The ABSOLUTE UNFAIRNESS of locking offline players out of cosmetics

people wanted an offline mode and now they are mad because they got an offline mode? Humanity at it’s finest :smiley: .

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At the moment. In the future, the offline mode would be completely offline (excluding patching).

Yes, that is basically the options we’re being presented with. Either an offline mode (“play without them”) or online (“connect to the internet to verify my cosmetics”).

Yes, but I want to use the cosmetics on my offline characters. The way I imagine it could work is a “verify cosmetics” button on the login menu. I’d press the button, the game would connect to the internet , check what cosmetics I have bought and let me use them on all my chars for this play session. If I’m somewhere without internet connection it would mean no MTX but I could still play the game.

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I think offline players would be satisfied with a limited store. You dont have to bring everything to the DLC page. I personally would be satisfied with a limited offline store so you dont end up with 10000 DLCS. It does not have to be all 10,000 DLCs or nothing.

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That is currently the plan, as stated in this announcement post and Kain’s first comment in this thread.

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I mean… really? What happens when that really super awesome weapon skin that Player_A wants isn’t available in the offline store? Or that portal effect Player_B wants? Or or or…

Then there would be nonstop griping about “why can’t all the cosmetic options be available in the offline store???”, or “why do online players get favorable treatment for cosmetic options!!!”.

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Well, since you are curious…

First and foremost - connectivity issues (obviously) - everyone will say that and they would be right. Not everyone lives in US or West Europe where the internet is of higher quality than the air you breathe. I am luckier than most - I have decent internet speed and connection, so no complaints there. But it is not perfect, it tends to snap randomly for a couple of seconds or minutes… After a couple of disconnects, my desire to play is gone completely (not to mention lost progress, various server errors etc). If a game is offline it counteracts those issues. And I don’t have all the time in the world to spend it waiting only to play for five minutes, which brings me to

Second reason, much more personal - the why? and how? I personally play games. Job that I do (adjacent to law enforcement) can be very stressful, and when I come home I wish to unwind a little, forget about the stress of the day and just relax. Arpgs are perfect for that, so for the last 15 or so years I play mainly D2, TL, GD, TQ and recently LE. Notice how these are all offline. In each of these games I have dozens of builds, finished and unfinished (in case of GD over 100). Sometimes I want to play max level character (or a specific build, depends what takes my fancy) and just go and mindlessly slay monsters, sometimes to level a new build and so on. Sometimes I start a new toon just because I want to make a build that corresponds to a certain look - hence my wanting of mtxs in a offline mode of LE - and LE has a lot of potential (we can all agree on that). I see a lot of people on the forum that say they will play seasons, and that is ok. Most of them will ever play a couple of builds, most likely the one that is meta in current season, perhaps a few others. Play for a couple of weeks, and then move on to another game and do the same until next content drop. And repeat. Not me. I create a toon and level it. If I wish, lets say a dw sentinel, I don’t take existing s&b build and respec, I start a new char. And so on. LE currently has limit of 20 characters for online play. If I play offline, there is no character limit, which is another advantage. And I plan on my LE offline toon roster to be even greater than in GD after a couple of years.

And lastly (finally!) - because I’m old :smiley: not old per se, but old enough to remember and grow up during the simpler times when people bought something they took ownership of said item. Lets say hypothetically, shit happens, and LE doesn’t survive next few years, despite it being and awesome game with awesome updates etc (money issues, EHG breaks up, servers shut down, more competition etc. like I said - shit happens). Online game is dead in that case. Any game. Offline game you can just play whenever you feel like. It doesn’t require external factors, it just needs someone willing to play and enjoy. Like I said - I wish to play LE 15 years from now. like I still play D2 or GD.

Sorry for the long post, wall of text and rant :slight_smile:
But I had to answer your curiosity why I play only offline games, and since this is likely one of my last posts on this forum, I took a liberty of answering in too much detail. Cheers :slight_smile:

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I’m with you…
But now…I would just like to retrieve my Voidwalker account.
And use my pets offline…
For the future,Offline DLC’s with shinies would be better to support the game.

