Funny you should mention WoW: its launch was arguably much worse than SimCity's, lasting far longer (it took a good month or two to settle down). If you do a search for "wow launch disaster" or "wow launch 2004", you'll find a number of message boards with the same type of anger and frustration demonstrated with the SimCity launch.

And they did that not only charging full retail price, but a $15/month subscription fee. Of course, "first month free" is the standard practice in the MMORPG market, allowing for some leeway, but they did give a few days credit here and there.

Blizzard, however, did have a fair amount of social capital that EA may not have and got through it moving into 2005. Social media wasn't anything near it is today, either: no Reddit, no Hacker News, no Twitter, and Facebook was just getting off the ground being open to colleges only.

You are going to compare a launch 9 years ago to what is acceptable today? Besides, the whole point of WoW was that it wasn't going to be single-player. Sims could avoid the server meltdowns by having a single player mode.

Where did I comment on or compare the acceptability of either? GGP mentioned the hypothetical outrage that would occur if WoW was unavailable for a week: well, surprise, it actually did fail, repeatedly, and not just for a week—but for weeks on end—during its launch. And just like SimCity, there was a large amount of justified outrage. It's simply historical context: we don't need to imagine the so-called "shitshow" because it actually happened.