I'm more than happy to sacrifice the offline in order to get the online. In hindsight they probably should've have mentioned it to the community first as it seems to have irked a very vocal minority. Still they can always ask us again, what do we want a good online or offline experience because it would appear that both are unlikely.
About DRM and the need to connect to the internet
- Thread starter beelbeebub
- Start date
Wow, everyone? Me thinks you're over exaggerating to a massive degree - why?
I wish people would just take the time to find out what something is, and what it isn't, before throwing terms around. It's not DRM. Why you may ask....
This is why https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management
Google for god's sake.
This is why https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management
Google for god's sake.
And that's all the hard copy was ever going to be , you did realise this....right? it's for display/souvenir purposes.
Im not going to get into the DRM debate but i would like to ask what the fuss is about, i mean a offline version of the game completely removes one of the major selling points of ED, its player driven/effected market, i can certainly understand the reaction tho of people who just wanted a single player game, although that version would missing the soul of the game imo. All you would need to do is find a good profit run between 2 systems... run it till it stopped (if it did stop) and continue this process till you have the biggest ship with the best weps... then what?, fight AI all day? just make money for the sake of it?, i understand folks may enjoy this but without the reactive market folks who have a single player version of the game will have no need to explore really and will get limited life out of the game.
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Though I don't like to, I will agree always on is a form of DRM.
Here is a silver lining to the cloud. In the above Wiki article, The newest SimCity was mentioned. That game only held my attention for a little while. (To add to the ancient Copy Protection anecdotes: The original SimCity had a little pattern card that you had to match up to play.)
After much trouble, even EA, the bane of all gamers everywhere, turned over and made an offline mode. I will admit by the time they stumbled out with it I didn't care and don't really remember if it works or not.
My silver lining is if *EA* can get around to fixing a stinker like the last SimCity for offline, I think you'll at least see commitment to release a "run your own Galaxy" end of life to Elite, don't you think?
Right now I will start muttering to myself that I don't really care anyway so why did I just type all this?
Here is a silver lining to the cloud. In the above Wiki article, The newest SimCity was mentioned. That game only held my attention for a little while. (To add to the ancient Copy Protection anecdotes: The original SimCity had a little pattern card that you had to match up to play.)
After much trouble, even EA, the bane of all gamers everywhere, turned over and made an offline mode. I will admit by the time they stumbled out with it I didn't care and don't really remember if it works or not.
My silver lining is if *EA* can get around to fixing a stinker like the last SimCity for offline, I think you'll at least see commitment to release a "run your own Galaxy" end of life to Elite, don't you think?
Right now I will start muttering to myself that I don't really care anyway so why did I just type all this?
I really don't have a problem with what they have decided to do. But I'm not sure I believe the 'it's in the cloud - it requires too much compute and data power' yarn that they are spinning. They have quit happily offloaded most of the network and instance processing to peoples computers. What on earth is the background simulation doing that would utterly swamp a PC. Run the game in solo mode and watch your network traffic... it's pretty obvious that the servers are doing next to nothing other than tracking your game state at save points and running market transactions. In fact most of it looks like 'Are you online?' 'Yep' 'Are you online?' 'Yep' It doesn't need to worry about what other people are doing around you because they aren't there. The game is using PG, it's not like they need a super computer going flat out to simulate the galaxy or it would defeat the purpose of the technology.
Sorry, I'm not trying to have a go at you and I sympathise with the reason I believe the change has been made (protecting their Intellectual property). I just don't feel they are being honest about why and that irks me (I could be totally wrong of course), even though I'm not directly effected.
They could of you know... Picked an earlier time in development or discussed it with the community and apologized profusely. Maybe even offered compensation to backers.
