SimCity is off to a very rough start. Despite a constant stream of assurances that Origin could handle the "always online" features at launch, players are reporting continued outages as the game is released in more countries worldwide.
In a post on their official SimCity Facebook page, Electronic Arts says they are trying to reduce server traffic by "aggressively undergoing maintenance on the servers and adding capacity to meet demand."
In addition, SimCity senior producer Kip Katsarelis posted a statement on the SimCity forums earlier today saying:
"This has been an exciting and challenging week for the team here at Maxis, the culmination years of planning and development. 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. 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. 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.
While the ongoing issues are troubling, we can also see that players are really enjoying the game. In a single 24 hour period, there were more than 38 million buildings plopped down, nearly 7 and a half million kilometers of roads laid down, 18+ million fires started and (my favorite fact) over 40 million pipes filled up with poop.
This team has put everything into this game and won't stop until things are smooth. We ask our fans to be patient as our team works diligently to fix the issues. We share your passion for SimCity and thank you for your support and understanding."
Maxis's own community manager later revealed in a subsequent forum post that the studio has decided to temporarily disable "non-critical" features including leaderboards, region filters, and achievements. This is an effort to reduce the overall server load, and will hopefully allow more players to connect to Origin's servers.
"We are continuing to do everything we can to address the server issues. In the meantime, so that we can give you as good an experience as possible, we are in the process of deploying a hotfix to all servers. This includes various improvements and also disables a few non-critical gameplay features (leaderboards, achievements and region filters).
Disabling these features will in no way affect your core gameplay experience.
We will continue to let you know as we have more information. We know it has been said before, but we do appreciate your patience as we complete this latest update. Getting you playing is our absolute highest priority."
Obviously EA and Maxis did not learn their lesson from Blizzard's disastrous Diablo 3 launch. With the OS X release soon to follow, we can only hope that they figure out a way to iron out these issues very soon.
SimCity launched in the US on March 5. It hit Japanese and Australian markets yesterday, and will launch in the UK tonight at 00:01 AM.