We should have been down the bookies and placed bets that the Sim City launch was not going to be smooth, despite what Ocean Quigley told us on Friday.
When the game launched last night, Origin immediately started to struggle and gamers who had pre-0rdered through Origin couldn’t get their hands on the game. If you were lucky enough to get the game installed. EA’s servers decided not to let players connect with the heart warming message of “We are unable to connect to EA servers to activate SimCity Digital Deluxe Edition on this computer using your account. Please try again later”.
Origin’s Twitter account has been been pumping out messages saying “We are continuing to distribute SimCity as quickly as possible. You should receive your game within the next one and a half hours.” The time delay to download does seem to be reducing now according to the Twitter updates but there are a lot of unhappy folk at the moment.
The EA CM team has jumped in on the forums for anyone who is concerned or after a refund. A refund? Really? How impatient do you have to be?
Hey all, after going through this thread (and the many similar ones), let me first of all apologize to each and every one of you; as gamers ourselves, we absolutely appreciate how aggravating it is to sit there and not be able to play. So yes, we are very sorry for the delay, and I just hope that once you have started playing, you can enjoy the game itself its fullest, despite this experience!
Let me address a few more points for you all:
1.) Pre-Loads: We agree, 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.
2.) Communciation: As they have a far larger outreach than the forums, we tend to use our social media channels like facebook.com/origininsider and @OriginInsider (general news) as well as @OriginStatus (outage and maintenance news) to keep you up-to-date on any issues.
3.) Refunds: If you regrettably feel that we left you down, you can of course request a refund for your order at https://help.origin.com/contact-us , though we are currently still in the process of resolving this issue.
If you have any further questions, I will keep a close eye on this thread.
It’s problems like these that will discourage gamers from pre-ordering in the future, we saw exactly the same problems with Diablo 3 last year. Our advice, be patient and don’t always try and start playing as soon as an online only game launches, it’s just frustrating.
