No Single Player Offline Mode then? [Part 2]

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On "dynamism" and offline.

I posted this on the old thread; it's my personal answer to claims that offline wouldn't work due to being too complex, or that it couldn't as "rich" and "dynamic" as the online galaxy (whose "richness" and "dynamism" we have yet to experience, by the way, in my opinion).
I think it's worth reposting it here for ease of quoting; please excuse the inconvenience.



Long post warning.
Conclusions and TL;DR at the bottom.
(DISCLAIMER - I bear no malice towards Frontier or any Frontier employee, my intention is not to harass or insult anyone, and even less to cause harm; I'd just like the truth to come out; I apologise in advance for any offense I might unintentionally cause)


I've been thinking about this whole DYNAMIC™ nonsense.

First of all, it doesn't make sense.

We have, what, a couple hundred thousand players, at best... let's say a million players, for the sake of argument... in a 400,000,000,000 star galaxy. That's 400,000 stars per player, in the best of cases.

OK, OK, so they're not all inhabited (by humanity, at least); fine then, how many are? A couple hundred thousand, I hear? Let's say one hundred thousand, again, to get the best possible result for the sake of argument.

So we have, at best, 10 players per inhabited star (assuming no one takes off exploring the other 399,999 uninhabited ones that would correspond to them, of course).

Fine then... how many NPCs do we have per inhabited star? Let's assume one million, on average (which probably wouldn't be economically and politically sustainable, but again, we're picking best cases for the sake of argument).

So, if we take this numbers, we have one hundred thousand NPCs per player. We're not the one per cent, we are the one per one hundred thousand (or more realistically, one in a million).

Not only that, but the whole Elite concept (if there's anything left of that) and Frontier themselves tell us that players won't be the kind of people who influence things on the grand scale. We're not potentates, presidents, kings, or crime lords. We're regular joes. We're truckers, mercenaries, small crooks, petty criminals. We're anything but influential. Many of us will have less effect on the galaxy's society and economy than they have in real life. We can't even gang up or organize, we won't have EVE-style guilds or associations, Elite is everyone out for themselves.

Player influence on galactic economy and politics makes no sense. It's a mathematical impossibility. Marketspeak. Hogwash.

Elite: Dangerous, except for combat, is, like all previous Elite games, a single player game, by sheer mathematical imperative.

But that doesn't mean we can't have a changing, evolving, and interesting galaxy.



We know the galaxy is procedurally generated.

To clarify for anyone who doesn't know, this basically means that you take a basic seed, shared by all players so that we all get the same results, feed it into a pseudorandom number generator (which generates sequences that look as random as possible, yet are deterministic), and use the results to generate every entity on the galaxy whenever they are needed (the whole point of procedural generation is to exchange processing power for storage space, generating entities as needed and discarding them after use).

For instance (this is probably not the exact process the game uses, but it's intended as an example of the kind of process it uses), when you want to generate a star system, you feed your coordinates and the seed to a system generation algorithm (the famous "stellar forge") which generates the list of objects in the system. For each object that probably means type (G class star, rocky planet, ice moon, orbis space station, ice ring, whatever), parent (what it orbits), second focal point in the orbit (the first one is the parent), direction of orbit, starting angle of the orbit (I'm quite certain Kepler's third law means you don't need to specify orbital period), plus a seed/ID that can be fed to subsequent algorithms.

For our hypothetical system that'd give us a primary star, and maybe some secondary stars orbiting it and each other, some planets and rings orbiting them, moons and rings orbiting the planets, and stations orbiting the moons and planets.

For each of those entities, you can then get their seed/id and type (when you need to because you're close enough to see them), feed them to the appropriate algorithm for their type, and generate the physical model for the object.

This process can be repeated ad infinitum. For instance, for stations, you might generate a rough model for when you're far away, with a list of subcomponents (inertial rings and whatnot) and, once you get close enough, generate details for those objects (up to the point, once we can walk inside stations, of generating details for a specific barn in a specific section in a specific inertial ring... but not for all other barns that are too far away for you to see).

That doesn't only work for physical characteristics, either; the same way you can generate a planet's surface you can generate a station's list of market goods, or list of missions.

