Most games on the internet are ladderbased ranking systems, people want to know how good there doing in the grand scheme of things. Not to mention in most games it also gives you a range of people you are allowed to attack and ones you aren't.
Logging in more often for pretty much any ladderbased game means a better position in the game. However, that being said you can adjust things to make logging in less often not a complete loss. For War of Empires there is a race, troll?, that gets lots of negatives for its turn production of resources but a large bonus to attack. So you can easily keep your resource production low so people don't attack you every hour for the mass of resources you've built up and you can attack at night with your attack turns and since you're online you can immediatly spend it all. You won't do as well as the guy literally losing sleep to check his game, but you can still check out the game, get a good feel for it, and do alright without feeling like your getting pounded for inactivity. Or at least that was the strategy I used when I checked out the game and I placed alright.
