EA pledges to commit 'everything we have' to fix embattled SimCity servers

Many US customers are still unable to connect online to EA's recently released SimCity, leading the company to take the game's servers down yesterday in an attempt to fix the stability issues that have hobbled the game since its launch on Tuesday.

SimCity requires a constant connection to EA's servers in order to function.

Last night SimCity's senior producer Kip Katsarelis wrote a message on the EA forums to apologise for the continuing woes, detail what EA is doing to fix them, and pledged that EA is working around the clock to iron out the game's server issues.

"This has been an exciting and challenging week for the team here at Maxis, the culmination years of planning and development," said Katsarelis. "We have been overwhelmed by the outpouring of support and enthusiasm from our fans which has made it even more upsetting for us that technical issues have become more prominent in the last 24 hours. We are hitting a number of problems with our server architecture which has seen players encountering bugs and long wait times to enter servers. This is, obviously, not the situation we wanted for our launch week and we want you to know that we are putting everything we have at resolving these issues."

"What we are doing is deploying more servers over the coming two days which will alleviate many of the ongoing issues. We are also paying close attention to all the bug reports we are receiving from our fans. We’ve already pushed several updates in the last few days. Our live ops team is working 24/7 to resolve issues and ensure that bug fixes roll into the game as quickly as possible."

"While the ongoing issues are troubling, we can also see that players are really enjoying the game. In a single 24 hour period, there were more than 38 million buildings plopped down, nearly 7 and a half million kilometers of roads laid down, 18+ million fires started and (my favorite fact) over 40 million pipes filled up with poop."

"This team has put everything into this game and won’t stop until things are smooth. We ask our fans to be patient as our team works diligently to fix the issues. We share your passion for SimCity and thank you for your support and understanding."

EA is also keeping a forum thread actively updated with its work on the game's servers. "We are aggressively undergoing maintenance on the servers and adding capacity to meet demand. Performance will fluctuate during this process. Our fans are important to us, and we thank you for your continued patience," reads the latest update at time of writing.

Yesterday, EA said it was "confident" that the game's issues would be ironed out ahead of the game's UK release on Friday. GameSpot's review of the game is currently in the works.