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 Anonymous
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Sorry guys ... but I really getting tried of the this attitude of "I want my money back, or I'll sue". I really don't care if they had developed the game as offline or not. The whole reason why I put my money down for the beta was to finally see ED come into the 21st Century gaming hardware ability. You might not like it but FD have decided this is the focus they want to travel along. So be it. I still want to play it and this was something I want to have happen for a long time.

I will be very upset and just as vocal as you guys if you take a class action and force FD not release the game. Really upset!!  😡

 

I sorry you are small minority of backers which is at the moment is screaming the loudest in both this forum and FD's forum.

 

PS - Please let move on and let see this game become the game we been dreaming about for decades. Space Exploration and Adventure.


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SerialKicked
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You can't have your cake and eat it : either this is a small vocal minority, so there's no reason why FD shouldn't refund anyone who asked to, especially given the current PR disaster. Either it's not that small and maybe they should reconsider their plans of not giving away the server binary.

 

 

It's always sad when people are expecting others to give away their rights as consumers (or otherwise, for that matter) just because they, themselves, don't feel concerned.


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ExpandingMan
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Sorry guys ... but I really getting tried of the this attitude of "I want my money back, or I'll sue"

 

I agree, that's absurd.  Talking about lawsuits is ridiculous, everyone knew damn well that if you back something so early, there are risks that the developer will fail you in some way

 

That said, FD really screwed this up.  It seems they were deliberately misleading and people should be upset.  I'm sure there were people at FD who fancied the idea of eventually making offline available until the decision to drop it was finally made, but if they were not trying to sell beta code, they would have told everyone what the deal was months earlier.  Suing a game developer because they don't do what you want is laughable, but people should be upset.


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robske
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Sorry guys ... but I really getting tried of the this attitude of "I want my money back, or I'll sue".

 

<snip>

 

PS - Please let move on and let see this game become the game we been dreaming about for decades. Space Exploration and Adventure.

 

I can fully understand you're growing tired of the bitching and whatever. And I'm not gonna sue over something like this (even though its well within the range of capabilities) and neither do I want to deny others to enjoy and experience the game.

 

When I purchased the game (during the beta) I made a purchase deal with them (as everyone does when they buy something whether they know it or not), which is an agreement to pay for a product which has a certain set of features and quality which the seller or creator of it advertises about it. They changed the conditions of that without my consent. The law in that states that such a thing is illegal and gives you the right to demand a refund. In my case, it's a dealbreaker since the being-online requirement makes the game much harder for me to play and enjoy. It's also one of the reasons why I quit EVE Online eventually, because trying to FC a fleet on a unstable interwebs connection is not really practical.

 

There's always gonna be people who are upset about this sort of thing, and people who will just be like "hey get over it and lets jusy enjoy the game for what it is.". In this case, I'm with the former group since it directly affects the level in which I manage to enjoy the game. For others, that reason may be non-existent and as such they won't be fussed about it. That doesn't mean I should just let go of my rights though.

 

So I wish you much enjoyment with Elite Dangerous. Its a fabulous game, but I can hardly even play it (even though I wish I could).


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DarkOne
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Oh I totally here where your coming from, I haven't pre-ordered or kickstarted this game.... why? Because I was in a wait and see mode because I could tell by the early videos and the kickstarter that FD wasn't 'big enough' to deliver all of what was talked about early on in the videos and I was right. I mean what I am seeing is great.... but me personally I haven't seen a whole lot of exploration gameplay and what we as gamers can do with it (but I will say I haven't played the game so I don't know). I try not to be harsh on any games when I play them and I give both pros/cons and I am fair. But I have a certain play style I like and I buy games that suit those. Right now E:D still hasn't shown me something that makes this a instant buy for me, Star Citizen did.

 

I was only irritated because I have said in other posts that these two development leads for FD and RSI are icons in this gaming genre and us as gamers kind of hold them to a standard. If you want to say a certain respect is given to them. Why? Because they have earned it with the games they have made in past, so as gamers we also deserve the same respect as consumers of their games. Yes, FD screwed up we all know this. Should they have told the community a lot sooner about their intentions yes. Yes SC/Squadron 42 has some SP elements to it but they have also released people can make their own servers, so what does that mean.... it means we can keep the game alive for a long time (like Freelancer). E:D only time will tell with this one, I rarely play MMO's personally now because the content is usually poor or 'actual people' ruin my fun.

