A site with balls. I'm talking about Polygon. They decided to stop rolling over like little puppies and letting the publisher scratch their bellies and show some fangs...or puppy teeth...or whatever it is gaming journalists show publishers when they decide to grow balls. Heck, I don't know, it's rare gaming journalists grow balls. Anyway, Polygon has done the unthinkable and lowered their score for SimCity because of the freaking always-on DRM. Thank you Polygon. Thank you!
The news comes courtesy of their Twitter account, where they warned and updated consumers about their review score following the trepidatious launch that left many gamers wondering if we were looking at another Diablo III fiasco, with the only caveat being that EA was at least offering refunds this time around.
For those that don't remember, with Diablo III gamers were unable to play months after the game launched and were denied refunds, save for when the Korean government stepped in and fined Blizzard since they originally denied Korean gamers any possibility of a refund.
Now, there's some butthurt people ragging on Polygon for “swishing” around their review scores, dropping the initial 9.5 out of 10 down to 8 out of 10. I believe Polygon is 100 percent right for knocking a point and a half off the total score due to “connectivity issues”.
There's no one in their right mind who puts down $60 for a product that doesn't work, and you'd have to be one silver-spoon-fed, stuck-up, pro-corporate, shill-touting douchebag to try and convince anyone that they should pay money to a economy-eroding, dollar-bill chasing corporation who doesn't give a flying ferret's feces about you, your hobby or their broken-out-of-the-box product.
Many of the shills believe that it's unfair to the game because EA is likely to fix the connectivity issues within a week. To this I say: you shills need to go back under your rocks!
Despite launching in May, Diablo III suffered DRM-related connectivity issues all the way to July, where the French UFC-Que Choisir consumer advocacy group were still trying to get Blizzard to stabilize servers for French gamers. Threatening a corporation to keep their product working (or get it to work as advertised) is bullcrap. And only someone who likes having broken broom sticks shoved up their butt would say "wait a week", especially with EA at the helm and always-on DRM a historical indicator of being a 100 percent clusterfail.
The reality is that I hope Polygon sticks to their guns. I hope – that despite EA's best efforts to stabilize servers – Polygon sticks it to them by maintaining the circumcised rating.
There are scores of people who have piss poor connections and are being ripped off with a product that will only work right when EA's servers are stable and the end-user's ISP connection is stable, and that in itself becomes a gamble. This very same issue became a pervasive problem for cafe owners in Korea with Diablo III that nearly resulted in a class-action lawsuit because the cafe owners were losing money since the game didn't work.
My hope out of all of this is that gamers kick up enough fuss to enforce the view that always-on DRM has no place in the gaming sphere. For people who want to play MMOs, the option is always there. You know what you're getting into with an MMO. SimCity, Diablo III and every other single-player based brand out there has no business adopting always-on DRM, and I really hope that Polygon's numerical review reversal will wake up enough people to let them know that always-on DRM needs to become extinct, ASAP.
You can check out the score-revised review of SimCity over at Polygon.
