ZiZiL

I got invited as well.

Well, when we played beta, we really did not plan anything right. I mean you have one hour, you just rush everything. I think with the regular release, this will be a lot more fun since you can plan a lot more. Other than that; Being in customer service / experience business in technology field, I know for fact that you cannot make everyone happy with your product. Most of the time this is not the goal of the company either. In the end, every single company in the world (except non-profits), do things to maximize its shareholders' value. No company in the world will try to make a game to satisfy all users and loose a lot of money in return. With this release, it seems EA accepted the fact that they might have to push some hard-core simulator fans away, but they will gain a lot of new users who does not like hard-core simulators. It seems what they have tried to do is finding a balance between simulator and fun. Let's face it, hard-core simulators can be fun to many simulation fans, but it is boring for many users out there. That is the trade off they decided to make and it seems so far it was the right decision. It is all about tapping into the right market. Realistically, hard-core simulator fan market is a lot smaller than regular users out there. This is pretty much what EA is after. From a business perspective, that makes total sense. Looking into social media, and tweet levels yesterday, it seems that EA will do a record sales with this game. That is my observation at least. Disclaimer: This is mainly my observation and my opinions. I have no connection to EA therefore I have no idea what was their strategy with this release.

I tried beta 2 on windows 8. It worked like a charm. No problems at all.

Here is my last try:

The reason I have shared them is because this time EA allows us to share (per http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/share-your-cities). People are posting them to twitter pretty much all day long. For a lot more screen shots see twitter #simcitybeta

For some reason land value showed quite low on those areas. I think this was due to wind carrying some pollution over there.

Low density, industrial city:

Let's have them under one topic.

I have pre-ordered and they did not even send me my key dude. I am on wait on origin chat support for 45 minutes now. It says remaining wait time 70 minutes. This is just crazy. I will see if I can get my key from them.

I have pre-ordered the game and not received a key. I am not very happy at the moment. If I do not receive a key by tomorrow morning, i am seriously considering returning my pre-order and not purchasing the game at all. I want to own a game from a company who keeps its promises.

Where do you receive the code? via email? I have pre=ordered two weeks ago but I did not received a key for second beta yet.

I am in

Nope. This is something new I believe. After you enroll for the second beta, it says if you pre-ordered, you are guaranteed to get a spot for closed beta 2.

Origin Name: zizil55

I am new to SimCity series and 2013 version will be the first one I will use. Obviously I cannot compare this version to previous versions but I can say that the reason EA decided to take a different approach to the game is to capture new markets. Let's face it, one of the reasons why I was not able to play the older versions is that if I wanted a lot of fun, I had to dedicate a lot of time. Let's face it, in today's day and age, people do not have that much spare time. Most people would want to get as much fun as possible in a short period of time without spending too much time on actually learning the game. I think this is the overall strategy which is making the game a bit simpler therefore capturing more customers. I admit that I am one of them. I cannot record bunch of stuff in a separate spreadsheet to keep the city running. With the new version, I do not have to worry about that. I login, play half hour and so, and enjoy that half hour fully. I think this was the idea that they had in mind when designing the game.