[PC] SimCity (2013)

[jms493]

I am slowly making to movement from mining to tourism. I built a computer chip plant and I am importing plastics and making alloy. I am thinking I will start importing alloy and shut down my plants. I am making good money running Shows and Monster Truck Rallies. I shut it down last nite after scheduling a 300K rock concert. Right now My city has some tourism, education and industry.

 

[Garrett67]

I am slowly making to movement from mining to tourism. I built a computer chip plant and I am importing plastics and making alloy. I am thinking I will start importing alloy and shut down my plants. I am making good money running Shows and Monster Truck Rallies. I shut it down last nite after scheduling a 300K rock concert. Right now My city has some tourism, education and industry.

This sounds familiar

 

[BigBucs]

EA Disabling User Accounts Because It Thinks Any Contact With Amazon Must Be A Refund Request

UPDATE: Electronic Arts has announced that CEO John Riccitiello is stepping down. His last day on the job will be March 30. Interesting timing, eh?
————————-
It’s now been almost two weeks since Electronic Arts launched its newest, always-online SimCity game. Since that debut, EA has apologized for slow servers and said an offline mode wasn’t part of its vision, further inflaming customer ire. And now it’s time for another chapter in this unending saga of fails: We’re hearing from readers as well as reports online that any users who’ve contacted Amazon for any reason regarding SimCity are getting kicked out of the game.

This phenomenon has been chronicled on Reddit as well as in gaming forums, and each story sounds a lot like what happened to Consumerist reader Jeff. He writes in that he had ordered the digital version of the game from Amazon, and decided to play it recently.

But when he tried to play, he was told that he had an invalid key and that the game code had already been used. He figured maybe it was a glitch as he’d had to update the game, and went to sleep thinking such. The next morning it was the same story — SimCity wasn’t going to work for him. So he went to Amazon first, where he had purchased the game.
Amazon was more than happy to provide me with a new product key. I put the key in, SimCity re-appeared in my Origin game library. All is good, right?
Wrong.

After yet another forced update, the game once again told me that the key is no good, that it had already been used. At this point, Amazon offered to refund me, which I declined because I want the game, I enjoy playing it, and I was one of the few that was patient enough to sit through the server issues, AND I’m one of the few that realize life is too short to worry about the always-on feature (although, I could totally live without it, but that’s an argument for another day).

So now, I contacted EA Origin through chat, and they said I need to call them. The problem is – I’m deaf, and a phone call is the only way to do this. EA Origin chat guy suggested I find someone to call on my behalf. What a jerk.

I used the relay (a service for the deaf where the middle-man relays the message in typed format). After an hour on hold, I was hung up on before I could answer. So here I am, sitting, waiting for someone to respond while being on hold for a second time. I realize that EA is backed up in the CR department due to the various gaming issues people might have. But this is ridiculous.

So I looked into the issue, and guess what? It’s happening across the board. Anyone who even remotely contacted Amazon about the game got their accounts cancelled – by EA. EA blames Amazon. EA claims that I (along with possibly thousands other users according to a thread) have been issued a chargeback. Except the thing is – I never asked for a refund, nor was I given one either. I had this confirmed by Amazon, which is why they were more than happy to provide me a new product key.

Jeff says he was finally able to use the relay to talk to EA, and found out that indeed, he’d been banned from the game because Amazon had instituted a chargeback. Except, it didn’t, because he never asked for a refund or chargeback of any kind. He adds that Amazon was nice enough to give him a $40 credit for the problems it hadn’t caused, while EA simply gave him a 15% discount off his next Origin purchase and blamed Amazon for his troubles.

According to the post on Reddit, an Amazon CSR said EA is “aware of the issue” and will be busy re-enabling user accounts.
Further proof that the word refund is a dirty word to EA these days? If you needed evidence, that is: EA is reportedly replacing its own support number with asterisks in the SimCity forum, just because players don’t already have enough hoops to jump through and hey, why not make it even more difficult to log complaints?

Now’s a great time to remind y’all that EA, winner of the Worst Company In America 2012, is up for a repeat on that title very soon. Something to think about.

http://consumerist.com/2013/03/18/e...contact-with-amazon-must-be-a-refund-request/

 

[jms493]

So WTH? My city is going broke because my trade centers wont deliver alloy to the processor plant. I import plastic and it is delivered no problem but alloy comes in and goes somewhere else. WTH???

Also what do you guise do with your garbage?

I picked up NFS on the PC.

 

[TeflonDonny]

So WTH? My city is going broke because my trade centers wont deliver alloy to the processor plant. I import plastic and it is delivered no problem but alloy comes in and goes somewhere else. WTH???

Also what do you guise do with your garbage?

I picked up NFS on the PC.

Do you have a great work in progress? if you want to know where your alloy goes turn on the trade map and watch the trucks when they leave your depot.


Burn the garbage. It will potentially trigger a godzilla attack but if your dump is far enough from anything important you will have minimal damage.

 

[jms493]

Do you have a great work in progress? if you want to know where your alloy goes turn on the trade map and watch the trucks when they leave your depot.


Burn the garbage. It will potentially trigger a godzilla attack but if your dump is far enough from anything important you will have minimal damage.

No that was another problem. I was sending stuff to my great work but nothing was progressing so I stopped. I follow the trucks and they go to other industry in my city.

Anyway I am thinking of dumping that city in the original VSN. Nobody plays so it is kind of useless.

 

[Garrett67]

EA Disabling User Accounts Because It Thinks Any Contact With Amazon Must Be A Refund Request

Maynard?

I believe he got a refund for a digital copy

 

[TeflonDonny]

The prices on the global market have changed a lot. Processors now sell for just over $100k

 

[Maynard]

Maynard?