Of course, all this can be overridden. We have a list of stars taken from stellar catalogues, for instance. If your coordinates coincide with one on the list, you simply use that stored data to generate the system, instead of the stellar forge (you might still use it to generate the rest of the entities in the system, though, if we haven't yet found any exoplanets there or if we suspect there might be more).

For certain systems, like Sol, you'll even override the planets, moons, rings and stations.

All this can be done in a run-of-the-mill PC. Frontier: Elite 2 did it (with less detail, obviously) in an Amiga over twenty years ago. Space Engine does it (with arguably more detail for stars and planets, but without stations and whatnot) for the entire universe. Limit Theory, a game not very dissimilar to this one but developed by a single person, will do it. Heck, I'm quite certain that the Elite: Dangerous client is already doing it (it would make no sense to be shuffling all this data over the network).

it gives us, however, a pretty static galaxy, one might assume at first look... but that needn't be so.



Take exploration, for instance... how do you handle that in a procedurally generated galaxy that can't be influenced by player action?

Simple, really... we define a starting date, or clock tick, and we subtract it from the current date, or clock tick (which can be server based so that everyone uses the same number regardless of timezones), and use the resulting number as a time-dependent (yet still deterministic) seed.

[UPDATE] - Some people might prefer a galaxy that only changes while they are playing, and not while the game is off; just use a counter that gets incremented only while the game is running instead of the date, then; there could even be an option in the configuration menu to switch between the two modes.

That means that after a certain pseudorandom amount of time a by default unexplored system might start to be generated as explored (you might even define various gradual stages of exploration between completely unknown and fully colonized). Take also into account the system's distance to "human space", and you get a gradually expanding civilization, at apparently random rates, in apparently random directions (all handled by your algorithm, though, so you still have full control of the rate and direction of expansion).

That also works for other possible effects, like famines, wars, and whatnot. Same way you can generate a high-contrast spotted pattern with a Perlin noise, you can generate relatively short periods of special circumstances amongst significantly longer periods of "business as usual").

You feed that into the mission generator, and you've got yourself a pretty dynamic looking galaxy.

And at basically the same cost as the static one.

But OK, let's forget all that, let's forget maths, let's forget that players are irrelevant in a sea of uncaring NPCs, let's skew the numbers and against all reason give players the power to influence the economy and politics and whatnot.

Does that mean we'll now need a server, that we can no longer do it on our regular PCs?



Let's see... let's generate a GUID as each entity's seed/id (that might be overkill, but we're arguing for the sake of argument anyway). Remember that even though you generate and discard entities on demand, the results (except those that we've made dependant on the date), including this GUID, will be the same every time any player generates the same entity, so IDs will still work even though the entities are procedurally generated.

Let's also make a database table, with the following columns: "entity GUID", "player GUID", "date" (or "clock tick"), "status", and, um... "target", let's say. We'll keep that serverside, for now.

What do we store there, then?

Let's start with player-driven exploration, for instance. We can still have the regular automatic one, or not, doesn't matter.

Let's see; a player arrives in a system. The stellar forge has flagged each entity in it as either explored or unexplored (that's the automatic exploration working).

The player detects the main star. The server looks at the table we made earlier, filters it by the star's GUID on the "entity GUID" column, and counts the results. If it gets none, the star was undiscovered.

The server then adds an entry to the table: Star GUID, Player GUID, current date, "explored" (you would store it as a binary flag, not as text, but you get what I mean, I hope), Player GUID.

Repeat for any other entity the player discovers in that location.

If the star had already been discovered, instead, the server could have filtered the results again by "player GUID", to see if that particular player already had data on the star.

When the player later sells this information, we can add another line with Star GUID, Player GUID, current date, "revealed" (or whatever), GUID of the faction the player sold the data to.

That table will (for now) grow every time a player discovers any stellar object, or sells that information. The server can then filter the table by "entity GUID" when it's generating the system and use the number of results to calculate the exploration status; for instance, if it's over a certain threshold, generate an Ocellus station, if over an even larger threshold generate a more permanent station type (maybe at various progressive states of construction), whatever.

