I'm serious, the unadulterated hatred against the new SimCity game is absolutely ridiculous, and what's odd and annoying enough is that it's the same 5 or 6 opinions everyone keeps spewing, so for anyone not really paying attention, I'll list them out and give my two cents on 'em.
1. ALWAYS ONLINE REQUIREMENT
I completely agree with the dislike of forcing a game to always be online in order to play it. But, I only agree with it on single-player games, but SimCity is designed around building cities next to other players, so I really don't understand the hatred for not being able to play a game offline that is designed around playing online.
2. ORIGIN
I got tired and over of the huge fiasco over Origin a LONG time ago, but people still love to beat it up because EA EVIL, apparently. Really in terms of the architecture, how it works, and what it does Origin is pretty much Steam, the only difference is Steam selling a multitude of other games while Origin focuses on selling EA (and now recently Ubisoft games).
3. THE CITIES ARE TOO SMALL
It's true that the largest size you can have is about a medium sized city from the older SimCity games, but it's already been mentioned to death by Ocean Quigley (who has the greatest name and mustache I've seen in a long time) that the GlassBox engine and how they've designed the game limits the scale they had in games like SimCity 3000. Quigley has even mentioned how that it's easier to start a game small and wonderful, then expanding it, than making a large and average game beautiful.
And it can also make sense in terms of gameplay by forcing you to specialize what your city does, instead of having some kind of mega-city which does everything, which ties back to the region of multiple cities and the multiplayer connectivity.
4. ITS' BEEN DUMBED DOWN
We honestly need to end this idea now, that simplifying something automatically means dumbing it down. Take the game Dungeon of Dredmor, the game which took the rogue-like gameplay of older PC titles to a new audience.
Do you have to press ALT+SHIFT+F5 to use a potion? No, you can just click it on the inventory bar, but it's not dumbed down. We had these same arguments with Civ 5, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and now SimCity.
But honestly, SimCity needed to be simplified. I haven't played the SimCity games before, but I found an old copy of SimCity 3000 lying around, tried it, and was absolutely confused on what I should do. And that's absolutely terrible for trying to get people into a new genre is when they look at your game and don't know what to do.
But I can look at the new SimCity and think "Oh, that makes sense! I am interested in this game because the learning curve isn't a wall."
5. EA WILL JUST SHUT OFF THE SERVERS WHEN THEY FEEL LIKE IT
Honestly this one is just the silliest. Companies only shut down game servers when the negatives outweigh the positives to running it. When there aren't enough people playing a game, why should you keep officially hosting it? But of course, EA is literally the devil for not hosting a game about 200 people play.
Did I miss anything? Am I right? Am I wrong? Put your opinions, replies, and hatred in the comments below.