Frankly, I don't know why people are so up in arms and conspiratorial about the always-online nature of SimCity. I understood it during the massive server problems, when people were frustrated and just wanted to play (because if you're going to require connection to a server, you better make damn sure those servers are up to the task on day one) - but now?
As the Maxis lady said in her blog (with the condescendingly bad opening Jeff quoted) - the always-on isn't central to the game actually functioning, but it IS central to their vision for how the game is supposed to work. You can not like and not support their vision, but it's THEIR decision to make. The people rooting out smoking guns about how the game doesn't "need" to be online to work, are fundamentally missing the point.
She even admits that they could conceivably put out an offline mode for the game, but they won't, because it's not their vision for the game. If you don't like that, then don't support it. They didn't hide the always-on nature of the game prior to release, when you plunked down your $60.
People should be focusing on the real GAMEPLAY issues the game currently has - braindead traffic pathing, the broken RCI model (it's possible to create cities with 300k+ people, with ONLY residental zones in an empty region), the police cars and ambulances that all swarm to the same emergency one at a time, and so on. And, sure, calling for the option to create bigger cities, for those of us with the hardware to handle it.
Instead, the internet cabal just spends all their kinetic energy making loud noises about the damn online requirement - the one thing they already knew about before the game came out, and the one thing that is more or less unobtrusive now that the servers are mostly working.
Because it's publishers shitting on consumers in an attempt to combat piracy. The game is worse than it would have been without the always online DRM. And if you sit back and say "Oh, it's just their vision!" then publishers will continue to try and find new ways to shit on consumers and limit their games. If people tell EA, Activision or Ubisoft that this stuff is shit then maybe they'll cut it out, but it's pretty unlikely at this point with how many people are keen to eat it up.
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