 

I hope E:D is a great game and is around for a long time, but like a lot of gamers here. I like to know that maybe 5-7 yrs from now after I have stopped playing E:D and I say to myself 'Man I haven't played E:D in a long time let me install it', will I be able too? People tend to be short sighted these days when it comes to games, in that games seem to have a expiration date or something. And people don't care that they loose access to play a game because the servers close of the developers are defunct. Why? You bought it you should be able to play it whenever unless they tell you eventually you can't. I guess that's why I have always liked games with SP elements because then I know I should be able to play the game in the future. I have a couple hundred games in my steam account and I have probably played maybe 10% of them, just don't have the time. But I expect the game to be there when I do have time.

 

SSC is here to preserve these games so 10+ yrs from now maybe we can download and play a game. We see so many games die and go into ether to never be seen again. I would hate for this to happen to E:D because it does show so much promise. I guess for me, I don't want to see the show end in a few years... there is nothing wrong with that 🙂


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robske
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it means we can keep the game alive for a long time (like Freelancer). 

 

I was wondering past evening why E:D didn't walk the Freelancer sp-mp model. It would be the perfect compromise imo.


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DarkOne
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Agreed, its called future proofing your game. Modding keeps games alive forever and mods usually can't be done in online only games unless you can create your own servers (ahem like Freelancer). So as long as Chris Roberts takes a page out of his own book SC/Squadron 42 should be around for a long time. I only want the same thing for E:D, so FD please... please think about the future legacy of your game.

 

Oh robske, you need to get off the floor and put that rig at a desk your gonna kill yourself... and I agree you have to tidy up them cables 🙂 hehe


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robske
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Agreed, its called future proofing your game. Modding keeps games alive forever and mods usually can't be done in online only games unless you can create your own servers (ahem like Freelancer). So as long as Chris Roberts takes a page out of his own book SC/Squadron 42 should be around for a long time. I only want the same thing for E:D, so FD please... please think about the future legacy of your game.

 

Oh robske, you need to get off the floor and put that rig at a desk your gonna kill yourself... and I agree you have to tidy up them cables 🙂 hehe

 

Agreed.

 

And why does everyone note the clusterfuck of cables but doesn't note the alpha centauri poster which came with the original retail box?  🙁


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VonPaulus
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I was wondering past evening why E:D didn't walk the Freelancer sp-mp model. It would be the perfect compromise imo.

Because he has/had a VISION.

Shouldn't this be moved to the MMO section?


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DarkOne
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Shouldn't this be moved to the MMO section?

 

Good point moving E:D forum to the MMO area. And I hope the vision is a good one 🙂


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Pinback
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I was only irritated because I have said in other posts that these two development leads for FD and RSI are icons in this gaming genre and us as gamers kind of hold them to a standard. If you want to say a certain respect is given to them. Why? Because they have earned it with the games they have made in past, so as gamers we also deserve the same respect as consumers of their games.

 

 

Just to pick up a point here they may be both gaming industry icons but I would say that Roberts has the high profile of the two of them and that to certain extent that the development of Elite Dangerous has been led on by what Star Citizen has been doing but in doing so Frontier have failed to manage the fanboys expectations which have far outstripped the reality of the game and we may be for a few other surprises when the game is released on the 16 of Dec.

 

And why does everyone note the clusterfuck of cables but doesn't note the alpha centauri poster which came with the original retail box?  🙁

 

That's because cable are for life not just Christmas.


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VonPaulus
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Good point moving E:D forum to the MMO area.

You can't imagine how sad I am with this move.

I feel like an idiot having pledged £90 for an MMO... I mean for an MMO... I still can't believe it.


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robske
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Reading back how it was advertised and how it became, it sounds pretty much like this 😀 (without the humor)

 


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SerialKicked
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You can't imagine how sad I am with this move.

I feel like an idiot having pledged £90 for an MMO... I mean for an MMO... I still can't believe it.

 

Given your reward tier was supposed to give you access to a DRM free version of the game and given they seems to go the sane way regarding refunds, you have a good shot at getting your money back if you want to.


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True
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I prefer to play online, But I expected this game to provide an offline mode as announced in the past. For me it was obvious that Elite will be an offline game with the option to play online if desired.

 

Now they just slapped many supporters in the face, but I am sure there will be an offline version in the future. They just could not make it for release but the shitstorm will make them consider the options again. 😉


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Pinback
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Given your reward tier was supposed to give you access to a DRM free version of the game and given they seems to go the sane way regarding refunds, you have a good shot at getting your money back if you want to.

Probably they had a chat with their lawyer and realized that what they are trying to do is illegal and are now trying to back peddle their way out of it. They should just offer a refund to those that want one.

 

 

You can't imagine how sad I am with this move.

I feel like an idiot having pledged £90 for an MMO... I mean for an MMO... I still can't believe it.

