Its stupid for the single player portion of the game. Well not nec stupid but restricts purchases to folks who will be on the internet whenever playing the game. So if you travel, have unreliable service or you are stuck in Afghanistan then such games are not the game for you and yes there are numerous folks in the USA who either do not have inet service, have unreliable inet service or are stuck in Afghanistan and many folks who like to play games while traveling; hell what better activity on an 8 hour cross country trip with a 2 hour layover much less a 20 hour flight to Afghanistan
In fact you could consider this un-American not allowing the good folks in Afghanistan or Iraq the pleasure of playing; 'cept ubi-soft is a french company that probably enjoys screwing Americans
Patches? Well that's not a big deal; grab your favorite usb; go to your favorite library, school, coffee shop or similar and download the patches.
Well Ubisoft deserves the hate. Making DRM that won't work unless you have internet on is stupid as seen by the fact that the login servers have been down twice at least preventing customers from playing. But hey, they've got their money already, why bother making sure you actually get to play the game you bought