Day 6 is starting off the same as all the others. It is still an continuous loop of attempted logins after "Cannot Connect to Server" screens.
To recap some information:
I'm using an iPod Touch 4th generation and it only uses WiFi to connect to the internet, so the problem is not being on 3G since that is unavailable to me. Everything else (non-EA things) work. Email works. The YouTube app works. The same for videos for The Daily Show, Facebook, Twitter, ... anything that uses an internet connection to function. So the problem is not at this end. It is either a problem with EA's servers or a severe bug in their Origin system.
As some one mentioned in an earlier post here (which I missed because this is going on into a second page), there is still a possibility of too many friend requests - a problem which EA should have taken care of long before this (I've been playing this game since LAST Christmas). They mentioned an Origin app that they could download to their PC (they were using the Android version on their phone). I'm going to see if there is a Mac version as a last ditch attempt to solve this problem. I obviously can't do it from my Simpsons Tapped Out game because of the "Cannot Connect to Server" screens.
Now into Day 7 of the "Cannot Connect to Server" game.
Things are working (or not working) about the same as they have for the previous 6 days. Once you tap to log in at the "Welcome back ______" message screen, it takes you into the game for about 10 seconds at the longest. You get to see perhaps a message from Lisa about sharing presents with other Springfields and, if you are really lucky, all or part of a message from Homer in response to it whereupon you get the dreaded "Cannot Connect to Server" message and you hit retry and start all over again.
Sometimes you open the game to discover you've been kicked out of Origin and have to log in again. Sometimes the game crashes and you have to start completely all over again. As I said above, this is Day 7 of this.
Some who have responded to this thread have suggested switching from 3G to WiFi to solve this problem - a good suggestion for those using it with many devices. But since I am using an iPod Touch 4 generation that exclusively uses WiFi for the connection, this doesn't help in this situation. But thanks for the suggestion anyway.
Another suggestion involves deleting friend requests. I, for obvious reasons, haven't been able to do it from the game. I found out that there was an Origin app available for my computer and downloaded it. I could find no mechanism for deleting friend requests but I did find you could delete existing friends ("unfriending" them) when this app worked. I had deleted one of them (someone not active at all) as a test but it didn't solve the problem. I tried doing it some more but the friends I tried wouldn't delete. I may try again today and see if I can take it down to a half, a third, or maybe delete all of them. (You are limited to 100. Last time I looked I had 625+ friend requests backed up.)
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am considering deleting this game after Day 7 or Day 10. I'm leaning toward waiting until Day 10 to see if this may yet be resolved and try the deleting friends strategy to see if it clears out the problem. Either at the end of today, or at the end of Day 10 (Friday), if I'm still on this nightmarish loop of "login, see 10 seconds of the game, 'Cannot Connect to Server', retry, repeat" then I'm going to nuke this game and never again download a game requiring a server connection to operate and certainly not another EA game.
Finally discovered how you delete friend requests in the Origin app on the computer. You go to the Friends menu and go to Show Friends List. Then it is an extremely slow process and going down the list and clicking on "ignore" links. There is a long lag before the names disappear. I started at 683 and I've managed to get it down to just over 640 so far with lots to go.
I don't know if doing this is going to solve the problem or not. If it does, it does bring up a number of beefs with how EA has been doing things:
In trying to locate information about the problem I'm experiencing, I noticed that buried in the Help sections was information stating that occasionally a game might be down because of maintenance. Now why couldn't EA give you this message right when you start the game instead of having it making their game look like a piece of *?
In order to possibly solve this problem I've had to download an Origin app for my computer. Why is there no information about the need for this app when you download a game?
Why can't you play the game while the server isn't available, postponing the updates for when you can connect?
If an overabundance of friend requests is the source of the problem I'm experiencing, why hasn't EA come up with a solution after all this time? They could make it so friend requests stay active if unanswered for a set, limited time (2 weeks? A month?) before they would be automatically deleted, preventing the system from being overloaded. Also they could delete friends who have been inactive for 2 to 3 months, thus freeing up space within your 100 friend maximum space.
I'm going to go through this long and tedious process of deleting friend requests and see if it solves the problem. I still may nuke the game even if it does because for something that is supposed to be fun, it is certainly a lot of trouble. I don't know if any EA staff every monitors these forums but perhaps they should. They might be able to improve their games.
