EA Offering Refunds for SimCity Launch Fiasco, Still Confident for International Launch

There are no doubts that SimCity's US launch yesterday was nothing less than an unmitigated disaster, one that cements EA's role as every gamers' punching bag nowadays - with good reason. Upon launch, the servers overheated at a phenomenally fast rate, failing miserably and consigning thousands of eager buyers to massive disappointments as all sorts of problems cropped up. The problems arose mainly from the fact that buyers were not allowed to pre-load the game, a step that was condemned by all as the servers promptly died from the strain of everybody attempting to download the game at once. This was compounded by several horrible design choices made by EA, such as there being no space on servers to play, difficulty in getting into the same server with friends, and worst of all, being unable to city-build between servers, forcing players to start all over again if they disconnect and were unable to get into the same server. EA has, of course, apologized for this, with its community manager, Marcel Hatam, stating that "pre-loads are very important, which is why we usually offer them (as we did for all of our last big releases like Crysis 3 and Dead Space 3). This didn't come together for SimCity unfortunately, for which I again apologize." and "If you regrettably feel that we left you down, you can of course request a refund for your order at http://help.origin.com/contact-us , though we are currently still in the process of resolving this issue."
Surprisingly, EA still seems optimistic about tomorrow's European launch, stating on Origin's twitter account "We're making changes to prevent further issues, and are confident that Origin will be stable for international launches later this week." Have they corrected their mistakes, learnt their lessons, and opened up all the bottlenecks, all in the span of a single day? Only time will tell.
Posted 06-03-2013, 19:44
If they piss off enough gamers, servers will be able to handle load from few that are left )