Elite: General talk
16 Feb 2021, 9:53pm
16 Feb 2021, 9:53pm
Rho TefnutetRebecca HailYou're not blocked from accessing the content. You choose to not access it.
Lemme put it this way: imagine a scenario in which players cannot access Engineers, because gankers are barring them from accessing Engineers, who would make them able to fight them against gankers.
Tough luck, but I can't see why a court should care about that.
If what you describe would be the case, you could, for example, sue against a ban in a video game, which isn't the case.
You don't actually own the game, you have no right to any content within it. You have the right to install and play it, on the terms of the developer.
16 Feb 2021, 10:03pm
Rho TefnutetRebecca HailRho Tefnutet
Lemme put it this way: imagine a scenario in which players cannot access Engineers, because gankers are barring them from accessing Engineers, who would make them able to fight them against gankers.
Tough luck, but I can't see why a court should care about that.
If what you describe would be the case, you could, for example, sue against a ban in a video game, which isn't the case.
You don't actually own the game, you have no right to any content within it. You have the right to install and play it, on the terms of the developer.
I think you are dense and not really catching what I am getting on in terms of customer rights or maybe you don't live in a country which takes these seriously.
Subject closed.
The scenario you describe simply carries no legal consequence. Like what customer rights would you even cite for a complaint?
17 Feb 2021, 4:42am
Rebecca HailRho TefnutetHeilriderI can think, what I want, but any changes are impossible. Buuut...I heard, than in very, very early days frontier promised offline mode, not solo, and they changed it into solo online mode, so I'm rly not sure about their promisses.
FDev were not able to give offline mode, because we're speaking about 1:1 galaxy which amount of data no PC or console would hold, hence constant connection. There is a reason why you need a very powerful computer for Europa Universalis 4 or Hearts of Iron 4, because all stuff that happens is not the graphics but PC itself making AI thinking for 240 nations - the similar would apply to BGS, I'd risk, and while it wouldn't do stuff every second, take into account the way bigger scale given there's over 50,000 inhabited systems with at least five factions each. Offline mode would be impossible unless it would contain maybe 1000 systems with fixed economy... so offline ED would be a wholly new game, what would not be profitable for FDev.
No, it's not a technical limitation. It's absolutely possible to run a game like Elite on a bog standard machine. The comparisons to HoI4 and Europa Universalis are grossly misplaced, those games do not work in the slightest like an offline Elite would.
Not implementing an offline mode was a design choice. FDev chose the multiplayer over the singleplayer and as a result abandoned an offline mode. People need to stop being so stuck up about this. FDev explored the possibility and decided against it, that happens all the time in software development.
There is also a major difference between not keeping promise about the offline mode (which was mostly technical limitation) and taking away something from any of three modes available to the players. Open, PG and Solo are equal in terms of BGS, economy, rewards and so on. If one mode would have better bonuses - or worse, got some content cut available one certain mode - that would meet with a very negative feedback from the people who prefer this and not the other mode, in some cases even ending in customer rights court. And like I said in the other post, there is a lot of reasons why people use PG/Solo and not Open while playing Elite: Dangerous. If such a decision to restrict certain mechanics to Open Mode happened, FDev would lose a lot of customers who prefer other things than PVP - and a lot of people seem to forget that BGS is not only PVP, but also PVE mechanic.
If you try to take game devs to a customer rights court because of a balancing issue, you'll get laughed at. Some people will be pissed and 80% of the playerbase probably won't notice for quite a while.
To be fair, I wouldn't want to try running the BGS and the galaxy on a single gaming rig...
17 Feb 2021, 7:39am
The BGS obviously can't exist offline as it collects kills, trade data and completed missions from thousands of players and aggregates them in a daily "tick" that updates system states (boom, war, lockdown, etc.) and commodity market data, which in turn affect signal sources, locations of conflict zones etc. It's basically a database behind a web service, running high-frequency, low-volume transactions all day.
But that's just my uneducated guess. The P2P matchmaking part of the game is the most fascinating and probably the most technically challenging part of the game IMHO. Can't think of any other game that does this. The great thing about P2P networks is their ability to scale with demand. The more people log in, the more instances exist. No need for FDev to worry about demand spikes such as the recent one when the game was free on Epic. Most other MMOs wouldn't be able to double their active player base over night.
