The only reason for the shop to not translate to offline, is because you don’t want people editing stuff to get them for free. That’s fair.
But what you’re doing by making this decision, is punishing the people who want to/will have bought things from your shop. That isn’t community first, that isn’t consumer first. Thats everything last, except worrying about what people who were never going to spend money in the first place.
And like, this shouldn’t need to be something argued, look at the incredibly levels of gratitude that cdpr got, and what that translated to (before cyberpunk), because they were so against drm and everything around that. People respect these choices, they look at them favorably, because they understand that it’s a decision to put the consumer, the player and the community before everything else.
I don’t expect ya’ll to change your mind on this, not at all. But god damn I still hope actions will meet the words.
No cosmetics in offline is a direct punishment to paying customers, because of what non paying people might do. It sucks.
I also think it makes no sense, the game is already asking you to prove your ownership when you log in into offline. why cant it verify and give access to the mtx at that point.
Not only is it not currently “true” offline, but you cant even use mtx/stuff you might want to buy? kinda whack imo.
I didnt even know that mtx wasnt gonna be allowed in offline, seems super weird.
I mean, the issue is that the game is essentially being launched in an online-only state. Offline was a holdover for beta testing, if I’m interpreting what’s going on correctly. Even if it continues to exist, its purpose isn’t to be the primary way to play the game. And as DiceDragon says, I don’t think you can even truly access it offline anyways. Except for making longplay videos or playing when your internet connection is down for awhile like if you’re on a plane or something, there’s not a huge use case for the offline mode in the current era. As far as I know, Path of Exile doesn’t even have one.
All of this being the case, you’re not being punished so much as mildly inconvenienced. I know you don’t mean literally punished like in court, but I still don’t think that word fits in this context. If you knew what you were buying and how it would function ahead of time, then it’s not a problem. That should influence your decision to buy it or not buy in the first place. Beyond that, I’m not too sure why this is a problem people would be very passionate about.
There’s only one situation I think this would make any real difference, and that’s if the game itself dies off and it can’t be played online anymore. In that event, I assume EHG would make all of the online-only content available for download and the offline mode permanently accessible via local saves / Steam keeping your cloud save for you. Sure, that would be annoying. The game going away entirely when it inevitably does 5, 10, 15 years down the road will automatically be a hassle for everyone. But that problem is both unsolvable and a long ways off. If EHG wants to tell us how they’re going to handle that, it would be a little morbid but I would be keen on some kind of guarantee we’ll get to keep a playable copy of the game and the content in it.
And don’t get me wrong, sure; I don’t like the lag right now. If they don’t do something about that, they’ll be in that boat a lot sooner than I anticipate. But I suspect EHG is going to fix most of it and make this a nonissue. It’s more likely than not at this point.
You should take a look at my response, I think it was pretty well thought out. Basically, it’s not. But that’s okay. See above as to why. (Obviously more complicated, why it took some words to get through.)
While I think punishment is a bit of hyperbole, you raise some legit concerns. I hope they’re at least continuing to entertain/troubleshoot ways to allow off-line folk to enjoy MTXs as well. There may be lots of reasons why it isn’t possible but if it’s sort of like waiting for gender lock stuff to be taken care of (time, money, resources, etc.) than maybe somewhere down the line they might try to do it.
I mean every time we’ve ever asked about having offline delayed from online, so new content isn’t instantly yeeted towards with super powerful characters, so it can all be solved, we’ve been told that it’s too much work to have different versions of the game.
Meanwhile for mtx we’re having different versions of the game. I don’t think it makes sense to assume that the reasoning is a technical limitation.
I do say so. By the way, if you did you’d notice I’m not being totally critical of your concept here. It is mildly inconvenient. “Punished” is definitely too intense of a word for what you’re describing here though.
While it’s not really a solution to your problem, there is also the potential of user created mods which add in new, custom skins and content.
EHG isn’t really sure where they stand on mods, but from my query last year, they were open to mods in offline and stated they would neither aid nor hinder their creation and would monitor what becomes of such a scene, if one does appear.
