SimCity... Why not to play it!!

[Zhar]

That's brilliant on their part, don't you think? Put in a horrible DRM to combat piracy and get more sales but because it wasn't properly tested/set up (as in, more servers) they are now giving away games for free. Losing money any way you look at it.

The thing is that if such issues happened before - D3 being the best example here, where they had to suspend sales for some time in order to tackle the amount of people trying to simultaneously play the game - they should learn their lesson (especially with high-expectancy titles) and prepare better infrastructure for it.

What's bothering me most in the way they approached it is that they put in a lot of unnecessary online-only features into the game that has historically been primarily a single player experience. You really shouldn't put persistent connection into single player games or game modes. You could even go further and offer two modes when the game is launched: online and offline, maybe even choosing where your saves/data will be stored - offline = on your computer, online = on the servers and you can play multiplayer with it as it's tamper-proof. Even Steam can be launched in offline mode, go figure.

Anyway, I think that people who got screwed the most and have the most (just) reasons to complain are those who pre-ordered the game and/or got early access as they were paying premium for the ability to play the game right off the bat, before major crowds hit it, which was ultimately denied to them (and EA has the no-refund policy).