SimCity Fix Means Disabling Features as Amazon Suspends Sales
It's been an "exciting" week for EA, Maxis and SimCity fans.
EA has decided to fix some of the server problems plaguing SimCity since its Tuesday launch by rolling out a hotfix that improves stability. While that may sound like good news, some of that stability stems from disabling a few non-critical gameplay features including leaderboards, achievements and region filters.
Community manager "LadyCoconut" is assuring gamers that EA is doing everything it can to fix the issues. On Thursday morning, she said that EA was aggressively undergoing maintenance on the servers and adding capacity to meet demand, thus performance would fluctuate during this process. By Thursday evening, the company had restarted the EU East 2 and Oceanic 1 servers, and added the EU West 3, EU West 4 and EU East 3 servers.
"What we are doing is deploying more servers over the coming two days which will alleviate many of the ongoing issues," SimCity Senior Producer Kip Katsarelis said Wednesday night. "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."
Meanwhile, Amazon supposedly halted the sale of digital copies of SimCity although it's now available to purchase here. The game was listed as "Currently Unavailable" Thursday night presumably due to the issues surrounding the game. However the company is still warning users of a potential problem after sinking a hefty $60 for the digital Standard Edition.
"Many customers are having issues connecting to the SimCity servers," Amazon warns. "EA is actively working to resolve these issues, but at this time we do not know when the issue will be fixed. Please visit https://help.ea.com/en/simcity/simcity for more information."
What likely happened was that EA asked Amazon to temporarily suspend sales to limit the number of new users flooding an already struggling infrastructure. Sales resumed as of Friday morning, but another suspension could happen again if EA is still having difficulty managing the SimCity flood.
The SimCity launch has certainly been a disaster in its first week, but has it topped Blizzard's Diablo 3 launch?
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the problem is users keep buying into EA. they will not learn their lesson until supporting EA stops, as investors keep investing in them. That goes for buying games like Crysis 3, Dead Space 3, or upcoming games like Dragon Age 3. the more people buy into it, the more EA is just going to do what they have already been doing, because their money is coming from the investors.
At least we're getting a free game out of it...a good game, like Need for Speed.
At the end, I meant HOPEFULLY a good game
the problem is users keep buying into EA. they will not learn their lesson until supporting EA stops, as investors keep investing in them. That goes for buying games like Crysis 3, Dead Space 3, or upcoming games like Dragon Age 3. the more people buy into it, the more EA is just going to do what they have already been doing, because their money is coming from the investors.
Um, Battlefield always requires an internet connection to play multiplayer. Unless you mean Single Player, I know Battlefield 3 Single Player can be played offline. and logically Co-Op will require online.
their shining examples of star craft and diablo3 are pure filth due to the online 'cloud' b.s. i pray every day anon takes down EA's entire server farms and renders them into what the 'cloud' is worth. nothing but target practice for Lock N' Load with R. Lee Ermey on the history channel
D3 wasn't nearly as bad...
I have a huge library of Steam games including many old school ones, but I have not bought a single EA game for years.
I put my money where my mouth is
It's not beta testing, not really, they know the code works. What people are doing is paying to stress test EAs servers, which is just as bad.
Why did I feel the need to pot this? I have no idea...;)
Ruining a great franchise is EA's modus operandi.
Not the same by a lot. Having to connect to the Authentication servers from EA and THEN go into the match is what this DRM does. We used to have LAN support right off the bat with games, but since DRM kicked in, no more LAN support and we need to connect to the internet to have LAN parties. That sucks so MUCH ass it hurts. Steam has this problem as well; they no longer provide LAN support in most of their games. Last one was L4D1 IIRC.
Anyway, regarding SimCity... Just go get CitiesXL 2012 or Anno 2070. Both are very good games, where CitiesXL is kind of bugged, but at least it lets you play it.
Cheers!