I am having same trouble and have downloaded origin on my computer, and it's not even updating my friend list it just says oops! can't load at this time, so it's pretty much just the same as the game. It comes up saying i just have one game on my account though and it's the sims, not the simpsons. any ideas how i can get my friends list?
It's Day 7 and I was finally able to solve the problem.
Here are the steps I had to take to solve it:
I had to download the Origin app for my computer (in my case a Macbook).
I had to delete 683 friend requests. The app is not very obvious on how to do this. What you have to do is go under the Friends menu (on the menu bar) and select "Show Friends List".
Then you go through the list of friend requests, one at a time, and click on the ignore link. The problem when you are starting out is that there is a significant lag between when you click on the link and when the name actually disappears. Fortunately the response time improves the fewer names remain, but it is still a major pain in the neck.
Once I had deleted this giant avalanche of friend requests the game actually worked.
I may still nuke the game on what could have been Day 10 because I'm so disgusted that this problem had to occur at all and I place the blame entirely on EA for not writing server code to handle this sort of problem - especially considering how long this game has been around. When you don't respond to a friend request you are essentially ignoring it and they should have written code to handle this eventuality. A friend request should have been made to expire after a set period of time so that one's account did not get clogged up. This is a gross oversight and should be remedied as soon as possible. No doubt EA has other games that use this Origin system too.
I really shouldn't have had to go through this trouble and nobody else should have. An omission this big makes me think twice about buying any EA game or buying premium game currency (in this case donuts) with my real money. To leave such a big problem unaddressed is inexcusable and if EA goes out of business because of it they will only have themselves to blame for it.
I seem to have just suddenly contracted this syndrome. My town was fine, I went to my secondary town and when I came back to my primary town able to play for about 8 seconds before it went to the cannot connect to server screen. Now it will occasionally connect for a few seconds before the CCtS screen. Grrr
I just got it too. Logged in, played for about a minute and then it logged me out. After a few tries it let me back it and then after about 10 seconds logged me back out.
I moved my gift tree and its stopped now. Took several tries cuz I kept selecting the gifts around when trying to select it. Hopefully this doesn't happen again. My tree was not even close to squidport
The main frustration is that Origin only respond on Twitter by saying things like "try uninstalling and reinstalling". There's clearly a widespread issue so just say there is!
My gift cards also reset to zero briefly earlier. Bleurgh.
Replies
To recap some information:
I'm using an iPod Touch 4th generation and it only uses WiFi to connect to the internet, so the problem is not being on 3G since that is unavailable to me. Everything else (non-EA things) work. Email works. The YouTube app works. The same for videos for The Daily Show, Facebook, Twitter, ... anything that uses an internet connection to function. So the problem is not at this end. It is either a problem with EA's servers or a severe bug in their Origin system.
As some one mentioned in an earlier post here (which I missed because this is going on into a second page), there is still a possibility of too many friend requests - a problem which EA should have taken care of long before this (I've been playing this game since LAST Christmas). They mentioned an Origin app that they could download to their PC (they were using the Android version on their phone). I'm going to see if there is a Mac version as a last ditch attempt to solve this problem. I obviously can't do it from my Simpsons Tapped Out game because of the "Cannot Connect to Server" screens.
We'll see if there is a Day 7.
Here is the link to download it:
https://www.origin.com/en-us/download
Things are working (or not working) about the same as they have for the previous 6 days. Once you tap to log in at the "Welcome back ______" message screen, it takes you into the game for about 10 seconds at the longest. You get to see perhaps a message from Lisa about sharing presents with other Springfields and, if you are really lucky, all or part of a message from Homer in response to it whereupon you get the dreaded "Cannot Connect to Server" message and you hit retry and start all over again.
Sometimes you open the game to discover you've been kicked out of Origin and have to log in again. Sometimes the game crashes and you have to start completely all over again. As I said above, this is Day 7 of this.
Some who have responded to this thread have suggested switching from 3G to WiFi to solve this problem - a good suggestion for those using it with many devices. But since I am using an iPod Touch 4 generation that exclusively uses WiFi for the connection, this doesn't help in this situation. But thanks for the suggestion anyway.