 

Same here would never have gone in for the £90 pledge if they had said it was just going to be an online game only, i would have split the money and back Limit Theory as well.

Still not heard anything back from Frontier about this boxed edition.


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robske
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Probably they had a chat with their lawyer and realized that what they are trying to do is illegal and are now trying to back peddle their way out of it. They should just offer a refund to those that want one.

 

 

 

Same here would never have gone in for the £90 pledge if they had said it was just going to be an online game only, i would have split the money and back Limit Theory as well.

Still not heard anything back from Frontier about this boxed edition.

 

My message to them after they refused my request for a refund:

 

"Those who have already been playing the game online in the Alpha and/or Beta phases, regardless of whether they backed the project via Kickstarter or purchased access to Alpha and/or Beta through our online store, are not eligible for a refund."

Please consult my provided info and the additional info in the links below:
http://europa.eu/youreurope/business/sell-abroad/defective-products/index_en.htm

(in dutch language):
https://www.consuwijzer.nl/thema/wet-oneerlijke-handelspraktijken
https://www.consuwijzer.nl/thema/dwaling

These laws apply to all European member states as they are european consumer protection laws. As far as I'm aware from your website, you're located in the UK, which makes these same laws also apply to your company. I don't want to be a big burden, so I provide all this information beforehand.

It is a one-sided change of a sale agreement. That i've played the game for a bunch of hours doesn't invalidate the right to a refund according to the laws in this.

 


 

Providing all the legal info they need, there's only one logical conclusion, and Pinback, you up there said it right!


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Vuzz
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... Very disapointed about thes news and about the future of ED , so i've ask today a refund for my preorder of the mercenary edition .

 

I prefer waiting one or two months after the official launch to see what append  to the Frontier  studio.


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ExpandingMan
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I feel like an idiot having pledged £90 for an MMO... I mean for an MMO... I still can't believe it. 

 

Perhaps this is a little premature?  I am also upset by recent events, for sure, but there is still a single player online mode, and there is little stopping you from logging on and off as you please (i.e., not much in the game requires extremely long continuous play sessions).  I would think this would primarily be a huge deal for those who don't have reliable internet connections.  FD really screwed up, but isn't it a little too early to completely write off this game we've been waiting 20+ years for?  I share the concern that they will focus entirely on PvP and neglect anything which can be done solo, but it's far from certain that that's going to happen.  I mean, it's not like it's suddenly going to become a WoW PvP server.


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Pyros
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"No pay 2 win" isn't the same as "no microtransactions".

 

 

 

 

They went for some sort of client/server architecture with the procedural generation, economy and mission handling done server side. NPC generation as well. You'd be basically visiting a static, lifeless sandbox.

 

I believe them when they say that releasing a standalone offline version would be a lot of work. That's basically a new game to make, galaxy generation aside. However, a much simpler method would be to release the server's binaries, which they are reluctant to for questionable reasons. They can't be that big or require some kind of supercomputer to run (at least not with a single human player).

 

Yes it probably would be a lot of work, but why should FD release the server binaries? AFAIK It incorporates a lot of proprietary tech that they spent tons of resources developing. And even so as the architecture is probably not a single server but quite a few role based servers interconnected it would require some development to cut that out from the current architecture to a single server based one.

 

 

 

Perhaps this is a little premature?  I am also upset by recent events, for sure, but there is still a single player online mode, and there is little stopping you from logging on and off as you please (i.e., not much in the game requires extremely long continuous play sessions).  I would think this would primarily be a huge deal for those who don't have reliable internet connections.  FD really screwed up, but isn't it a little too early to completely write off this game we've been waiting 20+ years for?  I share the concern that they will focus entirely on PvP and neglect anything which can be done solo, but it's far from certain that that's going to happen.  I mean, it's not like it's suddenly going to become a WoW PvP server.

 

/agree

 

Some (a lot?) of people are affected and they should be reimbursed of the money they spent on the final game (e.g. if a player purchased alpha access and accessed the game, in my book it forfeited any right to be reimbursed of the Alpha and beta cost). Sometimes people forget they are purchasing a product, not all the features of it. If the removal of a feature has a strong impact on the product then they are entitled to get their money back - and no true offline mode is bound to have a very strong impact on some people. But as long as FD delivers the product in working conditions it cannot really be considered defective.

 

Btw, the game has just gone Gamma and it is lovely.


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Cody
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... the game has just gone Gamma and it is lovely.

 

Yeah, it is... beautiful, in fact!

Oolite Naval Attaché


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SerialKicked
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@robske: I would be interested in reading the answer, if any.

