Maxis Apologizes for SimCity Launch Issues

It's fun to snark at Maxis and EA but what does it change?

Not a goddamn thing.

We'd be better off just moving onto the next thing, maybe Blizzard will screw up Heart of the Swarm's launch, the internet loves a good hatewagon.

This headline would be satisfactory if it ended two words earlier.

@ravage484: When a company keeps the lights on you tend not to shit in their hand.

Maxis won't exist after a year, anyways. It matters not.

Someone is standing up for EA? Wow, never thought I'd see the day. Good on you Maxis.

And when the servers are up, no one will remember that EA and Maxis screwed them over until down the line when the Simcity 2013 servers go down for Simcity 2014. Then everyone will be like "Oh why couldn't we have seen this coming?"

Was this a gamble by Maxis? I mean, servers have a cost and I expect a large drop off of players a month from now. Is Maxis just trying to save a little money by screwing us for a few weeks?

My girlfriends parents bought the game on Friday and have not been able to play yet at all, the patch server is as flakey as hell right now so they cant even get on to the first screen. Its pretty poor but at least as others have said they have held their hands up and are willing to try and make it work sooner rather than later. Though the general sentiment from my girlfriends parents is that they are probably not going to buy another game that has to go through Origin, regardless of who is to blame this is what they see as the issue and i have to imagine many other non gamers think the same.

@scaramoosh: I got Diablo on day 1, and I got SimCity of day 1, and I do not think the two launches has anything in similar. Diablo was playable on Day 2, and they didn't remove any gameplay elements in making it playable. SimCity has been released for three or four days already and I still cannot load my game from time to time. And even when I do load it the game itself doesn't work as they intended. Waste is piling up cause the servers handling that side of things are overloaded and don't work. It is hysterically bad, and that you think it is ok cause "Making software is hard." is rather ridiculous. These things are unacceptable, just as how I think releasing buggy beta-MMOs at full price to get money so they can keep developing them is unacceptable.

They could have added extra servers before the game launched, instead of going with the minimum amount of servers and then expand after they already got the funds from customers.

They could have also had open beta weekends if they wanted to stress test their environments, dunno if they did but considering the situation we are in right now they probably didn't.

And that is just two solutions I can come up with by thinking for 2 seconds.

Just because shitty servers on day 1 has become somewhat of a standard, doesn't mean that customers should ever accept it. If developers and publishers are going to have that mentality, they should just release their stuff as betaproducts, at a lower cost and then raise the price once their shit works as intended.

If I had to review this game now I would have had to say it is enjoyable when it works, but it doesn't work very well. 1/5. Once working 4/5.

@haggis: How do you know they can just patch it? If it is designed like Diablo 3 or an MMO like they've said, then the calculations are done on the server and so it isn't as simple as just patching it. If this is true then it means it was never designed to be Single Player.

People want to blame the DRM because they don't like the idea of it, but you're right--it doesn't have anything to do with the DRM. Core game functions rely on the servers, and the design is way too server-dependent. You're probably right that if they'd marketed it as an MMO people might be more forgiving of server load issues, but if they'd marketed it explicitly as an MMO, I suspect far fewer people would have bought the game.

They could patch the game to allow an offline mode (while retaining the authentication DRM) and local saves, and be done with it. But that's a logical response, so it's unlikely EA and Maxis will do it.

I don't think a free game is gonna make up for what's happened, especially if the people can't choose what the game would be.

I haven't had any connection or corruption problems and I don't want a free game.

I just want them to take SimCity back and refund my money, because the game itself is so simplified to the point of being broken (and much of what remains after the over-simplification is, itself, actually broken -- take the traffic and road system, for example).

It's a disappointing end to a long-running franchise. Selling out fans of almost three decades by reducing an open game with limitless possibilities and endless potential when the player steps into the role of the Mayer to a constrained polished Facebook-style game.

