How EA Ripped Me Off

I have been a loyal Maxis customer for years.  I have purchased all the Sim City games as well as a bunch of other games in the series.  I was very unhappy about the DRM in Spore, but I didn't run into any issues, so I didn't complain to EA about it.  I was unhappy with how the DRM escalated in Sim City 5, but I decided to overlook the issue and pre-ordered my copy anyways.  Now EA has $60 of my hard earned money and I have nothing to show for it.

I got my copy of Sim City 5 in the mail yesterday.  I heard some stories about people having problems playing the game.  I popped the DVD in and installed the game.  I have been watching Youtube videos put out by the Beta testers, so I had an idea of what the user interface looked like.  The install process took a while, since it had to download Origin and Sim City 5 from the internet (I don't exactly know what the 2GB on the DVD was for).  After the install, I started the game and was told there was an update that had to be installed.  I waited for the download again.

After a few minutes, I was finally able to start the game.  The Beta testers said you have to run through the tutorial before you can start the game, so I started the tutorial.  I had a few complaints, but I will reserve that for another day.  Today, my biggest complaint is that the tutorial didn't tell me to do anything.  The mouse worked.  I could fly around the tutorial city.  I could hit the non-game related buttons, but I couldn't actually build anything.  I tried multiple times.  I exited the game and tried again. The tutorial still didn't work.

Finally, I decided to check ea.com's support site.  That is when I found this forum post that describes my issue exactly.  You know your app has some problems if on 8:33am on launch day, you have to put a post saying most of your customers can't actually play the game they paid for:

When you start on a server for the first time you will be prompted to play the tutorial. In addition to teaching you the fundamentals about our game it also registers you on our system and secures your place in that server. We are seeing continuing reports that the tutorial isn't loading for some players. If the tutorial doesn't load, those players will be unable to play on that specific server.

This is a server-side issue and we are working around the clock to fix this as quickly as possible. In the meantime you can circumvent this problem by choosing to play on a different server while we resolve this issue. You will be able to rejoin the server after our maintenance is complete.

Thank you for your patience

Opening the thread up: Please post any details of which servers you are playing on in here!

Thank you

This is a perfect example of why DRM is a bad idea.  Honest people end up paying money for a product that doesn't work.  Who are the ones that can actually play the game?  Its the people who stole the game and cracked it.