17 Feb 2021, 7:42am
Most of the galaxy is procedurally generated on demand by the star forge locally when you vist a system, i.e. it doesn't occupy storage space at all. Manual changes to that galaxy do, but are rather low in volume and static, i.e. not frequently changing. Hand-placed stations and settlements, human-readable names, etc.
I know. It's not the galaxy that is the concern. It's all the other things Elite does under the hood on its servers.
17 Feb 2021, 8:44am
This approach could limit the influence of potato player PC/connection influencing all others.
... And as a side effect this can prevent combat logs as even if you loose connection the centralized instance will keep the asset
Last edit: 17 Feb 2021, 9:17am
17 Feb 2021, 8:58am
SakashiroMost of the galaxy is procedurally generated on demand by the star forge locally when you vist a system, i.e. it doesn't occupy storage space at all. Manual changes to that galaxy do, but are rather low in volume and static, i.e. not frequently changing. Hand-placed stations and settlements, human-readable names, etc.
Yup, that's essentially it. Apart from ... 100.000 or so systems that aren't generated by the stellar forge, most of which aren't populated
The BGS obviously can't exist offline as it collects kills, trade data and completed missions from thousands of players and aggregates them in a daily "tick" that updates system states (boom, war, lockdown, etc.) and commodity market data, which in turn affect signal sources, locations of conflict zones etc. It's basically a database behind a web service, running high-frequency, low-volume transactions all day.
Not in its current form, although I'm reasonably certain that you could change it to only collect data for one player and calculate the resulting consequences immediately instead of waiting for a tick. You could implement even random fluctuations
But that's just my uneducated guess. The P2P matchmaking part of the game is the most fascinating and probably the most technically challenging part of the game IMHO. Can't think of any other game that does this. The great thing about P2P networks is their ability to scale with demand. The more people log in, the more instances exist. No need for FDev to worry about demand spikes such as the recent one when the game was free on Epic. Most other MMOs wouldn't be able to double their active player base over night.
Warframe does it too, although it helps that it's only four players at most establishing a connection.
I know of some hosting services that offer scale on demand as well, but the details of that elude me. I'm not a network engineer (yet).
17 Feb 2021, 10:41am
EpisparhSakashiro, why do you assume that centralized instances cannot be scaled on demand. It is same model just instead of having 1 player PC be used to sync the instance you can have a centralized cloud instance which do the synchronization for all players in it until it is empty.
This approach could limit the influence of potato player PC/connection influencing all others.
... And as a side effect this can prevent combat logs as even if you loose connection the centralized instance will keep the asset
Cloud-based scaling is possible of course, but it seems to be somewhat expensive, otherwise there wouldn't be so many games getting into trouble during peak hours.
I've been to some busy places in ED but haven't experienced any lag, rubberbanding or similar. In fact during the first months I didn't even know ED was using P2P.
My husband's PC and mine are wired to our router, so the typical wifi packet loss due to hotspot overlap is not an issue for us. This usually makes a big difference in online games. We use wifi only on hour phones. We've also enabled UPnP port forwarding, which is a prerequisite for instance hosting AFAIK.
17 Feb 2021, 1:19pm
Sakashiro
Cloud-based scaling is possible of course, but it seems to be somewhat expensive, otherwise there wouldn't be so many games getting into trouble during peak hours.
I've been to some busy places in ED but haven't experienced any lag, rubberbanding or similar. In fact during the first months I didn't even know ED was using P2P.
My husband's PC and mine are wired to our router, so the typical wifi packet loss due to hotspot overlap is not an issue for us. This usually makes a big difference in online games. We use wifi only on hour phones. We've also enabled UPnP port forwarding, which is a prerequisite for instance hosting AFAIK.
Server side gaming is expensive, much more so than the current P2P model. Beyond that, in order to make use of such an infrastructure, the game code has to be architected, designed, and coded to make use of it. ED was designed around a P2P model and converting it to use fully cloud based servers is not a minor change.
