SimCity plagued with launch issues. EA refuses to give money back

The launch of SimCity has not been smooth sailing. Now its gone from bad to worse.

Earlier today, EA cut features from SimCity in an effort to get the always-online game running. These features included leaderboards and achievements.

“We are in the process of deploying a hotfix to all servers,” said a Maxis community manager in a post on the EA Forums. “This includes various improvements and also disables a few non-critical gameplay features (leaderboards, achievements and region filters).

“Disabling these features will in no way affect your core gameplay experience. Getting you playing is our absolute highest priority.”

Now they’re taken away, we’ve no idea when the features will be returned to the game.

However, removing these elements has clearly proven unsuccessful, so EA have had to resort to something more drastic. The ‘cheetah speed’ has now also  been removed from the game. ‘Cheetah Speed’ has been a core feature of the SimCity franchise for years, but this latest patch reduces Cheetah Speed, converting it into regular Llama Speed.

Here are the full patch details…

* Fix for crash caused most commonly occurring on servers experiencing lag. This crash would happen most often when claiming a new city when playing in a region.
* Fix for server select dialog not appearing on start-up if the server the player was last on is not available.
* Disabled Cheetah speed. Cheetah speed is is now the same as llama speed.
* Crash fix for finding closest points.
* Crash fixes in transport and pedestrian code.
* A fix cities having processing problems associated with helicopters.

You haven’t heard the best part yet. EA are not offering refunds.

Customers can claim refunds in “exceptional circumstances”, but when asked whether connection issues for the always online title came under that description, a customer service representative told Develop that it didn’t