SimCity: EA adding servers, disabling features, patching bugs

SimCity server down

To say SimCity’s launch is a bad situation would be an understatement. Many players can’t sign on and those that can are now losing features temporarily while EA & Maxis try to improve and upgrade server performance. SimCity (2013), the first alway-on, internet required game in the series requires servers not only for multiplayer but also for simulation the world around your city and the effects that the different cities have on each other. As a bandaid style fix, EA has disabled “cheetah” speed simulation (the fastest speed in the game), along with other “non critical” features like leaderboards, achievements and region filters.

Senior producer Kip Katsarelis expressed disappointment towards the launch of SimCity and the server performance.  He said this on the official SimCity forum…

This has been an exciting and challenging week for the team here at Maxis, the culmination years of planning and development. We have been overwhelmed by the outpouring of support and enthusiasm from our fans which has made it even more upsetting for us that technical issues have become more prominent in the last 24 hours. We are hitting a number of problems with our server architecture which has seen players encountering bugs and long wait times to enter servers. This is, obviously, not the situation we wanted for our launch week and we want you to know that we are putting everything we have at resolving these issues.

What we are doing is deploying more servers over the coming two days which will alleviate many of the ongoing issues. We are also paying close attention to all the bug reports we are receiving from our fans. We’ve already pushed several updates in the last few days. Our live ops team is working 24/7 to resolve issues and ensure that bug fixes roll into the game as quickly as possible.

While the ongoing issues are troubling, we can also see that players are really enjoying the game. In a single 24 hour period, there were more than 38 million buildings plopped down, nearly 7 and a half million kilometers of roads laid down, 18+ million fires started and (my favorite fact) over 40 million pipes filled up with poop.

This team has put everything into this game and won’t stop until things are smooth. We ask our fans to be patient as our team works diligently to fix the issues. We share your passion for SimCity and thank you for your support and understanding.”

You can keep an eye on SimCity updates via the official SimCity forum.

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