Ubisoft's new deal, for new games. Players must be connected to play offline...

[billswagger]

The world isn't perfect and things do go wrong on occasions, but your connection is still three times faster than mine and i have no troubles.
Much of what you described could happen to anyone i suppose, but the likelihood is rare. Your real problem sounds like your utility company, not the gaming companies.
The internet and computers is like shoes and socks, it doesn't make much sense to have one with out the other. When you mention cracks, and such, its precisely why this sort of thing is being done. I remember when online registration got you a key code for most games, but even that is not good enough anymore with the advent of torrents and such cracks.

Really all i hear is a bunch of nay saying and complaints, which might be justified, but you should recognize you are the minority on this one. Most people who play games just go along with whats required and seldom ever poke their kilobytes into a forum discussion.

I can understand why people are put off by change. I think of it as a sign of the times.
There are many other services offered through an internet connection. Banking, billpay, ebay, etc etc.

[=FPS=Salsero]

>Banking, billpay, ebay, etc etc.

And all these services require you constantly being online, eh?

Anyway, developers have said:

.....we came to the conclusion that you all needed the ability to fly without a permanent internet connection (in some game modes). A network connection will still be necessary for new user account and profile creation. ...

That's OK. When they will roll this patch out - I am going down this link.

No earlier, though.

Thanks, Eldur.

[zakkandrachoff]

Originally Posted by Quote

Will I need to be online the whole time when I play the game? Including for single player?
Yes. You will need to have an active Internet connection to play the game, for all game modes.
.

This is a very stupid idea.

The best proposition is that the people that download Storm of War battle of Britain from internet and parched that, cannot actualizing when Korea theatre release. And other series to. SOW will continue to more than 2030. Never can they parch everything series.

I have so many problems for play whit internet connection. I live in the rural and have so many crashes on the line of internet and the service CIUDAD FLASH is not good too.

At least, only require internet to open Storm Of War. And play offline without internet connection.

I don’t buy Rise Of Flight because is only constantly connected playing. when have a crash in the modem or in the line (all the time), crash my single player game. So stupid. very.

[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by billswagger

The world isn't perfect and things do go wrong on occasions, but your connection is still three times faster than mine and i have no troubles.
Much of what you described could happen to anyone i suppose, but the likelihood is rare. Your real problem sounds like your utility company, not the gaming companies.
The internet and computers is like shoes and socks, it doesn't make much sense to have one with out the other. When you mention cracks, and such, its precisely why this sort of thing is being done. I remember when online registration got you a key code for most games, but even that is not good enough anymore with the advent of torrents and such cracks.

Really all i hear is a bunch of nay saying and complaints, which might be justified, but you should recognize you are the minority on this one. Most people who play games just go along with whats required and seldom ever poke their kilobytes into a forum discussion.

I can understand why people are put off by change. I think of it as a sign of the times.
There are many other services offered through an internet connection. Banking, billpay, ebay, etc etc.

Small correction, my connection is 3 times faster than yours when it works. The bandwidth is there, but the delay in getting anything to start transmitting is such that i can't do much more than browse websites. Servers i used to fly on in Hypperlobby are totally out of reach because i might have enough bandwidth to transmit the needed data, but it lags as much as 2 seconds behind what is actually happening at that time, result is ping-kick.
In such a case, how would i be able to play a game that not only authenticates (which is a minimal amount of data), but also streams a good chunk of data back and forth? In Ubi's new deal they say that even the saved games are stored remotely and in new games, these could be anything from a few KB to quite a few MB in size. In Dragon Age origins for example, saves are close to 10MB each.
Now let's move away from my personal example and take a look at the big picture, geographically large countries like Australia, Canada and even the US, where a big part of the population lives in areas that broadband is not yet feasible or too expensive. I was surprised to read it, but someone pointed out that 30% of internet users in the US are still on dial-up.

I don't know, but i think that these measures have a good change of losing them more sales due to the inability of willing customers to meet the requirements, than they would lose if they used something that's easier to pirate but also easier to live with if you are a legitimate buyer.

I think the people who object to this are far from the minority, especially among the flight sim crowd. Look at Rise of Flight, how many copies do you think they have sold and why are they now lifting the online requirement? I don't know exactly myself, but i have a suspicion. Maybe it's because their protection system turned away so many people that they had sold a measly 40000 copies a full 6 months after game release (deduced from a survey they e-mailed to their customers, registered users on their forums and demo users, that's where the number comes from).

