While the latest SimCity launched to critical acclaim earlier this week, the game's online-only requirement has led to a rather frustrating launch window, plagued by delays thanks to the heavy load on EA's Origin servers. Now, EA is taking some steps to help get the game up to speed — the company announced that it will be deploying more servers over the next two days to help meet the demand. This announcement comes after the game launched in Australia and New Zealand — again with continuous server issues that the company said wouldn't be an issue for the game's international launch. Developer Maxis has also been helping to alleviate demand by adding and patching the game servers, but that only helps those who've been successful downloading and accessing the game from EA's Origin servers. While we're glad to see EA acknowledge and address the issues SimCity has had since launch, it might be best for interested players to sit things out for a week or two until things get squared away.

Update: In addition to the new servers, EA is apparently taking the dramatic step of disabling some "non-critical" SimCity features, including leaderboards and achievements, in an effort to improve the "core gameplay experience." Ironically, these are the types of features that would require the game to be "online-only" in the first place, but hopefully this will make the experience of actually playing the game better.

Update 2: EA has taken its disabling of SimCity features a step farther — according to Polygon, the game now no longer runs in the high-speed "cheetah" mode. It's clear that EA is continuing to have major difficulties with the game and the disabling of "non-critical" features from earlier wasn't enough to turn things around.