Another day, another apology.
EA's 'SimCity' continues to frustrate legitimate users trying to play the game they purchased. The problem stems from players needing to be connected to the internet for the game to function, even if they want to play by themselves.
One day after US users experienced massive problems those in Australia, where the game launched next, ran into the same issues. The official SimCity Twitter account is full of variations of this message: "We are working on the servers 24/7 - expect performance fluctuations. Our fans are our number one priority. Thank you for your patience."
EA Australia sent this statement to Polygon: "We are experiencing extremely high server volume and it's preventing some players from gaining access to the game. Our server team is working around the clock to resolve this issue so that we can get the rest of our fans into the game.
We are aggressively undergoing maintenance on our servers to add the necessary capacity to meet the demand. Players may continue to play throughout the weekend but we want to note that performance will fluctuate during this time. We thank our fans for their continued patience."
In addition, users are bombing Metacritic and Amazon with scathing reviews. "Sim City" currently has 1.2 stars on Amazon and a 2.0 user rating on Metacritic.
Update: Maxis, "SimCity's" developer, says they are putting up more servers over the next two days.
"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."
Update 2: EA is disabling "non-critical" features such as leaderboards, achievements and regional filters," according to a community manager.
