No Single Player Offline Mode then? [Part 2]

[phlOgistOn]

They wouldn't need to simulate 400 billion systems - especially not in offline single player.

The only part they would need to simulate is a bubble around the player, so the system they're in in fine detail and possibly a few immediately adjacent ones in rough detail. That's it. Space is pretty empty, so it really wouldn't take much processing to do.

The current servers don't simulate 400 billion systems. They only simulate the parts where players are. An offline server would intrinsically be doing a lot less, as there would be only one player to worry about.

Right, which requires them coding something completely different for the offline section. How much effort and time that will take is possibly what led to the decision.

Not sure if you understand what procedural generation is.

You don't have to maintain anything in memory as you can generate any component at any detail level because everything is mathematically bound to a single string or number, called a seed. At any point in time, any process can look at any part of the galaxy and know exactly what is there because of this. Eve is not procedurally generated and requires all of that memory because everything about the universe must be stored individually because it isn't organized by mathematics.

This means that the servers in Elite : Dangerous are doing significantly different tasks than what you think they are. For Elite : Dangerous, the challenge is synchronizing all of the changes being by players and other events. If you are genuinely curious, this is an excellent writeup of what is involved.

I know what procedural generation is and it's great for setting initial start conditions for a large arena - but once that has been seeded then you need to continually adjust it otherwise the whole universe will be inherently static outside of your little bubble - f.e. minecraft can procedurally generate infinite worlds - but it only simulates the area immediately surrounding the player. Again you'd need to specifically code something to 'spoof' the dynamic world for the offline mode as a separate codebase to what's being used on the servers...

Also FYI Eve did use procedural generation at the start in terms of planet/moon distributions amongst the systems (edit: and more besides). I believe I even read somewhere that the seed was '42'

 

[Rafe Zetter]

Juniper, the subscription model is a dying dinosaur. If they ever change, I expect Elite to become F2P in the style of World of Tanks. It's a much better model, and financed by those who get into the game so much that they want to put money into it.

Just out of curiosity - just how much per month do you put into World of tanks? is it more or less than £9 per month? Does it have regular updates of content that cost nothing extra to access?

I played Lotro for years (since launch infact) before it went F2P. After F2P the same amount of money as the sub would NOT BUY the equivalent content, as new things were added that could not be earned ingame but only bought. A significant change to the detriment of the community imho.

Subs are far from a dying breed - WoW still uses them extremely successfully and all content available can be earned by play (exclusive pets and mounts not included of which there are barely a handful). Eve Online also still uses subs AND all expansions are free too - plus they actually REDUCED the subs cost from £14.99 to £8.99 after 10 years of running and have seen no ill effects as a result of any kind. Eve Online also has a subs model that you could use ingame made currency (isk) to PAY FOR YOUR MONTHLY SUB - making the game for those willing to put the time in - free with access to all content. Eve Online still has a very healthy population and has no plans to change their business model anytime soon.

F2P is far from the only choice any game can make - if anything it's the death knell for games. I guess you didn't hear what happened to SWKotor? 6 months after launch and people were un-subbing by the thousands after content was poor, going F2P was the ONLY WAY LucasArts could go to recoup some revenue or face a ridiculous amount of loss.

F2P also opens the door to idiots/ spammers / goldsellers / griefers and all the other undesirables who can access a game for free. Archeage is so rife with it virtually every other chat message is spam in some form or another.

Do you know how long it might take a ticket to a GM to be answered in a F2P game? As much as a WEEK. Chances of that reply being anything other than an automated version of "we don't give a hoot, go away" NIL.

F2P is not a good business model by any stretch it's a "we don't give a crap about our players / we don't care if they are subjected to constant chat spam or whispers & in game mail / we don't really put that much effort into delivering buggy content as they are getting it free anyway / we don't really care about much of anything just as long as we get the money".

