I preordered a physical copy several weeks ago. I was never able to play the beta, because Amazon delayed my access code until it had ended. I have still not played the game, despite owning a physical copy. Tuesday, the game spent two hours completely downloading itself all over again, despite the physical copy. I was unable to join any servers in the US. It them refused to create a city once I was able to join a server in Europe. I gave up. Tried again Wednesday, still could not creat a city. Today, all servers were busy. Eventually got through, but was only allowed to play the tutorial, and about two minutes in the servers dropped out. Then back to unable to create city.
Frankly, I knew this was coming. I hate EA for what they've gradually done to Maxis since the acquisition. I knew always-on DRM and shunting the region math onto the cloud was going to mean connection issues. What I didn't fully know is that my saves are on the server, and I cannot even create a game if the server is down. I love SimCity...I can remember many hours spend with SimCity (the original), SimCity 2000, SimCity 3000, and SimCity 4...and this looks like a welcome update. Shame I cannot play it.