Have you played the game? Why is the offline (as opposed to single player, which I understand) mode so important to you?
While I can't answer for the other guy, I can answer for myself and why I personally asked for a refund of my £105 pledge once you told us you ditched offline.
I have plenty of online games already in my library. I used to be a hardcore raider in WoW and frankly got disillusioned with the attitude and inherent behavioural patterns that emerge in people when they see things as an 'online race' or 'online competition'. I want to be able to just relax when I play my games, and the ability to actively pause and do something else (like painting some of my miniatures, or pet my cat that suddenly wants attention) shouldn't impact on my ability to enjoy a game. It does impact in the 'need to be online' games, especially when you can't pause them (which is kinda natural for online only games).
Add that the game feels incredibly punishing with no way of 'starting over from an old save', and your product is just plain un-fun to me if it needs to be online.
Also, I have several games in my collection from years gone by that required connecting to servers to work, and these games simply don't work anymore because the company(ies) behind them either ceased to exist or decided that it was simply not profitable anymore to carry the luggage that those games were. A noteworthy 'poster child' in this kind of thing is "Hellgate London" which I bought at release. The guys behind that particular game were noteworthy and had decent experience while they created a nice game. Their desire to keep a persistent online component running all the time eventually meant that they couldn't cover running costs, though, and the company went bust. Even so, I am still able to play that game in its offline mode if I want to (and it's actually a nice game in that mode), but if they had forced the consumers to only be able to play online, that too would have been a 'dead' game for all intents. The offline mode keeps it alive for me to be able to play.
So basicly my reasonings are twofold.
I want the ability to play at my own pace, with saves and reloads, without being forced into some ratrace that playing with others will naturally put me into (I seem tor ecall you even said yourself that resources would dwindle in areas in the online version as players took them)
and I want to be sure that I can always pick up the game and play it again later on, when everyone else forgot about it, because >I want to play at that time< (and not when some guy running your servers think it is opportune).
A purely online version is just inaccetbale to me, especially as the originals were offline.