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SimCity News

Please note I'm currently working on the new site. I didn't want to take the site offline though, so you can still visit it. However me working on the site while it's still online means a lot of the pages will appear wonky. But not to worry, it won't take too long. Happy
Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - 02:10

The SimCity team just tweeted about what's currently in development. They are planning to release a new update later this week:

Currently In Development 

Hi Mayors – below you'll find the notes that will appear in Update 3.0 scheduled for release later this week. 

Update 3.0 Notes 

• New: Added more Hotel models to increase hotel variety. 
• Traffic: Updated routing system to improve traffic. Routing system now understands more information about u-turns, required vehicle stops, and vehicle behavior on certain road types. This should make traffic smarter. 
• Traffic: Commercial and industrial buildings stagger their work shifts to start throughout commute hours instead of at the top of the hour. This should reduce traffic. 
• Traffic: Fixes one issue where a car won't move causing traffic to back up behind it. 
• Traffic: Vehicles can now make right turns on Red. This should improve some cases of traffic. 
• Traffic: Trading polish that will improve regional traffic when one city has a lot of jobs and its neighboring city has a lot of workers. 
• Air Pollution: Fixed more issues where cities that placed air polluting buildings received large amounts of air pollution from unknown sources. 
• Service Vehicles: Fix for disappearing service vehicles on cities that whose vehicles had disappeared before update 2.
• School Buses: Fix for issue where school buses were getting stuck at neighbor's city or arcology. 
• Audio: Tuned audio on French Police Station. 
• Trading: Fixed issue where fire servers were not trading consistently between Brakeman's Folly and Twain in Whitewater Valley. 
• Trading: Sewage trading: Sewage will now take a more direct route to regional sewage plant instead of throughout the city. 
• Trading: Made gifting more reliable. 
• Ferry Terminal: Ferry Terminal can now send its sewage to the output pipe and treatment plant. 
• RCI Tuning: Fixed issue where sims going to a park via transit would sometimes lose their money or happiness on the way home. 
• RCI Tuning: Bulldozing abandoned or rubble buildings will now prevent new developments for 6-12 hours. 
• RCI Tuning: Less Happiness is taken from wealth 2 and 3 buildings when rent is due when no money is present. 
• RCI Tuning: Fix for issue some users experienced where buildings would stay abandoned because moving trucks would not be able to move in. 
• Trees: Trees now last longer, but also do not eliminate as much ground pollution. 
• Radiation: Radiation causes less ground pollution than previously. 
• Transit: Changed thought bubble suggestion to add more trains to deal with crowded passenger trains to suggest that you add more train stations. 
• Transit: Improvements to lights to make rail look better at night. 
• Transit: Streetcar stops can now be placed directly on standalone streetcar tracks, and passengers can walk along the tracks to them. 
• Transit: Tuned the chance buses or streetcars will go to high-traffic stops first as a minor traffic improvement. 
• Roads: University pedestrian paths can now cross streets. 
• Manufacturing Trucks: Fixed issue some users experienced where manufacturing trucks left the city and were lost permanently. 
• Delivery Trucks: Fixed issue where some users would experience a loss of resources is their delivery trucks returned to garages without proper storage. 
• Sports Parks: Tuned the amount of skateboarders and neighborhood athletes at the sports parks. 
• Data Layers: Zones are now visible in heavy data layers. 
• Edit Mode: Added more valid snap points in edit mode. This improvement is most noticeable on Parks. 
• Buildings: Addressed some cases where buildings would stack on one another.

Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - 02:04

 

Last month the SimCity team released a new patch for SimCity. Until now we haven't had a chance to post it. So here it is now.
 
We have an update for you, Mayors. An update about our next Update, in fact – this Monday, April 22nd starting at 9pm GMT 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 colour-corrects when in a colour-blind mode.
Data map: Data maps show the filtered colour when a colour filter is enabled (unless in a colour-blind 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 speciality. 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 neighbouring 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: Cool down for random disasters: Some players were getting hit too frequently with random disasters, this introduces a cool down 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 neighbours.
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: Neighbours 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 impaction.
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 approximately two hours while 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 9pm GMT 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! 
Saturday, May 4, 2013 - 01:39

Playfish recently announced that they are shutting down both The Sims Social and SimCity Social. You can read more details in the F.A.Q.