I've played in F2P : Everquest II (subbed first) Lotro (subbed first), Dungeons & Dragons Online (subbed first) Archeage, Age of Conan, War thunder, Planetside 2 (Subbed but sadly Sony Online treat subbers the same as F2P - badly), Neverwinter, Path of Exile (actually not bad service - recommended), F.E.A.R online, Rift (subbed first), Defiance, Star Conflict, Blacklight Retribution, Fallen Earth (subbed first)... and possibly others I can't remember.

So I'm pretty sure I know what I'm talking about.

Edit: SWKotor (subbed first) ... Doh

 

[Vargur]

The way i see it, it's like this all was a few circumstances that conveniently coincided.
FD had some issues with trying to build an offline mode since they didn't have time enough build one conform to 'the vision'.
The reason they didn't have time enough could be that they really needed to release the game.
While FD may not be a company running at a loss, they certainly aren't swimming in cash either, hence the kickstarter requirement.
So on to investigate how dropping the offline mode could be lucrative.
Well it allows them to control the whole game trough the MMO version.
This allows for maximum revenue trough microtransactions, ads, ftp subscriptions, etc.
This would be a steady and reliable revenue compared to having to sell individual games, and subsequent dlc's which in turn had to rely on the sales of the core game.
I'm sure the bean counters must have been all thumbs up for the decision as it seems like a solid business plan.
Whether the creative part of the developers had an easy or difficult time with making this decision makes little difference for the end user, of which quite a few had to get shafted in order to make this change.
Then again, they often say 'business ethics' is an oxymoron, so I guess it all makes sense in some way.

 

[DarkWalker]

If the server is doing enough gruntwork that it would melt a domestic PC (something has to monitor and simulate those 400 billion systems) then VMware wouldn't work. At that stage you have to think about recoding a smaller scale spoof version somehow. Interestingly I literally just noticed a new article on PCGamer about the Eve servers after going out for some cigarettes: http://www.pcgamer.com/eve-online-1/
4TB of RAM and 3THz of processing <gulp> although of course Eve literally runs EVERYTHING on the servers and doesn't have the separate instances for combat and encounters.

If the server is doing enough gruntwork to melt a common PC then the cost for the game's cloud computing would likely be high enough to be unfeasible for a game that does not have a subscription, though.

 

[dognosh]

Just out of curiosity - just how much per month do you put into World of tanks? is it more or less than £9 per month? Does it have regular updates of content that cost nothing extra to access?

I played Lotro for years (since launch infact) before it went F2P. After F2P the same amount of money as the sub would NOT BUY the equivalent content, as new things were added that could not be earned ingame but only bought. A significant change to the detriment of the community imho.

Subs are far from a dying breed - WoW still uses them extremely successfully and all content available can be earned by play (exclusive pets and mounts not included of which there are barely a handful). Eve Online also still uses subs AND all expansions are free too - plus they actually REDUCED the subs cost from £14.99 to £8.99 after 10 years of running and have seen no ill effects as a result of any kind. Eve Online also has a subs model that you could use ingame made currency (isk) to PAY FOR YOUR MONTHLY SUB - making the game for those willing to put the time in - free with access to all content. Eve Online still has a very healthy population and has no plans to change their business model anytime soon.

F2P is far from the only choice any game can make - if anything it's the death knell for games. I guess you didn't hear what happened to SWKotor? 6 months after launch and people were un-subbing by the thousands after content was poor, going F2P was the ONLY WAY LucasArts could go to recoup some revenue or face a ridiculous amount of loss.

F2P also opens the door to idiots/ spammers / goldsellers / griefers and all the other undesirables who can access a game for free. Archeage is so rife with it virtually every other chat message is spam in some form or another.

Do you know how long it might take a ticket to a GM to be answered in a F2P game? As much as a WEEK. Chances of that reply being anything other than an automated version of "we don't give a hoot, go away" NIL.

F2P is not a good business model by any stretch it's a "we don't give a crap about our players / we don't care if they are subjected to constant chat spam or whispers & in game mail / we don't really put that much effort into delivering buggy content as they are getting it free anyway / we don't really care about much of anything just as long as we get the money".

