Sim City

[Boss1000]

Is this your personal experience? Or is this as widespread as everyone predicted?

[Ninja]

A lot of people had that problem.

[CrackRabbit]

That screen is EXACTLY why I refuse to purchase anything from EA.

[Nick Mangiaracina]

A lot of people had that problem.

Well of course they did. Publishers refuse to allocate the necessary resources when it comes to launching a title that requires an internet connection and has a large fanbase. Look at just about any major MMORPG release with the exception of Guild Wars 2. All of them have had an absurd queue time. The difference is, the MMORPG experience is to playing with other people. Sim City's experience should be a sandbox on your own computer.

[No-eye-deer]

https://twitter.com/Polygon/status/309071096836136960

Funny

[Nick Mangiaracina]

https://twitter.com/Polygon/status/309071096836136960

Funny

People seem to be alright with what Polygon is doing, but I disagree. We have a history of games with game-breaking DRM getting high ratings because the reviewer failed to acknowledge the always-on DRM. The fact is, always-on DRM should receive a lower score regardless of whether or not it's currently affecting the reviewer. Why does this matter? Because what Polygon did was merely a pageview grab here. The metacritic score doesn't change. Take a look. Polygon still has a 95 score for SimCity on Metacritic, and the Metacritic score is the only one that matters. Here's an example why. Polygon gave them the score they wanted to give them, or got paid to give them, and then artificially changed it to get the page hits from the EA haters.

The entire score changing is a ruse to get more page hits. I no longer trust polygon.

[Squidulosous]

Isn't any review system that uses numbers generally kind of a bad thing anyways? I mean, due to reviewer biases, individual tastes, and how reviews generally talk about the quality of the game (quality of the controls, quality of the graphics, quality of the story, etc.) as opposed to quantifiable things?

Like, is the number what matters, or the actual experience of playing the game?

[Dirka]

FYI, I played all night on the Europe east server and had no problem at all.

[Ruugab]

Polygon gave them the score they wanted to give them, or got paid to give them, and then artificially changed it to get the page hits from the EA haters.

The entire score changing is a ruse to get more page hits. I no longer trust polygon.

[Boss1000]

Not really. At DragonCon I saw devs talking with reviewers about the process. It was very interesting. Devs will privately send the game to a site and ask for a review score. If it's not good enough, they'll go to another site. The idea is that the first review really needs to be the best to make a splash. The conflict of interest is obvious (you want the review hits, so you're encouraged to give it a good score to be the first), but so is the necessity for devs to do it this way.