I'm not happy about this, and a lot of people I know who play the games are upset. Some people even spent real money on these games and they are frustrated to say the least about the closure. EA is now pushing players to go to PopCap and pick a free game from a small selection, one of which being Bejeweled.

Monday, April 1, 2013 - 19:07

Yesterday (or rather, during the night) I announced the ending of SNW. Now I need fans, friends and foes to read this carefully: Everything I wrote in my previous post is true. Everything about the broken hardware/electronics, everything about the stress, everything about the community hate and everything about the site issues. All those things are true. Everything except the bit about closing the site. Yes people, that bit was an April Fools joke. Might be a harsh one, but that bit could have been true as well.

As I was typing my news post yesterday, Cheetah walked by, he saw the title and it scared him a lot. You see. He actually heard and saw me the past months. He knows how stressed I've been, and how I was this close to actually shutting down SNW. He kept me from closing SNW several times. So, you have him to thank for the fact that SNW is still up and running. Because all the issues are real. And I have real stress because of it.

Nonetheless though, it is absolutely true that I would miss SNW and the community too much if I'd close the doors. Yes, I'm talking about the same community with the haters. Because that same community also has a large group of lovely people. I met more than a handful of awesome people through the community. More people than I can count. And that's worth so much more than those haters I mentioned.

  • Like I mentioned, the problems are real. The computers are broken and we are working on getting the repaired. I don't know when but I hope as soon as possible. Not only am I bored out of my mind now that I can't game. I also can't work anymore and that's something I can't live with.
  • The site issues (the fact that it's slow and the weird bugs and errors) are not made up either. They do prevent me from posting anything right now. People are working on resolving those bugs. But it can take some time and even my lovely programmer boyfriend is unable to fix all the issues. At least not right away. I hate not being able to post properly. It's very frustrating, so please bare with us while we work on these things.
  • The stress I have from all the problems is real too. Some time ago I discovered I am losing a lot of hair and that's mainly due to medication and stress. Most of you probably don't know it. But I'm chronically ill, have several diseases and life is challenging at times, to say the least. I'm not a sad person because of it and I don't need anyone to pity me. But it's only fair to tell the truth. These illnesses make life harder and I realize more and more that I need to put myself first, before anything else, also meaning before SNW.
  • The community hate is real as well. I won't let others bully me away. But there are sites in the community who try their best to bully me and some of my friends, mostly because they are jealous. I refuse to mention their names, because I am better than that. I don't need to bring them down on my site. Karma will catch up with them later, I'm sure.

I'm very sorry I scared a lot of good friends and fans. I felt really bad seeing sad people on our Facebook and Twitter. I needed to let out my issues though and this was certainly a good way. No, SNW is not closing its doors. But sometimes I wonder why I bother to continue. And I hope after reading the previous post and this one, that you understand why I've had my doubts.

I'm also a little annoyed that some people could only look at the date and go: April Fools. Forget the date for a moment. Then read the previous post again, and read the above. And then think again. It was this close to being reality. Are these reasons not bad enough? Especially the stress I've had and still have are a constant reason for me to think: should I just stop all this? Of course every time I think this I'm reminded by lovely people that I shouldn't quit. That they love the site and the articles. Some also love the downloads. And then there is my other half, the lovely Cheetah, who says I will regret this decision if I would do it, that this is my hobby (so what will be left if I quit this?) and he tells me that the issues eventually will go away. I only chose a rotten date to tell you about the issues, I'll give you that. So yeah let's hope the issues will go away soon. At least now you know the issues I'm dealing with and that it might take some time for me to be back. If all goes according to plan they should probably pick up my computer this or next week? Not sure. I'll post about it on our Facebook page and Twitter account.