You can even automatically start a war, if the system information has been sold at similar rates to two opposing factions. All this statuses will generate different market demands, which will generate different mission sets, as advertised by Frontier.

That can be then optimized by periodically cleaning up the table. Once you've got an Ocellus station there, you probably don't need to keep track of all the discovery information, the system is already discovered, let's get some space back and start tracking how many players trade with the system, or pirate it, or whatever, and base system growth on that. It would probably make more sense to put that in a separate table that didn't track individual players, but only growing systems.

Anyway, we now have an automatically (or not) expanding dynamic civilization that is heavily influenced by player exploration.

The same concept can be expanded further to other player interactions. A player affiliated to a certain faction killed an NPC affiliated with a certain other faction? Keep track of that and, once you have enough incidents, you might have a war going on. A player has depleted a certain stock from a certain market? Keep track of that, and you might eventually have a famine going on. The concept is basically the same, in any case.

The cost of this is, basically, a quickly growing (even with optimization and regular cleanups) table or set of tables, with the growth rate and total size directly dependant on the number of players.

This probably means that you'll have pretty hefty storage and processing requirements, quite probably beyond those of regular PCs.

If you are managing hundreds of thousands of players, that is.



This design doesn't depend on the number of players. It's certainly more "dynamic" the more players there are (and it needs much more resources), but it will still work equally well with a single player.

And, really, how much space would a single player need? Could it be handled by a single PC? How many systems will the average player discover over their whole time on the game? One thousand? Ten thousand at most? How many wars can they start, if any? How many lines can a single player really add to the table(s)?

We're probably talking megabytes, here, not even gigabytes.

Your regular PC should easily be able to handle that (without synchronizing with the online servers, of course, but we don't really need that, offline was supposed to be separate anyway; we could still get the Frontier-originated events, like Thargoids and whatnot as updates, though).

And that's disregarding the fact that the end result would be, both for single player and massive multiplayer, virtually indistinguishable from the automatically dynamic procedural galaxy I discussed earlier, which makes one question the need for all this fooling around with tables and player influence and other nonsense.

And, for those worried about people who play offline finding out the "secret stuff" before those who play online... since online and offline modes are independent, just give different seeds to each one (and, if you want, don't give Frontier-specific overrides to the offline mode). The code doesn't need to change. Just a single number.



So, in conclusion:

  1. Player influence on the galaxy makes no sense given the numbers involved and simple math.
  2. A dynamic, evolving galaxy that isn't influenced by players can easily be produced through procedural generation on a regular PC.
  3. A dynamic, evolving galaxy that is influenced by a single player and by important Frontier updates can easily be produced through procedural generation on a regular PC.
  4. A dynamic, evolving galaxy that is influenced by hundreds of thousands of players and by important Frontier updates probably can not, and will need servers, but doesn't need the code to be substantially different from the single player version; it doesn't need to be a "different game" as Brookes and Braben claim.
  5. The galaxies on points 3 and 4 will be virtually indistinguishable from the galaxy on point 2 (except for Frontier's updates, and those could easily be implemented as overrides), so why the heck even bother!?.
  6. Given the previous points, Frontier's excuses for not providing an offline single player mode make no sense whatsoever, I'm afraid.


Now, I'm far from the most intelligent person I know. I know a little about coding (I somehow managed to get an engineering degree on computer stuff), but I've never coded professionally or even steadily. I have no significant coding experience. My capabilities, therefore, are undoubtedly way below those of the people who are making Elite: Dangerous.

Yet, in my ignorance, after a bit of thinking I've managed to come up with what looks like a design that would allow a game like this to work without problems and still fulfill Frontier's marketspeach.

I can have no doubt that the far more experienced minds at Frontier will have come up with much better, much more efficient designs.

Yet, somehow, they claim they failed to do so. :S

Now, I'm the first to call for Hanlon's razor to be used, but it's very difficult, if not outright impossible, to apply it to people who are clearly neither incompetent nor stupid.

Which, tragically, leaves us with only one possible explanation. :(



TL;DR: Frontier's excuses don't hold water; they make no sense; by any rational analysis, we are for some unknown reason (which I'd like to know) being given false or incomplete information.

