While Simcity has a good game hidden underneith bugs and glitches that they could have fixed but chose money instead.
Oh, if only it were just that. See, that's what is most rage-inducing about all of this. It isn't that they chose money instead. Sure, the online stuff can very well be argued as such, and does contribute to a large amount of the problems... But even if that is removed, even if all those 'greed motivated' decisions (which, let's be honest, everyone was expecting to begin with) were removed, you're still left with something which is broken to a high extent to the point where merely passing it off as corporate greed doesn't go far enough. It isn't greed which sank this ship, it's the sheer incompetence and laziness. Had they pulled off a spectacular launch with a great product, people would gripe about always-online and such, but it would overall be a pretty damn good game. Instead, it's become an unending debacle.
As others have shown on previous pages, the traffic simulations are completely broken. And what's worse, as I pointed out, is that one could very easily fix nearly all the issues with it; at the very least turn it from 'show-stopping failure' to 'silly glitch with little impact on gameplay.' And, indeed, they have announced they will be changing some of it to be a bit closer to my suggestions, though whether they have gone far enough remains to be seen (maybe, but possibly not; their system is still entirely deterministic).
Likewise, their servers are broken. They're a big, experienced company. They've compared this game to an MMO; and yet they don't seem to have learned any lessons from other MMOs their own company has created. EA runs SWTOR. Outside of Actiblizz, they should have some of the most knowledgeable people regarding the data and server requirements of highly multiplayer games. They've got networking source code and internal stats. Adequate server simulation and load testing obviously wasn't done, nor was proper analysis of data requirements. Had either of these things been done, the launch may have been a bit buggy, but not a week-long catastrophic failure.