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.
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".
The server side component is not solely drm. It is similar to WoW and League of Legends in that it actively correlates between different cities and does some of the processing.
If the servers were just DRM, do you really think this would be melting them because too many people used cheetah?