Which, frankly, sucks. :(
 
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ANGRY RED TEXT!
I understand your passion, but this is not the way to do it. Post calmly and contructively. Add "In my opinion" in front of your conjecture if you must. But please keep it civil. You've been banned once, it would be silly to do it again andhave your posts removed since you want people to see them.
 
@isthisreal Did you quote yourself quoting to defend your own comment?
Sounds like my PhD dissertation.

hehehe
 
Frontier have drawn a line in the sand and are for better or worse standing by their decision. The AMA topic / Newsletter #50 answer some of the questions that come up often in this topic (and it's predecessor) and I highly doubt you'll see any further staff responses on this topic any time soon.

It is for this that I feel that Frontier deserves the banner "ill-repute" from now on.
 
I won't believe anyone has worked for 15 years in the software industry without having personally scrapped a lot of features for many different reasons.

The problem they came up with wasn't that they couldn't move server code onto the client - it was that if they did that, they wouldn't produce a fun game. Not only that, in the time it would take to create the sub-par experience for the 5% of the backers that demand offline play, they could instead create more features for the 95% that will play the more fully featured online game. I manage development for one of our company's products, and there are plenty of things in the "someday maybe" list of features that would benefit some portion of our customer base, but haven't yet been the best bang for our development buck.
Nobody here is 'demanding' anything except what frontier promised to those last few backers who got the game over the kickstarter money goal. They really are a small minority and paying up is the moral, sane and logical thing to do BUT corporates don't make a profit from any of those things so they stone wall with lawyers and half smart kids applaud their tactics.
No wonder the world economy is a basket case.
 
Hogwash, what is legal and what is right is two different things and you very well know it. Ethically what they are doing is wrong even if legally they can do it.

It is like when a car company KNOWS their product has a defect but ignore it because it is cheaper to settle the here and there lawsuits rather than issue a recall to have the issues fixed, funny thing is though they will often do the recall to have issues fixed if the car is an older model or simple fix.

Precisely. Thanks for pointing that out: I tried myself a few thousand posts ago, but it seems to have been overlooked. The fact that FD have a legal shield behind which they can cower does not imply that what they are doing is in any way justifiable.

As for the analogy with cars, well, I think that's mostly due to white knights: car companies know better than to mess around with their customers, because they know they'd soon find themselves lagging behind the competition or even go out of business if they did. Gaming companies on the other hand know that no matter what they do, they can always rely on a horde of fans who will defend them to the death no matter what both by justifying their actions and by attacking those who complain. As far as I'm concerned, they're one of the main problems with the gaming industry today.
 
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Sadly most companies will do what is cheaper for their bottom line and screw the rest.

It's not really about saving money. In software development, there are always more things you could do than you have people to do. So you're going to take your team and you're going to pay them a salary that is the same regardless of what you assign to them.

It's really about what you produce with the time you put in that is the final deciding factor. For every hour someone spends working on offline mode, it's an hour that doesn't get spent on something else. It's not about the money to develop each feature, it's about the benefit to your customers versus the time spent. If they feel they'll make a better game by devoting resources to other things than offline mode, well, I think they're probably spot-on in that assessment.
 
Yes, but moe is not a legal defence.
What you bought and what you get when you went with the beta has been delivered in full and is still being delivered in full.
And you even get more than what's described; access to Gamma.

If Frontier decided that the game just isnt going to work out and closed up the whole project.
There was no longer going to be the full game but they are giving people who pre ordered but no others the option to get refund, I wonder how many beta and alpha backers would be upset about that?

It might be legally ok but you can guess the response.
 
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Goilveig,

It is very noble that you are coming to their rescue but lets not kid ourselves. At no point in time has FD come forward with any of those offline concerns and issues. Further more this ____ storm could have been avoided if they informed everyone of their decision before beta-playing started!

Why do you think they didn't? A wise man once said... "Sadly most companies will do what is cheaper for their bottom line and screw the rest."




I won't believe anyone has worked for 15 years in the software industry without having personally scrapped a lot of features for many different reasons.

