SimCity developer Maxis has rolled out patches to a few of the game's servers today in an effort to improve performance for players, and added servers to meet demand.
Maxis added two servers, North America West 2 and Europe East 2, last night and has now added a total of four since launching the game yesterday. In addition, the studio identified a variety of problems and began patching the servers in an attempt to address them. Reported issues include an inability to create a city, errors with friends lists and invites, tutorial loops, trading not working consistently and an inability to load or claim cities.
The first server to be patched was Oceanic 1; that process took approximately three hours, from about 12:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. ET. Maxis then began patching North America East 1 and 2 at 2:40 p.m.; North America East 2 came back online shortly before 5 p.m. ET. According to the studio, any server that isn't being patched should be available — the company is advising players to attempt switching servers if one is listed as "busy" or "full," since all servers are available globally.
We've reached out to Maxis for more details and will update this story with any information we receive.
Users also experienced problems downloading and accessing SimCity through the Origin client yesterday; Origin representatives said they expected to have the issues ironed out in time for the game's international launches later this week.