EA's claim struck me as really odd too; this just isn't the way that games are made [yet?] and if they did manage to get something like they claimed running, there would be much more interesting technical aspects of it that they probably would have done press releases for. In this day and age, standing up a system like that is still a major accomplishment, and the details of how they got around things like processing power and network bandwidth on consumer connections would be really interesting to the tech community.
TL;DR easily-verifiable claim by EA that stunk from the beginning proven wrong by anyone who knows how to use Wireshark
Forget Wireshark, the article implies that some of the critics tried the good old fashioned "yank the Internet cord and see how long it takes to break" method and got 20 minutes of playability.
TL;DR easily-verifiable claim by EA that stunk from the beginning proven wrong by anyone who knows how to use Wireshark
Que even worse consumer backlash at EA.