14 DAY TRIAL // Maxis boss Lucy Bradshaw has talked about the ongoing issues encountered by the studio's latest game, SimCity, and how they were practically the result of technical glitches that affected servers which were already under a lot of pressure from the many owners of the game.
SimCity is the latest installment in the wildly popular series made by Maxis and it was eagerly anticipated by many fans.
Sadly, the fact that it was distributed online via Electronic Arts' Origin service and because it required a constant connection to EA's servers resulted in many problems as the servers couldn't keep up with the high demand.
EA and Maxis have since remedied a lot of errors but, as of yet, owners are still upset about everything.
According to Maxis General Manager Lucy Bradshaw, the errors were the result of a perfect storm between technical problems and high demand.
"A lot more people logged on than we expected," Bradshaw told Polygon.
"More people played and played in ways we never saw in the beta. What we underestimated was a huge surge in pre-orders within the last week and the power of the great word-of-mouth created by the media and our community."
While Maxis used the previous SimCity beta test to fix its problems and prepare the servers for the official release, lots of new things appeared once the game was launched into the wild.
"We test and work out the capacity load of each server in load testing and through our beta events," she added. "We have seen play behavior and load in areas that have stressed our game server [databases] in ways that we did not experience in Beta or Load Test."
"Each game launch is very different and it's not as simple as saying we didn't have enough capacity. A perfect storm of highly technical issues related to massive demand cannot be anticipated, only addressed. We are committed to making this right."
Bradshaw thanked fans for their understanding and promised that Maxis would do everything it can in order to make SimCity a great experience that performs well around the world.