No Single Player offline Mode then?

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Incorrect. Again its not about refund.

Consider this : I bail you up in a dark alley with a knife and demand you wallet and jewellery. You complain, I return your wallet and jewellery (refund). The law has still been broken, refund or not. So the police would still prosecute.

I am confused. What law do you think has been broken? If FD have developed a product, which for some, is unfit for purpose, this is not in itself illegal (unless of course it somehow endangered life or would cause harm in some way). If it is unfit for purpose then most consumer laws will allow for consumer recompense. Not providing this recompense may be illegal. The argument would then be around what defines fit for purpose and/or the level of recompense.
 
The implication on Kickstarter is it'll be a disc with the launcher on it.

Yeah, I was being facetious. Though it would be funny if that were the case

Would have been easier to ask during the kickstarter - before handing over the money...

Yeah, if only...

I am confused. What law do you think has been broken? If FD have developed a product, which for some, is unfit for purpose, this is not in itself illegal (unless of course it somehow endangered life or would cause harm in some way). If it is unfit for purpose then most consumer laws will allow for consumer recompense. Not providing this recompense may be illegal. The argument would then be around what defines fit for purpose and/or the level of recompense.

Its an often used phrase and I shall utter it here once...maybe twice; False Advertisment.
 
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There is something some people here haven't realized, a fundamental difference the lack of offline mode makes : when you pay for the game you are no longer buying ED, you are only buying the right to play it for as long as the studio maintains the servers. Which is the main thing I don't like in multiplayer only games, but isn't really justifiable in a game like ED where you can play solo. We are paying for a temporary privilege, which could potentially be withdrawn from us at any time.
 
it's not only those with poor or non existant net connections but also for anyone who has issues with ED'd network, i would say that 90% of the little time i have played since alpha the stuttering when dogfighting etc is unbearable, hence why i only have 8 kills and never progressed further than a cobra, if nothing else an offline mode would have been a way out and as for not being dynamic i play every other elite games for years with no internet, i'd be just as happy playing ED with no net as well

offline mode would be nice but i think from a business prospective its not viable at this time. i would like to see this, otherwise people will work around it. That's what happens when boundaries are placed.
 
Nah it probably be empty save a piece of paper with a product code on it.

Exactly. Are DVDs getting pressed and shipped the day after (whatever the gold version it calls itself now) appears, or do we get the box, t-shirt, star map and novel, plus a piece of paper with the web address of the store we already know about on it? ;) Again - another reason for backing. Something physical and tangible at the end of the process. (Call me old fashioned, I still buy CDs. :p ).
 
Release a cut down server to run on people's machines. Remove all the background simulation stuff and multiplayer shenanigans, and put a mock in place that would respond to server commands.

I'm not sure this would work as it could expose the internals of saved games and the encryption etc.

The original idea of single-player mode was that the saved game would be local and unencrypted. What they would probably need to do is fork the current server code, cut out the network stack (and encryption) and join it onto the main game above the network stack there. Probably quite a bit of engineering involved and could be tricky. Also, replacing the database backend with a simpler, local system would also take a lot of work. Also, seeing as the servers run on the Amazon AWS cloud the code will be written for Linux, so it would need to be ported to Windows, yet another time consuming thing to do.

Also, it's highly likely that all the front end servers talk to a single database server at the backend which stores the current state of the galaxy and users' save games etc. The galaxy simulation would feed into this database. Well, that's ho I would design it anyway, especially for a "cloud" server based system as it allows the front end servers to not hold much state and be spun up and shut down quickly and without impacting the core.

Having said that, they should have planned all this as part of the original design anyway as it was one of the original primary specifications.
 
ei incumbit probatio qui dicit non qui negat...

The law is not broken unless it's proven by the court - the presumption of innocence.

True ! And thankfully Australia is one of those countries who does uphold this right. You cant be an aussie or have familiarity with the ACCC. A month ago they screwed a large supermarket chain for using the word 'fresh' on some of their products, it cost them $12million, the ACCC argued that 'fresh' means something different to Australian consumers, and didnt give a rat's what the company defined 'fresh' as.

Like I said, they are a rabid dog, once out of the cage, they will continue unabated until they get their feed.

But I do get your point :)
 
If you already have access to the game load Elite and select 'Solo Online'. If that is playable for you now it still will be.

I've just changed to that mode with task manager open and opened a few menus and the like (taken off, landed opened commodities, jumped to another system). Most of the time my network traffic is 0. The most I saw was 192 kbps download and 184 kbps upload but both were very brief.

From that test I suspect the game would be ok on a fairly basic connection. I think the peak I had equates to a 1.9 meg connection and none of it was time critical, so you could probably chop that in half (if not more) and not notice anything. I think so long as you can maintain a constant connection... even if it is 0.5 meg you will probably be ok. For comparison, if I open the BBC home page my peak data rate is around 1.8 mbps.

Hopefully FDEV will have to come out with some system requirements soon. But it looks like browsing the web data use and entry level broadband will be ok... for solo online.

Thanks for this. I have been playing solo online (guiltily - because I worry how much data I'm using).

I guess - what I'd like to know is how much I use over time. I could see myself sinking a lot of hours in ED - if, say, an hour's play used up ~5Mb of data, that'd be fine. But if it used up ~100Mb - then my monthly quota would get used up very quickly and my connection would be shaped to ~64Kb/s (advertised - the reality is around 10Kb/s). Last month I ran out with about a week to go so was unable to play that week.

Again - only reason I bought it was because it advertised offline play.
 
While I am unlikely to feel the bite of what is the problem here, I understand why so many are hurt by this issue.

that being said, kickstarter "promises" aren't exactly the best thing to grab on to. Simple as this, if development changes, development changes. Should they have been more specific about this particular decision as soon as they got to it? Yes. Would it have been bad PR? Yes. but honestly, at least they could have been immediately translucent about the online requirement.

Development is tricky, and having a solid vision of what you want for a game is a rarity... And that is something FD most definitely have. their hope was that they could handle most of the galaxy building stuff in a way that both the player client and the server could handle them for their respective modes; but the time they could have spent developing the offline mode was spent on things they felt would be more cohesive to the overall vision for the outcome of the game.

That really does suck for people who don't have a steady internet connection and I hope the quality of the "dynamic universe" that they build instead will really make up for the slap to the PR department and probably a few successful refunds. honestly, if it makes for a stronger overall game, that fits to what the developers want... even if I couldn't play it... it would be selfish for me to ask otherwise. I would just want a refund.
 
I am confused. What law do you think has been broken? If FD have developed a product, which for some, is unfit for purpose, this is not in itself illegal (unless of course it somehow endangered life or would cause harm in some way). If it is unfit for purpose then most consumer laws will allow for consumer recompense. Not providing this recompense may be illegal. The argument would then be around what defines fit for purpose and/or the level of recompense.

'mis-leading' consumers in and of itself is illegal here. I dont want to begin to explain why, it just is.
 
So that means that when I get to my 400,000,000,000th system I won't be able to because the servers won't be online...better change my goals then.
 
The online servers provide all of the data and processing for the galaxy, interactions between players and all transactions of value. Without it there isn't a game. We always intended that the way to play the game would be online. We had hoped that we could do an offline variant, but as the game progressed the online requirement superseded that. It wasn't an easy choice to make, but to stay true to the game we set out to make we had to make this choice.

Michael

Sorry Michael ...you take the money from the Kickstarte ...and say nothing in all this months... you and the company knowed that it never giving a real offline modus ... shame on you ... I trust you ... ED is death for me...
 
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