SimCity servers continue to struggle as game hits more countries (update 4)

Following the turbulent U.S. SimCity launch, some Australian SimCity players are currently struggling to access the game's Oceanic servers following its launch in the country at 5 a.m. PT.

SimCity is region free, allowing gamers to play on whatever servers they choose; however, Australian region gamers prefer to play on the Oceanic servers.

A patch was applied to Oceanic 1 starting around 9:15 a.m. PT (4:15 a.m. AEST) "to address some player issues that have been reported overnight". As reported by Polygon, NA East 2, NA East 1, EU West 1, and EU West 2 were also recently patched and reopened.

Some gamers playing on the Oceanic server before it was patched are reporting that their cities were deleted.

The EA Australia account tweeted: "We are aware of the current server issues and the team are working to fix this. Please stay tuned to @SimCity for updates!" Although EA recommends joining servers listed as 'Available,' a lot of gamers are reporting that they are unable to get into those servers greenlit for access.

Other lingering server issues include the launcher stuck "checking for updates" and the launcher crashing and not installing. EA Support issued updates with instructions on how to get around the problems and said they "are currently investigating the issue so that we can restore normal access as soon as possible."

SimCity launched on March 5 for Windows PC in North America, and March 7 in Europe, Australia and Japan, on March 8 in the U.K.. It will launch this spring on Mac OS X.

Polygon contacted EA Australia for more information and we will update this story as it comes to hand.

Update: EA Australia issued the following statement to Polygon:

We are experiencing extremely high server volume and it's preventing some players from gaining access to the game. Our server team is working around the clock to resolve this issue so that we can get the rest of our fans into the game.

We are aggressively undergoing maintenance on our servers to add the necessary capacity to meet the demand. Players may continue to play throughout the weekend but we want to note that performance will fluctuate during this time. We thank our fans for their continued patience.

Update 2: Early this morning, the official Facebook page for SimCity released a statement similar to the one given to Polygon from EA Australia, addressing not just Australian servers, but all servers for the game.

We are aggressively undergoing maintenance on the servers and adding capacity to meet demand. Performance will fluctuate during this process. Our fans are important to us, and we thank you for your continued patience.

Update 3: SimCity senior producer Kip Katsarelis at Maxis has taken to the EA forum to apologize to fans for the continuing server issues:

This has been an exciting and challenging week for the team here at Maxis, the culmination years of planning and development. We have been overwhelmed by the outpouring of support and enthusiasm from our fans which has made it even more upsetting for us that technical issues have become more prominent in the last 24 hours. We are hitting a number of problems with our server architecture which has seen players encountering bugs and long wait times to enter servers. This is, obviously, not the situation we wanted for our launch week and we want you to know that we are putting everything we have at resolving these issues.

What we are doing is deploying more servers over the coming two days which will alleviate many of the ongoing issues. We are also paying close attention to all the bug reports we are receiving from our fans. We've already pushed several updates in the last few days. Our live ops team is working 24/7 to resolve issues and ensure that bug fixes roll into the game as quickly as possible.

While the ongoing issues are troubling, we can also see that players are really enjoying the game. In a single 24 hour period, there were more than 38 million buildings plopped down, nearly 7 and a half million kilometers of roads laid down, 18+ million fires started and (my favorite fact) over 40 million pipes filled up with poop.

This team has put everything into this game and won't stop until things are smooth. We ask our fans to be patient as our team works diligently to fix the issues. We share your passion for SimCity and thank you for your support and understanding.

Update 4: Maxis is now applying a server-side hotfix that will disable certain "non-critical" gameplay features, in an attempt to resolve the ongoing server troubles.