As part of keeping the Sim City community up to date with what’s been happening with Sim City, Maxis’ SVP Lucy Bradshaw hit Twitter to take questions from the community.
There were a few decent responses from Lucy regarding this week’s events and how Maxis want to keep current and potential new customers happy. When asked about a possible offline mode she stated that they game could feature an offline mode at some point.
We have no intention of offlining Sim City any time soon but we’ll look into that as part of our earning back your trust efforts.
Regarding underestimating the servers required, something that has puzzled us here at IncGamers, she added:
Load experience in beta and load test is different than live. We’ve adapted and put out servers with changes, already seeing improvements.
The problem with the beta was the one hour limit, it was never really going to stack the servers with players. If you think about it, the beta performance wasn’t great either, there were connectivity issues during that too.
Going back to the subject of larger cities, a feature that Ocean Quigly told us in our interview may be added, Lucy confirmed this again.
We’re definitely looking into this as we know it would improve your experience.
Maxis appear to be pulling out all the stops to get the game on track and a formal blog update was also released by Lucy overnight.
I’ll keep this short since almost everyone who cares is busy building cities and making friends in SimCity.
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.
The situation is good, but not good enough. And since my boss is one of the negatively affected (!) – we’re still driving hard to get everyone online, playing together, and no hitches.
Tens of thousands of new players are logging in every day. For that support – that commitment from our fans — we are deeply grateful. More than anything, we know that information is important to our players. Our Twitter chat today made that especially clear, and I want to say thank you sharing your ideas, your issues and for being, well, nicer than I thought you would be, given everything you’ve been through. Thank you.
The new servers we rolled out have a new faster set up. We are now dedicated to updating our original servers so that those of you who have been playing these past few days can get the benefits on servers where your cities are played. To do this, we will have to take the original servers down one by one to upgrade them. The improvements will be worth the downtime, and thanks for hanging with us as we do this. We’ll also be adding more tonight as well. We’ll be sending out detailed info shortly through our community forums and launcher.
That’s it for today. We’ll keep you updated on what’s to come. Expect the first of our server upgrades to start this evening.
Are you still having issues with the game?
Published: Mar 10, 2013 06:15 pm