Hey
It's only my third post here in three years, so I'm a bit of a lurker but this whole "strip the game down to the bare bones and sell it for a higher price" thing is getting ridiculous. EA have always been at it, and you come to expect it with Sims 3, but I had high hopes for MC.
I first read about CXL here, and on the official site and they made it sound very exciting, and fantastic. But it seems things have vanished. I've never been interested in the planet offer thing, never really wanted to play a city builder online. I can understand them asking for a monthly fee for that, doesn't really bother me because I doubt I'll ever bother with it. But if they have purposefully took features out of the single player mode to get us to sign up for the monthly offer, then I might just cancel my pre-order.
At least, if all goes pear-shaped, we've still got SC4 to fall back on. Still play it several years on. A great game, made better with the fantastic downloads available here, which I'd like to thank the community for.