Switched on the PC this morning (Here in U.K.) and was greeted in Origin with Sim City saying that it was ready to be pre-loaded.

"Grand" thought I, "they must have learnt from the botched launch elsewhere"

I went ahead and clicked pre-load, agreed to Ts and Cs and was told it would be 12GB roughly.

About 1 minute later, it said the pre-load had finished and a fat blue banner has been added saying "THIS GAME IS PRE-LOADED".

Whilst my internet is fairly fast, it sure as hell doesn't download 12GB in 1 minute. I'm thinking that this is maybe damage control and they're trying to get some stories out saying "Yeah, we learnt so we allowed pre-loading" or something to that effect. It has to be a lie, maybe it's downloaded the installer? who knows. Oh EA. I do feel sorry for Maxis.

It did the same thing for me to.

But everything seems to be working fine. (aside from the obvious server issues)

the preload was just a little installer, not the whole game. but once you get the whole game running you can join the rest of us in the authentication server queues!

Yes it preloads an installer of some sorts, it was like 200Mb or so. Letting you preload 200Mb of an 12Gb game 6hours before its release is hilarious.

Yeah, it's the fact that it's now telling me it's pre-loaded that I find annoying/amusing. Someone is going to go play it at midnight and be really bummed.

Yea, it's basically just a downloader. You'll have to download 12gbs on release day.