100 Custom Commanders

I don't see any reason why Uber would spend tons of engineering time trying to protect something can't be protected.
For HDD space used extra 300MB it's just nothing.

I hope commanders we cant use being grey out goes away and we just don't see them. The current implementation is nonsense.

Think about a new player coming into the game post release and seeing a giant list of 100+ items out of which he can use 3-4! with no means of unlocking the others. The game has already made the mistake once with the whole 80$+ "steam release" that will probably always be remembered.

I doubt it would be tons of engineering time to host custom commanders on their own server and only distribute them to clients who own them if they intend to host a modstore and are soon to be offering "Playfab BaaS".

Seriously I just don't see why they would do that because saving HDD space as useless as assets protection. Any ideas?

PS: Don't forget there is also will be custom-hosted servers too.

I too will express my opinion in that case.

The suggestion that this is illegal is absurd, any suggestion that this breaches a contract would also be absurd, and the suggestion that backers have "bought space on your hard drive" is particularly absurd.

You bought an early access game in development (maybe you even bought it before the alpha was released, or backed it on kickstarter?) - you agreed to pay for the opportunity participate in the development of the game by testing new features and additions as they are added before launch. Also yes it was mentioned during the kickstarter campaign that this would be happening.

Essentially you paid for whatever the developers want to give you without knowing what that would be. Whether this was a smart thing to do I would leave for you to decide. Features are being added, the custom commanders are one of them - as was promised in the kickstarter campaign.

It's unfortunate that you dont agree with this use of file space and you are certainly free to discontinue playing the game/uninstalling it if you feel so inclined. I'm sure the developers will take your feedback on board, but ultimately you cannot reasonabley expect to dictate development of their game, especially when they are fulfilling a pledge to the highest levels of donors.

Plz dont start give me reason now!
Its .........

Except that there will be far more than 5 commanders available over time, not to mention all the other commanders associated with Kickstater/Pre-orders/Sales.

I'm also not a fan of some of the language being used, it's threatening to turn this discussion along the lines of "the rich get richer" or the "1% vs 99%" stuff that isn't the situation here at all.

Personally I don't see any issue at all, 300MB sounds big, but if PA is 10GB then custom commanders only account for 3% of the overall hard drive space and I just don't see the value in debating about it.

Mike

Thanks. And indeed I would probably buy one of those skin as well.

But let me say one thing straight, just so there will be no misunderstadings.

Living in Copenhagen as freelancer, my income after taxes approaches, time to time, the 5.000 euro per month (40.000 DKK). Unfortunately not always, 'cos I'm still new in town, but that's the trend. So I'm really not interested in infringing any copyrights what so ever.

If what I want as a price, I make sure to be able to buy it. Specially software, being a designer and developer myself. Just I do not do video games (I did a couple, 30 years ago but I was just a kid). I do respect the intellectual property of others. And from my part, almost everything I do is going to be released as open source and free software. On top of it, I do care a tons about optimizing resources, including digital resources. I'm usually paid for my time, not for my software.

I do respect any choice Uber made on their software. But it's a fact that I would be a bit disappointed in discovering that 200.000 customers (hopefully much more) will have to lock 300 Mb of space each, with not opt-out option. That quickly sums up to 60 Terabytes of unused space, to award less than the 1% of the supporters per investment, or the 0,0005% of the users per head. If 3.000.000 USD after the Kickstarter campaing wasn't minimally enough to budget PA, you can imagine how much of a difference 100.000 USD made at the end of the day. Nothing. So we can very well stop paying so much tribute to those who pledged for the higher tier. It really is an ethical aspect of all this story.

Now, back on topic, I'm just curious to take a look at those Commander skins and to know if I can do anything about.

So, perhaps this will help in putting my curiosity under a better light. Time to time I get quite nasty and frankly undeserved remarks, and I got a bit sensitive about

Thanks so far for your answers. I have a much better picture now.

While I agree that those statements are a little odd, I do wish everyone would get off this guy's back about the HDD space issue. People continue to harangue him for this, and he's stated several times since the original post that it *isn't* his primary concern. He politely asked for people to address his more pressing question - just leave it alone, already. And I mean absolutely no offense, catses - I understand the irony that if I'm about to defend *his* right to express his opinions however he wants, I also need defer to yours - but it seems as though he made an honest and open effort to direct the thread away from ideas that some obviously find inflammatory, and for my part, I find the virulent mob reactions difficult to watch. I know, I know, don't read the thread, welcome to the internet, etc.

Carlo, you seem to stir **** up like none other, man. Are you Italian or Greek, by any chance? I only ask because the questions you raise and the manner in which you do it reminds me very much of friends I have from countries with a strong and passionate anti-fascist tradition. I apologize if I'm inferring too much, but some countries simply express their opinions much more bluntly, even when they're controversial (sometimes *especially* when they're controversial ), than we're accustomed to in the US and Britain, where a lot of forum users hail from. I dunno', I just see that trend in your posts, Carlo - no fear of a reasonable conflict of ideas, and a desire for the masses to hold higher powers accountable.

