EA is continuing to try and solve the server woes that are facing players attempting

EA is continuing to try and solve the server woes that are facing players attempting to access their newly purchased copies of SimCity. And yet, we have no real explanation as to why EA wasn’t prepared for the launch. It also doesn’t help that Kip Katsarelis, senior producer on SimCity, has partly blamed players for the problems simply by not leaving the game and rendering it too popular.

In a post on the SimCity forums, Katsarelis attempted to give an update on the situation regarding player access to servers. He said it only took a few hours for the North American servers to reach capacity on launch day because “players were having such a good time they didn’t want to leave.”

Normally that would be cause for celebration by a publisher and developer as it means the game you created is very popular. But not in this case. Katsarelis went on to say that because of this, it “made it difficult for new players to join.” It doesn’t matter if he meant that to be a positive thing or not, it’s not the right thing to say when your gamer base is totally frustrated with the situation.

A forum post by Maxis yesterday said that new servers would be online by Saturday, but Katsarelis suggests it’s going to take up 3 days to have them installed. He also said EA has prepared for Australian, Japanese, and gamers across Europe by rolling out more servers for each territory. We’ll find out soon enough if the extra capacity is enough to cope as the game launches across Europe today.

If you have managed to get on the servers be aware that SimCity is not functioning with all its features enabled at the moment. As a way of dealing with the server load, achievements, leaderboards, and Cheetah Speed (speeds up time in the game) have all been disabled temporarily. Maxis and EA haven’t stated when they will be turned back on yet.

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The SimCity launch earlier this week was a complete disaster

The SimCity launch earlier this week was a complete disaster. Single player games that require an Internet connection to enable forced multiplayer features (as well as acting as a form of DRM) is bad enough, but then to not be prepared for the demand such a popular franchise has, well, that’s just dumb, and Lucy Bradshaw, EA’s general manager for the Maxis Label, has admitted exactly that.

She’s stated that EA simply didn’t realize how much demand there would be for the game, and based their predicted server loads on what happened during the beta period. What followed was a lot of anger and frustration, and EA desperately trying to increase the amount of servers supporting the game while Maxis fixed bugs.

Bradshaw says the pain is coming to an end. Server capacity has increased 120 percent over the past few days, and “disrupted experiences” have decreased by 80 percent. That means there’s still some way to go, but chances are you’ll be able to play the game now rather than sitting waiting to play.

EA also thinks, quite rightly, that they need to apologize to players. So, anyone who activates a copy of SimCity by March 18 will be entitled to a free game from EA’s portfolio. There’s no detail yet on what that game will be, or if there will even be a choice, but if you’ve picked up the game and have been waiting to install and play it, now’s the time to get it activated so you don’t miss out.

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