The Shattered Star

M.Steiner wrote:Patch 1.7 has just gone live peeps.

Adds improvements to car traffic routing, as well as the ability to destroy those lingering filler buildings. The team is still hard at work resolving other gameplay issues.

Update 1.7

• Traffic Improvements: Tuned traffic congestion and fixed some intersection traffic issues.
• Traffic improvements: Emergency Vehicles will drive in empty lanes to get around traffic at intersections.
• Traffic improvements: Emergency and Delivery vehicles get priority over regular traffic when leaving garage.
• All units and buildings can now be demolished using the bulldoze tool.
• Performance improvements for low spec systems.
• New Server: Asia 2 will be released Tuesday afternoon (PDT)!

I'm sure many will be happy with this as the traffic issues were one of the major issues with the game.
Still more to come ofc but off to a good start I'd say

What are the current patch's impressions?

I played some last night and my traffic seemed better but if I'm honest, traffic was no longer a big issue for me after I'd made those changes to my city anyway so I can't say for certain in my case. I have seen others say that their city is now running as clockwork after the fix though, then again I've seen other posts saying they either noticed no change or even a few saying their traffic is worse than before.

I hope the fix for rollbacks is coming next as this is the main issue putting me off playing atm due to the frequency I seem to get them.

People seem to be getting mixed results with this patch. Haven't had the time to try it out yet, but I'm hopeful. I will say though that this is not the definitive "traffic patch." Guillaume, the traffic guy at Maxis, has said that this patch does not address the "conga line" of service vehicles, and that mass transit still creates infinite tourists. These will be addressed in the future.

I got myself fifa13 yesterday, that is currently giving me a lot more fun than simcity also... my first city is running on such a big deficit because recycling is <censored> and I don't have money to rectify that... also when others send money, you don't get it immediatly, your timelines must be in synch... so that's <censored> too

Ava and I started a couple of new cities last night and the traffic definitely seems much, much better to us. Still some improvements on the way of course (as mentioned by Kahn above) but this is a step in the right direction.

any news on recycling being fixed? or sending other resources to your neighbours (cfr. ambulances, firefighters)?

Apparently the "big patch" is going through QA right now so should be with us soon. No idea what it contains and it did take a bit longer than I would have liked but better late than never!

haven't touched simcity because of the bugs, except for a little town like city that I played for 30mins or so

Yeah honestly I've not felt the urge to log in for quite some time. When I first lost patience with the issues I just started playing other games and haven't looked back. I actually requested a refund from Amazon at one point, but I never went through with it because I was afraid of getting banned from Origin like so many others had reported. I like Battlefield and it isn't worth losing access to another game I payed $60 for. I feel outright scammed by EA. It's like they took my wallet, kicked me in the balls, and ran off.

The only consolation I have is that I got a $20 rebate from Amazon for pre-ordering, plus Mass Effect 3 is an effective $20 value. So it's almost like I only paid $20 for SimCity. For that price, it's almost worth the occasional time-killer that it can hopefully become after patching.

That said, this experience has made me very wary of EA. They are no longer a reputable company in my eyes. It will be many years before I can be roped into buying one of their broken cash-in games again.

I haven't played the game for some days now either but that's mainly due to being completely engrossed in Bioshock Infinite. I won't lie though, as much as I was enjoying SimCity the persistent rollback issues I was experiencing on an almost daily basis was extremely off-putting and really starting to get to me. More so than the other issues.
I'm gonna do a replay of Infinite shortly but I'll be picking SimCity back up again once I'm done with that, assuming this big patch has made it out of QA and gone live by then

This was posted on the Czech SimCity site. Just linked it in IRC too but for those of you who missed it:

Google translate so don't expect it to be perfect lol wrote:We've got some news for you, dear mayors. News about a great new album, which we are planning for SimCity - update labeled 2.0! This update, which will be published soon (more on April 9 at 18:00), to include several critical fixes for which you have asked us most, and also some other improvements. The idea of ​​providing you with a complete overview of upcoming changes:

[list]
[*]Tourism: Repair unexplained fluctuations tourists - passenger numbers of tourists are now collected in a better way.
[*]Casinos: Casinos adjusted so that the gambling profitable - to activate this enhancement is necessary to demolish the old casino and replace them with new ones.
[*]More casinos: Number of modules Sci-fi casino casino and tidy increased to six.
[*]Playing in the region: football city may receive financial assistance from another city.
[*]Education: Addressed an issue with buses that are jammed in secondary schools; existing schools already corrected themselves.
[*]Education: Fixed a bug where the school bus picked up the students in neighboring towns as well as the absence of bus stops.
[*]Education: Better student population census.
[*]Education: Fixed a bug where the children after leaving school bus stop teleported to the nearest pedestrian route instead of having to go to school.
[*]Education: University for building extensions now the player gets the correct bonus.
[*]Recycling: Recycling Centre deprived bug that it ceased to function; recycling services now operate, and other cities.
[*]Air pollution: Fixed a problem that caused the contamination occurred suddenly without any apparent cause, corrected the problem, because of which the regional air pollution manifested a double penalty.
[*]The mayor's villa: The Mayor will now go to work on their catching cars. It will fly by helicopter or riding in a limousine and sports cars if it built the modules.
[*]Fire Services: Fire trucks are now getting to fires faster.
[*]Water: Water pumps now pumping water from rivers with a much larger area, making better use of water resources.
[*]Shop: Fixed ports that reason cease to function.
[*]Public Transport: Trams first come to stops at a higher frequency movement of passengers.
[*]Public transport: Cities with population and public transport now transmit correct region number of employees and customers.
[*]Public transport: Circular vehicle now will not attempt to load other Sims, but leaves the garage.
[*]Public transport: Bus neighbors do not often visit the surrounding cities and will focus more on serving passengers "at home".
[*]Processing of: Fixed problem that caused that some cities do not process correctly.
[*]Data maps: maps are now displayed in a standard color, even if the player uses any of image filters (except for color blind mode).
[*]HUD: The user interface now supports the mode for color blind correct color settings.
[*]Tuning: Pure City resident now support "state failure".
[*]Budget: Fixed bug in regular monthly transactions that permit circumvention of the system.[/list]

The above changes certainly do not represent a complete list of new version 2.0. Further details can expect on the day of the release, ie next week on Tuesday. Meanwhile, although the 2.0 update does not fix the loss of the gaming process and the "rollback", but very hard to solve these problems we work.

Because it is the first major update so, we would like to warn you that all game servers will be updated at the time of 2.0 to two hours off. Publishing updates to such a large number of players is not an easy task, so it's a necessary step. Nor was it easy to choose the right time for the release, according to statistics, game servers, however, we worked out that at least damage the failure of players currently in 18:00. We believe that given the list of fixes understand that you two hours waiting worthwhile.

For now, try the speed of a cheetah that we are back in the game!

Thanks for your patience, mayors!

Next tuesday then? or maybe it means tonight? I'm not sure.