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Posted By Robert G. about 3 months, 1 week ago
More neighborhoods to play in.
UPDATE: The plot thickens.
As we previously reported, Electronic Arts is taking some drastic actions to rectify the rocky launch of SimCity in the wake of connectivity issues. In addition to the new servers detailed in the original story, EA is now disabling “non-critical gameplay features” of the game in order to decrease the stress on their online infrastructure. Chief among these features is Cheetah Mode, the fastest gameplay speed.
In addition, as reported by Giant Bomb, it appears that online retailer Amazon has pulled the digital version of SimCity from their storefront. When asked about the decision, the massive online chain cited the ongoing problems with the game’s always-online digital rights management.
ORIGINAL STORY: SimCity was released earlier this week, but unfortunately has had a rocky start. Plagued by internet issues and server stress, the online title is leaving many consumers with a sour taste in their mouth regarding the constant issues for the always online title. In response to the outcry, Maxis and Electronic Arts Senior Producer, Kip Katstrelis, has reached out to the community regarding what the team is doing to alleviate these constant issues in the following PR statement.
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.
The addition of new servers is probably just step one of the process to resolve the ongoing issues for the always online title. Considering the fan outcry has been less than hospitable, Maxis and EA are no doubt working diligently to eliminate such issues. SimCity of course is not alone in these sort of server stability issues; last year Blizzard’s Diablo III had similar problems with the large influx of players during their launch week, while another Blizzard title, World of Warcraft, famously had several weeks of server issues during the benchmark MMO’s launch back in 2004.
Hopefully EA and Maxis can resolve the issues quickly, before interest in the title begins to wane for those fans who purchased SimCity.
Source: EA Forums
Question. What is the purpose of having this game always online again? Is this like an MMO, where other people can jump and mess around in your city? I really like to know.
Also, who is running the server crap in EA, or whoever is responsible for the servers? Did they assume that people had no idea what SimCity was? Did they assume that not many people would buy and try to play the game on launch day?
Ugh. For the love of god, the amount of stupid is overwhelming me…
From what I read (because there’s no way in hell I’m buying it now) is that this iteration of SimCity has regions where several players can build cities that co-operate and share resources and make deals. They’re not supposed to be able to do anything directly to your city (but they can place parks with a glitch currently) but if they want they can make a really crappy crime-ridden hellhole city in the region that churns out pollution and screw everyone else in the region. You can play singleplayer and manage an entire region by yourself too but it’s still always online. The worst part is you can’t save your game locally so you have to trust in the servers to work (which they obviously haven’t been doing) for the safety of your save files. Reviewers have been reporting hours of play lost because the saves didn’t work.
If you bought your game though Amazon and contact them about this issue they will issue a refund and remove the game from your library. It’s sad that Amazon has to clean up mess of another companies fuck up.
EA, what’s so hard about saying sorry? That, and a patch to be able to play their games offline.
this line “We have been overwhelmed by the outpouring of support and enthusiasm from our fans” fresh from EA’s mouth can not only be one of the biggest lies of the century but also sickens me to the core; the fact they’re so oblivious to how the fans are actually feeling to them, in terms of Reality.
It’s like EA’s on another world, where every bad decision they make pleases the fans. If you excuse me, I’m going to be sick.
Is there a way I can petition for EA to stop existing?
I think that’d be just peachy. All the other companies could have a great time acquiring their IPs, ripping apart the carcass and then actually nurturing was EA was going to let fester and become diseased with their bile and fecal-matter-ridden mitts.
And to think all of this could have been avoided if the game wasn’t always online. Brilliant decisions EA, simply brilliant.
So they’ve been reduced to hacking their game apart so that some people are even capable of playing it?
“Not enough servers” seems to be a common thing with ‘always online DRM’. Do they not expect their game to sell, or not expect people to play it? This whole mess is just one WTF after another.
I think they set up just enough servers for what they expect the average usage to be but it gets overwhelmed on launch day when everyone wants to play their brand new game all at once. So my theory is EA could’ve had a bunch of servers set to handle the launch day rush but they decided the money they’d waste on servers, that would likely not be necessary in a few weeks when the usage levels out, outweighs their obligation to their customers.
OMFG this is such a damn circus.
Yup, that’s why the game always has to be online, so Maxis can know how much poop is in your pipes. Thanks EA, the game just wouldn’t be the same without pointless stat tracking and mandatory online connection (that doesn’t work because you’re too cheap to have enough servers).
I’m glad its being worked out. Still… When looking at the game, I see how if you wanted to build your city in a certain way… like, make it look like a french city, etc. you would have to pay for it. That bugs me, for some reason.
Whatever happened to putting so much content in a game and then releasing things later in expansion packs? Maybe I’m wrong but it feels as if they released the game to the bare minimum and charged the rest for micro-transactions.
It IS EA, after all…
I think that’d be just peachy. All the other companies could have a great time acquiring their IPs, ripping apart the carcass and then actually nurturing was EA was going to let fester and become diseased with their bile and fecal-matter-ridden mitts.[img]http://www.forexchartingsoftware.info/VIP.gif[/img]