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EA not altering return policy for furious SimCity buyers
Publisher continues to scramble to increase server capacity, restore features.
"In general we do not offer refunds on digital download games," EA tweeted through its official Origin account yesterday, directing people to the company's online policy on returns and cancellations. While downloadable games purchased in North America are not be refunded "as a general policy," EA does offer a "14-day unconditional guarantee" on any physical product sold through the Origin store. European customers, however, may be able to withdraw their downloadable purchase during a 14-day "Cooling Off period" as outlined on EA's European return policy page.
The recent tweet comes after a message posted to EA's forums by Community Manager Raven on Tuesday, stating that "[i]f you regrettably feel that we let you down, you can of course request a refund for your order... though we're currently still in the process of resolving this issue." That message has now been revised to simply say "please review our refund policy here."
A minor furor developed over the last few days when one irate customer claimed EA support had threatened to ban his Origin account merely for requesting a refund. However, the banning "threat" only came when the customer himself threatened to have his bank stop payment on the still-pending transaction. "We will not ban players for requesting refunds," EA clarified through its Origin Twitter account.
Meanwhile, EA continues to apologize for the ongoing server problems. The company is spinning the issues as a result of the unexpected, overwhelming popularity of the game. After servers filled up within hours of Tuesday's launch, "what we saw was that players were having such a good time they didn't want to leave the game, which kept our servers packed and made it difficult for new players to join," Senior Producer Kip Katsarelis said in a forum message. He went on to promise that missing game features, taken out in an effort to reduce server load, would be restored soon, but that "our number one priority is to bring stability to our servers."
In a statement obtained by Kotaku, Maxis General Manager Lucy Bradshaw noted the game's popularity, saying that 700,000 cities were created in one 24-hour period, but she admitted that it's "now evident that players across Europe and Asia are experiencing the same frustration" as American customers. Bradshaw promised to "quickly and dramatically increase the number and stability of our servers," and the company did indeed add three European servers last night.
At the same time, an internal memo circulated to EA employees by Bradshaw (and obtained by Polygon), praises the hard work the developers put into the game while admitting that the public reaction to post-launch problems is justified. "I'd like to say that it's not fair— that the game score shouldn't be punished for a server problem. But it is fair," she wrote.
A manager for EA's Korean Facebook page, meanwhile, seems to have risked angering an entire continent by mentioning that there are no local Asian servers for the game because "there is a lot of piracy in Asia, so it would be difficult for the time being" (as spotted and translated by Kotaku).
Amazon appears to be offering both retail and downloadable versions of the Standard and Limited Edition SimCity on their online store again, after they were briefly unavailable yesterday. The online retailer is still warning potential buyers up front that "[m]any customers are having issues connecting to the 'SimCity' servers. EA is actively working to resolve these issues, but at this time we do not know when the issue will be fixed."
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