Say what you will about EA and Maxis' frustrating server issues or refund policies surrounding last week's botched SimCity launch, but the company has been working hard to communicate its efforts to fix the situation in recent days through Maxis General Manager Lucy Bradshaw.
In an update posted late Saturday to EA's official blog, Bradshaw said server response time has been improved 40-fold since launch. This allows for twice as many players to be in the game simultaneously (including "tens of thousands of new players... logging in every day"). She described the current situation as "good, but not good enough," and promised the team won't rest until they have "everyone online, playing together, and no hitches."
The Maxis team has added 12 new servers to the game since Thursday, including the pithily named "Antarctica 1" earlier this morning (servers are region-free, so this isn't as limited as it seems). Individual servers are still being taken down periodically to install patches that bring benefits like faster setup and traffic fixes.
Bradshaw also took to Twitter yesterday to address fans' concerns directly. Her answers included the first public indication that EA and Maxis may be considering loosening the game's always-online restrictions. Responding to a question about whether an offline mode patch would be distributed when servers were eventually taken down in a few years, or "perhaps before then," Bradshaw said that the company has "no intention of offlining SimCity any time soon, but we'll look into that as part of our earning back your trust efforts." That said, Bradshaw later tweeted, "the game was designed for [multiplayer], we sim the entire region on the server, so [adding offline modes] is just not possible." Talk about muddying the message a little bit.
During the 45-minute online Q&A session, Bradshaw also directly addressed how the team could have underestimated their server needs so drastically. "Metrics/beta was fairly conservative and live ops stressed our game server DB’s in ways that we did not experience in Beta or Load Test," she said. Adding later, "Load experience in beta and load test is different than live. We've adapted and put out servers with changes, already seeing improvements."
Bradshaw also cited unexpectedly high demand on servers in an interview with Polygon this weekend. "What we underestimated was a huge surge in pre-orders within the last week and the power of the great word-of-mouth created by the media and our community," she told Polygon. "We test and work out the capacity load of each server in load testing and through our beta events. We have seen play behavior and load in areas that have stressed our game server [databases] in ways that we did not experience in Beta or Load Test."
Not all of the server capacity problems were directly related to the amount of hardware, either. "We've identified that many of our issues were related to how [SimCity's] GlassBox [engine] managed the vast amount of simulation data through its database," Bradshaw told Polygon. "We've addressed that and we've seen an 80 percent decrease in connectivity or responsiveness issues. Still, 80 percent is not good enough and so we are continuing to aggressively address this area."
Regarding refunds, Bradshaw restated on Twitter that EA does not give money back on downloadable games. She clarified that the previously announced free game download will offer players a choice of which title they would like. The company is also "considering other ways to make it up to you," according to Bradshaw. She stated once again that players are not being banned for simply requesting refunds.
Bradshaw went on to promise that features like Cheetah speed and Achievements would be coming back once server stability issues were totally "nailed." She said that the team would be "absolutely looking at" increasing maximum city sizes in the future as well.
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