Just to mention the benefits of "online only" and single player uses just 10kb/sec... I just tried this evening to have a little cargo mission run in Solo online, the "alternative" to offline.
1. took a mission with just a 8 Ly jump, about 45 min left to deliver 8 tons of tea, easy job.
2. checked the system ("Wyrd") agricultural, well might need some metals so loaded and jumped to Wyrd
3. aligned myself in SuperCruise to the Voranberg Habitat and hit the pedal
4.
BOOM Server connection lost!
5. tried to log in again, and again, and again, and again...
6. after trying sporadic for about 20 min yes, finally Server seems back again!
7. ship in the middle between sun and station. Mission timed out, just earned me a 10,000Cr plus fine!!! (F...k! This should have got me money), checked Cargo: GReat! Now I have stolen goods loaded!
8. tried to get into the station quickly, got scanned another 13,000Cr fine and 2 evenings of earning cash utterly ruined after paying off everything.
9. So I rigged my Cobra for as less power consumption as possible, riggfed for silent running and sneaked out of the troublesome station.
10. jumped to the next best system, cruised a bit and found the Refinery at Chakra and BOOM! Server down again...
11. logged in again after a couple of minutes, and before i could reach the station BOOM server down again.
just to be clear my connection to the Internet was flawless during the time, I could look up things in a trade tool, I could surf websites no problem, and as E: D uses just the occasional 10kb/sec...ok, more like 17+Kb/Sec actually, but still no problem.
That told me two very important things:
1. Today is update day for the E: D Cloud servers to 3.9, so either the Cloud is utterly underdressed, badly automated to handle upgrades, or the provider had some issiues with his network / Hardware.
Anyway, the result is the same, ONline means more OFFline as in NO FUN, when things don't work, as many people already explained and argued.
2. If FD can't fix this crap Cloud DC to deliver a seamless experience, at least they should fix the Mission timers to STOP when the player is kicked from the cloud!!! This error cost me two evenings of trade runs I did to upgrade my ship (I don't care about the Cr,
but time is precious for me!)... as of now, taking missions in Solo/GRoup/or Open Online is a big risk to your ingame finances!
When this is the experience the players will get on 16th Dec, I fear the current issues could be topped!
And by the way, if I would have played OFFline Singleplayer, and just cached the trade and mision data, and the timer have stopped, and no server time out had happened, I would have been quite happy.
So now it is your turn Frontier, fix the netcode, make a working rockstable online experience or step in line with all the other Online Only desasters that promised a brilliant and stable game and how prepared they are for launch!
