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The game runs better, is less buggier, and less stressful here. The trading single player mod (among others) really makes the broken online community trivial and redundant.
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I like the online trial I got with my boxed copy for the New York City map. That's it. Everything else seemed a bit pointless and laggy to me. The chatbox was just obtrusive. The only real perk i see beside the famous city maps are landmarks, buses/subways/etc. and GEMs.
I think you might be onto to somthing. In effect you're basically subscribing to game updates.
And as OP mentions, the online version can actually be quite stressful because there is no pause (arbitrarily it seems) and its hard to correct a 'downward spiral', i play games to relax dagnamit :P