I’m also like this. I actually care more about the skills MTX than anything else. In PoE, the only armor MTX I have is what came with the supporter packs. Everything else I spent on skills and the occasional pet.
You can actually expand on this. The fact that there will be an offline version (meaning the whole game has it’s files locally) means that there will be cracked versions of it for whoever wants to play them. It really isn’t fair that people get to play LE for free while we paid however much for it.
However, that’s the way the gaming industry has always been. Maybe there are some players that never used a cracked version to play something, but I certainly am not one of them and I don’t think there are many of them out there, especially with the prices games go up to these days.
There have been quite a few games that I bought after playing a pirated version though.
I agree with you that it’s a balance with other costs. In the early 00’s every company invested a lot in anti-piracy tools and DRM tools. They would spend lots of time and money on them only to see them cracked shortly after release. Eventually almost all just dropped this. It wasn’t worth the time and money. Now it’s gotten to the point where even a game like BG3 has no protection whatsoever. You can just copy the files and play them on another computer.
And one of those costs would be the legal pursuit of players who engage in piracy that they made possible through this hypothetical offline client. I’m not sure how much of it applies in this situation, but it’s factual that in the US, owners of Intellectual Property can lose their legal right to it if they are not taking adequate steps to defend it from infringement. That is a concern they likely have to factor in to this decision.
I absolutely disagree with this. People in the 90s and 2000s were absolutely not paying full price for games instead of pirating them out of a sense of duty to support the industry. They did it for the same reasons most people still don’t pirate movies and TV shows today despite being more accessible than ever - It’s easier and safer to just shell out the money, they’re afraid of Getting In Trouble, and they just flat out aren’t tech savvy enough to do it (and without getting caught).
And on the flip side, just because some offline players want cosmetics offline doesn’t mean it makes financial sense to open up the offline client for them and all the piracy that would come with it.
To be clear, ultimately this doesn’t affect me at all. I’m never going to use the offline client and I also don’t care if people get cosmetics for free that I may end up paying for. I’m expressing my support for their decisions to keep paid cosmetics only available online.
Well, many of them also had some huge hassle to actual paying customers, as well. Old Bard’s Tale games, you had to have your manual nearby, and find the 4th word in the 3rd sentence on page 43. Other games I played, actually had a random ‘validation’ check, mid-game…or on a save/load. Heaven forbid you dog ate your manual, and now you can’t play your favorite game anymore. :\ heh
How are we validating the offline clients are legit paid? If we can’t do that, I guess we just need to scrub the concept of an offline client, altogether, because someone might hack it, and not pay for it. :\ Seems like a silly over-reaction to a miniscule issue, right?
I don’t really feel the need to support it. I am simply wondering about the pros/cons of the situation, and the effect on actual paying customers who might want to play offline, for whatever reason(s) – shitty internet is still a thing. There are some out there who might not want constant rubber-banding, or lag hiccups affecting their play. I, personally, would value the gaming experience of my real customers, and then worry about the small world of hackers – who wouldn’t be giving me money anyhow.
No idea! Maybe Steam can handle that for the client executable, but not for extra things internal to it. But I think it should be obvious that the two are different enough to make one tenable and the other not, or EHG would not be doing one and not the other. It’s kind of silly to use that as a jab, like EHG would purposely withhold a fun extra thing (that would also generate revenue) from offline players if they could make it work.
So, really, what I would call an “overreaction to a miniscule issue” is anyone getting up in arms that they can’t buy the prettiest hats when they choose to play a primarily live service game completely offline in 2024.
And they are, by doing something that’s almost unheard of in Current Year for a game like this - providing a truly, 100% offline client that can be played with no internet connectivity whatsoever. That’s how they are valuing the gaming experience of their real customers.
Cosmetics are fluff and luxury. They are absolutely not core to the experience of the game in any way. Not having access to them does not keep you from playing or enjoying the game.
While this is true, they are a source of revenue for EHG. If they block it from offline version, they are potentially also blocking the extra income they might have from people that play exclusively offline, for whatever reason. In that case you might say that it’s better to allow MTX offline, even if some will simply hack the game to have them, because at least some will still pay for it, which is more than they would get if they just removed MTX from offline altogether.
I don’t think there’s a clear cut solution to this. I’m sure EHG is aware of the issues and it’s up to them to decide which way they want to go with.
Yep. But they arrived at the decision that cosmetics will not be available offline, and let’s be real, there’s zero chance that the money factor wasn’t one of the first things they brought up and discussed. Clearly, they decided - with likely way more insight into it than any of us have - that the revenue potential didn’t weigh enough to tip the scales.