Fair enough, but the old Supporter Pack shop site didn’t communicate that all the cosmetics included in the packs and the intermediate currency for cosmetics would be exclusive to the online portion of the game and would be inaccessible for offline mode players from v0.9 onwards. I wouldn’t call that a scam because you most likely didn’t do that intentionally but it still feels bad to know that I don’t have access to what I’ve paid for.

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It shouldn’t be that big of a technical issue to sync your unlocked stuff when you login and store it for offline use. This really sounds like a lame excuse.

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A feature being used to fund the live service portion of a game being exclusive to the live service portion. The unfairness.

Please Mr Keyboard Warrior was my father. I’m more of a keyboard necromancer.

That really should be obvious by now. He’s a lot more palatable/less confusing if you view him as a jester/naysayer here to inject a bit of levity into a dry situation & hopefully get people to turn their frowns upside down…

Also fixed that for you. :wink:

Thanks. :slight_smile:

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Life is so much better when people get the likes of your/you’re & they’re/their/there correct.

We really should deal with people who are making personal attacks towards others shouldn’t we?

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Dear let me take you aside and tell you something. Toxicity doesn’t solve Toxicity. The only way to win in life is to make your enemies smile.

So let me cheer you up with a joke I’ve learned in my times as a necromancer.

What did one skeleton say to the other?

Nothing. They have no vocal chords.

EDIT
That was purely on accident. I didn’t even realize.

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Please remember to keep conversations civil. We certainly understand it’s easy to get heated about something that you care about, that passion is very important. However please make sure that passion isn’t directed at other users.

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I’ve said this elsewhere on another thread, but I personally don’t think this is that big of a deal. If this were the most annoying thing about the game to me, I think the game would be pretty awesome. If the online play eventually works well in the future, the use cases for offline will become fairly limited due to that, so this would largely be a nonissue at that point.

Having said that, the use of words like “punish” or “unfair” on the internet is completely out of hand. If you understand what you’re buying and how it works before you purchase it, nobody is being unfair to you. Unfair assumes you were supposed to be treated a particular way and then you weren’t. These days, the way people seem to use the term unfair is “not served in excess of what I was originally entitled or agreed to.”

Stop and think about this for a moment: Nobody had any reason to assume before any of this was announced that they were agreeing to buy and play the game on the condition that cosmetics would be downloadable once purchased for offline play, if we knew for sure they would ever exist in the first place. But 10 minutes after most of us found that out, some of us then somehow decided they were promised that this content would work offline. This is pretty astonishing, at least to me. If you had asked me beforehand if I thought that this would be a common reaction, I would have told you I would not have expected it, especially not from this community.

Having said all of that, as I’ve said elsewhere also, it would be nice if that content were made available to download before the game were to go permanently offline to where that’s the only way it could be played. And this is the only use case long term where I think it really matters. What EHG will do in that regard remains to be seen. But that’s what I would desire at that juncture. I hope that gets some consideration when the time comes.

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Given that, apart from a Steam update, there is no communication to game servers when using offline, would offline mods be possible? Not sure LE’s take on mods in general, but not good for online attempted play I assume for sure. But for offline, this may resolve some of the tension as modders would be able to create cosmetic replicas or originals for download through something like nexusmods for offline players to use. This would heavily rely on the community and enthusiasts to work on but would offer some potential for offline players, and if the online servers go down far into the future, there is a way for enthusiasts to keep making things for the game.

This might seem like a dumb question since modders can usually just mod it without the dev’s input, but there is a difference between modding a game where devs don’t care, where devs create a window for mods, and where devs actively try to inhibit modding. This also won’t relieve people being upset anytime soon but may be of use in the future if the mod space for the game takes off. The main concern being if you go to use an online character and a mod for offline use is detected, there is a risk of a ban even if it would have zero impact on multiplayer/online characters. This would be the result of inhibiting mods on the extreme end. Where having an in-game section within Settings for offline mods to be viewed, imported, enabled/disabled would be facilitating modding on the extreme end.