Maxis Insider Says Taking SimCity Offline Not Too Difficult
According to a Maxis insider, taking SimCity offline isn't quite as difficult as Maxis and EA have made it out to be.
For the past week, Maxis and EA have been dealing with the PR and technical fiasco that was SimCity's launch. Since the game requires an online connection to play, players have had to deal with server issues. Many accused EA of forcing SimCity to be always-online for DRM purposes. However, both the developer and publisher have gone on record to say that the always-online was necessary for in-game calculations that had to be performed by the servers.oio
According to an unnamed Maxis employee that spoke to Rock Paper Shotgun, this is apparently a lie. Allegedly, the servers are not performing any of the claimed calculations, and that taking SimCity offline would be a relatively easy feat.
“The servers are not handling any of the computation done to simulate the city you are playing," said the inside source. "They are still acting as servers, doing some amount of computation to route messages of various types between both players and cities. As well, they’re doing cloud storage of save games, interfacing with Origin, and all of that. But for the game itself? No, they’re not doing anything. I have no idea why they’re claiming otherwise. It’s possible that Bradshaw misunderstood or was misinformed, but otherwise I’m clueless.”
Both Kotaku and Mojang's Notch claim to have been able to play the game offline. According to Kotaku's Stephen Totilo, he was able to turn off his Internet connection while playing and continue playing the game for about twenty minutes before he was notified that his game was no longer connected to the Internet. When he reconnected to the Internet, his game was able to successfully synchronize to the servers without a hitch.
The Maxis source explained that while the servers aren't handling any computations, they are doing something. They're processing any data between players and checking to make sure that players aren't cheating: “Because of the way Glassbox was designed, simulation data had to go through a different pathway. The game would regularly pass updates to the server, and then the server would stick those messages in a huge queue along with the messages from everyone else playing. The server pulls messages off the queue, farms them out to other servers to be processed and then those servers send you a package of updates back. The amount of time it could take for you to get a server update responding to something you’ve just done in the game could be as long as a few minutes. This is why they disabled Cheetah mode, by the way, to reduce by half the number of updates coming into the queue.”
RPS's inside source's final verdict on the difficulty of taking SimCity offline? "It wouldn’t take very much engineering to give you a limited single-player game without all the nifty region stuff," he stated.

http://uk.gamespot.com/news/modders-find-way-to-play-simcity-offline-6405296
http://uk.gamespot.com/news/modders-find-way-to-play-simcity-offline-6405296
Way to go normal people !
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Bmce9oIxJag
These people amounts to at least 1/3 of the simcity's target audience. For EA to claim otherwise is an insult to the technical intelligence of the gaming community.
Because it's not what the server are doing but rather the sheer number of people accessing it. Regardless of what the server has to do for the game, it's still switching from user to user.
Now one thing about it, this employee took a major risk. Odds are he/she would get fired for saying something so contradictory that their bosses are saying UNLESS this was meant to float the idea that a single player offline patch may be in the works. I'm not holding my breath, but I could easily see the Maxis people, especially Will Wright, applying pressure of such a thing.
http://www.geek.com/articles/games/modder-proves-simcity-can-run-offline-indefinitely-20130314/
yeah EA and Maxis added online for DRM ONLY and no significant calculations are done on the server like they said...
EA is spouting Fear Uncertainty and Doom?
They are cheap and spent the least amount of money possible to get their farm going. Even then they waited quite a while to upscale due to demand which just shows you they aren't willing to put anymore money in besides the cost of bandwidth. I would even be willing to wager they didn't scale up server operations much but instead relied on less people hammering it and disgruntled people giving up and claimed that the lower usage was "increased capacity".