mack73

Yes, I lost 3. All had borders on. All were within he first week.

While not 100% sure, I believe I ended up playing someone elses city this evening........ I couldn't get in NA west 4, so I loaded up an old city that I started on launch day, and it did not look like anything I would create. I am more of a grid guy and there were way too many curved/diagonal roads - it did not look familiar at all..............

You've seen the dirt road vs. avenue videos right: What person in their right mind would wait in a line of traffic to take a dirt road instead of a freeway! The calculation appears to me to be very simple - and doesn't need to worry about doing a home/work complete path map for each sim. Instead when a sim reaches an intersection 3 variables would be calcluated: 1. Road size. Larger roads have priority 2. Road traffic. Less congested roads have priority 3. Direction to destination. The shortest route has priority Anytime a sim comes to an intersection a little bit of math is done and it selects the "best" path. We eliminate road size issues (dirt road vs avenue), traffic (high congestion vs low congestion) and destination direction (the sim will always try to go the shortest possible).

Well hum... I'm having traffic problems in 1 of my 100k cities due to the single highway exit. Maybe I'll just get ride of commerical all together - I've got enough parks to do the job............. just pitiful

I'm 100% for this. There have been many times when I'm placing a building and all of the snap-points are blue, boxes are yellow. But after I place it, I find that one particular upgrade doesn't work on any snap-point. Frustrating to say the least, but a huge waste of money

And since most plopables are enormous, and when you get some the city is so mature you have to destroy about 2 city blocks for them. I agree with you 100%. I'm still trying to figure out my optimum road placement - but most of the time I have wasted space in the middle waiting for some future building I couldput there. I swear a ful university takes 20% of the map

As far as I can tell, the game play is good. You simply have to get out of your mind over the small tile size, problems with regional play at this point, don't gift money between cities, loss of cheetah speed, some of the pathing bugs, some of the graphic bugs, ok man this list is getting long. There is a solid core here and the server experience is getting better. I just can't believe it is going to take them a full week to get the servers sorted. And why is there only 4 NA servers but 7 europe... it's probably because all the NA people have left the NA servers for the europe ones that seem to work better If the issue was simply a load issue - why can't they click the little button to fire up another Amazon EC2 on the highest settings, install their server software, test and launch. That can' take more than a couple hours and the spend on a new EC2 would have saved them thousands in bad publiciity and refunds/charge backs

Yes this can be frustrating. You've got to pay attention when placing the first building. You'll see yellow squares that represent the snap points. If any of these turn red those are snap points you can't use in the future

My experience tonight: Took 1 hour to finally get onto a server. All the servers that reported available were not. I finally made it onto the "busy" NA West 1 server......... Sandbox wasn't working for my existing city (I'll probably have to claim a new one to get it to work) - disasters were on and the cheats were not working However, even after leaving the game idle for 1 hour, I still received th "your city isn't sync'ed" message when exiting - so I wonder if all my progress was saved.....I guess I'l find out in the morning.

As it stands now this game doesn't deserve a single star with these online issues. The games great, the Online DRM is TERRIBLE. Basically, nobody can play. Maxis posted an "update patch" to address some of the issues, among the fixes was disabling cheetah speed and leader boards. Seriously they are disabling game features now instead of JUST ADDING MORE SERVERS. This has gone from a bad screw up to a colossal one. *hint - the problems are probably not server capacity - the server software must have a very huge flaw. Throwing servers at the problem won't resolve a server software issue, there will simply be more servers with crap software on it.

That wasn't the point. The thread is about all the Amazon reviews. You lose credibility when the majority of the reviews are from people who haven't bought the game. If the majority of the reviews were from people who bought the game, then we would something to debate. My bet is that the majority of people reviewing on Amazon bought it through Origin. They simply apply their rating to Amazon since it has larger visibility.

We in the US can't play the game either........... I think I've been in it for a total of 2 hours over 3 days. Started cities on 3 different servers and have completely lost 2 of them. Spent probably 6 hours trying to get in but get stopped with multiple problems (All servers down, Stuck in the tutorial, can't 'claim' a city, crashes when the city tries to load, GUI crashes so I can't click on any buttons, etc) I've been through some bad MMO launches before, but I don't think I've ever LOST hours of game play (on a character/Rollback) due to glitches And if it is true, whoever decided it would be a good idea to host the game download information on the actual gameplay servers is the biggest idiot I have ever seen. Seriously, no CDN?

This is completely wrong. Their DRM is more lax now than it was with Windows XP (you got a drilling by their customer service if you attempted to reactive XP on another computer, Now you simply call a phone number and an automated system gives you a new registration code. You are not required to use the internet. You can call a phone number for activation Yes you can reinstall the product using the same key. If the registration fails, you simply call a number and an automated system gives you a new registration code to enter. Have you actually tried activating any Microsoft software?