Sims do not commute enough to find work, even when there are heaps of jobs available in the region.

It takes quite a concerted effort and a heap of money to lay the infrastructure to get them out of the city and down the highway to the next city where there are heaps of jobs.  Or maybe there isn't the right kind of jobs.  It's impossible to tell apart from the RCI gauges.

The size of the cities is proof enough. I dont see why people can enjoy such a limited "City"

They don't even actually need jobs really. I made a city that was growing over 20,000 without a single industry or commerce zone in the region.  I doubt all 20,000 worked at the power plant or the parks around town.  But they were happy and paid their taxes just fine.  

EA can't give refunds.  They are a public company and analysts were expecting a revenue bump the quarter SimCity was released.  They can give away old games to mitigate damage to their brand since doing so won't harm current quarter projections.  The stock market does not take kindly to missing earning projections.

This is what separates the Stardocks and Valves from EA, Ubisoft, etc.

To read these stories about how someone else in the region can totally screw your city over...I just can't fathom how this is fun.  I want to build *my* city the way *I* want it and if it gets screwed it's my fault, not because some doofball wants to be funny and mess my city up.  It's the new "griefing".   Cements for me even more why I swore off this game (and EA completely) and didn't buy it as a good idea.  Tropico 4 and Cities XL Plat will more then fill the void for city building for me.

Last night, my friend and I started brand new 'cities' in a larger region (our original region only had 1 city space for each of us).   We gave the *mostly* residential strategy a try and while you can grow your city-pop really fast that way, we found it is also the single best way to bone your traffic situation really hard since without local commerce and industry they will all try to leave and re-enter your city at the same time.

We have also found that 'regional-trade' doesn't appear to be working properly or I should say consistently (I suspect server issues etc. here).  This is pure speculation on my part, but I believe it possible that the regional RCI may be having the same issues the regional trade/gifting etc. is suffering from which is why it sometimes appears like residentials are commuting to 'vapor-jobs', commerce is getting 'magical-freight', and while RCI states there is never enough localindustry there is massive regional job-sharing going on (at least for industry it seems).

Another thing we found curious is the fact that global trade take precedent over regional trade.  This does seem odd and counterintuitive at best.  Say my town has a massive surplus of something, my friend cannot 'purchase' all of it.  Seems like while the 'regional interaction' is supposed to be the focus of the game, in some cases the game engine still makes global choices for you, which isn't desirable in all situations.

I agree with bonscott that the new heavy focus on regional everything opens the door to intentional greifing and actually makes this game much more difficult and frustrating to play by oneself than it needs to be.  Even with a friend such as I have been playing with, when we're not on comms he or I can easily make decisions in our city that have far-reaching and sometimes costly consequences for our neighbor.

Like I've said before, perhaps this new game should have been called SimRegion afterall..... 

Having said all of this, I do believe the devs will continue to improve on the game.  It does seem unfortunate that these days we the customers are more often than not being used as the 'final beta' phase.  Oh well.......all large projects (and SimCity 5 is definitely a large project) run the risk of doing that, and I don't think we're going to be getting away from that any time soon!

In any case, my friend and I are still having a ton of fun.......even if that 'fun' sometimes comes with a few expletives hurled at each other for 'hey man.....you just screwed my city......what the %^&%^ did you just do?! "   hehe 

....so I logged into my city yesterday to find my sewage treatment system overwhelmed.  I'm usually pretty good about staying ahead of these things so I'm looking everywhere for culprit until I notice that every few seconds this gigantic blob of poo comes zooming up the regional highway and into my city!   I follow the highway right to the second city my buddy had built while I wasn't online.  It turns out he wanted to save the expense of having to deal with the sewage of his second city so he just opted to send it all my way!     Needless to say that issue has since been rectified.......hehe

Got Dead Space 3 for free, made me happy so I bought the Digital Deluxe upgrade for ME3 and Crysis 3 and a map for Sims 3 in the sale.

I understand the general complaints about the game as it was released way too early IMO (even barring the server issues, the traffic problems should not have made it past launch IMO.)  But the game is good.  It could certainly use a few more upgrades (bigger cities would still be nice) but I can't complain about anything else anymore.

I'm mostly done playing but I still load it up here and there.

Achievement get: Insert witty crap here.

That sounds extremely fun         If I knew were certain people were (like you) I would team up with funny people and focus on wrecking your cities                Trolling people like that is one of the funniest things I know 

Well I'm glad you're not on my friends-list then Campaigner......

Also, I'm not sure if these things have been 'patched-out' in the last few patches but it used to be that one could 'visit' a friends' city while they were offline and both use the bulldoze tool and also place parks!  Needless to say I think that behavior is not as intended and if it hasn't yet, will soon be patched out.