"Elite: Dangerous refund policy detailed after offline support dropped"

[kane_magus]

(EDIT) And here is the Rock, Paper, Shotgun version. They seem to be a bit more willing to take Frontier to task over this, as opposed to PC Gamer, which just seems to be more interested in reporting as is, rather than editorializing about it. And the comments under there are just as negative to this overall as they are at PC Gamer, which is nice

Comments

[kane_magus]

Yeah, Minecraft was the first, and arguably implemented it in the best way. It would have went over like a lead balloon, though, if Notch had charged 3+ times the final release price for people to have the "honor" of testing his game for him, rather than significantly less than full price like he actually did. Also, imagine the outrage if Notch had said, a month before the game went full release, that he was scrapping the offline[1] mode and would require constant connection to Mojang servers just to play the game at all.

Back on the topic of Elite, from what I've seen and read, it looks to me like the whole promise to include offline mode to begin with was nothing but a desperate, disingenuous ploy that they tried halfway through the Kickstarter to get more backers, because people simply were not backing what was before that point shaping up to be an online-only game. Now that they have the money and the game is about to release, they just no longer feel the need to continue with the deceit, and are now fucking backers over by not giving a lot of them the opportunity for a refund, just because those backers made the poor decision to kick in something extra for the "privilege" of testing the fucking thing for them (again, see my bizarro world comment about testers having to pay to test shit, rather than being paid for it). I'll just say it again, I seriously hope they get sued into fucking oblivion over this shit.

[1] - Sure, it's true that Minecraft does require an online login, as it always did as far as I know, but that's not even remotely close to the same thing as always-online, and even then I'm pretty sure you can still play the game on some level without necessarily having to log in.

[owsf2000]

With respect to Minecraft, you could always play offline without logging in. The only exception to this, of course, is to install it in the first place since it has to download the installers and thus log in the first time. After that, as far as I can tell, you can play offline as much as you want without it phoning in again. The only drawback being that you can't play online on any server that's running in online mode. (Meaning it will verify with Mojang when players connect to it to verify they are who they say they are.)

You could always run the server in offline mode, but you end up being a grief haven as anyone can log in as anyone else. So if someone logs in as an admin player, they technically are the admin.

So obviously most servers don't run in that mode.

But yes, Mojang did this first, and I agree that they DID do it the right way. At first having fully free accounts for the early early betatesters, then they went to alpha at less than half price, then to beta at about 2/3 price, and finally to full.

That's the way it should be done, honestly. Although probably only do the free-free until you start advertising it. As you get people creating shitloads of accounts. >_>

Just about every person trying to do this early access tactic ever since has been Doing It Wrong. (Since it makes them more money with fewer players.)

[owsf2000]

Also, reading over the comments a bit more, because I like torturing myself, I noticed that some of the FD defenders were going on how FD was "blackmailed" into adding the offline mode mid-kickstarter because they were going to withdrawl their pledges otherwise.

I'm like.. WTF. How's that blackmail. That's showing people actually wanted offline. FD added it because they knew even without the potential pledge removals (one was a high level bidder - probably the 5000 dollar pledger that was pissed off on last friday's announcement.) they were not going to meet their goal in time.

One commenter debunked the blackmail claims by showing it for what it is with this:

"If I was selling you a cake and you said to me "Yes, I'll buy your cake but only if it has cherry filling." is that blackmail?

If we we made the transaction on the agreement only for you to realise that the filling was blueberry filling instead of cherry like we agreed, is it you who is in the wrong because you forced me to sell you cake with the wrong filling? Or did I sell you a cake under false pretences?"

That's the situation right there. That's -exactly- what happened here.

[kane_magus]

You tell them you will buy their plain cake, but only if they put icing on it, and then then they say, okay we guess we'll put icing on the cake even though we wanted our cake to have no icing on it, and then you say okay, then I'll pay them for this cake after all. Then they say, hey, if you pay us a bit more, we'll let you eat a slice of this cake, to try it out and see if it actually tastes good and to let us know what we can do to improve the taste of our cake, and you were then dumb enough to pay them for that slice of cake with no icing on it, with the understanding that you'd still be able to buy the cake with icing on it later. But then after that, they say no, we're actually not going to put icing on this cake after all, and we're also not going to give you your money back that you paid for the whole cake with icing on it, because you ate that extra slice of cake with no icing that you paid extra for.

In that case, no, you weren't "blackmailing" them into putting icing on the cake. You were simply informing them when they tried to sell you the cake that their cake was inferior to a cake with icing on it. They had the option then to say well, fuck you, if you don't want our cake with no icing on it, we'll sell it just to people who enjoy our plain no-frills cake. But oh, wait, there aren't enough people out there who want our shitty icing-less cake. So what they did instead was the straight up lie and say yeah, we'll have icing on this cake, just so that everyone who wanted icing on the cake would pay for icing on the cake, even though they never had any intention of ever putting icing on the cake.

[kane_magus]

To explain it more simply, "blackmailing" implies that they were being forced to give you money for something, when that obviously wasn't the case. You (the buyer/investor/backer) are the one giving them (the game dev) money, not the other way around. Exchanging money for the expectation of a future good or service, and refusing to give said money when said good or service as advertised is not one that you want, is not "blackmail." And if they later change the terms of said good or service after you've paid them for it without offering a chance for you to get your money back because you no longer agree with the way they are doing business, they are the bad guys here, not you. Why is this so difficult for some people to understand? Why are people idiotically defending the indefensible? Oh, wait, answered my own question there: these people are idiots.

Also, on another note, I love (read: hate) all the dumbasses who say things like "Well, it's Kickstarter/crowd-funding/early access, anyway. You should know going in that they're probably going to change their plans and goals and whatever. That's part of the process of game design, and if you pay, you deserve what you end up with, even if it's something completely different from what was originally promised." In response to that, I say simply that, well, I suppose that just means then that I'll no longer be buying into the whole Kickstarter/crowd-funding/early access bullshit. I'll wait until a game is actually released (and then wait some more) before I consider paying money for it, and if that means that said game doesn't get released because they didn't have the money to make it, then tough shit. Sucks for them, I guess.

[kane_magus]

Heh, it looks like the guy who made the "(more like blackmail)" post under the PC Gamer article made the same post, almost word for word, under the RPS article as well, though he posted under a different user name. Reputation management at its finest/worst.

[owsf2000]

The comments were also aware of this stuff, and noticed that there was apparently the same guy in the pcgamer thread that had multiple alts all cross-responding/defending each other and up-ranking each others posts.

I believe the comments that were suspicious of that as well, given all these people were making the exact same kinds of typos and poor grammar mistakes. And they were all from south america somewhere where apparently there are "rent-a-trolls" to coin a term. Basically people that get paid to do shit like this.

Even if he wasn't being paid to try to defend Elite, it was basically the same guy. ie: far fewer real people actually think what Elite did was proper.

[kane_magus]

Were they talking about the blackmail guy, or the guy who keeps bringing up Star Citizen in the Elite threads, apropos of absolutely nothing at all? Then again, those could very well be the same guy, too.

You'd think that if they were paying someone to defend their game, they'd pay someone who's more literate than that guy. But then, maybe if they're too articulate, that could be another give-away that they're fake, I guess? I mean, after all, you'd normally expect the stupid, illiterate jackasses to be the ones defending stuff like this, rather than someone with an ounce of common sense and command over the English language.