While Electronic Arts might not be offering refunds to players irate over the continuing server problems for its online-only SimCity, it is making its remorse over the issues somewhat more tangible by offering all purchasers a free game from EA's Origin catalog.

"To get us back in your good graces, we’re going to offer you a free PC download game from the EA portfolio," Maxis general manager Lucy Bradshaw writes in a message on the EA blog. "On March 18, SimCity players who have activated their game will receive an email telling them how to redeem their free game."

While Bradshaw freely admits in the post that this is "kind of like buying a present for a friend after you did something crummy," she says that the entire team "really feel[s] bad about what happened. We’re hoping you won’t stay mad and that we’ll be friends again when SimCity is running at 100 percent."

How could EA have underestimated their server architecture needs so badly? She put it bluntly: "a lot more people logged on than we expected. More people played and played in ways we never saw in the beta. OK, we agree, that was dumb, but we are committed to fixing it. "

Bradshaw also gave a quick update on EA's efforts to repair the servers, saying server capacity has increased by 120 percent in the last 48 hours, leading to an 80 percent drop in "disrupted experiences." While the problems aren't totally fixed yet, Bradshaw says she hopes to be able to say the issues are behind them sometime this weekend.