Cloud based servers are also quite a bit more expensive to operate. As such, either Frontier could implement subscription charges to support that operational cost or they would have to ramp up the monetization to cover the charges. TANSTAAFL, there is no free lunch. Monetization requires not only cosmetic micro charges but, in all likelihood, some QOL items have to be included as well. So, think weekly ARX charges for FC, ARX for ship transfers, a severe increase in grind for credits, coupled with bundles that can be purchased with ARX that halve that grind, similar for engineering mats, etc. Look at current free to play games for examples of what is required to entice users to spend money.
Cloud scaling has its own issues. Amazon is quite good at offering scaling of instances, but getting new servers online is not instantaneous and requires Frontier to be able to "predict" when the load will hit and have servers already up and prepped to handle them. It takes about 10 minutes to get a new server instance stood up in an Amazon cluster, even if I have a stable gold image ready to go to get it built. That will still have to be recognized by load balancers to send load to that instance, etc. Since no one is going to start up the game and wait 10 minutes to start playing, it means, they have to predict likely load and be ready with new server instances when needed. Making those predictions for business related load is already difficult, for a leisure time activity, it is much more difficult. Insuring that you have the reserved load within Amazon is also more expensive than simply using excess capacity. But, when you have to have servers, you can't count on using excess capacity, so Frontier would have to pay the premium cost for reserved instances, again, raising the operational costs which must be born by the users.
And these things are all factors that require someone to have planned having to do them, learn about them, prepare for them, etc. Frontier has an existing model that it has been using for more than a decade, so thinking that the entire company can be upended, redesigned, and re-implemented, with changes to all the business processes, skills, personnel, etc, based on the notion that PvP players will be happier with it, is IMO, somewhat unreasonable.
Also, again, IMO, the PvP community in ED is very outspoken compared to more casual players. But, the PvP community is also much more likely to be end-game players, already having explored the existing mechanics and stories and being focused on PvP because that is all there is left to focus on. Frontier is in the position of either choosing to cater exclusively to an end-game player set or to try to attract new players to the game. And, it is a choice, anything that they do to move the focus to PvP, given the advantages that long-term players already have, will, by definition, discourage new players from adopting the game. There are a lot of other games that are struggling with this choice, Path of Exile being the one that comes most to my mind.
And, it is most definitely a choice. For the PvP players that complain about how few potential opponents there are, changing the game doesn't change that. The game is still quite a large place and even in server side based, Open only, PvP combat would still be relegated to a predictable few places, with those that don't want to engage, simply avoiding those places. So, think of a CG that normally attracts 10000 users, but in Open Only, only gets 100. In order to combat that, Frontier has to design events to make the PvP risk worth it to those players that don't specialize their builds/play around PvP. Again, that requires active effort, real choices, etc. Frontier only has limited attention and time, so they can choose to focus that on building events that attract all players, or PvP, but they won't do both because there are disparate requirements for those different types of players. And in most cases, those events still have to be optional, or they risk alienating the users that don't want to do PvP. If they do that too much, the game simply dies, and much quicker, depending on the operational costs involved.
Given the need to completely re-architect and rebuild the game for Server side play, the operational and business costs for doing so, the benefit to a smaller, end-game set of users compared to attracting new users, I am not sure I see that happening. Although Odyssey may prove that wrong but I suspect that Frontier is trying to move strategically into the shooter/action space while still playing to the middle by using existing P2P network structures and keeping a purely PvE focus available.
17 Feb 2021, 1:33pm
No more concerns about combat logging, no care bear complaints, everyone is literally "paying" for the privilege of blowing each other up with all events basically offering dedicated server side instances for those that are "elite" enough to join in. If PvP is as popular as some users think, it should be able to pay for itself.
17 Feb 2021, 1:47pm
Igneel PrimeYou think having to pay for pvp will sit right with those people?
They wouldn't have to. It would be optional.
17 Feb 2021, 1:57pm
MarcOmegaeveryone is literally "paying" for the privilege of blowing each other up
This says something else. It's one thing to make an optional game mode. Even having certain content specific to that game mode. It's a completely different thing to have such a game mode tied to payments let alone subscriptions