Unable to create your city at this time. Please claim a city again later

So, nearly 48 hours later and I still can't play.  On launch I managed to get the tutorial to load, played through the tutorial, got to claim a city....which I then got to play for 10 minutes before the game crashed.  Since then, I haven't been able to play.  Today it's telling me I need to go through the tutorial again (even though I joined the same server I'd finished the tutorial on yesterday) but I can't...when it's trying to load the tutorial city I get the message "Unable to load the city at this time.  Please try again". 

It would be a good show of faith if EA returned a portion of the purchase price to all customers by way of apology for this mess.  Hell, a few months ago I called my cable company because my On Demand movies weren't available - not only did they fix it within 24 hours, they took 15% off my bill for that month. 

A small gesture sure, but I appreciated it.  Obviously they value my continuing business...EA doesn't.