Electronic Arts said Saturday that it made improvements in online access for SimCity, the city-building game that requires online connections for its single-player experience. SimCity had too much initial demand, and that left most players unable to access the title, leading to a huge number of complaints for EA.
Lucy Bradshaw (pictured), general manager of EA’s Maxis Label, said in a post on Saturday that the game now has 40 times better server response times than at launch. And the company has doubled the number of people who can play the game at once. Server downtime is also reduced.
“The situation is good, but not good enough,” Bradshaw wrote. “And since my boss is one of the negatively affected (!) — we’re still driving hard to get everyone online, playing together, and no hitches.”
Bradshaw continued, “Tens of thousands of new players are logging in every day. For that support — that commitment from our fans — we are deeply grateful. More than anything, we know that information is important to our players. Our Twitter chat today made that especially clear, and I want to say thank you sharing your ideas, your issues and for being, well, nicer than I thought you would be, given everything you’ve been through. Thank you.”
EA can set up its new servers faster. But the game maker has to take down the original servers one by one to upgrade them.
“The improvements will be worth the downtime, and thanks for hanging with us as we do this,” she said. “We’ll also be adding more tonight as well. We’ll be sending out detailed info shortly through our community forums and launcher.”