WoW Insider

The Queue: The SimCity

Adam Holisky — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 11:00:00 EST

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky (@adamholisky) will be your host today.

I said in the last Queue I wouldn't do it, but then things kept getting worse. So let me take three paragraphs and expunge about SimCity, Maxis, and EA for a moment. Briefly, there are major problems with SimCity, namely that no one is able to play much, if at all. Severs have been crashing, the client locks up at unexpected times, and any work you do can be lost in an instant. Not a good situation for a game series that helped define video games in the 1990s.

But wait, you ask, isn't that just like what happened with Diablo 3? No, it's not, I say. With D3 we had a game that didn't work well out of the starting gates too, but at no point along the way did Blizzard and their community reps try to say otherwise. It was obvious, and they acknowledged as much and kept everyone informed. While we were all still pissed, at least we knew what was happening and what was being done.

On the other hand you have EA, who initially put up tweets saying SimCity was live, up and running. Only thing was at the time, no one (literally no one) could access it because Origin wasn't letting people download the game. Only eventually through their personal Twitter and Reddit accounts did Maxis personnel start to give us insight into the problems caused by Origin and EA. And finally after an insanely long delay did any official word come out of EA. Where Blizzard had a unified, quick, and professional response, EA has a fractured, bumbling, and an entirely untimely response to a problem that is threatening to tank the entire franchise of one of the few games that rivals World of Warcraft in its fan's devotion.

The only saving grace for EA is that I hear it's quite easy to get a refund for SimCity if you ask nicely.

Demonreach asked:

Has anyone done any kind of study to see it you actually get the same amount of loot using group loot as compared to the old method of individually looting? To me it definitively seems less

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The Queue: The SimCity originally appeared on WoW Insider on Thu, 07 Mar 2013 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

WoW Insider

The Queue: The SimCity

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