“Cosmetic items are not available in offline mode”
What…
What the **** do you even mean by this? Are you telling me that players, when given the choice to play offline or online, cannot use cosmetic items they have purchased based on the mode they want to play?
Do you have some *****ing partnership with a server farm somewhere that cuts you in on their profits based on how many “online” players there are? Did you even *****ing think that one through? Please tell me there’s a big brain somewhere in your studio that’s in the background saying “You know, maybe that’s not such a good idea”.
I can’t even wrap my head around how this even makes a fraction of sense. It’s not a coding issue. It’s not some performance issue that can be fixed with a later patch. This is some deep-dive worthy s*** right here, because there is absolutely zero logic to why PAID COSMETIC items are only able to be used if a player is online.
How many of these people are you literally duping into buying these versions of the game, knowing they won’t see the small disclaimer at the bottom? Does this mean ALL cosmetics purchased through the MTX shop are only for online players as well? What if they purchased them online, and want to play offline because your servers are garbage? This isn’t about people having the choice to buy MTX items or not. This is about intentionally hiding information behind a wall of text and flashy pictures, hoping they will buy your MTX items, just for them to later realize that they’re forced to play a game mode that they might not even want to play. This is the most fishy ****ing thing I’ve smelled coming from EHG in a very…very long time.
On top of that, THERE IS NO WARNING ABOUT THIS ON YOUR STORE PAGE. It’s literally ONLY on your latest update that most people don’t even read fully. If someone is buying this game for the first time because they want to play this offline, but still have cosmetics, YOU ARE LITERALLY SCAMMING THEM.
Someone smarter than me has to make this make sense. This is some next level *****.
The reasoning behind it, to my understanding, is that there is they don’t have any control over it anymore. What I mean is, when I play an offline game like Cyberpunk, I can simply use a mod to unlock all special content and exclusives.
Likewise if they would provide mtx offline, players could just unlock all of them without paying a dime. EHG would have to invest a lot of time to control your offline integrity to avoid that and other forms of cheating.
Online mode makes it easier for them to control mtx, cheating, ladders, etc.
Since offline mode will be totally offline other than the initial connection, according to the devs, there is no way to prevent cheating. No matter how much time they devote to it, there will always be workarounds that they can’t detect. Even denuvo and easy anti-cheat get cracked.
Yes but look at the Borderlands series for example. You are able to get all the MTX items in there without spending a cent. This is hurtfull for the company because they lose money. I think it’s a good thing that they protect their MTX from being used without paying for it.
With 1.0 offline will be true offline with no connection to anything.
(when starting the game in steam you will have the option to start the Online or Offline Client)
This is the reason why they do this to offline.
The devs are not happy about it either, they would love to do it, but right now they don’t have the technical possibility to implement it.
I am sure this will be something they constantly try finding a solution and once they have one they will implement it.
A possible solution would be a permanent token that’s stored on the client, that signifies ownership of a given MTX. You’d need internet connectivity to verify ownership and generate the token, but once the token is generated then internet connectivity should no longer be necessary since the token is permanent and doesn’t need re-verification. This isn’t foolproof as you could just copy the token from somebody who legitimately owns the MTX and use the token yourself (or, rather, the token would be distributed within piracy comments), but:
The token could be unique to a given username or Steam account ID, assuming that the offline mode has a concept of a username or Steam retains an account ID while offline. This prevents simple copying of tokens, requiring illegitimate players to jump through more hoops to use the token.
I’d argue that their current stance of just disallowing MTX while offline is just as vulnerable as it’d still be susceptible to change or side-stepping via mods. Somebody who really wants MTX enough in offline might use a mod which modifies the client to remove the menu block or bypass it via a custom menu a la trainer mods, or even brute force their way through it via Cheat Engine. Because of this I’d argue that their current stance is inherently flawed and only hurts legitimate players, since illegitimate players could just bypass it.
Wouldn’t be effective. Whichever algorithm you come up with to verify the token can be bypassed/duplicated. As long as you have local files only (which is what offline means) anything can be cracked.
That will actually depend on how they implement the offline client. If they do the most logical thing, then you won’t be able to do that because the offline client will just be the online client without the online features, like chat, shop, etc. So they won’t even be present in the game.
If someone really wants to, they can make a mod to change or add the assets into the game, but they’d need to actually create those assets, not use the MTX ones LE has on the servers.
If the online client doesn’t have the code for the MTX, there is no way for hackers to cheat them into the system. All they can do is create new ones, which isn’t the same as stealing them from the shop.
If they’re explaining up front exactly how it works. And you choose to partake. How is this a ‘scam?’
That said, there are plenty of threads going around on this topic. Reason for. Reasons against. EHG knows this. In fact on several occasions it has been addressed and is based on the current limitations of ‘fully’ offline (something DEMANDED by a certain contingency of the player base and EHG is trying to accomplish that FIRST) and what they may try to do or not do in the future.
