

Simcity's senior producer finally releases a statement - Maven911
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9342980.page

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binaryorganic
It really bothers me that none of the official responses have adequately
addressed DRM, which is the real controversy, and is what created the server
crisis in the first place.

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rainsford
To each their own, but honestly I don't view DRM as "the real controversy". To
me, the more important thing is that I paid them for a product that doesn't
really work properly or reliably. Had SimCity shipped with on online play
requirement but reliable servers such that the online requirement was
unnoticeable...I doubt I would have cared all that much.

I think it's also technically incorrect to say online DRM is the root of the
technical issues. The server requirements necessary to support online DRM
would seem to be much less than the server requirements necessary to support
online city-state storage and inter-city interaction. Had the online component
ONLY been about DRM, I doubt they would have had capacity issues at all.

I appreciate the fact that a lot of people are militantly opposed to DRM (the
more invasive the DRM, the stronger the opposition). And I don't necessarily
disagree. But it also seems like the fundamental problem with SimCity isn't
the DRM so much as it's the online gameplay nature of the game combined with a
totally inadequate server capacity. The less shouldn't be "don't use DRM" so
much as it should be "do a better job planning server capacity".

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Noughmad
Quick summary: They have a server shortage. They are adding new servers but
this takes time (three days, apparently). Also, they're disabling Cheetah
speed.

If only there was a way to start virtual server in less than three days...

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ZoFreX
They're using EC2, so I'm not sure why it takes them so long to add new
servers.

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pan69
Just because you're using EC2 (or any other "cloud" platform) doesn't mean you
can just simply add new servers to your infrastructure, your application
architecture needs to cater for this. With EC2 you have the "ability" to
architecture your application in such a way that you can take advantage of
this but if you don't then you have to do everything manual. Cloud is not a
silver bullet.

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kelnos
If they're truly using EC2, and they haven't architected their infrastructure
to be able to horizontally scale at the push of a button, then they're
incompetent. Period.

It's forgivable that it doesn't happen automatically, as automatic
provisioning in response to load isn't always an easy problem to solve, but if
it's going to take them 3 days to bring up new machines on EC2 to handle load,
they're doing it wrong. The ability to do this sort of thing quickly is one of
the top few reasons to use something like EC2.

~~~
gte910h
They very likely DID do something to bring up servers quickly. I bet they can
spin up stuff like NA East 3 rather fast. Just because there is a DB somewhere
who can't handle 2304982309482 people trying to slam cheetah mode while
230492340 are editing trade deopots, which is just a test they didn't happen
to simulate well enough in load testing, doesn't mean they're utterly
incompetent.

Server outside EA are pretty new to EA from what I understand

The weirdest crap melts sometimes when you apply real numbers of real non-
tester peoples to things. Weird crap you cannot test for. Often has little to
do with raw power, but instead is small architectural inefficiencies you
cannot easily fix.