I believe he got a refund for a digital copy

i got a full refund from amazon. i was still able to play the few times i tried...up until about 2 weeks ago. I logged in and it forced me to authenticate my copy by entering in my product key. Amazon deleted the key from my digital library so i couldnt even try the code. i didnt care at all cause the game is a turd pile. not to mention i already got my money back from them

I give amazon credit though because anytime i have delt with them about downloads they always resolve the issue.

 

[jms493]

I think I may jump in back in a start again.

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9453148.page

We have an update for you, Mayors. An update about our next Update, in fact – this Monday, April 22 starting at 1pm PST we’ll be releasing Update 2.0, which contains a number of top-requested bug fixes and improvements. Here’s the full list of changes included in the Update:

What’s New

• Mayors Mansion: Mayors will now drive their fancy cars to work. Mayors will take their helicopter, limo, or sports car if the modules are present.
• HUD: Now color-corrects when in a colorblind mode.
• Data map: Data maps show the filtered color when a color filter is enabled (unless in a colorblind mode)

Fixes and Updates

• Cities not Processing: Mitigates some of the issues that were causing cities not to process. We are continuing to work on and improve this issue.
• Region Filters: Now sorts regions with available cities to the top
• Invitations: Invitations to join a region should be sent and received more quickly.
• Tourism: Fixes for unexplained fluctuation of tourists. Tourists more smartly counted on transit.
- Cruise ships are now more effective at bringing medium and high wealth tourists in coastal cities.
- New tourists will now decide to come into a city once leaving tourists reach train stations, bus depots, or cruise ship docs instead of waiting for those tourists to go out to the region first.
- This change will reduce the downtime of tourist buildings.
• Casinos: Casinos tuned so that Gambling will be a more profitable specialty. Players can bulldoze and replace existing casinos to see effects of tuning.
- The larger casinos now invite more tourists into the city which helps keep them full.
- Note that existing casinos will need to be replaced to take advantage of this change.
• More Casinos: Raised module limit on Sci-Fi and Sleek Casinos to 6 modules.
• Region Play: Cash gifts can now be received in a bankrupt city.
• Education: Fixed school buses getting stuck at the high school. Existing Schools will fix themselves.
• Education: Fixed school buses picking up students at neighboring cities that didn’t have school bus stops.
• Education: Fix to more accurately track regional student population.
• Education: Fix where kids leaving the school bus stop would teleport to the nearest pedestrian path instead of walking directly into the school.
• Education: University wings now give the proper bonus.
• Recycling: Fix for the Recycling Center where it would sometimes stop working, recycling services will visit other cities.
• Air pollution: Fixed issue where air pollution would appear to come from nowhere. Fix issues where your regional air pollution would be reflected back into your box for a double penalty.
• Fire Service: Fire Trucks don’t clump, dispatch to fires more efficiently.
• Water: Water pumps are now capable of pumping water from rivers at a larger radius so they can take better advantage of the water table in a city.
• Disasters: Cooldown for random disasters: Some players were getting hit too frequently with random disasters, this introduces a cooldown where no random disasters will occur.
• Trade: Fix for trade ports that suddenly stop shipping.
• Transit: Street Cars and Buses go to high volume stops first.
• Transit: A city with residents and public transit will now provide the accurate amount of workers and shoppers to its neighbors.
• Transit: A transit vehicle stuck in a pick-up or drop off loop will now go back to a garage instead of trying to pick up more people.
- Transit vehicles should recover automatically after the update. If players want to force the recovery, turn off the stops that are having looping issues, wait a few game hours, then turn them back on.
• Transit: Neighbors buses will now come in lower numbers into the city and do a better job at picking up local passengers first.
• Residential Tuning: Residential-only cities have failure state.
- Buildings are prevented from going up in density when they don’t have power or water.
- The amount of happiness gained from low taxes, police, fire, and health outreach has been lowered.
- Fixed some cases where buildings would not go abandoned when they should have.
- Higher density residential buildings are no longer blocked from going abandoned due to not having enough money.
- Happiness from low taxes does not double up every time it is given.
- Losing happiness due to not having a job is more impactful.
• Budgets: Fixed bug that prevented systems like fire, abandonment, garbage, and sewage from turning on when they were supposed to.
• Audio: Fixes issue where audio will stop working after creating a large city or where phantom audio sounds play in a city.
• Demolish: Fixes issue that occurred when players demolished buildings that had service vehicles, delivery vehicles, or agents out in the city or region. Previously, the agents would be in a state of limbo and would not recover when new buildings of that type were placed. This will no longer happen.

Because this is our first significant Update, we wanted to inform you in advance that we’ll be taking down all servers for a few hours while these changes are being issued. Choosing a time to issue a major Update is never easy, but after looking our peak player time, we’ve concluded 1pm PST is the best window for us to make these improvements. As you can see from the list above, the wait will be worth it.

Thanks, Mayors!

 

[Chrispy]

Same here, was waiting for something like this

 

[Chrispy]

New region? :dd:

 

[Primetime]

we can do that connected region again. I'll be in.

 

[killgod]

the 1.8 patch to fix cities rolling back....cause everything I did to rollback (I wasn't previously suffering from that problem). would be nice to be able to play the fuckin game.

 

[jms493]

My trading stopped and totally fucked my economy.

 

[Chrispy]

So we have to wait til Monday night to start a new region?

 

[Primetime]

I wont be able to play until Monday night anyway.

 

[jms493]

I am going to update this tonite...hope to start new city tomorrow.

 

[Primetime]

I have a busy night ahead of me but if I get the time, I'll get around to starting a new region and inviting everyone.

 

[Garrett67]

I'm guessing the cities are the same size. I might try it out again.