No Single Player offline Mode then?

[Adept]

As a point. I didn't say get your refund and go. I said "If you want to ask for refund and leave, do." You have misquoted me.

How do I feel endangered? I feel like you have pushed this issue so hard that FDev now has bad press. That affected stocks. If you continue to push, maybe there will be no game. Maybe FDev will fold. Then all of us will lose out because a minority has decided to be vocal, or even take things to the next level and go legal and spoil it for the majority of us!

So yes, I am sorry that one feature you so wanted is being dropped and I'm sorry you're disappointed, but what has happened is childish. "I'm going to push and push until they do what I say." like the child that drops on the floor in the supermarket and screams because he can't have that biscuit or bar.

We are all adults and are one group of people who want to see Elite return. The division is totally in your hands and the rest of this same group of people are being punished for it.

This can not be said enough. People are behaving in a malicious, destructive manner. It's one of the ugliest aspect of human behaviour - spite. You gain nothing, all you want to do is lash out because you are upset.

Some of you ask for "empathy", and think the rest of us would behave like that in your position. I can assure you, we would not. Empathy is exactly what is lacking from the people who want to set fire to everything and do as much damage as they can because things didn't turn out exactly as they wanted.

For those who backed a kickstarter without understanding the risks, I'm sorry for you. I understand it stings. KS is new, and it's different from being a pure business model. It's closer to charity and voting with your wallet to allow unusual projects to happen.

 

[specialsymbol]

There are three reasons why I want offline mode:
1st I don't want to play an MMO - I want to be all by myself, explore, pause and save. And modify the game possibly, which some condemn as "cheating". I like the possibility to sometimes play with friends in an MMO and I accept that I need to start completely new there and can't use my offline save
2nd I don't want DRM, especially since I paid for that game
3rd I don't want to pay for a game and then need to use a cracked version to play the game the way I want

I still don't know if I should refund. It all depends on what Braben says in the next few days.

 

[Ericlas]

Granted, it's not a debate (I didn't call it as such, just quoted it in the reply), but whatever it is, it needs to continue, because nothing says you made a bad call like firing up your game's official forum and a thread like this is - yet again - right up there at the top.

Agreed but there comes a point when both sides stated their arguments.
The community did, to make the devs listen.
The devs did, to explain themselves and state they made an error and a decision.
So now what?

Someone above said the kickstarter backers are held hostage, well think about it, does that apply to some players now here too, holding FD hostage?
(threatening bad media rep i.e.)
This can be now repeated forever like the dispute of which was there first, egg or hen.

But the question is...what is reasonably achievable now by acting this way?

 

[Tony Grunt]

I may have missed it but there doesn't seem to any comments or statements in this thread from any of the company exec's........ Does their silence indicate guilt or just total disregard?

I think it means business decision and PR can't be done in internet time, everything on the internet usually explodes too quickly and real life business has to play catch up (eg steam support times). For the moment I give them the benefit of the doubt regarding time support times and public announcements.

 

[Zieman]

I may have missed it but there doesn't seem to any comments or statements in this thread from any of the company exec's........ Does their silence indicate guilt or just total disregard?

Oh there are, just not many.
Compilation here:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=59481

 

[Saetan]

I WISH there was a debate ongoing, i really do.
But instead this is rinse and repeat every single argument over and over.

At least it's feedback ... feedback which clearly tells, there is serious interest into an anounced offline mode.

Even if there are some guys who want this feedback to shut up, it's legit to go on with this feedback to show Frontier theres still interest - and how big it is - in an offline mode.

 

[ShottyMonsta]

In all honesty I didnt read all the thread, its just too big but I did read a big chunk of it. What strikes me most is I think I've read every possible argument one could possibly make on both sides of the argument but one thing that seems to be shockingly missing is that no one seems to be considering Frontier have just been honest with the reason they gave for ultimately not including offline.

I am not sure why its so hard to believe. Frontier designed Elite Dangerous to include a fluctuating market based on actual trade. Missions generated based on surrounding systems current affairs etc.. To do that at the bare minimum it needs to store for every system, price, demand and supply for every commodity. If we take an average of 1 station per each of the 4B systems and 3 bytes of data for each of the 80 or so commodities thats 894GB of data right there. But never mind that The system needs to poll each system periodically and generate missions depending on whats going on so its not just about storing those 900GB of data they need to periodically be accessed by the mission generator. With an average reading speed of 200mb/s of your typical harddisk it would take over an entire hour for the game to just read the data it needs to generate the missions. Each of these missions need to be stored of course. If we take an average of 20 missions per station with the system just storing 2 bytes for the objective and 1 byte for the reward thats another 230GB of data. Thats not all you got exploration too which needs to store which system you visited and which planets have been scanned and which not. Well I think you can see where this is going.

I dont think Frontier were misleading anyone when they said their vision of the game wouldnt easily translate offline. At least not within the vision they have of a dynamic ever evolving universe.

