More fixes on the way!

Greetings mayors.
Just a short news update.

Many of us have been experiencing these many, horrific bugs. The worst of them being loss of work. When your city crashes and fails to process, or when a roll back happens, causing you to loose many hours of hard work.

Well keep your hopes up! SimCity senior producer Kip Katsarelis, just did an update on the official SimCity website on what state they are at, as far as fixes are concerned.

"Keep in mind, if you don’t see a particular fix present in an Update, this doesn’t mean we’re not working on it, or we’re not aware of it. Our team is constantly getting reports about the top issues being raised and this is helping us prioritize what we need to address."

said Kip as he emphises how hard the team are working.

Kip also mentions the team working hard, heads-down to bring cheetah speed and the leaderboards back as well as many other issues.

Want do you want most? I personally can't wait to see no more city crashes and loss of data.

I recommend you check it out, I read it just after experiencing loss of work myself. I found it refreshing to know that the team at EA are hard at work, right now. So go ahead, click here and refresh yourself, more fixes are soon to come!

This was just a short update, to let you know that more fixes are coming.

Thanks for reading mayors,
~JMR

3/22/2013 Patch Notes! 1.8

Greetings Mayors! Our governmental body (EA) has passed a bit of legislation in attempt to make our lives easier. 

General 
Police station can no longer hold more prisoners than the capacity.
Added missing roof texture for certain commercial building.
Added completion moment cinematic for Great Works.
Visiting police cars have avatar of neighbor above them.
Arcology Population reflects the population of the Arcology, not the city.
Fixed a clog in the pipes where sewage would sometimes get backed up and act jittery.
Region Wall will pop up when a new chat message has been received.


Road Improvements 
Improvements to cases when connecting a new road to an existing road that goes over uneven terrain.
Tuned some of the road snapping priorities to address some edge cases where it wasn’t behaving as desired
Fixed a case where a new road would sometimes cause an existing road to change its shape drastically.
Made Upgrade Roads mini-tutorial appear at appropriate time.
Fix to four lane bridge to improve divider line placement.


Text Improvements 
Clarified alerts about residents not moving in because of high taxes to state if it is residents, commercial businesses, or Industry that won't move in because of high taxes.
Improved text and icons on cities in region view.
Updated text for "Become a Suburban City" mission to improve clarity.
Updated requirements text for HazMat garage for clarity.

Frenzytoast's Thoughts
The EA Government is definitely trying to improve the way our cities function but there are still a few issues that need addressed to allow certain city specializations to function better. There is a major issue with Recycling Plants. It seems that if they reach 20/20 tons of recyclables they will freeze up and stop processing recyclables altogether. 

What results from this is a plant costing 2,900/hr (fully upgraded) and a city complaining about trash/recyclables piling up. It also causes a major break in production of processors/televisions/computers unless the city map has an abundance of oil/ore/coal. 

Traffic is also still behaving irrationally. I've watched a car change lanes 4 times before going straight through the intersection. 

I don't mean to sound ungrateful for the changes that are being worked on and I do want to praise EA for frequent patching.
They have been releasing patches every 2-4 days which shows they are diligently working at improving our world.

Keep it up EA, we can't wait to see what you do next. 

Server Updates!

Good morning mayors,

I'd just like to quickly inform you all that EA has been working to get more people being able to play the game. In order to do so, they have added more servers.

Here's a quote from the community manager:

Saturday March 9th 
Update: 2:19am PST New Servers and Maintenance - http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9348373.page 
Friday March 8th 
Update: 11:19pm PST We have added 3 new servers, EU East 4, NA East 4, and EU West 6 
Update: 7:30pm PST We have added the new servers EU West 5 and NA West 3 
Update: 5:06pm PST We have added the new server NA West 4 
Update 4:23pm PST We have added the new server North America East 3 
Update 1:16pm PST We've added the new server Oceanic 2. Please note you may experience a waiting room while we allow new players to join 
Update: 900am PST We are currently aware that some servers are not performing optimally and are actively working on them.

Also SmCity's official twitter account posted a tweet regarding server updates:

"Server Update: We're still working on EU 4, good availability on others especially our 8 new servers, so try playing on one of those!"

It's great that now it's much easier to get into a server as more are available. But if you take a look at The Server Slip-Up  article I wrote, you'll see why there are still server issues. You'll also see why adding more servers isn't the best solution. One of the main reasons being that if your region is on one server & that server is full for hours and hours. Leaving you bored waiting to get into your main server you use, to play in your region.

Thanks for reading.
~JMR

The Server Slip-Up

Greetings Mayors!

In this article I will be explaining why I think the SimCity servers have had a slip-up and also things which I do not like about the server-system. I feel the need to write this article in a response to my Can EA Servers handle the UK Launch? article.

So, at first, the UK launch was not at all as bad as the March 5th launch. However the UK launch has defiantly grown much worse over the last few hours. Many people are getting server-related errors, bugs and city-sync problems. Some users have even lost all they're work (cities, regions and achievements) due to server issues.

The servers have also come to a stand-still point. Where most of the servers are busy, the ones that aren't have authentication and connectivity issues.