Again I'm so sorry for the people that were truly shocked. Thanks for reading my rants though. And I just hope you will understand why I chose to do a radical thing like this. Believe me when I say that I am done with April Fools for the next 10 years. :P

Monday, April 1, 2013 - 02:06

I don't know where to start. So I'll just cut right to the chase. I'm shutting down SNW. I've had this website for 9 years, and those have been 9 wonderful years. But it's time to let go. I have several good reasons for me to come to this decision and I hope you all understand.

As some of my friends might have read on Facebook, recently a load of electronics in our house broke down. Not all at once, but most of them broke the past few weeks. A few big examples: My main computer is "broken". The hard disk has been giving problems since the beginning of 2012. I already sent it back for repair back then but Apple said there was nothing wrong with the hard disk. Well I was right, because the hard disk has been showing loads of bad sectors and it's come to a point where I can't boot to Windows anymore, which is where I play my games. If I cannot play my games, I can't write any reviews and I can't make any downloads. It's a long story but basically, I don't have any warranty on this anymore (I should, I have Apple Care) and of course I'm getting it fixed anyway, but I don't know when I'll have it back. Then there is the laptop, which started smoking out of nowhere the other day. Scared the hell out of me. But yeah, broken. Cheetah's computer also broke down yesterday. It's probably the power supply which shouldn't be too expensive to replace but, it's yet another broken computer. If you all remember, in January we lost a lot of stuff when the server crashed. I really did suffer emotionally from that. Besides all these computers, other electronics are failing too and it's just too much for me at the moment. I'm so done with this.

Besides the failing hardware and electronics, you might have noticed there aren't that many updates on SNW. This is mainly cause I have a lot of issues updating the site. It's a long and complicated story. Long story short: I need half an hour to post 3 lousy walls. And for the news it isn't any different. I need to post the English news. Then translate. After I've translated the article, the Dutch article will have an English url and the English article will have no proper url at all, just numbers. I then have to edit both the English and the Dutch articles to fix the urls. With images it isn't any better. If I want to use images in my content I have to add those images first, then add news, link the images to the article. Save the article. Edit it again and then I can insert them. Don't ask me why, there are just a lot of bugs. I'm so fed up with all the stress I've gained in 2013 and I really need a break.

As if these aren't enough reasons, I'm also really fed up with the hate in the community. It's nothing new, the hate has been around for years. But I notice there are STILL sites out there who hate me (or my site), for no good reason. I can try to be nice and I can try to be mean, nothing helps. I'm really tired of this hate in the community and to be honest: I have better things to do than to sit here and be hated on by people who think they are better than me. I don't deserve to be treated that way. I just hope this will be a lesson for people in the community. Try to get along at least. Try not to hate. Isn't the whole idea behind The Sims that you can be whoever you want to be, no matter what colour or sexual preference or hobbies? Why hate? I realize in most cases the hate comes from jealousy but jealousy is just a nasty thing you don't need. If I can give people in the community some good advice: Be original in your work and be nice to others. You'll get far if you at least try to do those things.

So the past few weeks I have been talking about these issues with Greg from SimCookie and Daniel from SimsGalore, who happen to be very good friends. And we all just sort of feel it's enough. We feel like maybe it's time to let a new generation of Simmers take over for us in the community. There are so many fansites already. So yeah, not only is SNW closing, my friends from SimCookie and SimsGalore are also closing their site.

Au revoir, my friends!

Wednesday, March 27, 2013 - 13:04

EA sent this lovely EA-KeepCup to use during the reviews, since DST is coming soon for us Europeans. The KeepCup will come in quite handy. I have loads of reviews to write and I love to drink coffee, cappuccino, latte etc. Yummm. Thanks EA! :D

Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - 01:00

SimCity

Just a random screen of a city I started tonight.

Sunday, March 24, 2013 - 22:30

SNW is 9 years old!

SNW is 9 years old today! Now I don't have anything special planned. Working on the new website kind of messed up my planning. But it's still worth a mention! smiley

Hip hip hooray!

