Update: EA addresses the issues in a new post on the SimCity forums. Developer Maxis plans to add more servers over the next two days.
Publisher Electronic Arts and developer Maxis launched the newest SimCity yesterday, but things aren’t going so well.
SimCity’s servers — which you must use access in order to play it — are consistently busy, overloaded, or unreliable. To address the problem, EA is turning off the servers to install an update that should improve service.
Mayors — at 11:40am we'll be issuing a patch to the North America East 1 and 2 servers. More info here: http://t.co/Zg6IokmFl0
— SimCity (@simcity) March 6, 2013
Ironically, the maintenance message that greeted some players was also broken. Instead of listing a time for when SimCity would return online, it showed a bit of code that reads “<parameter: string>.” You can see it in the image at the top of this post.
Maxis released the following message on SimCity’s official forums:
We are still working on Oceanic 1 server and are about to apply the same server patch to NA East 1 and NA East 2. This will be starting around 11.40 a.m. PST. At this time all players will not be able to access this server. We thank you for your patience while we do this update. We will let you know when NA East 1 and NA East 2 are back up. In the meantime you can chose any other available server to play on.
Electronic Arts is under a lot of scrutiny from gamers that believe SimCity’s always-online requirement is a hassle. While not everyone is suffering issues, the fact that EA is already performing maintenance is evidence that the publisher believes the connection problems are serious.