I've played in F2P : Everquest II (subbed first) Lotro (subbed first), Dungeons & Dragons Online (subbed first) Archeage, Age of Conan, War thunder, planetside 2 (sadly Sony Online treat subbers the same as F2P - badly), Neverwinter, Path of Exile (actually not bad service - recommended), F.E.A.R online, Rift (subbed first), Defiance, Star conflict, Blacklight retribution, Fallen Earth (subbed first)... and possibly others I can't remember.

So I'm pretty sure I know what I'm talking about.

EVE's profits have taken a nose dive, and after 10 years the average player online is still less than 40000, I don't call that successful(WoW is losing subs on a monthly basis). F2P is here to stay,whether we like it or not(I don't), but WoW and Eve will have to change soon.....

 

[poet1960]

If the server is doing enough gruntwork that it would melt a domestic PC (something has to monitor and simulate those 400 billion systems) then VMware wouldn't work. At that stage you have to think about recoding a smaller scale spoof version somehow. Interestingly I literally just noticed a new article on PCGamer about the Eve servers after going out for some cigarettes: http://www.pcgamer.com/eve-online-1/
4TB of RAM and 3THz of processing <gulp> although of course Eve literally runs EVERYTHING on the servers and doesn't have the separate instances for combat and encounters.

If they initially thought that a tacked on subsystem to approximately spoof the online component would work effectively and be possible to quickly code then I can see how the mistaken belief arose. This is really pushing the limits of my knowledge of server architecture and coding though so I'm not really qualified to pass judgement either way.

I'm not trying to judge anything. I'm merely looking at facts and extrapolating on them. It goes like this. I am making an mmo game and that is my main goal, but I also promise to make a stand alone SP offline version. Why in the heck would I even bother trying to connect the two in any way? It makes no sense. A stand alone SP offline game excludes by it's very nature, a connection to some online data depository of any kind. That's what doesn't make any sense to me. Especially when you are building both from scratch and have complete control over the development of both. It's like painting yourself into a corner on purpose.

 

[Juniper]

Right, which requires them coding something completely different for the offline section. How much effort and time that will take is possibly what led to the decision.

No, it does it all already for thousands of players. An offline version only needs to do exactly the same thing for one player. The effort is that it's all currently server-side, and has been intertwined into the background events system (and probably some other unrelated to single player systems too) which would be too complex to un-pick. At least, that's what I took from Michael's statement, as a dev myself.

It's easily done. Should never have happened in the first place if they cared about offline mode, but it's easy to see why it did.

As -c-s- has tried to point out, the main thing the servers are doing is synchronisation between players and events. The galaxy itself (even 400 billion systems) is relatively trivial by comparison. Any bog standard PC can handle that no sweat, because it's all just maths and some lookup table overrides.

 

[phlOgistOn]

If the server is doing enough gruntwork to melt a common PC then the cost for the game's cloud computing would likely be high enough to be unfeasible for a game that does not have a subscription, though.

The highest cost of running servers is the data rates and maintenance staffing rather than the electricity running costs for the hardware (of course the startup fee for the hardware is an expensive one-off cost as well), if they're doing a lot of processing but only requiring small amounts of data in/out then the costs shouldn't be too high imo.

Servers are optimised completely differently to home PCs going for pure CPU grunt and absolutely nothing in terms of shunting polygons around - again for a gaming analogy it's similar to the difference in hosting an Arma server (just about possible on i7's and upwards for very small groups) against joining as a client (possible on i3s/i5s) against hosting on a dedicated server (able to process hundreds of AI)... against having a separate server JUST to run the AI whilst the main server just hosts (far better reactions from and higher numbers of AI again)

Now if they upped the minimum specs to Xeon class processors for you to simulate this at home then I imagine 99% of the userbase would first say 'WTH is a xeon' and then cry after googling it and realising that they need to build themselves a server with a starting price of $1500 for the processor.... of course I'm completely speculating here but anything that's aiming for 400 billion systems to be simulated is going to need a lot of processing power OR need to have a separate game coded to spoof the mechanics on a smaller scale, which means developing two separate codebases

 

[Vim]

What person buys Beta (early access) to a game to then sit on it for months until release?

