The newest iteration in the SimCity franchise recently launched to fairly favorable reviews. The main problem is the online connectivity issues many players are experiencing.
After US gamers struggled during the launch to connect with the game, new reports from Australian gamers with the same issue have surfaced. Players in that region are having a hard time accessing SimCity’s Oceanic servers (via Polygon).
Not only is there connectivity problems, some Australian region gamers are reporting that their entire cities have been deleted.
Sim City requires player to be connected online but they can connect to any server they choose.
EA Australia issued the following statement to Polygon this morning to announce that it was “aggressively undergoing maintenance on the SimCity servers and adding capacity to meet demand”.
The official SimCity FB page also responded to the issues referring to all the servers worldwide adding: “Performance will fluctuate during this process. Our fans are important to us, and we thank you for your continued patience.”
A patch was issued this morning to the Oceanic servers in order “to address some player issues that have been reported overnight.” A patch has also been applied to many of the North American and European servers as well. We will see in due time what, if anything, these patches will do.
“Want to fix SimCity EA? Get rid of the stupid DRM and servers! We don’t need them to play a single player game,” a user on FB wrote.
SimCity developer Maxis is now bringing server-side fixes that will disable certain non-crucial aspects of the game in an attempt to get things running smoothly again.
Lets hear it for always online DRM!
Regardless of EA’s poor choice to enforce always online connectivity, fans of the game can be assured that “This team has put everything into this game and won’t stop until things are smooth,” Senior Producer on SimCity Kip Katsarelis explained.
We have reached out to EA for comment and will update this post when we hear back.
Craig Hunter – who has written 1161 posts on The Jace Hall Show.
Craig Hunter is a main contributor for the Jace Hall Show and has been an avid gamer for over 15 years. He also freelances for a number of websites and magazines covering mobile products and emerging technologies.

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