"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

[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.)