Maybe a solution to MTX skins being unusable in offline would be to mod in your own skins, or creating a modding scene with some new transmog appearances to match your interests.
Source:
Mods are great. We don’t have any plans to directly support or hinder their creation. If an offline modding community emerges, it is possible that we might consider revisiting this in the future. It’s a pretty low priority topic for us at the moment.
I do agree that skins should be accessible in offline mode, but it’s probably an authentication nightmare since those skins have DRM attached since they’re only obtainable for real-life money.
No, they always advertised the game with the capability of playing it fully-featured offline (at release). That was the sole reason I made the purchase in EA even though I’m extremely cautious when it comes to games in their EA stage.
The supporter packs (for multiple accounts) of the game I bought included some cosmetics and currency. IIRC it wasn’t communicated that those are online-only and would be inaccessible when the multiplayer update (v0.9) starts at all. I just double-checked and the shop site definitely doesn’t say anything about online-only. I don’t really care for these cosmetics as I haven’t used them anyway. But it feels kinda bad to know that I could have spent way less money for the same feature set even though I primarily spent that money to support the studio. And now I can’t even use the currency I got with the purchase of the supporter packs.
And there are definitely ways of making cosmetics available in the offline mode.
I consider that highly unlikely. I can’t think of a single game that was revamped to allow for all online features being accessible from an offline mode in all the years I’ve been playing and working on video games.
If a game is no longer profitable enough to warrant maintaining servers then those are usually just shut down, with everything that is connected to it. Why would they spend a considerable amount of money on something that doesn’t make them any money?
Personally I dont bother with MTX so its not a real issue with me but it is generally a raw deal for those, like myself, that are forced by physical circumstance to play predominantly offline but would like the bling.
I live in South Africa so the absolute best pings I can get are around 160ms purely because of physics and even on good fibre there are occasional network issues that mean I cannot trust connections to be perfect throughout a playsession. So while I can usually login fairly reliably, its dog$$$$ to play online.
EDIT: Like right now, 8pm UTC, its almost impossible to play an online char at 170ms EU West on 200mbps fibre with speedtest.net perf from my location to the UK maxing out at 120mbps. Everything from watching my shield throws dissappear while playing to waiting for skills to register point additons 20 seconds after I click the node to forging taking 5 seconds to register a forge - so yeah playing online is simply impossible to enjoy for me
I’ll still probably buy something to support the game cause $35 for 2k hours of play means I feel I owe the devs something for the cookie jar but MTX as a means of revenue automatically excluding the offline player base is probably something the devs would/could/should figure out something for. There are always ways around the technical issues but its cat and mouse with the hackers out there so it probably isnt gonna be easy (quick).
Either way, it doesn’t seem like the primary feature they’re going to be selling the game based on. If they’re committed to making sure the game is playable offline, I’m not sure that means MTX cosmetics are a core part of that. As long as the items in the game have models added and look good, that’s all I really care about. And I really only care about that, as I mentioned earlier, from a very-long-term perspective. It would be nice if they would make MTX stuff you paid for like DLC you could download towards the end of the life of the game. I personally wouldn’t lose any sleep over it though.
I’m not really concerned if it’s likely or not. I was just discussing what I would assume would be the case if they acted consistently with this principle of people keeping their content and their track record. I profess not to know how likely or unlikely that actually is. I try to assume people will do the right or consistent thing until they don’t. That might unfashionable or hard to do sometimes, but that’s the hopeful attitude I try to keep about me in these things.
As for examples of things like this, yes there is one precedent, kind of. ArenaNET said at some point, if memory serves, they wanted to make an offline playable version of Guild Wars available to people when the game servers eventually go away. This is more of a thing on consoles though; a lot of the older online stores allowed people to download the games they had purchased for months or years after the store stopped functioning so that they could keep their content. Steam also allows you to keep and play games you have that are no longer available for purchase as well. So yes, there’s a little bit of this attitude of “keep what you paid for” in the industry already.
