There is no doubt that SimCity is a very popular game indeed.
So you would think that having tens of thousands of new players logging in each day would be a good thing.
Well it is unless your servers are not powerful enough to meet the demand.
And the servers used by game makers Maxis were not nearly up to the task of accommodating so many new players.
Many players for the newly released PC title found themselves shut out when they tried to play the game and others reported laggy servers.
The long-running franchise, first released in 1989, lets gamers build a virtual city – but in the latest version they must be connected to the internet to play.
However because of the huge worldwide demand by SimCity fans:
- there were long delays for many in logging in
- servers crashed
- Amazon stopped selling the game for a while on Friday because of so much bad feedback on the site and
- angry users vented their frustration on social media sites.
Electronic Arts (EA), which owns Maxis, has added extra servers to cope with demand, put in patches to stop the game crashing, and disabled some features in the game to speed things up.
Lucy Bradshaw, head of games developer Maxis, wrote in a blog post: “…a lot more people logged on than we expected. More people played and played in ways we never saw in the beta.
“OK, we agree, that was dumb, but we are committed to fixing it. In the last 48 hours we increased server capacity by 120 percent.
“It’s working – the number of people who have gotten in and built cities has improved dramatically. The number of disrupted experiences has dropped by roughly 80 percent.
“So we’re close to fixed, but not quite there.”
In an update to the blog post she wrote: “Maxis continues to make huge progress in addressing the lag and server-capacity issues we experienced at launch.
“We’ve improved our server response time by 40x, we’ve doubled the number of players in the game at the same time and reduced server down times.”
It’s good to be popular and it looks like the guys and girls at Maxis are getting things under control.
Via: SkyNews