To further stretch the analogy: you in charge of creating an online children's interactive learning site and somebody asks you to produce an offline version. It's not just a case of dumping the site to a local hard disc, because lots of the content is pulled from servers to download the latest info (celebrity faces for you to throw coconuts at, background music based on the top 10, weather backgrounds based on the weather where you are etc). So the content for the offline site has to be reworked so that all the pictures, music, stories etc. come from a local source, which then has to be created and packaged. Things like the weather background need to be removed and replaced with local backgrounds based on the internal clock. Then, as you cannot patch problems on the fly, you need to test every one of the pages and games to make sure there are no major bugs. You are no longer devbeloping one web site but two.
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As your post shows, at first glance the problem of providing "offline" seems simple (initially I thought it was) and I'm sure FD thought it was at the beginning. However, what I suspect has happened is that as time went on more and more of the client has come to rely on the servers (Stations and docking are an example where processing moved from players PC's to FD servers to improve the experience) to the point that it is now no longer simply a case of "just swap out the cloud for local storage", as originally hoped.
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It comes down to your level of cynicism. If you think FD are people just like you and I, trying their best with a complex problem, then you can believe their statement that it has become too difficult to provide an offline mode whilst also providing the online mode they are happy with. This is what all their statements have pointed to.
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However if you are a cynic, and you think FD are out to deceive us, then you will not believe their public statements, as nothing FD say can be trusted, you are free to make your own version of what is going on without contradiction.
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For all we know, the final decision to kill offline was made in the past few days. FD will have known that offline was getting harder and harder for a while. It would almost certainly popped up in meetings when the decision to implement a given feature in online was made, with the knowledge that it would make offline harder. But the final decision to kill offline might not have been made until very recently. It may be that FD knew this from day one and have been stringing us along, it may be that they decided they wanted always on DRM and an offline mode would have compromised that, but so far FD have always been straight talking. They have been guarded as every word that comes from a dev's mouth is analysed and dissected looking at tense and exact phrasing - "He used the past tense, that means the feature is in!" - "He said 'could be' not 'is'! It's not finished yet!". Having been in a situation where someone was literally writing down every single word you said and then badgering you over a sentence you uttered 6 months previously when you said "we'll get that sorted" instead of "we will try to fix it but it may be beyond repair, we won't know until we have dismantled it completely which may take a number of weeks or longer if other events take priority". As I said above, it comes down to your level of cynicism, if you think FD are untrustworthy, then nothing they say will satisfy you and any mistake they make is the cover for other actions.
No it wasn't. Michael Brookes already told us that the decision was not made in the last week. https://onedrive.live.com/redir?res...authkey=!ANh_YPbOPTho524&v=3&ithint=photo,PNG
This is one of the key things that is annoying people and will come back to haunt FD, whilst they publicly admit the decision was not made in the last week there were mods in the last week telling people that the game was available offline mode. Very naughty behaviour not just to the buyers and backers, but also puts their mods in an invidious position.
Whilst the decision itself may have solid rationale behind it, the management of the impact has been very weak.
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Fair enough the decision was made earlier. If you look further in the quote, FD spent a lot of time trying to make it work before deciding it wasn't possible. What more do you want them to do?
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before you get all legal on things...
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Your are aware that the mods are not connected with FD, they are just volunteers who moderate the forum. Nothing the mods say represents the actual official opinion or word from FD (any more that the person who cleans the offices of IBM can speak for IBM). The mods have repeatedly stated (as it is asked often) that they have no special inside track and they learn information when we learn information.
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I don't remember any recent FD posts saying that Offline was definitely happening (one might be out there but I can't remember it). If you look at the web sight it doesn't mention offline on the front page. In fact in the "join beta" section it has the following features listed
- 55 star systems covering 29,000 cubic lightyears
- Initial online mission system functionality (to be further developed through Beta)
- Player-to-player communication by text and voice
- Friends management and matchmaking
- Overview trade route mapping
- The concept of fuel consumption
- Docking computers to assist with safe landings
- Additional Viper heavy fighter and Lakon Type 6 medium trader ships
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So your case may rest on people pre ordering a product based on a feature that, although it has been discussed as a possibility, is not officially in the product.
