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In fairness, even the original release had some bonus content that you could only access if you registered for an account online and downloaded a code to input into the game. Ubisoft might be the least bad of the big publishers, but does that make them good or just the least evil?
Just play indie games instead and ignore 95% of everything AAA.
I'm not sure if you needed an account for that, but at least that was optional, and you didn't miss much if you ignored it.
What was dumb about it was that Ubisoft couldn't even be arsed to keep their site up and running, making that part of the game technically unfinishable in recent years, if it wasn't for fans reverse-engineering the encryption algorithm (luckily, they used a symmetric algorithm instead of something harder to crack). And of course, the fan-maintained websites are still up and running: https://darkroom.bgemyth.net/, because apparently fans can do what billion dollar multinational companies cannot.
Credit to ArenaNet on this one: GW1 is still up and running, and I believe they really will keep it so as long as ANet lasts.
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