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Have you tried to go to the online shop and add premium beta to your cart? You should get a discount.
Well kiss my butt.. IT DID give me the discount! Ashley said I couldn't upgrade in email. Boy I feel like a whiny dummy right now. I better upgrade now before he figures out I upgraded
Feels like christmas!
Well kiss my butt.. IT DID give me the discount! Ashley said I couldn't upgrade in email. Boy I feel like a whiny dummy right now. I better upgrade now before he figures out I upgraded
Feels like christmas!
Glad it worked!
ps. they should've explained it in the email
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I'm pretty sure that that will not be the case. Imagine the outcry if those who bought PB would be reduced to 1.1 for two weeks multiple times during beta.
Um yeah, I'm assuming we're talking about a few hours.
Well, no... what about market data, mission/npc states, whatever stuff the background simulation contains? Surely that makes up a server-side universe state... Updates to this state done by early-access players will have to be either lost or somehow merged in if regular players can keep playing.
Yes, I got a confusing reply way back, too. It seemed like they were just copy-pasting a pre-fab reply no matter what people were actually asking - bad form really. Luckily my store-relevant kickstarter stuff (standard beta and expansion pass) eventually just appeared so I had no problem upgrading. Glad you got it sorted as well.
Most of this I think is currently handled client side, and communicated to other players via P2P. Remember the game is being written to be played entirely offline. The few things where a server needs to get involved, there are multiple ways of handling this - from conditional packets (client A requests data in format A, client B requests data in format B) to a dedicated server for alpha users.
There is no background simulation really as yet - at least not in the form that it will be nearer release.
Sure there is. There are market prices and supply/demand figures that are globally affected by the players. How these are communicated technically is irrelevant. The fact that matters is that actions of one player have observable effects for all others.
But different versions of the game cannot communicate! If they did, bugs in the new code could affect the players of the old version: the very occurance this whole pre-release period is designed to eliminate.
So the test period ends with the price of tea at 10Cr in the new version and 11Cr in the old one. How do you reconcile or avoid this contradiction? You either drop the changes from the test universe or you disallow changes to the regular universe (shut players out).
Unfortunately, the latter option might still seem preferrable to FD, because by definition the test universe would run in a different environment than production. There is always a chance, however small (cloud servers, virtual machines, and deployment automation can replicate environments pretty closely), that some horrible bug will only show up in production.
In any case, I still think it is not a nice thing to shut out players for any amount of time, especially if another group of players gets to keep playing. It will inevitably be seen as a priviledge. In fact Frontier are advertising it as such and (were) charging money for it! This creates the wrong incentive.
In my humble opinion FD should either bite the bullet and make sure a parallel-universe test can eliminate game-breaking bugs with high confidence, or allow everyone to enter the last-line-of-defence test phases.
I would be surprised if there is, in the Alpha the download was only ever available when the respective phase/patch was up for everyone.
From what I can tell from Alpha 4 (and others who have had more time to play than I have can tell me I'm wrong
) the prices are pretty much static at the moment. There's no supply & demand as such from what I see, just what has been hard set.Obviously that will change, but there are plenty ways to test that - most obvious one being a separate server for two weeks.
Why would two different versions need to communicate with one another? :S
It's quite simple really. They do as they have done every time up till now - do a complete reset when the next phase of beta goes live.
Indeed, which is why beta folks should not expect a bug free release when they get it. That's what the ticket system is for.
I agree, which is why it won't happen.
The first part is exactly the bullet they've bitten by pre-testing it on alpha backers first.
Well, great. My question was, do we have any indication that that's actually true? Because your argument was "not a problem because there's no shared universe", which is nonsense.
I don't know if we're talking at cross purposes here or not... but please don't put words in my mouth. I never said any such thing.
The game galaxy exists in the client. Everyone has the same galaxy because it's generated on everyone's PC through the same procedural generation seed. Some aspects of the game have to be synced from a central server, which may happen regularly when the background simulation gets into full swing, but right now seems to be pretty minimal.
But I really fail to see why they would need to stop PB users playing their game just because the alpha players are playing a later build, even if both games used the same server. The alpha build would simply call a later version of their network game API, as both the old and new would be installed on the server.
At some point afterwards, when the new API is considered stable enough, they turn the old one off, reset everything as necessary, give everyone access to the new build, and continue onwards.
Alternatively, they might have two completely different servers for a time. Matters not. The alpha and PB players will not see each other in game during this pre-testing window anyway, so how it's done is an irrelevance.
From what I can tell from Alpha 4 (and others who have had more time to play than I have can tell me I'm wrong
My understanding is that the prices are expected to change as a result of player trading in Alpha 4. I asked this question in this thread: http://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=16613
To which Michael replied:
So assuming my understanding of the reply correctly, there should, currently, be some communication between client and server for trade pricing at the very least.
