People never change.

That guy is totally hopeless...I showed him the wikipedia entry on persistant online DRM like 3 times, he still did not understand it.

Silence you! Don't crush those people's sacred hype!

/Sarcasm

I wonder if there were people on the EA forums defending that "reasoning" as blindly as people on the Frontier forum. I can't be bothered to look, but I would not be surprised.

EA must have sycophants too.

I think some people just believe that indie devs are automatically somehow more honorable than big companies are and thus can do no wrong. And David Braben has gathered a quite a bit of hero worship during the years same way as Richard Garriott has for an example (yet another old school dev who is developing a MMO game that is supposedly going to have some kind of off-line mode, but as far I know only thing they've shown thus far of Shroud of the Avatar is MMO stuff.)

This one is pretty good too!

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=58789&p=1007212&viewfull=1#post1007212 Good grief. Steam is now DRM-free? What the heck do these people think DRM is?

Server authentication being around *before* DRM? Again, WTF do these monkeys think DRM *is*?

There are all kind of whackos and fanatics in the world. There are plenty of Steam and DRM fanatics. Same way there are islam (and other religion fanatics) who slaughter people and claim to do so in order to fulfill some "greater good" and obey some "higher power".

The imbecile quoted above is the kind of geek who has now seen E: D as some sort of second coming. The question of wether the game is any good is irrelevant. The game must come out, regardless of wether it's filled to the brim with DRM and will format your hard drive or install spyware on your pc.
The same Richard Garriot who, in the end, destroyed the same loving franchise he created.
Let's not forget that even Ultima X (which was cancelled) was conceived as being an online game.

The whole "is online requirement = DRM" is a red herring. One can argue until they are blue in the face about it. To me - that is DRM, but it doesn't matter.

What DOES matter is they promised an offline mode (as previously quoted above) and have now retracted that: Not delivering what was promised - THAT alone is enough to get a refund. It doesn't matter if some particular person thinks of that as DRM and another does not. Red herring. Not delivering what was promised = REFUND eligible. Simple.

However, it is also OBVIOUS that Frontier knows that online = DRM; as they also have this in the FAQ: See - they recognize RIGHT THERE that a good place to mention the online requirement is in the question about DRM. Hmmm...

The droids in the official thread are still claiming that this is not DRM and that Frontier will deliver a DRM free version.

Yup, because limited installations is the "only" kind of DRM. That thread on their forum is becoming comedy-gold.

@Solei

THANK YOU so much.

I was about to buy myself Elite Dangerous as an christmas present, but "online only" is an absolute no-go for me.

everyone spread the word.was wondering if they would have had to refund if ks not delivered as promised...ie those recent changes to ks rules a while back :)

How? If they can't now and only just announce it right before release, after thinking they could for 2 years, I don't see a way.

And what a lousy situation. I mean, huge software houses with multimillion (sometimes billion) dollar corporations behind them routinely pull the plug on underperforming MMOs and games that are a few years old. How does an indie startup that needed to resort to freaking crowdsourcing intend to keep servers up when the money runs out or misses projections?

Is this game going to be playable for all of a year? Two years? Because when those servers go dark, you're apparently left with a game that, from the mouths of the developers, can't function without them.

Definitely, they are legally required to refund if they don't deliver the pledge rewards, that is in those words in the kickstarter terms. And since DRM free versions, as the pledges literally say, are impossible now, they have to refund.



No they can't just the droids say they will, because they dont count always online DRM as drm. I explain it to them, show them the wiki page, but then they just don't reply, and ten pages later a new person says the same crap. Maybe I should open a nw thread there explaining always online DRM.