People who just go along with everything they are servred without questioning the internal workings of the deal are usually late-comers to the PC gaming scene, they belong to a different gaming background like consoles, or they came to the PC from consoles. To this part of the gamer demographic tweaking and configuring is respectively unknown because they are late adopters, not needed and impossible because they play on consoles, or unkown because they come from consoles and didn't need or even couldn't take a look under the hood up till now.

On the other hand, people who have for a couple of decades been given the option to tweak things on their own and are interested in the technical side of things will always question what goes on under the hood. I think that someone with a keen interest in aircraft is more likely to belong to this second category and not the first one, so the sales will be shaped accordingly.

The proof is right before our eyes again. If simmers didn't question and dislike such measures, why would RoF not surpass the 50k mark in sales a full 6 months after release? Don't tell me it's an niche-within-a-niche product, it is, but IL2 expansions sold like crazy, the original IL2 also sold well and it was a niche-within-a-niche product too.
Had anyone ever done anything about the eastern front up till then? Nah, but there had been previous titles dealing with WWI. In a sense, what Maddox and company risked and managed to pull off with their choice of theater was even harder than what RoF does. WWI is not as popular as WWII for a sim setting, but it's definitely more popular than eastern front WWII.

In any case, voting is done with the wallet mainly and as long as we are strong-willed enough to stay away from games that punish you for buying them, it will start becoming very costly for the companies to keep producing, maintaining and bundlig a bunch of artificial fiery loopholes along with the real piece of software. The only 100% sure defence against piracy is a happy, dedicated and enthusiastic customer that respects your work, the rest is just wishful thinking and money-sinks that fail to stem the tide of piracy while aggravating the legitimate customers.

[billswagger]

I dont think RoF sales figures have much to do with the connection requirement.
I seem to remember reading that the first release was as much a beta release by the opinion of the users. Remember hearing of high load times, and lots of stutters?
Needless to say, RoF has probably had a slow start but it still lives up to what i think most people can expect from a newer game engine. Its a popular game amongst the sim world and many people admit to putting more time into it than they might Il2, except one thing.
The most common downside i read about concerning RoF was the lack of online (multiplayer) services, which like i've previously mentioned seems to indicate how well a game does. I also haven't been following RoF as closely, so maybe this is an area they have also improved upon.
Do you know if they are lifting a connection requirement, or was that just speculation?

It might be better to look at services like Steam which require a connection for all their game downloads. It seems they are doing well and still i hear a lot of nay saying against steam. If it were that much of an issue they would be out of business. Fact is, you are the minority, its just the 2 percent who are against these services tend to have the louder voices. Generally, people don't hop on a forum to praise a service. People are 20 times more likely to cast something in a negative shadow because they are unhappy.

I'm not really advocating for this service with SoW, but i would like to play a decent hack free game. I know you and I both might appreciate the game and its creators, but what keeps the next guy from wanting it for free or even worse giving himself a slight advantage in the multiplayer world? Is that not bad for the game?
what would be a better alternative to a required connection?

[Blackdog_kt]

RoF had a lot of things that needed patching, but the most cause for gnashing of teeth was given by the DRM used, with the pay-per-plane add-on system coming second. So, how did the DRM work out bad for them? Very simple, many people can and will live with a half-complete game until it's patched to a satisfactory standard, as long as it's easy to use. Heck, one might even get suckered into it without paying too much attention to the unfinished bits if it doesn't stray from one fundamental axiom: games are meant to be entertainment and that means you get to use it at your own discretion. If you institute things like a mandatory 300 megabyte update that happens to be on my day off, well you've just ruined my gaming evening and lost yourself a customer.

The moment you use restrictive systems like these is the moment you lost a large chunk of your impulse buyers. Not only that, but if you give the cranky, high maintenance flight-sim crowd (there's no use denying it, we're a demanding audience compared to other kinds of games) reason to pause with your DRM, then they'll have enough time to thorougly dissect your game and find everything that's faulty with it. Now i'm not advocating that companies should sucker the consumer into buying an unfinished game, but this discussion is meant to be an example of how heavy-handed DRM can look bad even from the developer's and publisher's point of view.

