Actually, now that I said that only morons would believe EA's BS about the CPU not being enough for their game, and that they're actually processing your city on the server... it kinda makes me wonder if they ARE trying to get morons as a target demographic.

I was reading a paper a few months ago about Nigerian widow scams and such. The question they had basically asked themselves was: why those scams don't try to be a little less ridiculous and more plausible? Why don't they try to snag more people?

Their conclusion was that basically the scammers don't really want everyone. They actually want only the morons, who are more likely to then go through with it. If a smart person gets tipped off that it's bogus... GOOD! That's one less dead end to waste time on.

So I'm thinking, hmmmm, maybe that's EA's plan. Maybe they do want to reach the morons. More morons with money probably means more crap DLCs sold down the line :p

Well, that much is clear.

In fact, here's a thought: they said that the processing was so complex, they had to do some of it on their servers. But... if my still fairly top of the line 4 cpu / 8 thread Intel couldn't do it... what was EA going to do that actually makes a difference? Add one more CPU of their own for everyone who plays at a given time? Yeah, I'm so going to believe that they'll buy a 1 million CPU server farm just to handle everyone at launch. NOT.

So, yeah, it was clear that they're just shovelling ridiculous BS and hoping that enough morons would actually believe that.

The sad part, though, is that I've actually seen morons repeating it in excuse of the crashing servers fiasco.

Actually, considering how the game works, I'm 100% convinced that it's the result of EA considering the single-player case... except in EA management lingo that use-case sounds a bit like, "OMG, gazillions of people will pirate our game, or buy it used on EBay."

Seriously, the game IS at heart a single player game. I've managed to squeeze in between server crashes and start a game or two, and guess what? The game functions exactly the same when the server crashes while you're in your city.

The lie that the game is too complex for a single CPU and they need to do server-side processing too, was just that: a lie. The only "server-side processing" they do is saving the game and publishing your game events.

But here's the funny thing: Steam for example manages just fine to send your achievements to the server in the background, without needing the game to be tethered to a server all the time. Skyrim, Fallout New Vegas, A Game Of Dwarves, etc, take your pick, they're all single player games that Steam can both provide DRM for and save the achievements (and for some even the save games) on their server without pretending it's an online game.

So anyway, the game IS perfectly able to run single player. It's not a real client-server product like WoW or EA's own TOR. It doesn't need a server or a server emulator to play exactly the same. It's a single player game, which is perfectly able to function without a server, plus some artificial tethering to their servers that doesn't really add much.

So why IS a single player mode missing at least as an official option to start the game, when the game functions perfectly well in single player?

It seems to me like the only reasonable explanation is that they considered single-player offline mode as something to prevent.

You know, it just occurs to me... their problem with piracy and with second hand games is that someone gets to play one of EA's games, and EA doesn't get paid for it.

So let me get this straight, the result of putting the idiotic DRM in SimCity, is... that now a LOT of people get to play one of EA's (other) games, and EA doesn't get paid for it.

Sure, most of those wouldn't have bought the other EA game, but then neither would have most pirates. That is, outside of putting the BS in BSA.

But if you do the the maths BSA style, where every single copy downloaded is a lost sale -- and you just know whoever came up with that over-the-top DRM is -- yeah, great job, EA. Did you need a scope to shoot yourself in the foot so neatly, or is it a natural talent?

No, seriously, releasing SimCity without DRM would have probably resulted in less people playing an unpaid copy, AND saved them from all the negative publicity and angry customers.

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.

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.

The difference is that a wood deck is a simple thing and a thing that doesn't need any maintenance. There will be no point where someone will come and say, "you know, I thought about it, I want that deck to be able to reconfigure into a boat when I want to sail."

THAT is the problem with programming, and the one thing you won't learn by just building your own deck.

Making a thing that's written once and stays that way for ever, is EASY. Dealing with something that the client told you would be a deck, and next month he wants it to be a separate house, and next month he wants it to be a boat, THAT is the problem. Or even if the specification doesn't change now, next year someone comes with the idea that their business requirements changed a little, and now he wants that deck turned into a glider. The real art is to make something you can turn into something else without having to rip everything out and start from scratch.

The problem isn't with knowing how to cut wood and hammer nails, or in the case of programming, how to write functions and loops. That's the EASY part. At least half the population can do that, if they wanted to do a few tutorials.

And the problem is when everyone who barely learned to cut wood or respectively write a for loop, thinks they're somehow qualified to judge architecture. Or worse yet, be incompetent enough to think everyone is trying to scam him, if they try to do a good and maintainable design.

