So my game starts to crashes right after the game loads a city. This happened at launch. If the game loads up a city and cannot sync to the servers for whatever reason it crashes to desktop (no error message pops up because that would make too much sense and require effort on the part of the devs). The game's log and dump file also reflect and pretty much state this (it says it's a graphical problem but the errors are consistent with launch and you can't really read dump files without source code).

I contact EA tech support and do 2 hours of basic system diagnostics. Then I am told to re-install the game. It should be noted that SimCity doesn't download from Origin. Instead you just get a launcher and that launcher downloads the game from a separate server that's capped to 3Mbps (more like 2.5). After that i'm told to use the recovery app that comes with the game. This app just basically re-downloads everything and re-installs the game. After all this i'm told the game is "experiencing problems, similar issues have been reported and we are looking into it". Note I told them I suspected the game was having server issues but they refused to answer me. Only after wasting at least 8hrs (downloading) and 2hrs directly of my time through support do they state they know "many" people are also experiencing similar issues. Oh and no where does it state on the games website, forums, twitter etc that "many" people are experiencing problems loading cities/ playing the actual game.

Oh and a new expansion is coming out soon.

Now I can't be 100% sure it's servers but that's what all the evidence points too and it has happened before. If you're going to store all player saves on servers and almost nothing locally, you'd better be sure your system works. Especially if your game is a single player focused game with no actual multiplayer or benefits for... that's another problem entirely.

SimCity still catching fire sporadically 7 months after launch. And these are just the technical problems.