SimCity Update #3

Hello again everyone – I’m Barrie Tingle and I’m one of the Live Operations Producers on SimCity. A whole lot has happened since my first update just a couple of days ago.

First things first: we’ve been making great strides towards improving our servers. In addition to adding several new ones the past couple of days (including the addition of Antarctica today), we’ve been applying upgrades to 11 of our initial servers. What does this mean? We’ve beefed up these servers to allow for a larger capacity that will not only allow more players to get in, but will also help address a lot of the connection issues we’ve been addressing.

Of course, this means we had to temporarily take down servers to apply the changes, but we think the process will be well worth the wait.

If you’re curious about when servers will be undergoing maintenance, we’ve actually created a forum thread that updates every time an upgrade occurs, so be sure to check that out in addition to following our Twitter account for the latest updates.

Also, we’ve released a new Test server today. As you may have guessed by the name, we’ll be using this server to test changes and new features before we deploy them to all of our other servers. Before you ask, yes, you can play on it. In fact, we’d be grateful if you did. Just note, because this is a test environment, you may experience some unstableness as we push new data to improve non-test servers. To learn more about our Test server, check out this forum post.

Last, but not least, we’ve added a new patch today that indicates on the “Select a Server” menu which servers you have active cities on. Read the full notes here.

That’s it for today. Keep checking back for more updates.

If you’re experiencing problems with SimCity, take a look at EA’s Answer HQ.