SimCity crumbles under online issues
(Read article summary)The good, the bad, and the ugly of the latest SimCity. Apparently, there's not a whole lot of "good."
On March 5, gamers eagerly downloaded Electronic Arts's (EA) latest game, SimCity. By March 6, players were angrily posting about the game (or lack thereof) and by March 7, Amazon stopped selling it.
SimCity was highly anticipated. Early reviews heaped on praise, but what should have been a magnificent launch for EA has turned into a nightmare. The latest SimCity game will not work unless you are playing online. Games save to EA's servers automatically and friends can build up regions together. But things fell apart, either by fan overwhelming the servers or through simply mismanagement on the part of EA.
“We are hitting a number of problems with our server architecture which has seen players encountering bugs and long wait times to enter servers,” writes SimCity Senior Producer Kip Katsarelis. “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."
So what is the problem with SimCity? Well, to start off, the long wait times for server connection have frustrated players across the Internet. Wait times of 30 minutes or more have been reported as well as saving problems. That last one, the saving problems, has had a huge effect on digital mayors. Players have reported losing hours of work and planning due to connectivity problems.