I did. for one. I've had no particular interest in the online portion of the game, but I bought the beta package purely because it was not the cheapest option in the store. I had no illusions that the online+offline concept described at the time was an easy thing to do, but the developers seemed like they had things pretty well figured out and I wanted to show stronger support for those efforts than a simple pre-order.

I played in the beta for the first time a few days ago so that I could get a better understanding of where the game is currently at while deciding how I feel about this situation. It's a decent enough game and I'll probably end up playing it a bit more just because I have it, but I have no reason to buy any further games or expansions if I can't play them at my own pace or on my own schedule.

The notion that "single player online" is some kind of substitute for the inherent flexibility of offline play continues to be both wrong and deeply condescending. As I've said earlier, it's the worst of both worlds without the benefits of either: you can't stop or pause it and come back to the same point later, you can't play it without a network connection, and you don't even get other players to interact with as compensation for putting up with the necessary .

 

[DarkWalker]

One idea for Frontier regarding how to handle the refunds in light of downloading and playing the beta and finished game: stipulate a timeframe, starting as soon as possible and ending perhaps a week after launch, when downloading and playing the game absolutely won't be counted against the player's possibilities of getting a refund. Make that benefit available for all of us that purchased the game before the removal of offline play was revealed.

As for the reasons:

- Elite has always been meant as a game to play for long stretches; it's not a game that one can play for a few days and be done with it.

- It allows those of us that wanted offline, and that are ready to ask for refunds due to offline play not being available, to try the game and see for ourselves if the online solo mode is an acceptable substitute. The way it's now, with players assuming that any attempt at playing the game will mean forfeiting the chance of refunds, those players — even the ones for which solo online might be acceptable — will simply leave without trying the game.

- Making it available only for those that have already purchased the game should keep any abuse of this to get what amounts to a free trial to a minimum.

- It can be seen as a gesture of goodwill, and goodness knows Frontier needs some of those to balance out the negative image this whole thing created for them.

 

[Juniper]

The highest cost of running servers is the data rates and maintenance staffing rather than the electricity running costs for the hardware (of course the startup fee for the hardware is an expensive one-off cost as well), if they're doing a lot of processing but only requiring small amounts of data in/out then the costs shouldn't be too high imo.

Servers are optimised completely differently to home PCs going for pure CPU grunt and absolutely nothing in terms of shunting polygons around - again for a gaming analogy it's similar to the difference in hosting an Arma server (just about possible on i7's and upwards for very small groups) against joining as a client (possible on i3s/i5s) against hosting on a dedicated server (able to process hundreds of AI)...

Now if they upped the minimum specs to Xeon class processors for you to simulate this at home then I imagine 99% of the userbase would first say 'WTH is a xeon' and then cry after googling it and realising that they need to build themselves a server with a starting price of $1500 for the processor.... of course I'm completely speculating here but anything that's aiming for 400 billion systems to be simulated is going to need a lot of processing power

As far as I'm aware, E: D is just renting cloud space on Amazon's AWS servers. They're not physical boxes that require extra maintenance. Bandwidth is of course an issue, but that was a factor in some of the DDF discussions - to keep bandwidth costs down as much as possible.

Secondly, as has already been pointed out by myself and others, they are not simulating 400 billion systems. That would be insane, and require a supercomputer... unlikely even that such processing power exists on the planet at the moment.

Thirdly, any offline component for E: D is not for the purposes of running a group of players. It only has to handle one. You. Nobody else. If integrated into the client, it doesn't even require any networking code.

 

[phlOgistOn]

The effort is that it's all currently server-side, and has been intertwined into the background events system (and probably some other unrelated to single player systems too) which would be too complex to un-pick.

Exactly, it's reconciling the expected data in/outs from the current client with a separate 'simulation code' which will basically need to be coded specifically to superficially do the same, but in a completely different way

 

[Juniper]

This is a complete non-problem, solved simply by changing the name.