If there are going to be multiple clients (alpha get early build, beta get 'stable' build - (our current understanding in the absence of official info), then things could get difficult if both clients use the same server. Using two has issues also.
I always assumed that Alpha backers got first look/play/test on the updated code entirely at FD's discretion. When PB starts, we will get what the Alphas are seeing now until such time as FD release an update that, for whatever reason, they want to test with a smaller group of players. If that reason is due to some bug or tweak they want to test, then fine. And if that's because the Alphas simply get first try, also fine. Makes me wish I'd bought Alpha when I had a chance but I didn't. As long as the gap isn't more than the two weeks, without a good reason, I can live with it.
It seems to me that a lot of the PB players are expecting that once Beta kicks off properly, that there will be some sort of unification of the players, with everyone getting the newest, shiniest release all at once. I really don't see why this should be the case. It's not just that Alphas bought into the game early and all the prestige that goes with it, but from a development point of view there's no reason to expose the last, untested version of the game to everyone all at once. If it falls over, locks up random computers for some reason or a myriad of other potential disasters, I would argue that the Alphas are the least likely to rage about it. The more people buy into the Beta of the game, the more there are thinking they're buying a finished product. If they get a new version and it fails spectacularly, then FD will be wasting time with damage control and PR that could have been spent fixing the thing.
Until the game is much, much closer to (or even at) release I don't see the 'Alphas first, Betas second' rule changing.
TL: DR version - A lot of Beta players (me included) are smacking their foreheads that they didn't get in on this fantastic looking game at Alpha and some are getting pouty about it. Suck it up.
It seems to me that a lot of the PB players are expecting that once Beta kicks off properly, that there will be some sort of unification of the players, with everyone getting the newest, shiniest release all at once. I really don't see why this should be the case. It's not just that Alphas bought into the game early and all the prestige that goes with it, but from a development point of view there's no reason to expose the last, untested version of the game to everyone all at once. If it falls over, locks up random computers for some reason or a myriad of other potential disasters, I would argue that the Alphas are the least likely to rage about it. The more people buy into the Beta of the game, the more there are thinking they're buying a finished product. If they get a new version and it fails spectacularly, then FD will be wasting time with damage control and PR that could have been spent fixing the thing.
Until the game is much, much closer to (or even at) release I don't see the 'Alphas first, Betas second' rule changing.
TL: DR version - A lot of Beta players (me included) are smacking their foreheads that they didn't get in on this fantastic looking game at Alpha and some are getting pouty about it. Suck it up.
Edit: OK, my previous post really wasn't worded nicely. I'll try one better.
What I meant when I said this above...
[If different versions of the game could communicate], bugs in the new code could affect the players of the old version: the very occurance this whole pre-release period is designed to eliminate.
...was that even if you had the two versions of the game talk to the same server via different APIs, they would still be interacting with each other and bugs in the new version could be experienced by people playing the old one. So FD might not consider that a solution to the problem. Plus it's easier said than done in practice to always have a backwards-compatible interface.
So again, there are two possible scenarios here: The alpha backers play new versions in a parallel universe that gets scrapped when the update is released, or they play them on the "real" universe while everyone else is shut out. Which one it is, as far as I can see, has not been established.
What I meant when I said this above...
[If different versions of the game could communicate], bugs in the new code could affect the players of the old version: the very occurance this whole pre-release period is designed to eliminate.
...was that even if you had the two versions of the game talk to the same server via different APIs, they would still be interacting with each other and bugs in the new version could be experienced by people playing the old one. So FD might not consider that a solution to the problem. Plus it's easier said than done in practice to always have a backwards-compatible interface.
The "alpha" version will be put through internal testing before being released to anyone, alpha backers included. The early-access test phase is to find those game-breaking showstoppers that they missed.
So again, there are two possible scenarios here: The alpha backers play new versions in a parallel universe that gets scrapped when the update is released, or they play them on the "real" universe while everyone else is shut out. Which one it is, as far as I can see, has not been established.
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+1. I would like to keep practicing on 1.0 as my combat kills are truly, awesomely bad (and that's not in the modern sense of "good" :smilie: )
1.0 is also a handy way to test new keyboard layouts.
Just a little question about beta launch
Do we need to uninstall solo ED and keep luncher or we need to uninstall both luncher + ED solo game ?
Thx for your answer (and sorry for my bad english
Later versions also include the current solo part as a main menu item.
I stand corrected.
These are issues for FD to sort out, and I'm sure they have / will do. I've already given two potential solutions that would work, there may be others. Either way, it's not something we need to worry about.
Always worth remembering that your "progress" will be reset several times during beta, there is no need or requirement for FD to integrate different builds' data.
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