Another suggestion involves deleting friend requests. I, for obvious reasons, haven't been able to do it from the game. I found out that there was an Origin app available for my computer and downloaded it. I could find no mechanism for deleting friend requests but I did find you could delete existing friends ("unfriending" them) when this app worked. I had deleted one of them (someone not active at all) as a test but it didn't solve the problem. I tried doing it some more but the friends I tried wouldn't delete. I may try again today and see if I can take it down to a half, a third, or maybe delete all of them. (You are limited to 100. Last time I looked I had 625+ friend requests backed up.)
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am considering deleting this game after Day 7 or Day 10. I'm leaning toward waiting until Day 10 to see if this may yet be resolved and try the deleting friends strategy to see if it clears out the problem. Either at the end of today, or at the end of Day 10 (Friday), if I'm still on this nightmarish loop of "login, see 10 seconds of the game, 'Cannot Connect to Server', retry, repeat" then I'm going to nuke this game and never again download a game requiring a server connection to operate and certainly not another EA game.
Finally discovered how you delete friend requests in the Origin app on the computer. You go to the Friends menu and go to Show Friends List. Then it is an extremely slow process and going down the list and clicking on "ignore" links. There is a long lag before the names disappear. I started at 683 and I've managed to get it down to just over 640 so far with lots to go.
I don't know if doing this is going to solve the problem or not. If it does, it does bring up a number of beefs with how EA has been doing things:
In trying to locate information about the problem I'm experiencing, I noticed that buried in the Help sections was information stating that occasionally a game might be down because of maintenance. Now why couldn't EA give you this message right when you start the game instead of having it making their game look like a piece of *?
In order to possibly solve this problem I've had to download an Origin app for my computer. Why is there no information about the need for this app when you download a game?
Why can't you play the game while the server isn't available, postponing the updates for when you can connect?
If an overabundance of friend requests is the source of the problem I'm experiencing, why hasn't EA come up with a solution after all this time? They could make it so friend requests stay active if unanswered for a set, limited time (2 weeks? A month?) before they would be automatically deleted, preventing the system from being overloaded. Also they could delete friends who have been inactive for 2 to 3 months, thus freeing up space within your 100 friend maximum space.
I'm going to go through this long and tedious process of deleting friend requests and see if it solves the problem. I still may nuke the game even if it does because for something that is supposed to be fun, it is certainly a lot of trouble. I don't know if any EA staff every monitors these forums but perhaps they should. They might be able to improve their games.
It's Day 7 and I was finally able to solve the problem.
Here are the steps I had to take to solve it:
I had to download the Origin app for my computer (in my case a Macbook).
I had to delete 683 friend requests. The app is not very obvious on how to do this. What you have to do is go under the Friends menu (on the menu bar) and select "Show Friends List".
Then you go through the list of friend requests, one at a time, and click on the ignore link. The problem when you are starting out is that there is a significant lag between when you click on the link and when the name actually disappears. Fortunately the response time improves the fewer names remain, but it is still a major pain in the neck.
Once I had deleted this giant avalanche of friend requests the game actually worked.
I may still nuke the game on what could have been Day 10 because I'm so disgusted that this problem had to occur at all and I place the blame entirely on EA for not writing server code to handle this sort of problem - especially considering how long this game has been around. When you don't respond to a friend request you are essentially ignoring it and they should have written code to handle this eventuality. A friend request should have been made to expire after a set period of time so that one's account did not get clogged up. This is a gross oversight and should be remedied as soon as possible. No doubt EA has other games that use this Origin system too.
I really shouldn't have had to go through this trouble and nobody else should have. An omission this big makes me think twice about buying any EA game or buying premium game currency (in this case donuts) with my real money. To leave such a big problem unaddressed is inexcusable and if EA goes out of business because of it they will only have themselves to blame for it.
Oh, I have no pending friend requests btw.
[EDIT]: As others have said, after about 20 seconds the game crashes, whether you tap on something or not.
Seems to me like it are server issues, a server restart would fix it probably/hopefully.
Thank goodness it's now, I nearly spent some money,well that won't be happening!!!!!
Merry Christmas all...chances are if any of you are my neighbours I won't be visiting till next year! :roll:
All over other forums as well.
Quite obvious it is some kind of server bottleneck and it's been piling up all day long, it just hit the last drop(bite) so everyone is stuck.
The main frustration is that Origin only respond on Twitter by saying things like "try uninstalling and reinstalling". There's clearly a widespread issue so just say there is!
My gift cards also reset to zero briefly earlier. Bleurgh.