Elite Dangerous Lite
Elite Dangerous: Boring Offline Edition
Elite: Not Dangerous At All

Or any millions of variations. Give it a name that identifies it as the inferior edition, and make people aware that they need to have the "full" version in order to gain the benefits of online.

Extremely condescending post, thanks for that.

What you consider a "benefit", I consider a poison. There are no benefits to online from my perspective.

And there we are.

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

Exactly, it's reconciling the expected data in/outs from the current client with a separate 'simulation code' which will basically need to be coded specifically to superficially do the same, but in a completely different way

Yep. What I suspect they planned to do was simulate the server using Mocking, which is usually fairly quick to write by its very nature.

Unfortunately, not everything can be mocked out if it's not written well - and they likely found they would have to rebuild large chunks of it to do it.

 

[banana]

I haven't yet decided if I would retract my refund request if David and Frontier would publicly state something like this:

---------
"We have heard you. We have felt your anguish. We messed up. We messed up *really* badly. Please forgive us. We would like to start earning your trust and respect back.

We are publicly committing to delivering you the offline single-player experience that you have made clear is important to you after we made the wrong creative decision in removing it.

We can't deliver offline to you right now, but X has been assigned the task of organizing and planning the delivery. Furthermore, from now on, you will get public monthly status reports that detail the progress being made. At any time during this process, you are welcome to get a full refund.

We really need your support at this critical time. Would you consider giving us a second chance?"
---------

Wow! Get a grip mate.

 

[phlOgistOn]

Yep. What I suspect they planned to do was simulate the server using Mocking, which is usually fairly quick to write by its very nature.

Unfortunately, not everything can be mocked out if it's not written well - and they likely found they would have to rebuild large chunks of it to do it.

Exactly, I think we're on the same page - your specific knowledge is definitely better than mine though (I'm just a geeky gamer that has helped run and participated in various communities over 20 years rather than someone who actually could write a piece of code from scratch - and I'm not in the DDF)

 

[DigitalDuck]

Extremely condescending post, thanks for that.

What you consider a "benefit", I consider a poison. There are no benefits to online from my perspective.

And there we are.

Erm... I think you need to read my previous post where I'm really, really annoyed at not having offline mode on top of all the other crap that I've gone through to the point that I've requested a full refund and will be extremely disappointed to not get it.

My point was that the potential for people believing the "inferior" offline-only ED is representative of the "superior" online-only ED is completely mitigated by changing the name, making the difference between the two clear. I was responding to someone who is not particularly fussed about the loss of offline-only ED, and therefore the names were tailored that way.

I could just as easily have called them:

Elite Dangerous Anywhere
Elite Dangerous: Awesome Edition
Elite More Dangerous Than You Might Think

And the point would still be exactly the same.

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

Don't worry about it Juniper.

Here we have a prime example of a juvenile wannabe-gamer. It needs room to develop and grow, the occasional pat on the back to tell it it's good and loved and wanted to be around.
It'll start school soon, so don't confine it's possible achievements.
After all - it's special.

And here we have an ad-hominem attack made completely on the basis of entirely misunderstanding the context of what I wrote.

You realise I'm on your side, right?


EDIT: To NOT get it.

 

[Juniper]

Erm... I think you need to read my previous post where I'm really, really annoyed at not having offline mode on top of all the other crap that I've gone through to the point that I've requested a full refund and will be extremely disappointed to not get it.

My point was that the potential for people believing the "inferior" offline-only ED is representative of the "superior" online-only ED is completely mitigated by changing the name, making the difference between the two clear. I was responding to someone who is not particularly fussed about the loss of offline-only ED, and therefore the names were tailored that way.

I could just as easily have called them:

Elite Dangerous Anywhere
Elite Dangerous: Awesome Edition
Elite More Dangerous Than You Might Think

And the point would still be exactly the same.

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



And here we have an ad-hominem attack made completely on the basis of entirely misunderstanding the context of what I wrote.