 

@pyros:

Yes it probably would be a lot of work, but why should FD release the server binaries? AFAIK It incorporates a lot of proprietary tech that they spent tons of resources developing. And even so as the architecture is probably not a single server but quite a few role based servers interconnected it would require some development to cut that out from the current architecture to a single server based one.

 

I was talking about the binaries, not the sources. Every executable ever sold contains mostly "proprietary tech", except pure open source software, ofc. Heck, the beta of the game i'm writing is 100% "proprietary tech". And the "tons of resources" they spent doing so was community funded, anyway.

 

It's very unlikely they have a server for this and one for that. It's just not how it's done. Maybe the backend (behind the server the player is connecting to) consists of multiple modules and the server itself dispatch connections to each backend, but there's no reason it can't all run on a single machine, especially for a single client. They cannot be THAT bad at coding something, seriously. Also, what you're implying means they knew even before the kickstarter that the game wouldn't have an offline mode at all.


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Pyros
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@robske: I would be interested in reading the answer, if any.

 

@pyros:

 

I was talking about the binaries, not the sources. Every executable ever sold contains mostly "proprietary tech", except pure open source software, ofc. Heck, the beta of the game i'm writing is 100% "proprietary tech". And the "tons of resources" they spent doing so was community funded, anyway.

 

It's very unlikely they have a server for this and one for that. It's just not how it's done. Maybe the backend (behind the server the player is connecting to) consists of multiple modules and the server itself dispatch connections to each backend, but there's no reason it can't all run on a single machine, especially for a single client. They cannot be THAT bad at coding something, seriously. Also, what you're implying means they knew even before the kickstarter that the game wouldn't have an offline mode at all.

 

 

Well, PG techniques are supposedly one of the "hot" - if not "the hot" - technologies for game development for the next few years. And FD is banking on licensing the tech along with the Cobra tools, so probably they are pretty careful regarding the possibility of reverse engineering - of course I'm assuming that that tech is included on the server binaries, which is something that might not even make any sense.

 

Regarding the server structure, AFAIK, current MMO architectures use multiple role based virtualized servers (e.g. authentication servers, "session/instance" servers, database servers, ...).

 

IMHO I think there was not deception (intent) from FD, only substandard communication regarding this issue. Functions were developed for the multiplayer online context and became hard to recreate with quality for the offline. If it was easy to port for offline they would certainly do so, as they would have a lot to gain.

 

But the above is, naturally, speculation on my behalf.


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SerialKicked
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(disclosure: procedural is what i did before my current game, I am not some pg guru, but i still know my way around it)

 

Well, yeah PG is the new hot topic in a sense. But in themselves PG algorithms aren't that complicated, or at least, not that secret. Perlin/whorley noise, data driven algorithms, grammar based generation. All that stuff is freely available on wikipedia. It's how they're used that really matters and that's game dependent. As such, there's no real gain in reverse engineering the PG system behind E:D apart making another galaxy for E:D. And network code can be reverse engineered without access to the server exe/source (but with a lot of coffee). 

 

About the server, as I said, even if it's the case, no reason why it can't be bundled on a single machine. As they said themselves, "will you release server code if game dies?" "it's a likely possibility" (something like that, too tired to quote the exact lines, it's somewhere on this thread, or at least linked).

 

 

IMHO I think there was not deception (intent) from FD

 

I don't think either, but they knew quite a while ago, that's for sure. For a project of this scale, you don't just sit on your computer (all 20+ of you) to type lines of code. There's meetings, specs to design, plans are made and executed. The most likely "non conspiratorial" answer is that they got a bit scared, between the development cost, the deadline getting nearer and nearer, and a ton of content to add and bugs to fix, the offline thingy became some "i'm sure we'll find a way to shoehorn that somehow" mantra. Repeat it enough time and maybe it'll work. Never does, but everyone fall for it out of convenience once in a while.

 

 

I realize, I may have come a bit aggressive on this topic, but I do respect the design choice (i don't think it'll work for more than a year or two, being generous, but it's only an opinion and i'd love to be proven wrong). My only complaint, even if I am not concerned as a consumer here, is the refund policy (and communication skills). This kind of behavior is bad for early funding in general, which is bad for indie devs in general too. You'd expect a more professional behavior from pros with 15 years or more spent in the industry.


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Pinback
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 You'd expect a more professional behavior from pros with 15 years or more spent in the industry.

 

They have shown a complete disregard for the backer of the game and then to add salt to the wound with the arrogance of saying "no refunds"  because you downloaded, what in is in fact nothing more than a paid for demo of an unfinished game.

 


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