It would be nice if you could create some middle ground for offline runners to use cosmetics.
Just to show why I personally can’t play online: create characters in off/online and check the Grael movement in second starting area. The animation stops a few ms before he gets into his position in the world which causes him to slide in idle animation.
The same issue is with all npcs/mobs/creeps/enemies in online.
I want to emphasize that I get the word “supporter” in supporter packs.
But you can’t deny that there is a certain dissonance in buying visual stuff you won’t be able to ever use.
I’m pretty sure that the gliding animations issue is being worked on. I remember seeing something about it, just not sure if it’s for 1.0.
In any case, even though I don’t plan on using offline, I agree with this. You paid for the MTX, why shouldn’t you be able to use it, even while offline. Unless there’s some technical issue for this, but if there is, I’m sure the devs will clear it up and say so.
If purchasable MTX were available offline, there would be nothing in place for verifying legitimate ownership that couldn’t be immediately circumvented. It’s a situation just begging to be abused. And the only way they can solve that is by compromising on their promise of offline being totally, completely, 100% offline.
There’s no possible “middle ground” here. It’s not going to happen.
I mean, how is that any different from just editing your file and cheating everything you want? It’s offline, I don’t personally see the issue with it. There will probably be some mods for offline that change all sorts of things anyway.
As long as you can’t take the stuff you edit in your offline saves to online, I have absolutely no issues with it.
Editing your offline character’s save file doesn’t get you something for free that everyone being honest has to pay for. One is piracy, the other is not. I don’t know why this is even a question.
Well, don’t the artifacts have to be downloaded by the client, in the first place, to be rendered in-game? Either by the player, or anyone they encounter in MP with MTX cosmetics? I can’t imagine it would be that hard, for someone determined enough, to hack the client and make those available in off-line mode… soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
Current state of the client is: you get the list of your online characters which is the middle ground and is not “true” offline.
You could just get another .json with allowed mtx for your account, and if you want to buy more - you will need to use online version.
Yet again I want to point out that this post wasn’t made to create wedge between online and offline, but to make offline “more” viable and also to be the source of income for EHG.
With the caveat that I have no idea what their code base looks like, it’s theoretically possible for them to break out the necessarily different code into its own chunks to minimize maintenance problems. They may structure all the gameplay logic code so that both the servers and the offline client are bringing it in from the same place to use it. And (at least according to a Unity employee and the code for the game we both supported), it’s standard practice in Unity dev to use (gross) compiler constants to chop out or include different code depending on what you’re building (dev vs release, online vs offline). So in theory it’s not as big a deal as it might seem to maintain two different clients.
Or TLDR, it would honestly surprise me if they didn’t use two different client builds, and @Iceberg appears to have a receipt for that.
They had complained in the past about the difficulty/additional workload (I think) of maintaining both the pre-0.9 SP client and their own mp client, having (ithink) to add new stuff twice (to both sp & mp) & the reason we got nothing for a year prior to 0.9 was due to them focussing solely on converting everything over to the mp-client. This is also why we had a load of old bugs come back with 0.9.
I get but it was just an “out of the hat” idea And sometimes cost of man-hours to block user from pirating the content will result in net loss as the given marginal group of players are not the paying users anyway.
From my personal experience hardship of containing two mirrored instances is never worth the pain it brings.
Especially for Unity engine driven project.
It’s easier to have one code base and cut some of the beforehand isolated stuff during actual build process.
Keeping this in mind my hypothesis is that behind interface wall (local system tick/distant server tick), it is the same code base with the same assets. Which still creates a possibility for middle ground.
Yeah, this just seems like something to keep people from abusing something they weren’t going to pay for, in the first place… but also ends up punishing those who are supporting your game, financially.
I don’t really see the value in not allowing cosmetics online, but perhaps there’s quite a bit of overhead involved in allowing them, that just makes the entire situation a lose/lose.
I mean, ultimately we’re both in heavy speculation territory here. For context, I’m a software engineer and I have a few years of experience doing DevOps for a AAA game that is built in Unity. I know that it’s possible to architect and manage the code in a way that makes compiling into separate online and offline client builds mostly painless. But I also know that if you didn’t start out with that goal in mind, it can be a huge pain in the ass to refactor code that wasn’t built to do that. So, I can make some good guesses and talk about what’s possible and what I’d want to do in that situation, but don’t think I’m trying to say anything definitively.
There’s obvious financial value in keeping players from being able to pirate paid cosmetics with an offline client, but I honestly think EHG probably cares at least as much about the feeling of fairness for other players. By which I mean - Would it be fair that the honest players who want to support the game have to pay for cosmetics, but the dishonest ones could get all of them for free?
Yes, this is a key factor. From the screenshots/teasers, and without having any other info, I’d say they did at least a partial recoding and have 2 clients. But I’m mostly talking out of my ass without any real info, just based on my programming experience (though not in games).
Another important factor is how often the offline client will need updates. Will offline also get seasonal content? Will it need to be updated at the same time as online?
The main issue is that the online client doesn’t have the full game code. A lot of it will be in the servers. So you can’t really use that client for offline. Offline needs to have all the info locally, otherwise it won’t work without a connection.
Well, a big part of having MTX is being able to show them off. I know this is not true of everyone, but it’s a general trend. And usually someone that will hack the game to use MTX is someone that wants to show them off as well. Which they won’t while offline. So there isn’t as much incentive for that.
This is not to say that I support having them offline or not. I’m fine with either decision EHG comes up with, especially because I don’t plan on playing offline.
I absolutely agree with with this statement and such discussions even in speculation format could provide invaluable feedback for dev team. As sometimes it’s hard to break from known loop of made concrete decisions which are bound to current state of the code base.
Or just to have a laugh about people trying to guess how the things run under the hood during a coffee break. That helps too.
I had the exact same questions and it would be nice to receive some official statement about the plans for offline, But I think it’s better to create a separate forum post about it, just to keep topics isolated even if they fall under the same category “offline”.
I wonder what the breakdown is on that and if anyone has ever tried to find out. Personally, I’m not one of those people. I like cosmetic MTX because I want to look awesome while blowing up monsters. The only interest I have in other players is using them as a store.
But you have to balance that against other costs. And, what would be the overall impact, really? In the 90s and 2000s, basically every game had a pirate/cracked version you could get. Yet, millions of people still paid cashy monies for them. Why? Because the real gamers know developers need money, or there would be no more games. The real gamers would still pay EHG for cosmetics, because they want to support EHG, and fund further development from them. Just because some hackers wanted free cosmetics, doesn’t mean the entire player base (or even a large % of them) would partake in it. So, all a limitation like this would effectively do is, keep the small portion of people not going to pay money anyway, from getting something.
And, fairness? There’s maybe 3 people out there that would care about this. I mean, I’m not in the slightest bit upset that I paid full price for this game, when some other player might have gotten it at a 60% off Steam holiday sale. And, I doubt EHG would refund everyone who paid full price… out of fairness.
And sometimes cost of man-hours to block user from pirating the content will result in net loss as the given marginal group of players are not the paying users anyway.