I do! There’s actually two:
Don’t buy things you can’t use.
Time traveling pixel hats are not real, be ok with not having them.
Since I don’t care, I’ll belittle the issue for those it does affect.
Brb, I’m going to tease all the colorblind and vertigo players, because their accessibility options aren’t in the game, and it doesn’t concern me. #FeelsGoodMan
This is quite a maximalist point of view, which results in negative-sum game.
Deconstruction and nihilism can be used as a starting point but it is rarely a solution.
As I’ve written in the first post: I want to support the game, but as a healthy human individual my egocentric traits demand for either a higher quality for animations/sync of given animations for online game play (which is a harder solution) or cosmetics as a form of reward for offline.
Both solutions solutions will undeniably result in improvement of player’s experience, one for online player base and one for offline player base. I’m up for any of those.
It is worth mentioning in this thread that online and offline experiences are quite different.
I don’t know how or why, but it feels like the game has been entirely recoded for online and now runs on two completely separate clients.
And if you compare, ALL the differences are in favour of offline. It is simply a better game, unless you really want to play in a group.
Strangely, I don’t mind cosmetics being online only for now, because I see it as the only, and much needed, incentive to play online.
I don’t know what the future holds. A few possibilities:
. 0.9.2 online, while still inferior to offline, runs better than 0.9.0 online (that I considered unplayable). If we keep going in that direction, online could become better than offline.
. The clients could align and the game become the same offline and online. I would expect that, because I find starnge that we have so many differences.
. Sooner or later (likely later) some achievements will appear, and I have a feeling some of them, if not all, will be obtainable online only. That would be another incentive to play online.
That is because the server performance still isn’t optimal. EHG is aware of this and they want to improve it for 1.0 and onwards.
The gliding animations is one of the things they’re trying to fix for online, along with load times and other things.
I don’t see that happening. Any lag you experience will always negatively impact online experience vs offline experience, which will have none. They might be mostly similar, which is the objective, but there is always the chance of lagging. Online play will offer other advantages (like trade or grouping to get past some obstacle or getting rushed) that offline won’t get.
Again, this is simply because of server performance and it will be (hopefully) fixed.
Mike has said that achievements will happen and that we will also likely get steam achievements. Kinda like what happens with PoE or other ARPGs. Meaning you can get the in-game achievements offline but you’ll need to be online for steam to register those.
Although, if it works anything like PoE, you can get them offline and you’ll get the steam achievements when you go online.
I used to play PoE with their client for years. When I returned this year for a little while, I used the steam client. Once I logged in, I was awarded with a huge amount of them. Basically all the ones I had already collected before.
That’s not what I was talking about (although it is a valid point, I cannot reach Heoborea without dying from lag or disconnection but I play Diablo 4 hardcore without any issue on the same machine).
I was talking about code difference between online and offline. There are plenty. A few examples to clarify:
. When I time travel I get a cool animation offline. Not online.
. When I enter a new zone online, my HPs start at around 20%. Because the game apparently removes and reloads all my gear. Offline, I enter at full HPs, as shall be.
. Channeling skills get “stuck” online if you just do a quick burst. Offline, they don’t.
. Even more puzzling: the chest in the secret area in The Courtyard is full offline, empty online. One room in The Shattered Valley can be entered offline, but online you cannot break the door.
. I can’t “empty” a skill button online (as in, make it blank). Offline, I can.
All very small differences, of course, but many, so they add up. And they are not about servers, the code is different, and the offline code performs better.
Now, thinking about it, it could be server related in the sense that they had to cut off part of their code to make it “lighter” for the servers to handle. I don’t know.
I think they disabled that animation in online because some people complained about causing them vertigo. I expect at some point it will become a part of the options to enable/disable this and both versions will have it.
I expect that many of the differences are because the offline client hasn’t been regularly updated while they’re working on the definitive one. They seem to only fix serious bugs on it.
So when they fix something, or they break something, in the online version, the offline one gets further out of sync.
Once we get to 1.0, I think we can expect a much more similar experience both online and offline.
The point is modders can just mod copies of the skins or make even cooler skins thus just completely shutting down your argument. At least with allowing offline characters access to skins that’s just another source of revenue even if there are pirates out their most people are lazy and would rather just buy the ones right in front of them instead of going to look for a modded one but if you don’t give them that option they’ll just turn to mods.