Like They said to do an offline mode they'd need to severely reduce that vision. Now Ironically most reasons I saw for wanting an offline mode that didnt have to do with connection issues or the game's longevity were actually because said people wanted a static universe that didnt change much if at all. So I don't know perhaps frontier's fear of compromising their games vision when delivering an offline mode might actually be unfounded in that by killing all the awesome functionality they're putting in their online version they'd be delivering exactly what that intended audience wants. Maybe thats something they can consider. I am sure it would be much easier to do an offline client if they compromised on all the dynamic elements of the game and that seems to be exactly what a lot of people are asking for. Win/Win ? Dont know just an observasion

I don't think you are following the main gripe with why people are peeved off... it's because they promised offline and are now reneging on that promise.

 

[sharft]

good to know thanks

 

[Juniper]

Like They said to do an offline mode they'd need to severely reduce that vision. Now Ironically most reasons I saw for wanting an offline mode that didnt have to do with connection issues or the game's longevity were actually because said people wanted a static universe that didnt change much if at all. So I don't know perhaps frontier's fear of compromising their games vision when delivering an offline mode might actually be unfounded in that by killing all the awesome functionality they're putting in their online version they'd be delivering exactly what that intended audience wants. Maybe thats something they can consider. I am sure it would be much easier to do an offline client if they compromised on all the dynamic elements of the game and that seems to be exactly what a lot of people are asking for. Win/Win ? Dont know just an observasion

Actually, that's pretty much exactly what they promised during the Kickstarter and since. A static universe, without all the dynamic background sim stuff, playable offline.

Unfortunately, this is precisely what they say they're not delivering.

 

[littleminxundr]

Agreed but there comes a point when both sides stated their arguments.
The community did, to make the devs listen.
The devs did, to explain themselves and state they made an error and a decision.
So now what?

Someone above said the kickstarter backers are held hostage, well think about it, does that apply to some players now here too, holding FD hostage?
(threatening bad media rep i.e.)
This can be now repeated forever like the dispute of which was there first, egg or hen.

But the question is...what is reasonably achievable now by acting this way?

Nothing more, really. I still read, but hardly post anymore. But the thread still has purpose because at this point there are still people unawares and they'll seek answers and will need time to come to terms too. Be happy for this thread, it's actually the most disciplined thread I've ever seen, with little to no spill over, apart from white knights starting complain threads about the people in this thread.

 

[Gazz]

The Offline Experience in Elite Online. An alternative?

So now that the game has changed into "Elite Online" and all the enthusiastic fans (who pledged serious money) are summarily denied refunds, what alternatives are there?


If your internet connection is flakey or non-existing part or fulltime, you're simply screwed. It's an unfortunate fact that FD had to accept but keeping your money may have helped easing the blow.
No way around that, though, with an MMO wannabe.


But what really defines the offline experience is that no one else messes with me or my game!
That should be possible.

The effect of players on the markets and universe in general is supposedly amplified so that their actions are actually noticeable among the thousands of NPC.
So there is a multiplier at work.

For single player, this multiplier can be < 1 instaed of > 1.
Actions of other players (if the Goon Squad sails a thousand ships to ruin the central systems' economy for a week) would practically not affect you if the scale of their effect is 1/1000 of what they actually do.

Same applies to exploration. You would not have to "compete" with kids who play this game 24/7 and "explore" everything before you can even get there with your limited playtime.

This can be a slider, too, so players can decide how "online and dynamic" they want their universe.

 

[Deyn]

Unfortunately as you already downloaded and played the game a refund is not currently an option.

That may change and I can see why they are doing it but that is FD's stance right now.

Which would force me to revoke the payment and leave them with the option to go to court... not really what I think is in everybody's best interest?
In the end a judge will decide who is "right". Unfortunately until then, FD has far more problems at hand than a few angry customers.
As people already mentioned, if a lot of people would revoke their payments through credit cards it will trigger certain automated actions at the debit card providers.
If FD needs to take legal actions to get that money back, it can be time consuming plus it poses the potential risk to lose the case (again costing a lot of money).

The negative press, also wouldn't help in selling the product I guess.

Worst case for one or more of the above reasons, developer team members might leave "the sinking ship" (I doubt that will happen, as the team seems very attached to their work, but in the end it's a job and you need to get paid).

Again, I'll emphasize: I decided to see if the preview is at least stable and works for me in Solo play. I tried on monday with a devastating two crashes in some 15 minutes of "gameplay", not to metion the usual delay when leaving supercruise or hyperjump - and no I don't have a bad Internet connection and I was the only one using my connection at that time.

I would like seeing FD succeed with Elite: Dangerous, as I would like them to dedicating some ressources to give us an Offline mode.
And no, it was not "technically impossible", they decided that the "limited, out-of-sync experience they could offer" is not what they want and that they don't have enough ressources, as in money to hire developers to deliver that.
They not even tried to ask if may be most of the "Offliners" would rather be happy to have the same static universe back again, they enjoyed so enthusiastically in the 80ies and 90ies, as FDs vision was an Online Universe.

