Even though Electronic Arts’ problems with Sim City are not over, things are starting to look a lot better and I am sure that pretty soon we’ll all be able to fully experience this wonderful rebook of the series. Proof that EA and Maxis are working hard to solve the problems stands the release of the Patch 1.3 for SimCity which adds a bunch of new servers – 8 of them – to keep players online and a bunch of fixes to help us get the most out of the game.

The new SimCity servers are divided in three regions: 1 in Oceania, 3 new ones in Europe and 4 in North America, while the Sim City patch 1.3 brings in the following fixes and tweaks:

– Fix for a crash related to the highway interchanges and vehicles.
– Traffic was optimized for complex road sections.
– Fix for a specific case of city processing that forced players to rollback their cities to a previous state.
– Fix for a crash some players saw when exiting their city.
– Rapidly clicking or accidently double clicking the Claim city button will no longer create multiple regions.
– We temporarily removed filtering by friends and maps on the Join Game screen to better support database performance. Players can still find friends’ regions by going to their friends’ profile pages.
– Various database optimization to address issues with connecting to our servers

And there is even more good news! Electronic Arts wants to make up for the trouble of having you unable to play the game and they’re going to bring in a goodie. Here is what they say:

“The good news is that SimCity is a solid hit in all major markets. The consensus among critics and players is that this is fundamentally a great game. But this SimCity is made to be played online, and if you can’t get a stable connection, you’re NOT having a good experience. So we’re not going to rest until we’ve fixed the remaining server issues.

And to get us back in your good graces, we’re going to offer you a free PC download game from the EA portfolio. On March 18, SimCity players who have activated their game will receive an email telling them how to redeem their free game.”

So I guess that we can really pardon Electronic Arts for all these SimCity related problems. After all, they were not ready for the amounts of traffic that we sent their way and they’re learning from their mistakes right now. And they work hard to make sure that we get the best experience, and that’s laudable!