<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\nWe have reached the point in the crisis where the gaming media is dangerously close to running out of lede paragraph puns and jokey article titles. Sham City? Sim Shitty? Sim Sleazy? SinCity? There’s only so much we can do with the phonics we’re given. If this crisis continues we’ll run out of lame-ass jokes entirely and be forced to come up with proper headlines. <\/p>\n
The SimCity story continues to be a mess. Just to outline the basics for those of you who get your gaming news by jogging past people discussing old IGN threads, the story so far is thus: The new SimCity “reboot” released with this always-online stuff that was either DRM or social networking and multiplayer, depending on who you asked and how cynical they were. The servers couldn’t keep up with the player demand, nobody could connect, the game was broken and crashed a lot, cities would revert to some hours-old state without warning, blah blah blah. It’s the same stupid crap that happened when Diablo III released as a multiplayer-only title<\/a>, only much worse.<\/p>\n We got a few patches, and then more, and eventually Maxis disabled a lot of the multiplayer features just to give the servers a break. Most painfully, they disabled “cheetah” speed, meaning players that run out of money need to spend more time doing nothing while waiting for the next in-game hourly payment to roll in. All of this brought stability at the expense of making the entire online system completely pointless. (But still mandatory!)<\/p>\n But let’s look at some public statements. Keep in mind that this stuff is a couple of days old at this point. If you need up-to-the-minute news then you should know better than to read my blog. I just got around to playing Max Payne 3 this week, for crying out loud.<\/p>\n As I mentioned on Twitter, I really hate it when gutless, irresponsible, and dishonest corporate hacks bungle things and then cower behind a polite, earnest, and personable face. Yes, I know this is what public relations is for and this is just how business works. I don’t really expect John Riccitiello<\/a> to come out and admit he doesn’t know how to run a multi-billion dollar publishing company without driving its dependable cornerstone titles into the ground. Then again, Steve Jobs was able to take tough questions and admit mistakes<\/a>, and that guy did okay. <\/p>\n But whatever. The EA public relations punching bag this week is Lucy Bradshaw<\/a>. Laying aside her conciliatory tone, let’s look at how EA (by way of Bradshaw) reaches out to fans<\/a> to explain what’s going on:<\/p>\n In the last 48 hours we increased server capacity by 120 percent. It's working \u00e2\u20ac" the number of people who have gotten in and built cities has improved dramatically. The number of disrupted experiences has dropped by roughly 80 percent.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So… they have more than doubled their server capacity. And<\/strong> they’ve disabled large portions of the game. And doing this has only reduced the problem by 80%. This suggests that their initial server capacity was way, WAY off. If gutting multiplayer, removing cheetah mode, and adding 120% more servers still<\/strong> hasn’t fixed the problem, then they were off by a ridiculous amount. <\/p>\n So what went wrong? The short answer is: a lot more people logged on than we expected. More people played and played in ways we never saw in the beta.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n