Amazon just processed my return of my physical disk of SimCity.

I had opened it and been unable to play about 60% percent of the times I tried. I'm glad Amazon has such great customer service, every time I have had a problem, they have given me the benefit of the doubt. In this instance, refunding an opened software box, which is not typical policy.

I am disappointed that Maxis or Origin made a bad judgement call in my opinion. I am pretty sure that these problems are a result of skimping on servers and not bringing the Beta to a wider audience. For example, the Betas were only an hour long and only accessible for 48hrs. I imagine this resulted in a tiny fraction of the retail horde testing the servers. At this point, a Beta internally is not good enough. For online games, you need a full stress test.

I'm not sure if my CD key will be removed from my account. Do they have people sitting around opening returns and de-activating keys? I tried to log in today and could not access my cities on Europe East 1. The game just sat on the loading city screen for 20min until I force quit the game.

But for now it is farewell, for there are other big things coming out. Games that are well supported by the developer behind them. Blizzards Heart of the Swarm and Monsterhunter 3 Ultimate are what I'll be doing. Remember the Diablo 3 launch? Error 37 only lasted about 24hrs, not a whole week like SimCity. I've read the SimCity dev press releases, they're all: were doing everything we can, it is being resolved. This is bullshit, as I can not load my cities and it is the 03/12 now, Tuesday after they launched. Obviously, they don't care and are sticking with the strategy of waiting for player numbers to drop off and saying things are ok when they are not, instead of actually paying for additional hosting.