EA Responds to SimCity Complaints; Gamers Launch Non-DRM Petition

SimCity (5) Senior Producer Kip Katsarelis posted a statement on the EA forums Wednesday night, addressing the issues surrounding the inability to download and/or play the game, and other bugs.

Players began to flood the Origin servers early Wednesday morning after the game officially went retail, a game that relies on an internet connection to EA's network. But due to the overwhelming flood, wait times have been horrendous, and many new SimCity owners – many of which simply want to play the single-player aspect -- can't even install or play the game.

In the blog, Katsarelis called this week "exciting" although many gamers will likely disagree. "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," he said. "We are hitting a number of problems with our server architecture which has seen players encountering bugs and long wait times to enter servers."

Katsarelis goes on to report that the team is putting everything they have into resolving the issues at hand. "What we are doing is deploying more servers over the coming two days which will alleviate many of the ongoing issues," he said. "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."

Katsarelis calls on fans to be patient as the team works to fix the issues. Meanwhile, there are plenty of gamers who are having a bit of fun playing the new SimCity installment. He points out that in a single 24 hour period, more than 38 million buildings have been constructed, nearly 7.5 million kilometers of roads paved, and more than 18 million fires started.

Over 40 million pipes have also filled up with virtual poop. Yummy.

Naturally a number of replies to the post weren't very positive. "If you failed to predict volume for this game, based on pre-order sales alone, someone is grossly derelict in their job," one disgruntled customer stated. "This is not tough stuff to figure out and you KNEW going into launch that the server capacity would be inadequate. That's a problem."

"Just realized the irony that a game focused on building infrastructure is unplayable due to a lack of infrastructure," one Twitter user posted. Another annoyed gamer launched a petition on Change.org that requests EA to remove the "always on" DRM from SimCity and future games.

To keep players up-to-date on the reports, the team is making postd regarding game updates, EA is keeping a thread open here. Gamers can also jump on Twitter and use the #SimCity hashtag to keep track of all the complaints submitted by SimCity 5 players, some of which demand a full refund. Ouch.

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