This, exactly. In another discussion on hn, someone was basically saying "no one acts so surprised when you can't access Facebook if your internet connection i

This, exactly. In another discussion on hn, someone was basically saying "no one acts so surprised when you can't access Facebook if your internet connection is down, why are they so ticked off here?" I'd argue that it's because most people have a reasonable expectation that a locally-installed, single-player game should work regardless of connectivity. There may be potentially valid technical reasons why SimCity might need or even want a persistent connection, but you absolutely need to call that out. With EA's record of shutting down still-active servers for the multi-player portions of games that were just a few years old, I would be very reticent to buy an EA product that required a server even for single-player mode.