The problem they came up with wasn't that they couldn't move server code onto the client - it was that if they did that, they wouldn't produce a fun game. Not only that, in the time it would take to create the sub-par experience for the 5% of the backers that demand offline play, they could instead create more features for the 95% that will play the more fully featured online game. I manage development for one of our company's products, and there are plenty of things in the "someday maybe" list of features that would benefit some portion of our customer base, but haven't yet been the best bang for our development buck.
 
It's not really about saving money. In software development, there are always more things you could do than you have people to do. So you're going to take your team and you're going to pay them a salary that is the same regardless of what you assign to them.

It's really about what you produce with the time you put in that is the final deciding factor. For every hour someone spends working on offline mode, it's an hour that doesn't get spent on something else. It's not about the money to develop each feature, it's about the benefit to your customers versus the time spent. If they feel they'll make a better game by devoting resources to other things than offline mode, well, I think they're probably spot-on in that assessment.
And no sane person would argue against such reasoning

IF

They simply paid out the refunds to those last few backers.
 
Ok, entertaining though this has been, I do need some sleep and it 6:30am...
I'm not trying to offend anyone, if you feel attacked please tell me in a PM.
I was just seeing the legal (not moral) side.

Someone said no one is applying at FD and they have jobs out there... oddly, I have applied to them.. twice I think.
In Customer Service in fact :)

- - - - - Additional Content Posted / Auto Merge - - - - -


Now now, I haven't made this a personal attack ever, don't you start.
Keep it civil.
 
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Ok, entertaining though this has been, I do need some sleep and it 6:30am...
I'm not trying to offend anyone, if you feel attacked please tell me in a PM.
I was just seeing the legal (not moral) side.

Someone said no one is applying at FD and they have jobs out there... oddly, I have applied to them.. twice I think.
In Customer Service in fact :)

- - - - - Additional Content Posted / Auto Merge - - - - -



Now now, I haven't made this a personal attack ever, don't you start.
Keep it civil.
Mmmmm many replies possible to that and I'm tempted . . sorely tempted . . . but I'll stick with 'pleasant dreams'.
 
Don't take this personal but I believe you would fit very well there but if I was in your place I would wait to see if they manage to get themselves out of this fiasco before uprooting myself and my family.

G'Night!


Ok, entertaining though this has been, I do need some sleep and it 6:30am...
I'm not trying to offend anyone, if you feel attacked please tell me in a PM.
I was just seeing the legal (not moral) side.

Someone said no one is applying at FD and they have jobs out there... oddly, I have applied to them.. twice I think.
In Customer Service in fact :)

- - - - - Additional Content Posted / Auto Merge - - - - -



Now now, I haven't made this a personal attack ever, don't you start.
Keep it civil.
 
A good read:

Originally Posted by Zuikaku

This issue has escalated and FDs are doing everything to ruin their reputation.

phase 1:
-FDs : support us , we are planning multiplayer along with offline experience

phase 2:
-FDs : thanks for the support, multiplayer experience is really cool and exciting

phase 3:
-FDs : game is soon to be released. BTW, we scrapped offline mode but multiplayer experience is really cool and exciting

phase 4:
- offline community: Why? You have promised us offline mode, we have paid for it!
-FDs : offline is not good for you and is not making us happy. It was so "tough" decision for us but we have to cut something out and multiplayer experience is so exciting. Why are you not excited?!
- online community: We got what we wanted, so shut up

phase 5:
- offline community: we feel betrayed and can not enjoy the multiplayer for various reasons. Can we get the explanation and refund
-FDs : we'll pretend nothing is happening
- online community: Take the refund and shut up! You are ruining the game!

phase 6:
- offline community: can we get some answers on refunding and why offline mode was abandoned?
-FDs : It was a tough decision. But details are very secret. What is done is done! anyway, offline mode might work if we want it to work... maybe when servers are not going to be profitable any more. ofcourse, we'll give you a refund. Now, let's talk about new anaconda skins and how exciting multiplayer is!
- online community: lets build a stake and burn the offliners, they want to destroy everything

phase 7:
- offline community: hey, all refund requests have been denied
- FDs: let's pretend we did the right thing...
- online community: see, you like the game, so shut up!

