I haven't been paying much attention to SCV except that it seemed to be generating a lot of hype and excitement...so I'm kind of confused why the game has to be so intricately tied into whatever (apparently faulty) online service that EA has setup.

I mean, besides the DRM. I don't get why my fake city has to be attached to a world of fake cities if all I want to do is play in the sandbox. Didn't the designers/executives consider that many people would be perfectly fine playing alone? And then slowly rolling out the multiplayer features?

I doubt we'll see it, but it'd be great to see a post-mortem of the actual bug. Was it load-related or just something extremely boneheaded?