doubt it; their solutions from earlier bugs included such gems as disabling the fastest play speed in order to improve stability.

I wouldn't give EA the benefit of the doubt about an 8 month patch. They probably began work on it late last week. The company has shown time and time again that they don't give a fuck about you -- the offline patch is just the minimum amount of work they have to do in order to unplug the servers on a new game without total outrage.

"Look, we pushed an offline patch before terminating the servers, WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT FROM A GAME LESS THAN A YEAR OLD!?"

Actually no. People were able to hack the game to run offline within 2 weeks of its release.

Seems like EA should be hiring the crackers who patched the game then considering they got the job done within a week or so.

No the excuses were not true. It was Origin's fault, and Maxis had to take the blame. The people working at Maxis opposed it, and it didn't actually need to be online to play, but the people at Origin insisted it only run online.

Chances are those excuses were purely FUD considering it took people who had no access to the source code less than a week or two to make it work offline with a crack.