Wednesday, March 20, 2013 - 23:20

I have no idea where to start, and I don't want to make this a long post so I'll keep it short and happy...

SNW is back!

The server crash caused the website to be gone for 2 months. That's something I never want to experience again! The temporary site was a burden to be honest. And at times so was re-building the new website. But it's up and running now - sort of. And I hope you all like the new look and the new layout of things.

It's not quite done... meaning I have plenty of old and new content to add, both on the news sections and in Simpedia. I also have to re-add the old downloads and I have a bunch of reviews to write. Errr. Luckily Cheetah and Mari offered to help with the reviews. :D

I would like to call the website "beta" as there will be things that aren't working properly and there are still things missing. We're still working on the site so please bare with us as we try to make it better!

If something isn't working for you, please let me know. We have a contact form, a Twitter account and a Facebook page. The comments below our news posts should work as well. Plenty of ways to contact us! Happy

I want to add a special thank you for Cheetah who has been a tremendous help working on the new website. <3

Tuesday, March 19, 2013 - 00:40

SimCity has already sold over 1.1 million copies of the game, of which the majority (54%) were digital copies. Despite the troublesome launch, millions of cities were started by players who have played over 15 million hours in total.

SimCity Sells More Than 1 Million at Launch

Digital Sales Drive Record-Breaking Performance

REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: EA) today announced that SimCity™ recorded more than 1.1 million units sold through in the first two weeks, making this the biggest SimCity launch of all time. Roughly 54 percent of those sales have been of digital versions of the game, downloaded directly to players’ PCs via Origin™ or other digital download services.

“SimCity had a great weekend with sales strong across both North America and Europe, adding to overwhelming demand at launch that has us tracking well beyond expectations for the game,” said Peter Moore, Chief Operating Officer for EA. “SimCity is one of the storied brands in gaming, and Maxis delivered a game re-envisioned and engineered for the online age.”

Gamers have logged on to SimCity via Origin in record numbers, with 44 percent of SimCity sales delivered via EA’s direct-to-consumer digital download service. SimCity gamers have also helped set new records for peak concurrent users on Origin, now at 1.3 million and rising.

In just two weeks:

  • SimCity players have logged more than 15 million hours of online gameplay.
  • More than 5.7 million original cities have been created since launch.
  • More than 780 million buildings have been built.
  • SimCity mayors to date have built enough road and railroad tracks to circle the globe more than 40,000 times.

The Maxis™ studio also continues to enhance both the core SimCity game and the online service infrastructure; in the last two weeks, they have increased server capacity by more than 400%, optimized server response times by 40 times, and deployed fixes to address players' direct feedback on game performance.

Everything is intelligently simulated in this new SimCity, from all of the Sims in a city, to every kilowatt of power pulsing through a region thanks to the powerful GlassBox Engine. It is the most expansive city management game yet where multi-city gameplay across regions delivers a larger playing field. No longer are players relegated to playing one single city, now they can manage and play up to 16 cities at once. Each city can have different specializations; they can share services and trade resources; they can help or even hinder each other; every decision a player makes in each city has impact in the broader region. It’s up to the player to decide where and how they play.

For the first time in the series multiplayer is added to the gameplay giving players a new dimension to the game, as decisions impact both the city and the region, creating new ways to play by collaborating or competing to earn achievements. Underpinning SimCity is a live service that simulates real-time updates and pushes them to players in the form of new challenges and achievements. Players will track their progression alongside their friends and the world for the most polluted city, the richest city and more. Whether players play by themselves, with their friends or with the rest of the world, SimCity will challenge players to create the city of their dreams and answer the question – what kind of mayor will you be?

SimCity is available now worldwide on PC via Origin and retail stores. SimCity is rated E10+ by the ESRB. For more information regarding SimCity, please visit www.SimCity.com. SimCity for Mac will be available in spring 2013. Press assets for SimCity are available at www.info.ea.com.

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