Ofcourse, that is somewhat simplified.

Anyway, the saddest thing is that FDs managed to split community in two. the ones that got what they wanted for their money. And the others , who feel let down, betrayed and basically decived. Some that have paid for the game will not be able to play it at all. The others are getting something they didn't want or backed at all.

But the most tragic thing is that FDs are not doing anything to live up to the reputation they have been carefully building all this time in with this wonderfull fan base. and some of the attacks and hate expressed by some comunity members toward the people that feel dissapointed and let down are particularly disturbing.

All of us wanted what we have paid for. Offline mode was promised to be integral part of the game. Those of you who are enjoying multiplayer, try to understand. for some of the players, your fellow Elite fans, multiplayer and online mods are either not enjoyable or not playable for various reasons. And just as you enjoy multiplayer we enjoy single player. we gave money for single player offline we planned to enjoy. Now with offline singleplayer gone, we have really got something we didn't wanted. Refunds, without any tricks and law excuses would be the least FDs could do, a sign of goodwill, to try to keep their reputation within community. And that is not about someone trying to destroy the game. It is about good customer service and support. That makes the difference between developers we coul'd trust and the ones we coul'd not. The fact that you got promised multiplayer and some other guys did not get promised single player does not entitle you to attack them or hate them. We have all supported the FDs for the things they have promised us. And nobody can tell me that single player offline mode is just a minor feature, cause it's not!

The whole thing about FDs promising single player offline ,then forcing players to like multiplayer, then finally scrapping single player offline before release and after fundraising is over, then wondering why people want single player and forcing fans again to like multiplayer with words and limiting their choices leaves a really bad taste in the mouth. and we even didn't mentioned refunds requests being refused.

FDs, what have happened to you?! the last 2 years I have been pointing you out as an example of how developers shoul'd work and treat their players. It is really hard to find the words now...
 
Finally, please let me quote some people that have expressed the reasons for our being annoyed much better than I could ever hope to do:

Imagine that you are obliged to go and live somewhere, for work/family/other commitments, that has no internet access. The lack of internet access might be due to security, financial, or technical restrictions, but whatever the reason behind it, you won't be able to go online when you want for the entire duration of your stay. You will be stuck there for a long period of time. There will be boredom.

You have been a fan of Elite/Frontier/FFE for a number of years, and sci-fi games in general. You keep an eye out for Elite IV every so often, but the series seems about as likely to be revived as manufacturing of the Sinclair C5.

Then Chris Roberts goes and makes a load of money from Kickstarter. You are vaguely interested, although his brand of sci-fi was never really your thing. However, you now start to read something about Elite IV! You immediately go and find the Kickstarter page, read the fairly modest proposal being presented with a lot less flash than the Star Citizen campaign, and think that this oddly-named "Elite: Dangerous" will be a perfect diversion from the withdrawal symptoms (like intense boredom) that you will almost certainly feel when cut off from the internet.

You back the game in minutes, and start getting together a shopping list for a decent pile of hardware to play the game with.

Time passes... you have built your steroid PC for playing Elite. You downloaded the various versions, played them just enough to maintain anticipation but no more, and submitted support tickets when required like a good little tester. You have read the forum worrywarts talking about the game being boring and buggy, but have kept your faith that the game will be up to snuff when it is finally released.

You've read Newsletters #1-48 with mounting excitement.

The beta period is about to end, and you can't wait to sink your teeth into the gamma, and then the final release.

Then comes Newsletter 49.

"No offline mode". What? WHAT?!?! (Profanity filter engaged...)

And now it transpires that you can't even get a refund because you helped test the prototype, boring, bug-ridden, feature-free versions of the product? You, who were instrumental in getting the Kickstarter over the finish line (along with a bunch of other people)?

Perhaps you understand a bit better why some people are a bit annoyed, and have had their trust levels depleted somewhat?