Dude, this is not reddit or even Twitter. If you’ve got critiques to make and reasons to support your ideas state them. But these ad hominem attacks you’ve been peppering the board with are not going to help anyone take you seriously, even if you have a good idea.
Part of the problem is that the explanation isn’t in all the appropriate places (eg, the place where you buy the packs, in addition to the main steam page where you buy the game). If it stated there that mtx were only available online then yes, I agree that it’s disappointing but hardly a scam.
Even the way it is now, I’d hardly call it a scam. It would be a scam if they didn’t warn of this everywhere. This feels more like an oversight. Maybe 1.0 will have all these warnings in the right place. It’s just that we can already buy these things and don’t yet have the warning.
But I highly doubt this was done maliciously by EHG. It would go against everything they’ve stood for and said all these years.
Because they lose money? You mean the same amount of money that they lose by not allowing them as well? That amount? But, they also lose out on the honest players that would have bought cosmetics, had they been available.
Also, the game itself can be hacked, and run, without paying for it… so should they just remove the entire offline game? You know, since they will lose money from the people who play a hacked version offline, without buying it.
Given that you can freely swap between online and offline characters right now, I don’t think they’re not present in the game currently, rather they’re just disabled (there’s probably just a condition on the appearance tab that requires online mode for the tab to be “active”). The appearance tab and MTX are still in the game, you just can’t “legally” access them right now since EHG has disabled them. This may change with the upcoming true offline mode, but I doubt it since that would basically be a second copy of the game at that point.
This isn’t how online multiplayer games work. The assets are not on LE’s servers, they’re stored locally with the client. The servers just contains a map of IDs that they can use to refer to assets through, and they send these IDs to the client whenever they want to notify the client what type of asset is necessary. The client contains all assets used in the game for a few different reasons (the player may encounter any asset in the world by interacting with other players, the asset may be shared between different items/entities/objects/etc), regardless of whether the player actually owns whatever’s using the asset. At most the client may be told to not load certain assets or register certain assets with the engine’s asset manager, but the asset will still be present on the player’s own machine.
Going to assume you meant the MTX shop and appearance tab since I covered the MTX assets above. In that case hackers can absolutely cheat them into the system since the MTX assets are still present in the game. This is how you can download cheat menus for GTA V, for instance, that allows you to spawn cars officially exclusive to GTA Online within single player. The cars themselves are still present in the game, the means to acquire them are just disabled, but mods can still access the cars themselves. Same exact thing applies here.
Anything that gives you access to MTX can be counted as “stealing from the shop” since the end result is still people using MTX that they’re not supposed to. This is my entire point, there’s literally zero way for EHG to prevent this without completing shipping an entirely separate offline client that does not contain the MTX assets at all, then encoding the assets for the online client so that it only works with the online client (but even that can be broken with enough time and willpower).
EDIT: And to make it clear, I really don’t care about this personally since character visuals aren’t a big selling point in ARPGs for me (unless I look like an actual hobo, which is not the case in LE), I’m just pointing out that EHG’s stance is somewhat flawed because it’s not possible to fully block this. IMO it’s similar to the cat-and-mouse chase between publishers and pirates with regards to DRM: pirates will always eventually find a way through the DRM, meanwhile legitimate players are shafted since the DRM actively makes their experience worse.
Yeah, 100% fair critique. And hopefully they do a clear pass on where everything is stated to make this clear everywhere.
I’m guessing when it started getting pointed out to EHG that it wasn’t clear in places they’ve been trying to figure out WHERE they posted the info to try to bring it up to speed. One of those problematic issues with people requiring info be posted in 8000 different places to accommodate their specific info dump of choice.
The real question is how crap the servers will be on release. The last time I played (more than half a year ago) abilities behaved differently online than offline and some builds were borderline unplayable online. If I’m forced to play offline because of that and I can’t use skins then I think twice before I hit the upgrade to deluxe button on Steam (which I’m planning but this thread made me think twice)
Considering studios that have a lot more money than EHG (like Blizzard or GGG) always have issues on launch, I’m assuming there will be issues in LE as well, like the occasional disconnect or a higher queue on occasion. I’m hoping EHG have taken the necessary precautions regarding this, but having a smooth launch isn’t easy and I’m not expecting one.
That being said, I do expect that these issues won’t be so severe that you can’t play online and that EHG will step in fast to fix the things that do come up.
From my point of view? Yes. To me offline mode is just a waste of time because where I’m from I have internet without issues. People who like offline modes are most likely happy to get an offline mode and I can understand why. I can’t understand why people who want to play offline make a fuzz because offline functionality isn’t equal to the online experince.
Not everyone can be pleased and someone will always come up with strange topics… like this one ^^.