Well, what can I say? I am very disappointed, that's for sure. But thinking about it, it could be far worse. I have had about 3 hours of gameplay, which I really enjoyed, but as people started coming home from school and approaching mid-afternoon, things started getting busy, very busy.

---

Major slip up:
Although things could be worse, things could be a lot better too! I really dislike the fact that all a user's data is stored on one particular server! So if that server goes down, or has to be replaced, you loose everything you have done. Any cities, regions achievements and leaderboard rankings! That is why I think this is one of their major slip-ups, in my honest opinion.

A part from possible data loss, there are other reasons I do not like the fact that all a user's data is stored on one particular server, they are:

• If a server is busy and your friend wants to come and play in the same region as you, he'll have to wait, most probably a while to even connect to the server.
• Leaderboard rankings are only for that server, which makes the leaderboard not really worth looking at.
• Hard to find what server your friend is on
• Instead of just saying 'My region is called:', when informing people about your region. You also have to include server details.
• If the server you've been playing on all the time, has got too busy, you are then held out of the server until it is available again

With all these things baring in mind, there isn't really an easy solution. But given all the time EA had to think about they're choices, I think a lack of wisdom came into this choice somewhere.

---

When you slip up, you've got to get back up. But mayors, the question is, how long will it take for EA, to get back up, from this server slip up?

Thanks for reading! Feel free to post your opinion in the comments.

Can EA Servers handle the UK Launch?

Hello Mayors and wanna-be mayors who have yet to get into an actual server.

It is 00:22 and loads of people from the UK are now downloading / installing and connecting to the EA servers!

I was on the forum and I thought I'd add a bit of humor by rushing up a fail-drawn illustration  Well, lets just say... it worked.

I will be making more funny SimCity pictures in a few days, make out of that picture what you can & enjoy the humor!

Link to original forum thread: 

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9343056.page

Post in the comments how you think the UK launch will go! :D

UK preload is now available!

Just a short update I thought I'd share with you all.

UK users are now able to preload SimCity! I am a UK user and I am very exited, but also very anxious. What do you think the UK launch will be like?

Share your thoughts here:
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9342599.page#27490383
and/or in the comments. :)

Forums Erupt with Fury - SimCity 5 Launch

Greetings Mayors,

Due to the launch, I have been very intrigued to see what's happening on the forums. As I have not yet been able to load the game until the 8th, because I am in the UK and well, lets just say, 'no surprise'.

Considering how much hype there was to get pre-ordering the game, which led to many doing so. SimCity's employees weren't the only ones under pressure, as the servers would have to cope with loads of excited avid gamers, grasping for that play of the game they may have waited months, maybe years for! All this pressure on the servers, or what EA calls 'stress', quite frankly, I was not expecting a smooth launch.

And to no surprise, YEP, quite an unsteady launch by EA. Numerous of threads were posted on the forum on the day of release with players claiming that they had:

• Trouble creating a city
• Creating a region, then leaving, then not being able to rejoin
• Unable to log in
• Unexpected crashes
• Not being able to connect to the servers at all

...and many more complaints flooded the EA community forums of SimCity.

OriginInsider's twitter account stated:

" Due to the high demand for SimCity, Origin has experienced delays impacting a small percentage of users. We’re working non-stop to resolve."

source: https://twitter.com/OriginInsider/status/309045923248480256 

For the unfortunate 'small percentage of users' who had experienced great trouble in trying to experience this game that they have been waiting for. The forums were the ultimate rant area, where they decided to flood the forums with they're opinions and complains of the launch.

Thinking about it though, we do not actually know how many players actually ARE being able to play the game smoothly on the launch. We are just seeing an emphasize on the problems with the launch on the forums.

Take a step back for a moment, have you noticed how many new members have joined the EA community forums because of the SimCity launch problems? Well if you have, like me, you'll realize that many, many users infact did join because of launch problems.

In a way, this can be seen as a positive. A whole new addition bundle of members flocking into the forums to post! Also, a member of the forums who posted on my A positive to the launch issues  which made me realize that this is also giving SimCity a great SEO boost. Just think of the amount of users who have searched "SimCity Launch Problem _Insert_stuff_here".

Although the negatives outweigh the positives. I think it would be a good idea for users to calm down a little, not saying they shouldn't be mad. But EA GET IT now. People are also giving the moderators a pretty hard time by posting pointless rant threads acting as troll bait. As an active moderator of the forums told me:

" Moderators are working on cheetah speed at the moment :)"

And judging by the flood I have witnessed, I can certainly most see how much them moderators have had to work. So hats off to them, for they're endurance during this rant-like launch.

So, what do I think of the launch? It was as I expected. That's all I can comment really, as not being able to play the game until March 8th. It's also the reason why I haven't been able to post much actually about the game yet, but trust me mayors, I'll be working hard on bringing you entertaining-packed blog posts as soon as I get the game!

Thanks for reading mayors, & I would appreciate anyone who would promote this blog in their forum siggy, it would mean a lot!

~JMR (Origin: JordanMRichards, Skype: jordan-m-richards)