And maybe I'm just writing stories about strangers on the internet, but I wish people could see that bluntness should not be conflated with impoliteness, and that controversy is not the same as negativity. Let's everybody try to be a *little* less reactionary, a little less defensive, shall we? Before another thread goes all Hindenburg.

I worried what happen if you'll know how big part of Windows DLLs and different compatibility things will be never used by most Windows users.

I think you'll be too busy in court with case against Microsoft.

I really appreciate your comments, thanks. And yes. I am Italian, proud to be, and even more proud to be anti-fascist. I guess you've seen it right

But I'm fed up. The proportion of immature minds on this forum, and the video games' forums in general to be frank, is disarming

Personally I'm not worried about the disk space. Also I'm not interested in playing the commanders I'm not entitled to- just think it goes against the spirit of the thing. What I would like is a viewer that will let me have a good look at them, possibly with the name of the designer / owner (if they're happy to be named) and some info about the design. The PA commanders are works of art imo and I think it would be nice if we could all appreciate them

I was kind of surprised too, since I expected all of the controversy to be related to potential copyright issues and not about the hard drive space. It's actually a very reasonable question to ask, considering PA currently is about 1.5GB. An extra 300MB without any good reason does seem like a significant increase. Now, Uber hasn't ever shown a lack of technical skill, so I'm sure they can come up with something as simple as on-demand download of the commander art into a temp file.

The real issue is all about moddability and digital rights. This game won't have any DRM aside from the ubernet accounts, so you can already swap around commander art all you want. What we won't be doing is putting mods up on the mod manager that make it easy to share art that people might not have paid for, but that's about where the restrictions end. Uber (probably) won't be sending Brad over to your house to knock down your door and break your arm if they find out you modded it for personal use.

If only I had photoshop skills... so much lost potential.

I find it funny for you to say this when you set yourself up for failure based on the way you approach topics. Things like word choice and overall intent have a huge impact on how something is viewed and in turn how responses are created.

You could have put this forth more so as an inquiry or random thought and it probably would have gone much smoother, instead right out of the gate you were pretty aggressive about the whole thing.

Mike

Wait..... people are actually serious about this 300mb thing? Even on some computer from 10 years ago with just 64gb that's nothing.

Figured. I think a lot of the hate you've gotten, sadly enough, is really mostly due to a clash of cultures. I don't want to stereotype, but a lot of people in the US really mistake the directness that typifies dialogue in some countries for aggressiveness, negativity, etc. People here tend to be more concerned (no judgement, it's just the way it is) with polite phrasing, being inoffensive, and generally keeping conflict to a minimum. My buddy Andreas, for example: his language has a command form - a case that's explicitly used for giving directions or instruction. English lacks this entirely, so the only way he knows how to translate this case is to just talk like a ****. Or at least, that's how it's usually interpreted.

Case in point, see above. I DON'T WANT TO OFFEND ANYONE, but I don't think he's being aggressive - he's just being Italian.

You have a fair point, I simply get irked when people make incendiary claims (such as alleging that Uber have or may have acted illegally in this case) - and then trying to stem off any kind of response with the statement that it isn't really something they wanted to talk about anyway. If people make baseless claims they should expect to be called out on them.

Fair play. But I really do think a lot of the statements that are being considered incendiary are just representative of a cultural misunderstanding. In the US, for instance, we don't really have anything like what I'm presuming Carlo's perspective is. The closest analogy I could make is maybe... an intense Libertarianism? But that's not really accurate. This is going to sound *way* off-topic, but lots of people seem to think he's gunning for Uber, and he's not - there's just a tradition were he's from of questioning centralized authority, of scrutinizing it in a harsh light, that dates back to WWII. Fascism is still a relevant political topic in parts of Europe, and the attitude that *truly* democratic ideals should be aggressively defended is something that spills over into many aspects of life, resulting in very principled arguments against economic inequality, on internet gaming forums, with crooked hotdog vendors, etc.

That doesn't mean people don't get to have their own opinions and reactions, of course, but they should just consider that his intent may not be to incite negativity or criticize for the sake of being critical. There are places where a deep mistrust of authority, and of *secrecy*, is sort of intrinsic, and exists *for good reasons*.

Again, apologies if I'm making too detailed an assumption about anyone, but I've dealt with similar misunderstandings over and over again with my own friends.

Edit: Also, people are *still* just going on about the disk space. Maybe he could made his phrasing more palatable for general consumption, but he said several times that he doesn't really care. How is that not enough by now? Proportionate reaction, people.

I see this as a kind of non-issue, honestly. I mean, look at TF2 and the number of cosmetics most players don't have access to. I have never heard anyone complain about that.

I'm also assuming there will be ways to redirect the relevant files to use default commanders, so that a player could erase the custom commander files without repercussion.
EDIT: Also, it should be possible to change out commanders without including a new copy in the mod itself. As in, change the unit file to use a different model which is already in the game files. I don't believe that could be considered copyright infringement either.

I also think it would be cool if there were a commander showcase so people could preview the custom commanders, or if they were featured in some kind of credits. I'm sure those who donated at that tier would be happy to have their custom commanders visible in a showcase, and at least there would be a reason to have them all shipped with the game by default.

tl;dr people are overreacting.