Oh and yes, they have confirmed it themselves that they are doing away with it on their blog, so it's already strike one for DRM in the simulator world. The next big showdown will be silent hunter 5, the last in a long line of games that sold very well. When a simulator series (about submarines none the less) manages to sell a couple million copies or more it's definitely a success. With UBI's new system, SH5 falls under the constant connection deal. I'm waiting to see how well or badly it sells. I'm guessing that it will be much like RoF, the guys who are really hardcore about their sub-genre within the simulator genre will buy it, defend it and say it's no big deal in order to convince the rest to chip in and keep it from selling badly, while the rest of the crowd who's interested in more kinds of simulators than just the particular sub-genre will pass it by until the company caves in. So yes, i expect it to sell worse than SH3 or SH4 did.

Finally, let's take a moment to ask ourselves how did we live before mandatory connections and how did a lot of succesful companies manage to thrive despite piracy? Of course there are the studios that had to close because of piracy, but there's an equal or greater amount of game designers than overcame the obstacles and they didn't really have much in the way of copy protection going for them.

This includes giants like Blizzard, with games like Diablo and Starcraft being top-sellers and propelling the company to greatness despite the fact that they were both heavily pirated. Why? Because they took care of their legitimate customers and they even let non-customers have a taste of their product. You could play Starcraft on LAN with your buddy with just one copy of the game, as long as you installed a specially modified, stripped down version of the game. Then you could host a session and he could join in. He couldn't host himself, play on the internet match-making service or play the single player campaigns, but he could play all the races and units in the game if he had a friend to host LAN sessions for him, without even paying a cent. This didn't come with limited installation, activations or any other redundant and useless artificial hurdles, it just had a serial number when you installed the game and you could install the light version on as many of your buddies' PCs as you wanted. That is good marketing right there, we had ONE guy in our group that bought it and after he started handing out the "light" version to the rest of us and playing some sessions on LAN, we all ended up buying the game as well. Contrast this system that served them so well, with the upcoming Starcraft 2 title where you won't even be able to play on LAN but only through their proprietary service and it will ship in three parts, with every 1/3 of the game priced as a full stand-alone title, and something becomes clear...it's no more about survival, but about the ability to run market analysis on customer demographics by collecting data from them, control how your customer uses the product in accordance your liking and not his and in some cases, plain greed.

Better yet another question, how has DRM and mandatory connection requirements stopped piracy? The answer is they haven't. Black Shark is pirated. ArmA2 was pirated before they lifted the DRM. Grand Theft Auto IV with its online authentication and release date restrictions? Ditto, just set your system clock 5 days forward, apply crack and play 5 days before the game is even on the shelves. Empire Total War, a game that even its boxed version requires a Steam account? Yup, it was leacked days prior to release, a friend of mine was using it as a demo and was half-way through the campaign before the original versions showed up in the stores and he actually bought it. The latest Need for Speed Shift also had connection requirements and guess what? Yup, it didn't prevent people from pirating it, it even runs with your router turned on but it doesn't connect to EA's servers. What about Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War 2, which i think requires both a Steam account and a Games for Windows Live account? You guessed right, that one is circulating freely among pirates too.

So, my question is, since they can't prevent these people from stealing their games no matter what they do, why are they trying to contain the phenomenon with means that are not only ineffective but also p*ss off their legitimate customers? Are they such masochists that they want to further hurt their sales by turning away their fans as well? Or are these decisions made not by the developers, but by a bunch of accountants who have absolutely no connection with the demographics and culture of the PC gamer crowd and think that we'll buy any half-baked, unfinished game they throw at us that requires you to jump through fiery hoops while fighting a polar bear with one arm tied behind your back before it even lets you see the introduction screen?

I'm betting on the latter and if you do some digging around on the internet you'll see that many developers are trying to self-publish their work and not have to deal with dedicated publishers anymore for this simple reason alone. They have no freedom whatsoever to decide how their own creation will be shaped, distributed and marketed if they end up working with a big publisher. Some companies use simple copy protection like serials and disk checks, some other use light versions of DRM and some use nothing at all, but the truth remains that some of the most succesful and certain low-key but highly specialized developer studios are doing just fine on their own without imposing ridiculous requirements on their customers and that is for a very simple reason. They make games that none of the big studios care about and even though their market share might be small, their audiences are small, dedicated communities that will buy their work out of mutual respect alone. That, gentlemen is how you defeat piracy, by showing the guy who's giving you cash the necessary respect so that he will feel pampered and well treated and continue buying your stuff. Just my 2 cents as usual

[flyingbullseye]

+1, well said Blackdog_kt.

Flyingbullseye