That's the nightmare boss. The kind who knows just enough to think you're trying to scam him if you want a real database, instead of going with his idea to use the Windows SDK and save all the date in .ini files. (Again, I'm not making it up. I actually saw a client throw a fuss about our not just using the Windows SDK to save his data in .ini files.)

Or the kind who's just barely competent to come with an idea like running the source code through an automated translation program, and maintain 3 different projects, one for each language, with the strings hard-coded in the text, and think you're trying to scam him if you want to do the extra work of extracting the strings into resource files. Strings which should have been in resource files in the first place, but, well, he didn't let the guys who programmed that monolithic monstrosity "unload him from money" by doing all that resource file stuff. (Again, true story.)

Etc.

Oh, each of those knew the programming equivalent of cutting wood and hammering nails. But they were just in the Dunning-Kruger zone when it came to judging a design. They didn't know how to design something more like a pagoda than a deck, but were stupid enough to think that knowing how to cut wood is making them an expert on that too.

That said, of course, testing a candidate is still a great idea.

I don't think that's enough.

Most of the problems with programming aren't writing the code. Anyone can do a write-only program. You can even deliberately go the wrong way about it (I used to do program flow with ONLY goto statements just to annoy a professor who hated goto religiously) and still bend it to do what you wanted.

IMHO to really understand why you need all those patterns, and refactoring, and unit tests, and why you don't just put a connection as a public variable in class X and directly assign it in classes Y and Z (true story, saw that done verbatim), you need to really be thrown into a team and be given a million lines of code written by someone else and be told to make it do something that goes against every assumption that was made at design time. Again, it's not a particularly large system these days, but it will serve to illustrate the point that it's different from immediately finding everything in your own 1000-line test program.

So, no, I don't think just a little BASIC experience will make them understand the real problems better. In fact, it might just make it worse IMHO.

IMHO part of being a good leader is knowing how to delegate. If you're an MBA with no real skills in programming, GUI design, database management, etc, IMHO the solution isn't to learn just enough of ALL of those as to move from "outsider" to "taking decision based on being dangerously incompetent in that field." The solution is to find some people who know that and delegate.

If you don't have anyone you can possibly trust, or, like in TFA, you've actually gotten to the point where you think you're at the mercy of the programmers... well, the first step would be to ask yourself WTH went wrong. But that's ok. You can ask a second opinion. You can get a consultant to eyeball the design and tell you what's wrong or right about it. Or, you know, whatever.

But delegate to those who are the experts. Don't think you've become an expert by learning just a little BASIC. In fact, the latter is the worst possible thing you could do. Or close enough to the worst.

(Of course, in all above it's a generic "you", not, you know, you personally.)

I'm not sure that learning some superficial idea of a language is going to help. And I'll give you a couple of reasons why:

1. Dunning-Kruger. The people with the least knowledge on the domain are those who overrate their knowledge the most.

Now I really wish to believe that some management or marketing guy is willing to sink 10,000 hours into becoming good at programming, and have a good idea of exactly what he's asking for. I really do. But we both know that even if he does a decent amount overtime, that's about 3 years of doing NOTHING BUT programming, i.e., he'd have to not do his real job at all any more. Or more like 15 years if he does some two-hours a day of hobby-style programming in the afternoon. And he probably won't even do that.

What is actually going to happen, if at all, is that he'll plod through it up to first peak of his own sense of how much it knows, i.e., the Dunning-Kruger sweet spot. The point where he thinks he knows it all, except, you know, maybe some minor esoteric stuff that doesn't matter anyway. But is actually the point where he doesn't know jack.

2. And from my experience, those are the worst problem bosses. The kind which is an illustration of Russell's, "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." The kind who is cock-sure that he probably is better at programming than you anyway, he just, you know, doesn't have the time to actually do it. (Read: to actually get experience.)

That's the kind who's just moved from just a paranoid suspicion that your making a fuss about the 32414'th change request is taking advantage of him, to the kind who "knows" that you're just an unreasonable asshole. After all, he has no problem making changes to the 1000 line JSP or PHP page he did for practice (half of which being just HTML mixed in with the business code.) If he wants to add a button to that one, hey, his editor even lets him drag and drop it in 5 seconds. Why, he can even change it from displaying a fictive list of widgets to a fictive list of employees. So your wanting to redo a part of the design to accommodate his request to change the whole functionality of a 1,000,000 line program (which is actually quite small) must be some kind of trying to shaft him.

