video game. The only people who care about that are those who can get something out of that, e.g., the people in the raid group who need you to be able to tank the boss, so THEY get their own chance at their own epic loot and tokens. Trust me, they're not checking your equipment out of care for you, nor are going to envy your gigantic virtual penis because you got the epic Sword Of Ganking +5. And even that requires an ACTUAL multiplayer game, not just a web page.

But ok, let's say they do think there is a whole market segment of friendless morons, for whom having a site with their game log is the closest they'll ever come to "playing with friends." WTH does that need a permanent connection for, or being an online game at all? Can't the game just upload the list of achievements at the end or in the background? Steam manages to do that just fine, for example, without making every game be online.

So, anyway, to sum it up: it's not even just that it's DRM, or that it calls home (Steam can do those without being intrusive), or even the lack of infrastructure. It's that the DRM and infrastructure are stupidly and incompetently implemented, that caused the problems. And on top of that, what's causing insult to injury is that the whole hype about it being online, is just BS, and that thus what caused the whole problems was a "feature" that the game needed like we all need a hole in the head.

That's very true, the jokes were that it was multiple Touches taped together. And we see how wrong that was.

You're wrong on the size of the 7'' though. I have a SG3 and a Nexus 7 and using both feels very different. I would never read on a SG3, but it feels quite natural on the N7.

Apple created the "tablet?" I'm sorry, but no. Apple's success was a mobile-centered OS and marketing when the relevant hardware was able to be produced at the right cost. Tablets were around beforehand.

If what he said WAS objectively true, would your response be any different?

Kudos to you for getting it completely, right down to the point about ethics. Of course, most of the people you respect to fancy themselves some sort of intellectual elite that think that since they are good at some parts of (say, physics) that they can disregard something like psychology in favor of their own intuitions.

Funcom has a long-standing reputation for horrible support period. They are a joke of a company and anything they churn out should be ignored. Age of Conan was downright criminal in every aspect, from bait-and-switch type tactics (past the newbie stage the game was garbage and undeveloped), releasing what really was almost alpha-quality (WoW's Betas had far less bugs than AoC on release) and false advertising (the main attractions of the game didn't work and did not for quite some time, if they ever did).

WoW was fucked in many ways for a long time with some server issues. The thing was, there was nothing else really, and despite its problems it was still good. Warhammer online just wasn't compelling enough. Age of Conan was... *promptly bursts into a fit of laughter*

Is something wrong with you? You may as well suggest that Google facilitates piracy through Chrome as Chrome allows people to set it where you can download pirated material just by visiting piracy websites.

If you want to act like the contrary "voice of reason" in hopes that the mods will upvote you, you should probably read the article and understand the situation before you let your greasy cheeto fingers type away at that disgusting keyboard of yours.

Sure, I can give you a link or two. Far from me to discourage a healthy dose of skepticism :p

http://definitions.uslegal.com/b/breach-of-fiduciary-duty/

"When one person does agree to act for another in a fiduciary relationship, the law forbids the fiduciary from acting in any manner adverse or contrary to the interests of the client, or from acting for his own benefit in relation to the subject matter."

So, yes, if you just decided to just give this year's profits to charity and it's not obvious what that does for your investors, you might just get sued.

Also, for an actual law, you can check out stuff like Fiduciary Obligations Act

Note that as per section 1, ""Fiduciary" includes a trustee under any trust, expressed, implied, resulting or constructive executor, administrator, guardian, conservator, curator, receiver, trustee in bankruptcy, assignee for the benefit of creditors, partner, agent, officer of a corporation, public or private, public officer, or any other person acting in a fiduciary capacity for any person, trust or estate." My emphasis.

So, yeah, if you thought being a CEO meant free hand to do whatever you wish with other people's money, think again.

That said, note that there is leeway in exactly what is the best for the principal, i.e., best for the person whose money you're entrusted with. Nobody is forbidding you, for example, from whitewashing the company image with ads, PR or, yes, by playing the charity card, if you can make a case that you expected more profits as a result of it. There's a lot of 'oh, we care so much' act that basically is ok if you can make a case that a corporate asshole image would hurt your clients' interests more.

That said, also note that most of the big charity is actually private. A guy like Bill Gates is perfectly within his rights to spend his own money however he sees fit. Basically if you decide to just give 20 million of the company's money to charity, you might get sued, but if you can pull a 20 million salary as a CEO (and God knows some people got paid even more even to drive a company into the ground) and then give that money to charity, well, nobody can tell you what to do with your own money.

Also note that the rules are a bit different from non-profit organizations. Those are by definition not supposed to make a profit for anyone. So if an organization is registered as a charity, well, it's safe to say it won't be sued for actually spending its money on charity.

Fair means they'll leave the customer with some money for other corporations to fleece.

I don't think it means even that. In fact, I don't think "fair" was ever meant to mean "for you".

From my subjective experience just means "we want more money". The idea is that what they're already getting is so incredibly unfair, when they could be getting more with just a little PR, disinformation and maybe a little collusion. Why, the CEO is probably still driving a Mercedes, while his neighbour is driving a Bugatti Veyron. Can you imagine how unfair that is?

Sarcasm aside... Not that it's necessarily a bad thing or evil. They're expected, and indeed the system is such that they have a legal obligation, to make as much money as possible for the investors. Not fleecing you as hard as physically possible, would be a breach of that obligation. Whether you have some money left after that, is more of a side-effect, than intended. Indeed, it would be a breach of trust if they actually intended to take less money for fairness sake.

I suppose the system just works. Might as well enjoy it. But the corollary is that whenever some large company is talking about something being for your own good in any way, better bring your own lube, they want to shaft you. They're supposed to, after all. Some just are more subtle than others.

There's another way. Round up the crazy people and remove their hands. that'll keep guns out of their hands.

Well shucks kid, if he ain't out there playin' football like a healthy boy his age ought to do, I reckon there be something not right in that there head o' his and he should be seeing one o' dem head-looking-atter fellas or whatcha call em