Now, this is not my story (I have no intention of going where there's no internet, and my connection is rock-solid). It is similar to those I've seen (with some variations on the theme) on this forum ever since the Newsletter #49 was put up. I didn't used to think like this, but it does seem like Frontier should just pony up the refund cash as soon as they can afford to do so, and take the hit that might come from the odd fraudulent claim.

They will make the cash back, and then some, if the game is up to scratch.

If they deal with the refund issue based on an assumption that their backers are a bunch of con artists, it would look more like projection than realism.
I think this covers it pretty good and saves me from writing it:

"Well, there you have if folks. Newsletter #50 makes it painfully clear: "This whole issue comes down to what the vision is of the game we are making..."

Like I said: we entered into this with mutually incompatible visions of the game, we just didn't know it.

And: "Is offline mode an impossible problem, or just unfeasible?
It is a creative decision, not wanting to produce an empty game."

This was a choice, not an unavoidable consequence of technical or even budgetary constraints. Braben/FD *CHOSE* not to develop a game that matched the things they originally said which convinced us to give them our money.

Sure, they can mince words about it if they want, to shirk the moral obligation to provide refunds or any kind of recompense to those of us that didn't read between the lines and understand that they were making an online-only, multiplayer-only, DRM-laden game.

Vision can be communicated clearly, early, and unambiguously, and they didn't do that. Many of us have said unequivocally that if this had all started with the tagline, "Elite: MMO", we would've run the other way.

How many of us would've opened our wallets if Braben had stated originally that "an offline game is an empty game" and "cloud processing and always-online entertainment benefits everyone"?

They never really committed to or believed in the value of an offline Elite, and it's clear now that at every step it was the runt of the litter for their efforts, if even that.

"Do you now consider Elite: Dangerous to be an MMO?
Technically, it has always been."

They were disingenuous about the project from the beginning, and gave lip service to several things in order to secure a higher level of backing than if they'd come clean on their real motives at the onset.

This is so much worse than if they'd really just had to scale the project or postpone some features until a later release. People understand that aspect of game development.

I'm a 15yr veteran software developer (native platform, web, and server) and you don't suddenly discover that you've got a product that can't manifest without significant centralized rack resources and a persistent network connection. They knew with each day they developed that they were entrenching that into the game, and they did so purposefully and without transparency to us regarding the sacrificial consequences it was creating for other promised features."
I'll add that there's a Design Decision Forum composed by people that paid a *lot* of money to be at least somewhat informed and consulted regarding the development of the game.
Essentialy they (we) paid to be a focus group, where FD were able to test their ideas and see how the public would react to them.
Some members put in a really large amount of effort into helping FD attaining their vision.
Needless to say, there were never any consultation about this surprise there. So much for paying to be kept informed...
Well quite.

More than that, there are some really clever people in the DDF (I'm not one of them btw) who might, y'know, have been able to offer FD some useful suggestions and workarounds that might have kept everyone happy.

FD are a clever bunch too, but there isn't a topic in there where someone hasn't thought of a design hole or issue that FD themselves missed.
Let me tell you my story.

I had never heard about Elite before CR sent the nod over to their Kickstarter. The more I checked out the project, the more I looked into the past Elite games. That got me more engaged with the community and that led to more discovery of the depth and love that both DB and the community have for Elite. I was both impressed at what I discovered and disappointed that I had missed out on such an awesome world.

I was very interested, but I was not convinced yet.

I am very leery of online MMOs. I don't like them on principle and I will never support anything with any form of DRM. I was on the fence for a long while.

I got really excited as I read the updates to the FAQ, the AMA responses, the many places that David and Michael said over and over that even though they are shooting for an awesome online experience, that they would definitely support offline play. They even created new reward tiers specially catered to those wanting an offline, DRM-free experience.

So, I was finally convinced that I would have years upon years of awesomeness in store. I pledged for the "Physical DRM-free collector's premium boxed edition".

I was elated on the success of the kickstarter because it was very much up to the wire. I remember how quickly the celebratory comments rolled in that day. I was there. Rejoicing with you all at our accomplishment. I went back to the comments section day after day to direct folks to the forum and help out where I could. I made sure to befriend all of those fine folks that I had met during the kickstarter on the forums.

