I was a fairly early adopter, and honestly today I feel that there is very little online connectivity adds to make the experience of the game better and more often than not online connectivity actually diminishes or downright ruins the experience.
Some games you certainly could not do without it, but realistically those games are too few and far between. If you put a gun to my head and told me I had no choice but to name a way online connectivity enhanced the experience of the game the only one I can genuinely think of is fighting games in that online connectivity can fill in the gaps that come when you dont have people to gather around in one room to play head to head matches, but really online connectivity has only become strong enough within the last 5-10 years to become viable for fighting game due to issues with lag becoming less prevalent
Honestly I would have no problem to see it discontinued or at the very least have its saturation level returned to about the 2000 level. Sure it sucks in some respects for the players due to a few nice things that have came up since its rise in popularity, such as DLC extending good games, occasional twitch head to head gameplay, etc. But I would gladly give all that up so as to get rid of whining screaming hate filled man/children that dominate the FPS scene, Developers who are using it to skirt around their legal responsibilities, Developers who are using it to get by with giving less of their developmental effort for more of our money, Developers who are using it to overinflate an issue so as to further restrict and monitor your usage of their product after they no longer have rights to do so as once it is sold it is no longer their product.
So really, the biggest bulk of my issue with it, is not the jackasses you might encounter. My problem with it, is the same sort of problems that are essentially effecting every facet our the global economy right now. Wealthy corporations consolidating power and using that power to undermine the rights of the general populous by the extensive manipulation of the sheer unadulterated ignorance and stupidity that is present in large swaths of the general population, and its those same types of things that has small groups of people banding together right now across the US and working its way across the globe in resistance to the continued perpetuation of these toxic ideologies and practices.
(side note: Before I end up derailing the thread, please let me state, I am not against a corporation making money. They need to exist, there is no question about it. Hell look at how pathetic our every day lives would be without corporations. That is not the problem. The problem comes in when certain corporations get to a point where they are comfortable in profit and try to either secure that profit or expand it and do so at the expense of the people who gave them that profit in the first place. I want the "job creators" to have money, so they can create jobs. I just do not want them to be allowed to "create jobs" overseas because they dont want to comply with regulations that exist only because they were doing something grievously wrong in the first place)