Comment EA's reason for the Always Online Restriction (Score 3, Interesting) 569
According to EA, hte reason for the always online requirement, is because the game truly is a client server model. Each client, runs 1 region at a time. it then sends data about what has occurred in that region to then be processed by the EA server's and then pushed to the other regions in that game. This occurs every three minutes. Welcome to cloud computing.
http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/The-Benefits-of-Live-Service