This is probably my favorite thing you've ever posted, Mr. Good. I lol'ed.

The servers do SOME things. Basically, they're what transfers fund/power/water/population back and forth between city and give you access to the (incredibly well hidden and hard to use) social functions. The funny part is two fold:

This is what I was thinking, specifically your first sentence.

I have a couple of questions for anyone with a better legal mind than mine. EA's EULA states that all games are sold "AS IS" with "NO WARRANTIES". I have, however, been reading about my (and other) state's Deceptive Trade Practices Act, which is meant to protect consumers from, among other things, misleading business…

The way I understand it, the way the agents work is the entire basis of the engine. I dunno it CAN be changed. Wasn't the whole point of the always online to allegedly take care of the processing because regular PCs can't handle it or have we all just given up on that charade?

I'm with you on this one. I hope RPGs get more and more advanced combat, a la Dragon's Dogma or Dark Souls.

Right, okay, picture it like this. When you pull into parking at a concert venue or a football game or an amusement lot, everyone is generally coming in one entrance. You're all going to one place: the closest available parking spot. The line might be long, but it moves relatively fast because at least it's organized.…

That's a whole other can of worms. My point is as long as this system is in place, the traffic can't be fixed. The traffic is symptomatic of the design of the agents.

Haha, I guess it's a pattern of erratic behavior? Regardless, it's not something you can plan around.

They leave a different house and go to a different job every day. That is not a pattern.

That isn't a game flaw though, according to the designers. That is intentional.

What is going to happen is that the Sims will divert onto a different path then immediately revert back to the exact same path at the nearest junction until that backs up because they're all trying to go to the exact same place. Then they'll repeat it to the next junction and then the next. A gridded city is going to…

It doesn't matter what I want, it won't fix anything. As long as all the Sims are trying to go to the exact same house and the exact same job at the exact same time, your traffic is going to be fucked.

Cities are based on patterns. People wake up in the same house, go to the same job, at roughly the same times. Mass transit follows a predetermined route. We use highways and interstates to move faster around low densitiy traffic areas, to go from our high paying (or low paying) job to our predetermined wealthy (or…

This fixes nothing. Each Sim goes to a different job every day and a different house every night. This is a fact. All this "fix" does is make them randomly go down two separate roads instead of going randomly down one. This is treating the symptom, not the problem.

This just goes to show you how little EA thinks of their customer base. Gamers generally have, at least, a pretty smart subset of users. A game like SimCity definitely will draw more than your average FPS. A lot of us are programmers, networkers, systems administrators, troubleshooters, etc. for a living and your…

I was mostly being tongue in cheek and hoping to coin the term "Molyneauxian".

This is honestly the most robbed I've ever felt in a game purchase in my 25 years of gaming. Every single thing about this game is broken: utilities, zoning, population, finances, traffic...everything. This isn't the lamentations of one single consumer either. Check out some of the topics on the answers.ea.com forums.…

Chris, might want to check Owen's latest post about SimCity. Even if you had a subway, no one would use them. This game is either horrendously broken and bugged or the entire GlassBox engine is a sham of Molyneauxian proportions.

This is very unfortunate and explains a lot of the issues I couldn't understand and just figured was a learning curve. Why my casinos would never get tourists, why some industry would never get workers, why some people would never get to schools. This is terribly and utterly game breaking.