I don't think they are at this point.  They were at the beginning though for reasons that I can't be bothered to look up or remember.

They weren't, directly. They were just creating traffic with things like a version check on startup and attempted (and failing) validation that was bringing down the servers through collateral damage.

That problem has been fixed now. The current connection problems are unrelated, and don't affect everybody. But for those who they do affect (like me), they're pretty frustrating.

Hopefully todays update will solve that.

in fact, in the release version, each time demigod was launched, the first thing it was doing while playing the cinematics was trying to connect to the auth server to verify if there is a new release (and by the way if you key is valid). The problem is that with something like 100 000 pirates launching the game, the auth serv was overloaded. And since it was also doing some other stuff, multi was unplayable.