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?
