SimCity hotfix to disable non-critical gameplay features

Shawn Knight

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Electronic Arts is still working around the clock to resolve issues surrounding the launch of SimCity earlier this week. In what is a surprise to nobody except EA, the servers required to play the DRM-laden title haven’t been able to cope with the type of demand that a high-profile game brings with it.

In a recent post on EA’s forum, Maxis senior producer Kip Katsarelis said they are hitting a number of problems with their server architecture that has seen players encountering bugs and long wait times to enter servers. He said they are deploying more servers over the next couple of days which will alleviate many of the ongoing issues.

drm simcity ea

Furthermore, they will continue to monitor bug reports and issue additional updates when they become available.

In a separate post from earlier today, we learned that the team is in the process of deploying a hotfix to all servers which includes various improvements and also disables some non-critical gameplay features like achievements, leaderboards and region filters. The poster says that disabling these features will in no way affect the core gaming experience – aside from the fact that you aren’t getting everything you paid for, of course.

Earlier this week EA said they were confident they would have everything worked out later in the week and that international launches wouldn’t experience similar issues. In what is yet again a surprise to nobody but EA, international servers like the ones in Australia are experiencing the same sort of issues.

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Persistent online DRM = Tyranny of the VG Sheeple
No Thanks, I'd rather not be able to logon to the servers and still have $60 in my pocket.
 
This is not a DRM issue, it's a SimCity is a multiplayer-only game and the servers are terrible issue. The disabling of Cheetah speed makes it sound like the game's simulation is not running completely client-side because why would the client sync with the server in game time and not real time? If that's the case and SimCity does some sort of cloud computing stuff for everyone playing the game, then that's not DRM. That's a fundamental design decision. Whether it's to make it easier to sync data among the region's players or because running all the simulation client-side would blow up the minimum CPU requirements, I don't know. Maybe both.

Don't get me wrong though. I hated the direction that they took SimCity and I delight in EA's misfortune. Even if this was on Steam, I still would not have bought it.
 
There needs to be a single player option, as well as an option to play on a lan. I was able to play fine the first night, and most of that 1st day, until they shut down the servers for updates. I haven't been able to get online at all for 2 days now though... For me, this was EA's last chance, and as a die hard fan of the old SC franchise I bought it willing to take the risk, however I won't be purchasing any more games from them again. First unstoppable hacking and admin abuse on BF3, then that clusterfu** of a game MOHWF, now this buggy pos. During the beta, I must have sent them a dozen or more reports on piss poor server performance, and it's obvious they really just dgaf.

BTW- Sorry to the admins about my abbreviated profanities circumventing the filters. There just aren't any polite words, that I know of, in the English language that can get my point across as well as those do. Besides, I'm not in the mood to sugarcoat anything, especially now that I'm out $80 with no chance of a refund.
 
So, EA needs always-online DRM to curb PC game piracy..and then their servers can't handle the huge number of games that they sold. Meanwhile the pirates are playing it offline with no problems. You can't write this stuff.
 
EA has just sealed my deal of pirating there game thanks to this and EA so I was going to buy this until they went all failure on it now its just gonna make me pirate it :)
 
How do companies manage to NEVER have enough servers at launch? Can they not predict that people who pre-order / buy on the first day will want to play on the first day?

Not being able to play a single player game because of server capacity is a kick in the balls.
 
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