I don't blame Maxis for this one, and I don't think theres all that many people that do. This is EA, and there warped idea that you can make a game thats from the beginning was a single player franchise, and force online on it, otherwise it wont wort, and bind it to there buggy service Origin. If it was up to Maxis I'm 99% sertain that SimCity still would be a single player experience, and 100% certain that it would have nothing to do with Origin.
The thing I don't understand is, if you have a better experience with a presumed hacked copy of the game, that probably wont force you to be online every time you want to play the game, have you really reached your goal to protect your product from being pirated then?
I have no interest what so ever in playing SimCity online, I want the single player experience, and I want to be able to play it whenever I want, and thats just not possible. On the other hand, guess, if I would torrent the game I would get that experience. So my solution is not a good one, but a working one. I will buy the box, put it in one of my bookshelf's, and then proceed int the strange way of download a cracked copy, and play that one. This is not how I want to play the game, but as long as EA insist on a permanent connection to Origin, the buggiest online service we ever experienced, well maybe UBI's thing was even more broke, but they removed the forced connection "feature", as long as this is the route EA want to travel, I will actively seek another route. But I guess the biggest problem for EA isn't me, cause in the end I try to do right, the biggest problem for EA is the people that thinks just like me, except that they wont buy the box, cause why would you buy the box if you're downloading the hacked game?

It'll be extremely interesting to see how/if the crack groups are able to get around the online connection aspect of the game. Purely from a technical standpoint I'd love to see how much of the heavy lifting is handled server side compared to client side.

Remember when Ubisoft used a cracked exe from RELOADED for Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 after a patch broke legally downloaded versions of the game? I'd laugh my asshole inside out if something like that happened again.

I've played 3 hours with two friends yesterday with no problems at all, friend system and invites begin to work as intended too.

Except I did buy the game, and I don't have any problem with their timeliness. I don't know what you mean about wanting an apology upfront, do you think every box should have come with "We're Sorry" printed on it?

If you had bought the game I'd imagine you'd want an apology upfront. Though for me a halfhearted apology doesn't fix the inherent flaws and server issues.

Since her boss is negatively affected.

What a fucking lame excuse for a joke. Her boss probably didn´t spend 50 to 60 bucks on this thing. Seriously, fuck that. Stop releasing broken games. Put that in your apology.

They apologize yet break federal law when it comes to refunds. They're scumbags.

I think that comment about not issuing an apology earlier was a little petty. The game launched on fucking tuesday.

"We knew this was going to happen six months ago, because it happened with every other game launch, and we didn't want to do what we needed to to to prepare, so here - have a free game that costs us nothing at all since it's just data on a server and you weren't going to buy it anyway.

Thanks for continuing to be huge suckers,

Your friends at EA."

I don't get it. They saw the Diablo III launch and all the mess it has caused, player were (fairly) furious and disappointed and everything you can imagine. They know that this kinf of DRM can cause serious problems, why choosing it in the first place? For piracy? Come on, it's plain stupid and a poor excuse. Now, with all this mess, they think that people didn't pirate the game more? I bet that the illegal version is more playable than the legit version, so they've failed the intent. They would sold more copies of this game without implementing this online DRM crap in it, avoiding in making the players (fairly again) angry and disappointed. I don't understand this stupid design choice, single player is single player, it's not an MMO. I hope they'll learn something from this.

Yeah. They apologized almost a full week after launch. No refunds, terrible customer support with queues up to 10 HOURS, and people that bought the digital game on Origin unable to download it. Fuck Maxis. Fuck EA. Fuck their "gift" of a free game.

