Because if something goes wrong on a 3rd party provider side EHG won’t be able to do anything and only tell us ‘sorry guys we can’t do anything about it it is {SOMENAME}’ s fault’. It is risky when you don’t have control over so many parts of your own game.
how can ’ User / Game Access’ be non-core?
No.
When you provide a service, if you hire a third party to provide it for you, you’re still responsible.
But you can’t do anything about it just sit and wait for a 3rd party provider to fix the issue. Nothing else. Also if that 3rd party company goes out of buiseness you’re in a big problem.
Most of these companies that are industry leaders have Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that clients negotiate with them to clearly lay out the expectations and outcomes of any breaches or interruptions caused on their end. These companies also typically have a very robust uptime percentage and if things do hit the fan, they have entire teams of engineers on call around the clock to investigate and address any issues.
Not saying that an outage and extended outage is possible, but realistically, that company will most likely be able to identify and resolve the issue in a more efficient manner than a small team where it might be 1-5 people in charge of that system or are familiar with it
This is the first of our main set of changes. We consider this of extreme importance as the integrity of the online experience will be critical to have a competitive ladder, as well as ensuring we can maintain a great community by ensuring bad actors cannot access the game again.
Yes, it’s very important. 
Sure, that was not my point.
What about the engine? Would you have EHG scrap everything they’ve done & start work on a brand spanking new engine?
I’m an accountant so have zero experience/knowledge in this particular scenario & I suspect that virtually all people on here are in the same boat & we do need to trust that EHG know what the risks are (better than us) & that they’ve taken reasonable steps (SLAs) to mitigate them.
Asking about it is absolutely reasonable though.
I just express my concerns because it is not common for other major aRPG titles to use 3rd party solutions for MP so heavily in such vital parts as User access. I don’t even know one to be honest. I think there’s a reason why they avoid doing that.
Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. Just because nobody says “we’re using a 3rd party solution for X” doesn’t mean they aren’t. If nobody did that then the software wouldn’t be available.
It’s actually the opposite. We’ve moved to services where we can own and customize the code to our needs better - I can see how some of my language may have suggested otherwise. By moving we’ve increased our ability to customize, own, and respond quickly. We’ve increased our overall ownership of the technology by a huge amount.
Thank you for the clarification. I’m sure EHG can find the best possible solutions for MP I’m just being too impatient cos I want to play with my friends in a party so much.
Our intended Community Testing program for Multiplayer has moved to Q1 2022.
Does this mean for everyone who has access to the game or is this just for the people who already are in the community testing group? Forgive me if I misunderstood, but I could have sworn there were some prominent members of the community who get early access to some content to help test before the rest.
There is a bunch of people that are CT. We get early access to the patches for testing, some weeks before release.
For MP - as far as I understood - EHG wants to extend the CT group. Later it is planned to also have opt in testing where you can choose to take part, if you want.
So there might be both. 1st phase limited testing only for CT, opt in later and finally the rollout.
Edit:
This is pretty accurate, though of course subject to change. But the general strategy here will likely not be modified much - we are of the belief that a steady increase of players before a rollout are our best chances for success and catching major issue
sounds good if it were just impacting multiplayer, but if you take away access to the game entirely you better be prepared to offer a refund as it is essentially equivelent to damaging the customers product at that point(and may be rather iffy at a legal standpoint)
There’s no point in arguing about this. Although the terms of use aren’t specific to multiplayer mode and apply also to singleplayer mode, how would they recognise a cheater that has no connection to any competitive game mode?
I don’t think that EHG would waste resources on tracking offline cheaters. But I wouldn’t post any cheats or hacks or links on forums or encourage this kind of behaviour.
You forget that the cheater may still want to play the single player after being banned. If they cannot even do that you have an issue.
Even more importantly “bad actors” does not just mean cheaters, I have seen what happens when devs have the power to prevent people from playing entirely and it almost always gets abused. The worst cases are bans for mere criticism, bans for difference in political opinions, or even bans for literally no reason.
It depends on ToS and country. I´m not aware any lawsuit which was in favor of cheaters.
Sure that bans could be abused but they are mostly healty for game community.
The reason I’m here reading the forums today is because I just learned that Amazon has made yet another amazingly bad decision in New World. They are making a change to the HWM system that effectively wipes out the progress of thousands of players and forces them to start grinding for higher gear scores. It also severely impacts the crafting market, as high GS crafted items are no longer going to provide a means for (in the words of AGS) “circumventing the endgame gear progression system”. In other words, after months of release, your purchased and crafted items will no longer provide the benefits they state in their stats, you have to “grow into” them by grinding gear score. That was my last straw.
Sorry for the lengthy rant, but I just wanted you to know that I MUCH prefer you take your time and get this right before launch, instead of going the Amazon way. Thank you, thank you, thank you. My wife and I look forward to jumping into LE when it’s ready for MP.
Hm… Somebody that violates the TOS (no matter if cheating, abusive behaviour etc.) loses the right to use the product.
If we ever get an offline mode that works without login, the bad actor is safe to still play offline.
Without taking a dive into law stuff (I’m defeintely no expert), people should not violate the TOS of a service in the first place. That’s the best thing you can do to prevent being banned from the service.
You are right. There are companies that really abuse their right to exclude people and also ban for questionable reasons. The best example is New World. But the truth is hard to find. Not all people that pretend to be innocent, are innocent. But massereporting also seems to be a thing in this game.
In the end you have to trust the company that provides the product/service. Only time can tell how EHG will handle that kind of stuff. My impression is that EHG is a reasonable company.
I can agree with you regarding the concern of how “bad actors” are defined. But not about the treatment. If the definition of “bad actors” matches common sense, I’ve no issues with people getting perma banned even from offline mode.