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You could be right but I think that you would need two different programs to do that. So it is a possibility to be an expansion after the game has gone live. I think.
So important thing, I really don't attack the technical merit of the decision to remove offline. I take what FD tell me at face value. I backed to a significant level and I stand by that backing even though I am very dubious as to general quality of the game right now.
I am aware that mods are not FD staff but would someone visiting the forum know that? They may have a legitimate expectation that what a mod says - as someone empowered by FD and in fact carrying the FD logo as their avatar - can be acted upon. After all, mods are sanctioned by FD to do forum tasks. If a mod is sanctioned to make decisions on banning people, redacting posts, then surely they are empowered and at least expected to post reliable information. Otherwise, how can they make reliable decisions on redaction of information (moderate) if they do not have the latest reliable information and standards? It's a simple logical point. A question we might ask is, "who assigns the role of a moderator? and therefore who is accountable for ensuring they perform the assigned role correctly?"
You have to think of this in terms of not how you or I may think, but a forum newbie looking for information on which they base a purchase. Through FD's weak management of the human impact of what I am prepared to believe is a sound technical decision, we now have a scenario where that mod's post may conceivably be used in a legal context, as would Brookes' and Braben's own. The mod in question could even have to give evidence one day, should a case end up in court, which of course we hope won't happen. How much weight would be placed upon that post and any evidence is of course anyone's guess at this point. It's the very fact FD have allowed him to be put in that place that is alarming, they basically put that guy in the front line then crapped all over him by not keeping him abreast of changes and thereby put him in a rotten place.
The crucial thing in the EU is that any case such as this, actually rests on the seller making known DRM or any other such technical constraints at purchase time. So if it does end up in a legal situation, that's merely down to FD not following the rules. The ball is made to be firmly in the seller's court and you can't blame anyone who does now want to take FD to the cleaners, if they spent £200 on alpha, for example. Again, FD put themselves in that place by not managing the impact. It was notable when I asked Brookes a direct question 7 times yesterday as to whether refunds would be offered to Store buyers due to this decision, he would not unequivocally answer it. Maybe FD need to seek legal advice themselves, but then he could simply say, "we're going to examine the impact of this decision over the coming week". It's the lack of accountability they show that galls me. Every newsletter is, "last chance to buy xxxxx", but when it comes down to clarity and accountable decision making, there is no one there. It's all very 'bedroom developer' mentality.
I am not saying I have all the answers and I am very interested to see what happens with any refunds and so I have vowed to support any such requests (my sister is a law partner and I simply have too much time on my hands and an enquiring mind!), and yes, this may well be the only reasonable technical decision, but the management of the impact of the decision has been very weak, and who would you say is accountable for that process?
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I don't know if it's DRM or not, and frankly I think the terminology is irrelevant in the end. The point is that people understood that they would have a way to access the game they bought without limitations, when it turns out if you don't have internet access you can't launch ED even though it is installed on your machine.
I apologise if this sounds aggressive. It's not my intent, but I'm still having my first coffee of the day.
Anyway, how can you be so sure this is the only thing that's going on across ED's entire server infrastructure? In fact, how are you even sure that the front-end boxes we see are the only servers in use? For all we know there could be half a dozen very big number crunchers behind the front-end. Has FD given us info on their exact infrastructure?
The background simulation could quite easily swamp a PC (just think of the volume of work and the fact that most graph algorithms tend to be expensive). Most gaming PCs are better on a thread-by-thread basis compared to servers, but you don't often find 256 threads of execution on a PC. Simulation problems like this one are great for massively parallel architectures, and PCs can't do this stuff and push vectors to the GPU at the same time.
My point is: we're all speculating.
About the DRM: the way I always understood the DRM-free media offer was that the actual physical media would be free of DRM so they can be copied and backed up. I never understood that to mean that I could run my own server and/or play entirely offline.
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