As Maxis VIP Lucy Bradshaw explained, the servers handle all region status updates for players around the world. A few days ago, modders made the discovery that a few changes client-side would allow them to edit areas past their own city boundaries, which would then sync on the server-side over at Maxis. As innocent as this discovery was, it paved the way to much more sinister findings - that gamers could go into any neighbor’s region and effectively bulldoze their entire city. The hackers in the video below disabled server-side syncing for the purpose of demonstration, but stated that City Owner IDs could be spoofed to allow truly malicious hackers to actually perform these acts online.

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Obviously, paying customers are more than a little offended after all their server woes, and now the city they painstakingly created on a public region can now be completely destroyed by any random Internet troll. SimCity hasn’t posted any official response to this hack, and hopefully their server-side securities and updates will actively prevent less-than-upstanding citizens from being able to do this.

Those looking to get in touch with customer support over the phone are also running into problems, as the customer service support hotline (866-543-5435) is being censored on the official SimCity forums. Whenever any user goes to enter the number, it is replaced by an asterisk; a common form of auto-censoring usually implemented for swear words and offensive content. Forum users tested other phone numbers on the boards and found that the official support hotline was the only number being censored, likely because EA is having problems dealing with the massive amount of calls.

Valve has a similar practice on their own forums, replacing the phone number with a support email to prevent a volume of calls from building up. Still, this practice is much better than simply preventing customers from getting any kind of support at all, leaving confused users high and dry. Countless posts have appeared online from frustrated customers, most saying something among the lines of ‘SimCity’s Titanic of a launch has hit another iceberg on its way down’, and it doesn’t take a genius to get the general tone of most consumers.

What do you think, Ranters? Are you frustrated by the plethora of problems in SimCity? Would you purchase another online-only game by Maxis?

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Sources: CinemaBlend, Destructoid