With the arrival of the first skill MTX, I wanted to bring back a long discussed subject about cosmectics ans offline mode. Right now, cosmetics are simply desactivated when you play offline, meaning that even if you paid for the MTX, they just don’t appear in your session.
That’s a choice from EHG, because as they want the offline mode to be really offline (no connexion to server, no verification for your account…), integrating MTX to offline mode would mean that you have to download a folder with the cosmetic, and they can’t check what you do with this folder or how you got it. Therefore, getting cosmetic illegally would be way too easy.
I always thought that it just makes it a little more difficult for hackers to get cosmetics, and simply impossible for legit players to have them. But I understand EHG position, if you can get all the cosmectis offline, maybe some online players would play offline and stop paying for micro transactions. I’m not sure if there are many people in that case but I understand the logic.
With the arrival of skill MTXs (which look really cool), I feel like it’s a new downgrade for offline players that want to support EHG. I don’t want to play online as it consumes way more ressources than I need. So I just play without them for now.
But I wonder, was EHG completely firm about not having MTX in offline mode? Is it possible to have them in the future, maybe if they find a clever solution to this hacking problem? Or is it definitively a closed topic?
I don’t think this was ever a hard stance of EHG. It’s more that it’s not as high priority. Mike has been asked about this on the stream and he says they’re looking into it. I don’t think I ever heard him say “No” to that.
Oh great, thanks for the response!
I understand that it’s not a priority, I would rather have an even better game than just cosmectics. But it’s good to know that it may happen in the future.
I guess it just depends how you view “not going to happen” as whether that’s a “hard stance” or not… Personally, why my ex said that “certain things” weren’t going to happen, I took that as a fairly hard stance (& am now divorced, but anyway)…
Well, I’m not personally aware of any other official statement on this issue. There was a long thread about a year ago about this and players had plenty of things to say one way or another, but I don’t think EHG ever chimed in.
Maybe they did it before I started playing?
They’ve always said that they won’t be doing offline MTX 'cause piracy or similar (ie, that they can’t be sure that the true offline mode couldn’t have all of the created MTX activated).
Then they need to implement a proper verification process. There’s a myriad of ways to do that, with another myriad of ways to ensure that people can’t easily (and sometimes even with decent effort) pirate your stuff.
But plainly spoken? If the option is between ‘We don’t sell a single thing’ and ‘a good portion of the stuff we would’ve sold is pirated’ is there then the choice is fairly self-explanatory.
‘Some’ is better then ‘None’.
None that can’t be cracked and the vast majority of them are very easily cracked. It’s why almost no games these days have DRM, or have only “out of the shelf” token ones, because it’s not worth investing in them anymore.
The only solution that has been resonably successful is online verification. And even that can be worked around.
Ordinarily I’d say yes. But those aren’t the options. The options are: “We don’t sell a single thing offline and we don’t provide MTX in the offline client, so nothing gets pirated” and “We sell a few things (how many remains to be seen) and our stuff gets pirated”.
Are people actively playing online because of the MTX? Or primarily for other reasons? And how many would we be talking about?
And in comparison… how many would only play offline if MTX were also available there? Rather then online?
Not to speak of how many would pirate (with a annoying method to crack and hence pirate, rather then ‘change this single value’, make it several times redundant and hide it in fractions behind values throughout the game to verify as an example, that’s provide to be one decent fairly fail-safe option) versus not.
I think EHG would come out substantially better with the offline method and at least a half-decent system. Not even a very complex one… just half-decent.
Sure, that’s all valid. And I’m sure EHG goes through the data (and player feedback) to arrive at whichever conclusion.
I was just pointing out that the current method completely prevents MTX piracy by not including it in the offline client.
And there’s also the psychological aspect of it: people paying for MTX and seeing people pirating them for free.
It’s always something to account for, although I wouldn’t put too much emphasys in this particular argument. It’s not different from paying to play the game and seeing people playing it for free.