These assholes should be offering refunds to people that want them and not another game on that shithole called Origin. If they don't they should go to the BBB. There are standards and practices out there in the sale of goods to consumers. It is unacceptable at this point. People should not have to wait a week for server issues that might not ever be fully fixed. You buy something and take it out of the box it's expected to work, not work randomly a week down the road.And instead of the media being perpetual hype machines and taking obvious ad kickbacks (see IGN for the most blatant example) maybe they should be speaking out against this shit more harshly and more critically. The blame is no longer just on gamers for their actions because time has proven that gamers are pretty fucking dumb sheep incapable of waiting to see if something is good, instead pre-ordering the first chance they get. Twist their arms and break them if you have to. This shit should not be happening. Ever. In any product release. The industry apologist attitude is getting kind of sickening and games journalism is the only thing that seems to do it.

I made my first city anticipating the worst(namely losing my city). Was a mess of streets and zero planning. My second city, on a new server of course, I bought a coal plant too quickly and lost all my money before realizing what I did.

It's not a bad experience if you only play the game sporadically, have no idea what you're doing, and are a sieve to your neighbour cities.

I hate to pile on in agreement, but...I do agree. Gamers have absolutely no self-control or conviction when it comes to taking a stand against anything. They are never buying (insert publisher and/or franchise)'s games again! Until the next one comes out and they think it looks awesome.

I stopped giving EA my money after I was disappointed with a lot of things they were doing shortly after BF3 came out (not just limited to BF3-related gripes). Yes, it sucks once in a while when I see something that looks interesting like Most Wanted, but I can live without them. Plenty of other stuff out there to occupy me.

This. There's always going to be more fun games to play out there than hours in a day. Publishers know we'll jump through hoops and can't help ourselves when it comes to the hottest latest, which in turn means they get to keep on testing to see where the line is in all of this. Until that general attitude changes and it affects their bottom line, it's going to get way worse before it gets any better.

Funniest thing of all this? Let's play "spot the angry console fanboys who selectively forget about the crippling limitations of their platforms of choice". It's hilarious.

I think I'll wait until this mmo goes f2p.

Are they also going to fix the part about it not being good? You know, being a stripped down piece of garbage? I'd like another free game because I wasted my money on this one.

“.....EA does not force design upon us....."

In this time of year, everybody wants to keep their job. I understand.

This sucks, EA should not have fucked this up this badly, but server issues are not an easy thing to fix. I wonder if a slow roll out or a longer beta (say something like Dota 2) would fix these issues, never the less feel bad for the customers and Maxis.

Before D3 launched I knew there would be server problems the first few days and I expected the same with Simcity (obviously the simcity situation is much worse). Hopefully people realize now that server issues are a real problem with these kind of always-online games and should be taking them into consideration before buying the game.

10 dollars says it's Sims 3.

This a billion times. I can't play my original city because it's on Oceanic 1 and that's nearly always full. The locking of your city to a server is painfully, PAINFULLY stupid. What happens if Oceanic 2 becomes full? Am I locked out of those cities as well, until I can be fortunate enough to log on?

Awful design. Which is a shame, because the game has some really neat, really clever decisions. But they're marred, and marred horrifically by bad, bad, BAD decisions.

I like how their excuse is "we didn't anticipate so many players, and people would play for so long!!!" when SimCity is a beloved, legendary franchise that millions have played and loved (Hell, I've been playing the damn games for 2 decades now). I think they've been spending too much time on FaceBook thinking video game players only play games for 20 minutes at a time. Never at any point in the series history was it a game you play in short bursts, when you're building a city you're gonna spend at the very least an hour or two.

I'll say exactly what I said on GameSpot's story a few days ago:

How abut you just give me my money back? I don't want another one of your broken, buggy games tied to your BS service, Origin.

This product has all the signs of being rushed out the door by EA. There are far too many bugs that could have easily been fixed with a few more months development time. So yeah, EA does deserve some of the backlash Maxis is trying to be the scapegoat for.

Yeah, it's really vital you keep upgrading your PC to keep on par with 7 year old consoles. And that nasty problem with PC parts just falling apart after a year of use or so. Dang, it just really sucks how you can't play games at all on PC unless you're upgrading every year to stay at the top of the line.

