SimCity 5 Disappointment-All

Elysium wrote:

No the game just releases at 12:00 EST. EA has confirmed there will be no preloading.

It's a decision they made for who knows why. They had preloading with Crysis 3.

In that case, their support people utterly fail. (Which, to be honest, is not all that surprising.)

Keithustus talking to EA support a few pages back wrote:

[em]Final question: Will customers who preorder on Origin be able to preload the game before the servers go live so that they can start playing when the servers go live instead of just then starting to download and not being able to play for a long time?[/em]

Yes. They will be able to pre load the game before the servers go live.

[em]Ah, good! Well, thank you so much for the answers.[/em]

Re: the post above, looks like EA customer support folks didn't have a lot of accurate information. Or maybe they only knew about people in places like Singapore, who were able to preload for a few hours before their servers went live this morning.

Xeknos wrote:

...

It's your region. I'm sure there are plenty of folks, maybe already in the earlier regions, or posting on here and haven't expressed interest in joining (Hypatian), that you can drag in.

In that case, their support people utterly fail. (Which, to be honest, is not all that surprising.)

It appears to have been a recent change to the decision. It also indicates in the receipt that there will be a preload.

Downloading now....

It's still telling me it's unreleased.

won't let me on the left coast.

Waiting for Gamefly to let me start downloading...

I am in California. Hit a refresh on Origin.

Did we have a consensus for which Region for GWJtropolis #2? Titan Gorge, Viridian Woods, or Discovery Delta?

I've been Preparing Download for 5 minutes now, so I've got that going for me.

It won't let me in central time either

Still saying its unreleased for me.

Yeah Eastern time here, and still unreleased...

Restarted Origin, now it won't load anything. I guess we could have predicted this with no preload et al. Goodnight Now!

I'm in for joining whatever group has city space available!

Yeah this sucks, really wanted to get this download started before going to bed. Good luck to everyone staying up. See you guys online tomorrow.

I bet they hit their download cap so we're all just waiting in a big queue for it. It makes no sense to not allow the pre-load unless theres some monetary issue to allowing preloads. We're a captive audience so maybe they figure they'll take the PR hit to save some bucks instead of having to increase capacity temporarily to meet the demand.

Hey I'm down for joining friendly regions too.

It's not just you guys. The official forums just exploded with about 50 new "unable to go online"-related threads in the last 20 minutes.

Petriefied and anyone else who wants to join GWJ regions: please provide your Origin username here and post your info into the GWJ username Google doc. You can find a list of GWJ names and Origin IDs for players already arranged into regions on the previous page of this thread. Joining now will put you into GWJtropolis #3.

indy wrote:

I bet they hit their download cap so we're all just waiting in a big queue for it. It makes no sense to not allow the pre-load unless theres some monetary issue to allowing preloads. We're a captive audience so maybe they figure they'll take the PR hit to save some bucks instead of having to increase capacity temporarily to meet the demand.

That's sad. I would think that Origin would take a cue from Steam and Blizzard and the like and beef up the pipes. I hope they have enough server capacity for the game itself, or the internets are going to go berserk.

Downloaded, installed, now processing large file.

jonnypolite wrote:

Downloaded, installed, now processing large file.

Aha, so not everyone is in download hell. What was your secret?

...processing large file...

The secret? "Origin is people...."

BadKen wrote:
indy wrote:

I bet they hit their download cap so we're all just waiting in a big queue for it. It makes no sense to not allow the pre-load unless theres some monetary issue to allowing preloads. We're a captive audience so maybe they figure they'll take the PR hit to save some bucks instead of having to increase capacity temporarily to meet the demand.

That's sad. I would think that Origin would take a cue from Steam and Blizzard and the like and beef up the pipes. I hope they have enough server capacity for the game itself, or the internets are going to go berserk.

I'll say it again, this should not be an issue for game companies anymore. I know of one major game company that uses Chef to dynamically spawn new game servers and HAproxy loadbalancers in their own cloud infrastructure, or on Amazon's if theirs get overloaded.

I"m in, so i'll set up region 2 after the intro tutorial.

You'd think that if they're not going to preload that they'd at least implement torrenting to help distribute. Doing so would not interfere with the activation DRM.

Well, I've been watching this all tonight just to see how it's shaken out, and await my Amazon box tomorrow. See you all then.

I don't think that's the issue, the issue is origin has not sent the pre-order keys out, if you got your key from someone else you can download fine.

It took forever but it's downloadable now.

1AM, it just became downloadable for me.

Edit: 1:06, download and install complete. I don't think they're overloaded, I think they tried to roll it out by timezone, and whatever GeoIP tool they used blows chunks.

Origin is just sitting there. When I mouse over SimCity, it says "Not yet released." WTF?

EDIT: Oh. Rolling it out by timezone I guess.