April 2015
May 2015
The final answer received from EA regarding this issue, follows
"I am sorry that you are experiencing this issue with your game, Sim City. After speaking with the specialist team it looks like there may be some preorder content or other limited time content that could be in those cities that you do not have in your game. Unfortunately we do not have a way around this and there is currently no fix for this issue. You will not be able to claim that city without having the content that is needed, and we unfortunately have no way of adding those items to your account.
I will be closing this case as we currently have no work around for this issue. You were directed to the forums as one of the developers may pick up the issue and address it. However, just being completely transparent, with this being a slightly older title chances are it may not be fixed in the future.
Thanks for waiting while we investigated your issue. We’re sorry for the delay in responding to your case."
July 2015
"I will be closing this case as we currently have no work around for this issue."
Can i just say this is total and utter BS... you know what would be a good work around? Giving Simcity players the option to DELETE a city, no more content that we don't own, problem partially solved with one minute of logic thinking... (i'm talking about Single player mode offcourse)
In any case, this whole poppycock about there being no work arounds... is EA at it's finest.
Why? Any self respecting Simcity player will want to control certain Cities when they get abandoned in their Region, this is offcourse because when you only control one citiy in a region where the rest of the mayors are "on vacation", that specialising your City doesn't really work.
And if you're in this situation for a month or two, where your city moves at snail pace because of other bugs that never got adressed, and you suddenly see two cities in your Region abondoned, then offcourse you WANT to claim it, and then you get the lovely message that "you do not own content to claim this city", well then pretty much almost everyone feels enclined to buy himself/herself the "Missing DLC", just so they would be able to claim the city, so it's great to know that when people spend over 200$, buying every dlc, that even they cannot claim "contentcities" (this is offcourse sarcasm)
So in my humble opinion, the only reason they never adressed this issue because fixing it would mean less profit.
August 2015
I agree 100 percent. It's really frustrating to have an abandoned city that I cannot claim when I own every single expansion available. After a couple years, you'd think they'd have this fixed. It'd also be nice to be able to kick people out of your region if they haven't been playing. I'll take on more cities. Maybe I should try private?
August 2015
Guys, I think the only workaround here is to transfer your region for offline play, delete the file for that particular city and replace the file with a new blank one. I tried it and it worked.
August 2015
I just received this error, fixed by updating the game as there was an update available.
September 2015 - last edited September 2015
Blue_Francis14 said: "Guys, I think the only workaround here is to transfer your region for offline play, delete the file for that particular city and replace the file with a new blank one."
I actually wrote a post about that just before the revamp and it got deleted, but yeah ... that works but with one glaring problem: that blank city will not connect to any pre-existing cities. Or to put it another way, you can't purchase services from a pre-existing city. If you try to get water or electricity, it comes up to your city entrance but does not come in. However, if you have a "region" with more than one of these that you replace with blank ones, those CAN connect with each other. Oh yeah, and whatever great work that city had going, you're forced to continue it. So you end up with different great works in Single-Player mode same as online.
I chose to only do this in abandoned cities that were practically empty or out of money. In region view, the city's info may still show broke, but when you load it, you get your newly created city however you've built it. And even though you can't connect, you can still do things like send Omega, or get tourists/supply tourists to a gambling city.
The inspiration came from a Sky Storme video on you tube: https://youtu.be/Mf5PYPRmRPs
September 2015
I lied. Here's my post before the help revamp: http://answers.ea.com/t5/Miscellaneous-Issues/Playing-abandoned-cities-in-downloaded-regions/m-p/477.... Either way, I wanted to add a P.S. ... I only tried by creating a blank region to match the region with abandoned cities (i.e. A new Titan Gorge to copy a "blank city" to a Titan Gorge with abandoned cities.)
I imagine someone a lot smarter can take this and run with it? OH ... one more thing! It's a language thing. I tried to devipher the game file, and couldn't, but most definitely saw that the first glaring difference between my city's files and one I couldn't claim because I didn't own the content was the language "tag" ... for lack of a better word. A city I wanted to claim was Belarusian (BEL) where mine was english (ENG).
I wonder if I could install SimCity on my computer with another language pack and ... oh, what the hell, no way. Screw that.
-VH
September 2015
I agree with you, unfortunately, there was an epoch where the games were made for the User to play, have fun, be enchanted ...
Today the games are made to sell DLC !!
To extort our money !!
And all this without a good experience at the game, no fun, no joy ....
What remains to the Gamers who buy is a disappointment and frustration ....
Long life for Gamer !!
Long live the Games that give us Joy and Fun !!
DLC Out !!
Out profit at any cost !!
Out Games infested with bugs !!
September 2015
I agree with you, unfortunately, there was an epoch where the games were made for the User to play, have fun, be enchanted ...
Today the games are made to sell DLC !!
To extort our money !!
And all this without a good experience at the game, no fun, no joy ....
What remains to the Gamers who buy is a disappointment and frustration ....
Long life for Gamer !!
Long live the Games that give us Joy and Fun !!
Out DLC !!
Out profit at any cost !!
Out Games infested with bugs !!