In case you couldn't tell I'm being facetious and you're an idiot.

Yeah dude, BF3/Battlelog runs like a charm.

@reelife: That's exactly the same thing that came to my mind too. XD

This has nothing to do with DRM. This is a server load issue. The DRM starts and ends at authentication, which I never had a problem with since Day 1 of the this games launch. Bringing up the launcher and authenticating has worked fine (for me). It was getting the servers to load up ANYTHIGN past that point where it completely broke. At the heart of this is the decision to design this game in such a way that you need to always be online to make it work. This is more like a Sim-City MMO than anything. I imagine if they marketed it in that way people would be a lot more forgiving of server load issues since it's totally expected at the launch of an MMO.

@scaramoosh said:

But they did, everywhere but in a few small squares.

Maybe the beta test should have been real. Not one day and limiting ppl to 1 hour on a city.

@slyspider: This statement is just total bollox. There was lots of warning about the always online DRM, any one who plays games knows to expect server issues for the first few days in an online game. Not so much with say an FPS because lots of companies sell servers to the players and they're not all in house. Also because Sim City runs a lot of the simulation server side (apparently) so there was always going to be a much bigger toll on the servers, similar to how Diablo 3 or MMOs are made.

Also 3 non vital features were turned off that barely have any impact on the gameplay and they will be reintroduced once they're confident in the server performance.

It's hardly like they turned off the city building or anything worth crying over.

I haven't upgraded my rig in 2 years, I can still run the likes of Witcher 2 and BF3 maxed at 60 FPS at 1920x1080. (and the majority of my PC is from 2009, only the graphics card was updated in v.late 2010)

Let's write off PC gaming because one game took someone back to the desktop once, oh no!

Funny how the misinformed cretins come out with pitchforks to try and kick PC gaming when they believe it's down, for whatever asinine reason.

What do you actually get out of such comments? I sure am glad I'm neutral to platforms, y'all just sound like whiny, bitter dweebs.

Cue Maxis taking 100% of the blame for EA's incompetence and bad decisions, getting shut down and the remains being integrated into some social/phone/tablet/F2P hellhole.

@jackg100: I bet most the complaints come from people who haven't bought the game, they just hate EA. Then I bet the other complainers are people who knew it was going to be an issue at launch, however decided to act surprised and complain about it anyways.

The servers were borked for a few days, so what? They were with any MMO launch, I remember a COD having problems with one launch, Diablo 3 had problems etc etc.

Making software is hard, building the server infrastructure around it to cope with the amounts of people on day one is hard to. This will continue to happen, people need to fucking get over it and prepare for it. If say WoW 2 comes out and you don't want to deal with the issues of borked servers for the first week, don't buy it until they have them sorted. Don't buy the game knowing full well it's online only and then complain about it, especially when it's happened before, many times.

The world isn't a perfect place, nor are people, mistakes happen, companies cannot just throw money at problems or they wouldn't make profit. It takes time, reasoning and reaction a lot of the time to these situations.

Yeah it's not a good situation and it isn't fun to have the servers playing up, however there has been a complete over reaction to the situation. I can only assume it's because people hate EA and this gives them even more reason to. No one down rated Diablo 3 for it's issues and in MMOs reviewers wait a month before posting the review. I don't get why reviewers didn't just give a warning out and wait until things stabilized before the review. It would be quite easy to say on your site... "don't buy this product atm, it's broken at this time, the review will come when the issues are fix and the game is playable again".

Reviews like Gamespot's just seem rather bizarre to me, especially seeing as most of the points Kevin has made are redundant already as the servers are much smoother.

So wait, are you trying to jab PC gaming because one game is having server issues? Yeah because console games never, ever have server outages. Right.

and all I have to do is look at my PS3 and remember when PSN was dead for over a month, affecting a multitude of games and virtually killing any online community Mortal Kombat had a chance in gaining.