And then life. I enjoyed the newsletters and the video updates. My excitement was quietly building over the almost 2 years now. I would save screenshots. I would keep my client up to date, but I never logged in because I was too busy. I was waiting and every indication was that Elite was going to be really great. I would catch a youtube video here and there.

I found some time and logged in and was able to play 1.5 tutorial missions. Then more life. I tried online once for maybe 20 minutes, but it had been too long since the last time and I died pretty quickly for something stupid because I had forgotten how to play. No worries, it looked great, and the release was coming soon, when I could explore at my leisure.

You guys see the exploration video of the guy that had an absolute blast discovering the planets around the binary star? Yeah, that really got me excited.

And then David ripped my still beating heart out of my chest 5 days ago. It is clear that there will never be offline support. WTH is this "solo" junk. WTH HAPPENED TO MY ELITE???????

I have no interest in an online-only MMO. I asked for my money back. "Sorry, you downloaded the software, shuffle off" is the reply everyone is getting. I haven't gotten that email yet, but I am expecting it like the condemned waits for the guillotine to fall.

Elite is dead to me now....or perhaps I am dead to Elite. It is damn sad. I didn't want it to be this way. I had absolutely no control over this. And yet so many of you accuse me of horrible intentions because I am just asking for my money back.

Frontier is going to make the Elite that they want to make, that is great for everyone that wants an online MMO. But I don't. And that is not what I signed up for. David promised me offline support...and I believed him.

Also, given that most affected people won't get refunds, it's probably worth keeping this in mind:

A quick reminder to people suggesting people sell accounts over ebay

Please refer to the terms and conditions and you will find that this is expressly forbidden, your license is not transferrable. If you do this you will put any redress you have at risk and you will risk the buyer of the account being banned in the future.

Do not make the mistake people on World of Warcraft and other MMO's have done, know that FDEV -will- enforce the rules and -will- ban people if they get the slightest idea that this kind of thing is going on.

You may continue shouting angrily at each other now.
 
But if you made the purchase based on the information that was available about the game you might have a reason for a refund. If you feel that you've been cheated then you should look for one.
It is very simple. When you make a pledge on a Kickstarter project, you are funding a development "proposal", NOT buying an existing product off of some shelf. You should consider any pledge you make as a contribution. If you want a sure thing, then you should wait until the final game ships and make your decision based upon actual features available at that time. You funded a dream. Dreams don't always come out the way you expect.
 
I won't believe anyone has worked for 15 years in the software industry without having personally scrapped a lot of features for many different reasons.

The problem they came up with wasn't that they couldn't move server code onto the client - it was that if they did that, they wouldn't produce a fun game. Not only that, in the time it would take to create the sub-par experience for the 5% of the backers that demand offline play, they could instead create more features for the 95% that will play the more fully featured online game. I manage development for one of our company's products, and there are plenty of things in the "someday maybe" list of features that would benefit some portion of our customer base, but haven't yet been the best bang for our development buck.
Evrn assuming you are right (and I do),
- there is no way they realized that 1 week ago.
This should have been announced months ago, not 3 week from launch
- you don,t announce a significant change as an aside.
If newsletter 50 had been in my inbox before 49, I would be a lot more forgiving.
- you offer compensation
Even if their legal trick of paying for beta and getting a free game as a bonus held, there is such a thing as ethics.
Especially if you are certain only 5% of the customers will care.
-you don't insult your customer by telling them they were wrong to want what you promised but cannot deliver.
 
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I think this mess has hurt everyone and it does need to get sorted.

For backers like me who want a refund as we wanted the offline mode this has resulted in bad feeling at the way we have been treated and now a number of us feel that we may not support another kickstarter or another project Frontier Development has done. This will hurt other people trying to get money for their projects.
The people who want to play will be hurt as now a number of potential buyers have seen this and now will not buy the game especially again those who wanted offline and drm free. This will result in fewer sales and less revenue which will mean less money put into ongoing development.
Frontier Development also loses as well one from reduced revenue from less slaes and their own reputation for how they handled this all.

Who wins on this nobody everyone is going to be worse off which saddens me no end as Elite is a great game for those that wanted an online experience.
 
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