Out of Pod Experience

Meh, that sucks for people with ****** internet but it does not surprise me in this day and age that the devs would want to do something like have a constant internet connection.

I'm not surprised that nobody wanted the hassle of doing what amounts to a live database merge every time some offline player decides to go online again.

The only sort of offline gameplay they could make work without killing themselves is to have the offline game be some kind of virtual/holodeck thing, so that you get the gameplay but with zero impact on the persistent world. Even then, as another poster in that threadnought noted, you're still asking for a baked-in client/server architecture, or else a whole new application. Both have severe disadvantages.

Frontier are dumb for promising it in the first place, but everyone makes mistakes. IMO their best bet is to pull a Bethesda and release the MMO as a separate game from the standalone offline games. So ship Elite: Dangerous, set up support and new content development teams, and then start on the offline-only Elite 4, or whatever they want to call it.

Backlash is quite impressive, with over 7,000 comments at the 465+ pages (and growing) thread. Dunno if someone is ever keeping track of that monster full of disappointment, but the tone is quite civil at this point and apparently the discussion revolves around refunds to people who will not be able to play the game.

And IMO they have a moral case, obviously some people without a reliable Internet connection would not have backuped a online-only game, yet that was not what Frontier told them...

I doubt it.

Complainers tanked Ubisuck's stock by almost 10% and yet I'm sure AC Unity still sold like hotcakes. Now the gaming subreddits are filled with garbage like, "herp derp how do I get AC Unity to run better?" Instead of, you know, not buying an obvious turd shat out by the one of the most anti-consumer publishers in gaming.

I doubt it will affect E:D's sales much. ;D

Well if something does happen to Elite I'll be really sad.

Star Citizen is utter crap right now IMO.

CCP please dont **** up. You look like gold compared to the other two big space games right now.

Well those players are certainly not flocking to Eve right now.

And where were all those guys in the last 11 years?

Get a clue, free of charge: EVE has hit a population cap. Now CCP is selling the game back to former and current subscribers... and that is a very short lived strategy.

Once you sold EVE to everyone interested on it (and CCP managed to consume in excess of 9 million unique users in the process, not a small feat), the only options are:

- sell another game (we know how that worked... twice!)
- call it a day and grow petunias in glasshouses
- sell EVE to (gasp!) people who never bought it in the past

HTFU can never fail, it can only be failed.

EVE doesn't suffer from a marketing problem. Lots of people try EVE. They don't stay. I personally know two people who wanted to try EVE for exactly what it is--Machiavellian, cutthroat, dystopIan--and they still didn't stay all the way through their trial periods.

EVE's problem is retaining people once they're here. I don't know where the idea comes from that retaining new players necessarily involves mollycoddling them, but it's stupid and it needs to go away. The simple fact is that, as it stands, EVE fails to get new players into the game. That's neither a marketing problem nor a problem with the game, necessarily (though: sov nullsec). It's a problem with the new player experience, and CCP needs to fix it.

Back on topic, I hope ElIte:Dangerous recovers from this gaffe as well, because it looks like a very well-executed game, and different enough from EVE to be its own thing with its own appeal.

There are a lot of features that are coming to ED that Eve does not have, a current system is manual flight into a station. I wonder if we might see this in Eve due to the WASD keys that are currently being tested?

I'll add, if E:D is having this much issue with canceling a feature for now, imagine the backlash that other game will get when they need to scrap huge sections of it.