It's the kind who thinks that if he did a simple example program in Visual Fox Pro, a single-user "database", placed the database files on a file server, and then accessed them from another workstation, that makes him qualified to decide he doesn't need MySQL or Oracle for his enterprise system, he can just demand to have it done in Visual Fox Pro. In fact, he "knows" it can be done that way. No, really, this is an actual example that happened to me. Verbatim. I'm not making it up.

3. Well, it doesn't work on other domains either, so I don't see why programming would be any different. People can have a superficial understanding of how a map editor for Skyrim works, and it won't prevent them from coming with some unreasonable idea like that someone should make him every outfit from [insert Anime series] and not just do it for free, but credit him, because, hey, he had the idea. No, seriously, just about every other idiot thinks that the reason someone hasn't done a total conversion from Skyrim to Star Wars is that they didn't have the precious idea.

Basically it's Dunning-Kruger all over again.

I think more than understanding programming, what people need is understanding that ideas are a dime a dozen. What matters is the execution.

What they need to understand is that, no, you're probably not the next Edison or Ford or Steve Jobs or whatever. There are probably a thousand other guys who had the same idea, some may have even tried it, and there might actually be a reason why you never heard of it being actually finished. And even those are remembered for actually having the management skills to make those ideas work, not just for having an idea.

Ford didn't just make it for having the idea of making a cheap car, nor for being a mechanic himself. Why it worked was managing to sort things out like managing to hire and hold onto some good subordinates, reduce the turnover that previously had some departments literally hire 300 people a year to fill 100 positions, etc. It's the execution that mattered, not just having an idea.

Once they get disabused of the idea all that matters is that their brain farted a vague idea, I think it will go a longer way towards less frustration both for them and their employees.

On the contrary. I already mentioned that there are choices that matter, and choices that don't really matter. And that WoW did increase complexity in the areas that actually are part of the game, like raid tactics (used to be you didn't need pretty much any), while reducing the complexity of, yes, that kind of metagaming.

I don't see how that counts as a dichotomy.

I'd be all for more choices in the actual game, but I can't say I see what's the mourning about when it comes to choices that were at best illusionary (like whether you really want to buy your next tier of spells) and at worst just a metagaming exercise that nobody but the alpha nerds were into (like the talents.)

Look, let's put it like this. For you, who not doubt know the system, and studied the spell rotation, and may have solved the puzzle of how to shave 0.5 seconds off a cooldown to get a better attack chain... yeah, I can imagine you'd get some satisfaction out of that.

But... let me give you an example of what a day in the life of a real newbie is like. And I swear I'm not making it up.

This is quite literally what happened the second day of trying to get mom addicted to WoW.

So I log in and invite her to a group, and she's a ghost. Well, that kinda thing happens. She runs straight past me to her corpse, resses, and keeps running straight into the next group of troggs, and starts swinging her axe at them. Plants, runs back to her corpse and does it again. And plants again.

Well, I figure she's getting into character as a dwarf warrior with a big axe. After all, the previous day she had exterminated every single rabbit and squirrel within range. In retrospect, I think even that was just a case of not yet grasping what she was supposed to kill and what not.

Well, anyway, I had rolled a priest for just that kind of occasion, so I switch characters and keep healing her on the next try. It wasn't easy. She kept fighting with no regards to any self-preservation, like someone trying in all earnest to earn her place in Valhalla or maybe Sto'vo'kor (Klingon Valhalla;)). She done me proud, she did.

Then I ask her where was she going. Says she doesn't know. I ask her to follow me to go repair and replace her equipment, she asks where am I. I'm kinda surprised at that point, because her character was some 10 yards from mine and looking at me. I start jumping up and down and ask whether she sees me now. No, she doesn't.

Well, to cut a long story short, at some point she had apparently yanked the mouse while using the right mouse button. I swear to the FSM, she was literally seeing just the top of her head and maybe 2 ft in front and behind, and maybe 3 ft to each side. She was running into those troggs just by sheer virtue of not seeing them.

You'd think that including a line about being able to turn the camera would do the trick, but... it actually took another 15 levels or so, and drowning about a dozen times, before it turned out she doesn't understand wth is that "camera" I'm talking about. For her the only camera she knew about, was that thing on her desk she had photographed squirrels in the park with. She kept looking in her in-game bags for anything that might be a camera.

THAT is the kind of problems the newbies have, not min-maxing stuff in a talent tree. When you're that green, you don't even understand wth they're asking you to do, much less feel any accomplishment for clicking randomly and then turning out it's the wrong choice. And, as I was trying to illustrate, you have much more pressing problems than that.