New Test Server

We wanted to let you know about the new test server that we plan to put up today. It’s going to be called “Test”, so you'll know exactly which one it is.

Q: What is it for?
A: This server is used by us the SimCity developers, and players to test changes and new features before they are released across all the other servers. This test server will improve our ability to deploy these updates as quickly and accurately as possible.

Q: Can I play on that server?
A: You can and we would be very grateful if you did, as we need people to help test. But by it’s very nature it will not be as stable as our other live server environments.

Q: What does that mean for players?
A: You’ll have the sincere appreciation of the SimCity development team for helping us test the game, but your experience might be unstable. We also may take this test server down at any time, and you could lose progress in your saved cities. You should not lose your cities on this test server, but it is always a possibility.

We thank you in advance!

The Maxis Team

This should have been done with a real beta ... just sayin'

ANy info about EU West 2 ?

I'm trying to connect to the test server but it's saying login is closed. Is it full?

So come on, let´s play

Would love to help,
Also partly maxed out one city with 300.000

now i first need multi-city to be fully functional.

will there be another board to post bugs and sugestions on for the test server?

But Also cant get in, Login is closed

EDIT

Open Now

things I found:

- Commuting isn't very accurate,
...Resident city sad 10 workers comuting to Industrial city but when i load industrial city it shows that it isnt commuting at all

So that means we wont be able to connect to the test server either ?

Good Job
Time Well Spent.

Thanks.

1. Why are city's saved on physical servers, what about cloud / city synchronisation on other (online) servers?

2. Why does Maxis performs hardware-/software server updates at a time when most people are online (europe)?
Link: https://www.ams-ix.net/technical/statistics

3. Could you inform the community better, not during gameplay, but before? And how much downtime is expected?

Sure seems like all the servers are test servers. . .

You could of course resolve all the issues by allowing offline play.

From Ultima Online where there also were lots of servers for each regon of the world, they had server updates when people would be sleeping. If im not all wrong they had them around 6:00 am everyday.

I wish they would do same here.

You should appreciate they try to fix things ASAP.
Test server might be good to test AI changes and City interaction patches before applying them.
If they now would get a bug report subsection in "Ideas & Feedback" that is moderated (instead of spammed with 10+ versions of a single bug report), that would be great.

Maxis_MD wrote:This server is used by us the SimCity developers, and players to test changes and new features before they are released across all the other servers. This test server will improve our ability to deploy these updates as quickly and accurately as possible.

Sounds awesome. I'll grab a friend and join in on the test server tonight, assuming I can log in when we try.

Thinking about all these changes and updates, it'd be real nice to see a centralized list of all patch notes for both test and live servers that is a little less like forum/EA Help/Answer HQ posts and a little more like www.spore.com/patch. It'd be even better if the SimCity launcher's "View Updates" link pointed directly to it. Speaking of which, why isn't there a www.simcity.com/patch?

isnt' gonna be as stable as live servers made me lol. Test server, now worse than the non functional live servers.

Can we get a dedicated Test Server forum to discuss changes and bugs encountered while playing on the test server.

Has an IT I wanted to give you my thanks and support for this. I am one of the mad ones and also feel that this is the sort of thing that should have been done in beta, not after we purchased the game. Of course there are some instances where you are going to have issues after seeing it all run in a live environment with tens of thousands of users so I for one will back off the complaints and lend a hand. I think we all need to realize that running apps of this scale in a cloud environment is new and has challenges that other game types do not. Let’s support Maxis and I say that because I have nothing good to say about the rest of EA and probably never will, but I think the communication that the Maxis team has done making sure we are all up to speed with what they are doing is commendable and goes above and beyond (something that the rest of EA could learn a lesson from).

With that said and the question has been asked a few times with no response but will there be a board where we can post issues and bugs? Or do you have systems in place to log these without the need for our input?

One last rant though that really has me ticked off! Seems EA is denying refunds and I have to say that in my TOS I am guaranteed a game that performs as advertised and so far that has not happened. I can see a lawsuit over this arrogant position. Word of advice, in the future do a REAL beta test before you release a game for us to purchase!