I for example could live with an "boooring", reduced, static experience like in Elite back then.

I hope Solo and group play can live up to the expectations now...

 

[piotrr]

Like They said to do an offline mode they'd need to severely reduce that vision.

Good.

Now Ironically most reasons I saw for wanting an offline mode that didnt have to do with connection issues or the game's longevity were actually because said people wanted a static universe that didnt change much if at all.

Yes. I don't want people in my game. Not even remote people. Not even people just messing with my universe's politics or markets or exploration.

So I don't know perhaps frontier's fear of compromising their games vision when delivering an offline mode might actually be unfounded in that by killing all the awesome functionality they're putting in their online version they'd be delivering exactly what that intended audience wants. Maybe thats something they can consider.

The thing is that all the while they are saying the game wouldn't be the same and the "vision" wouldn't work and they're not going to do an offline mode - when they are then being asked what happens when the company goes under, they say there will be, in the future, an archived server version that you can play if that ever happens.

That ... sounds very much like all those things they didn't want to do. That sounds very much like offline mode.

 

[Joe Spivey]

Drop the dead donkey.

 

[Ventura]

Some of you ask for "empathy", and think the rest of us would behave like that in your position. I can assure you, we would not. Empathy is exactly what is lacking from the people who want to set fire to everything and do as much damage as they can because things didn't turn out exactly as they wanted.

Well, that's what you get, when...

a) people care
b) a core feature is removed
c) its removal is announced less than a month before the final version is due to be released
d) the game has been funded by (a)

Cause and effect.

what is reasonably achievable now by acting this way?

They realise the error of their ways and seek to remedy the situation by patching in offline single player shortly after release.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease, remember.

 

[zelda_n64]

As I process my words for a refund, it has become clear to me that their propriety game development system COBRA is unable to offer such a facility.
-
According to their report for their investors in 2013:
-

ELITE: DANGEROUS Frontier’s high-end franchise re-boot uses the latest COBRA technology to deliver an innovative multi-player experience in galaxy containing 100 billion star systems, the largest game-environment ever created.

-

We have added Cloud-based capability to COBRA, whereby Frontier’s code running on commodity servers interacts with games to provide data-driven game rules and information gathering. This facilitates full play through tracking, sophisticated A-B tests, player segmentation and friends’ lists as well as the usual leader-board and achievement functionality.

-

-

For example, some PC online games (Elite: Dangerous is a PC online game) that have caught the public’s imagination, such as Minecraft and World of Tanks, have reached estimated revenues of over £100 million per annum over a small number of years. Others have not grown quite so quickly, but on the additional platforms the levels of success could be higher still. We expect Elite: Dangerous revenues to grow gradually in a similar way to other PC online games, but also that it will hit a quality resonance at which point revenues would increase significantly, as it did for those other titles.

-

This one above statement implies they knew in 2013 that there would not be an offline game, over a year before they dropped the bombshell in newsletter #49
-
Notes:
-

COBRA proprietary cross-platform technology allows code and resources developed on PC to be compiled and run on different platforms such other desktop and laptop computers, tablets, videogame consoles and smartphones, whilst offering the ability flexibly to take advantage of the different platforms’ capabilities (e.g. different artwork resolutions, shaders etc.). The current fourth generation of COBRA provides a common platform-neutral core API and resource pipeline that isolates both game code and resources from the underlying hardware, whilst maximising use of the multi-processor, multi-threaded environment.

-

 

[piotrr]

you know...

If the effect of other players diminishes by distance, I'll just go live in the furthest spiral arm from where the rest of you potter about.

 

[Adm Lazarus]

Isn't there still going to be a single player version

 

[EbolaConundrum]

You know what bothers me most about this is having read David’s comments about offline mode on Eurogamer; I get the distinct impression he never took it very seriously as a feature, it was never part of his vision for the game and he offered it during the Kickstarter thinking it could be tacked on at the end and would get more people on-board.

But it’s clear that he did not keep the promised feature in mind when making any of the design decisions, deciding they might tag it on at the end if they had time and it wasn’t too difficult and if not it might upset some of the people he got on-board with that promise but who cares the moneys in online gaming anyway.

I work in System Integration; this is like promising a client a system that can be used on or offline then telling them just before delivery; Oh by the way we’ve dropped support for the offline requirement, it would have been too difficult and have less features so we thought you wouldn’t mind. If we did that we’d be in court for breach of contract. The game industry however is not held to the same standards because there is no contract only empty politicians promises and false advertisement.

I have to say not only will I never buy another thing from Frontier, but it’s put me off kick-starter as well.

 

[Solei]

Isn't there still going to be a single player version

Not really.

Even when you're going solo, the environment and markets is still influenced by other players. You just can't see them.