You realise I'm on your side, right?


EDIT: To NOT get it.

I says what I sees, and the irony you obviously felt you laced your post with clearly went right over my head. Apologies, it's late here.

To be blunt though: there is no "inferior" or "superior" ways to play E: D. It's not a war! I don't like online-only games, but I have zero problem with anyone who gets their kicks that way if it floats their boat. It doesn't float mine though, and I'm not "wrong" in that.

There's been too many posts here in the last few days from people who seem to lack all sense of empathy or even intelligence when it comes to admitting that, yes, offline mode has its benefits too... and it hurts the game by its omission.

Ironically, since E: D sadly isn't the game for me any more, I've moved over to Limit Theory, as it's offline only. Someone from there had posted a thread here and immediately experienced the worst that this "community" had to offer in response. It was very sad to see, and it gave a shocking impression of the community to the outside world.

 

[DigitalDuck]

To be blunt though: there is no "inferior" or "superior" ways to play E: D. It's not a war! I don't like online-only games, but I have zero problem with anyone who gets their kicks that way if it floats their boat. It doesn't float mine though, and I'm not "wrong" in that.

There's been too many posts here in the last few days from people who seem to lack all sense of empathy or even intelligence when it comes to admitting that, yes, offline mode has its benefits too.

Absolutely. Everyone has the right to play their way, and it's understandably distressing for anyone to have the rug pulled out from under them weeks before release. I was going to play online, but ED seemingly doesn't want me to play online, and Frontier doesn't want me to play offline either, so...

Ironically, since E: D sadly isn't the game for me any more, I've moved over to Limit Theory, as it's offline only. Someone from there had posted a thread here and immediately experienced the worst that this "community" had to offer in response. It was very sad to see, and it gave a shocking impression of the community to the outside world.

I've been looking into that. I initially had no interest (why would I care about Limit Theory when I could play Elite: Dangerous?), but now I can't play ED so this is interesting again. Doesn't tick as many boxes, but it has more chance of actually working for me.

 

[Gaijin]

You mean apart from forcing you to be on their servers all the time to play you mean? I think that's a pretty big change from the original design. What I'm speculating about here is what that enables them to do down the line. DLC is one thing, but they're not necessarily going keep that up forever.

I just think you're speculation on this subject is getting out of hand. There is no reason, at this moment, to speculate that they will monetize their game to the level you are suggesting.

An evolving galaxy is a wonderful thing if you're prepared / have the time or inclination to live in it 24/7 and experience it first hand.

Having it move from under you while you're not there is just frustrating, annoying, and Not Fun.

If I was playing offline like I'd originally planned, I could have just paused or saved the game, and come back to it whenever I could - and carry on from where I left off.

I disagree with your assessment and I do understand where you are coming from, but I think you are overreacting a wee bit. Certainly, the situation you described is possible, but again, we have a 400billion star galaxy. It doesn't mean we'll see every star, it means there is always a little corner of the galaxy for you if you get tired of people ruining your game.

Again, I understand your position, but perhaps you should take a break from the forums for a bit and give FD time to review your case. I think if you did that, perhaps your opinion on the subject would change. Not suggesting anything about your character, or how you are dealing with it. Sometimes things irk us the wrong way, and even if you feel the same after your little break its best to get out of a negative situation for a little while.

 

[ThatFuzzyTiger]

EVE's profits have taken a nose dive, and after 10 years the average player online is still less than 40000, I don't call that successful(WoW is losing subs on a monthly basis). F2P is here to stay,whether we like it or not(I don't), but WoW and Eve will have to change soon.....

EVE might. WoW won't. WoW just jumped back up 3 mil subs to the 10m mark. Everyone who keeps claiming the death of World of Warcraft really needs a reality check. They're not just planning one expansion in advance, they're planning *three*. They intend to keep the air sucked out of the monthly subscription market for as long as such a market exists. Good luck proclaiming the death of WoW's model whilst they can attain over even half of what they're running right now. Most MMO's would give their eye teeth to even get one fifth of that.