Server In 1.0

There is literally nothing good that could come out of not having offline in 1.0. Nothing.

Always-online on launch is never a good idea.
Unless your servers are the best on the planet and you're 110% sure that players can get a perfect experience when doing something that should be offline like AI skirmishes or Galactic War, I implore you to reconsider this decision.

Well. I wasn't planning on being productive tomorrow anyways...

I do agree. Matchmaking? Would be very nice, but not the end of the world. Balance? Astroid belts? Unit Cannon? Nice, but not the end of the world.

Server/offline... That's a bigger deal.

Exhibit A: Sim City

After all... wouldn't it be awesome to let me host a 20v20 match? Or a 40 way FFA?!?

If you don't have an offline mode ready to go by launch, 90% of the people at least who own the game a few days after launch, including those who already had it in beta, will think that this game is unfinished. Even if it's just an offline galactic war, it will keep the rioting at bay.

I'll say this again.

If you do not have an offline mode by launch, you are not ready for launch.

There are soo many games that have shown this, unfortunately, and they have invariably done much worse than they could have done had they had an offline singleplayer.

Unfortunately there are thousands of people playing and each person has their own set of priorities they think the devs should follow. I wouldn't do things the same way they do every time either, but if they waited until everything the community wants is in the game they would never release. Is it sad that they had to push this back? Yeah it sure is. They're probably disappointed about that too.

I totally agree, not having offline-mode at launch will be a big mistake for sure. People will rage endlessly (as they always do) and I believe that it will deter some people--not having offline.

However, it's not my decision to make. (Just sayin')

The problem is that it's a pretty important feature, that will actually prevent some people from playing if it's not implemented...

I totally disagree. If they release the server (with no DRM) piracy of the game will be rampant and the player base on the Uber servers will be drastically reduced. I think they should wait at least a month after release. That is the common process other games follow.

No - that doesn't fly with this.

A game is complete without a ladder.
A game is complete without matchmaking.
Offline, on the other hand, is a NECESSARY. FEATURE. There is no way whatsoever to get around this.

I do agree with this in that I think people will rage. I would encourage people here not to, but I think we all agree that not everybody out there is rational.

Yeah I totally agree with that. It's just that I know I don't have all the information Uber does when they made this decision. I imagine they had some pretty heated discussions about it internally but ultimately they're forced to balance out the promises they've made to various parties. The customers want everything finished right now and the retail publisher is probably pushing for a real release after the apparent failure of the early access retail box. I'm just speculating but I assume there are good reasons behind the push to release. Normally in game development a lot of really cool things get cut in order to release the game and we just never see that. At least here they still promise to finish it.

It is scary though. I can only imagine how angry people will get.

People can pirate the game all they want. That doesn't mean they'll have an Uberent account. No Uberent account, no playing on Uber's servers.

Oh yeah, because pirates totally won't wait.
You introduce temporary DRM, pirates will wait it out. You introduce permanent DRM, pirates will either not buy the game or find a way to break it.

Doesn't matter how good a blockade is. Someone is always smarter than you and someone will always break it.

Given that we've already observed server problems happening after the PA Steam sale, failing to include offline in 1.0 would be a frankly foolish decision. We've already observed backlash from the Diablo III and Simcity launches where server capabilities were insufficient, and Uber lacks the publicity of Blizzard or EA, so the backlash would hurt them even more.

Furthermore, the existence of offline mode was promised in the Kickstarter, and many people backed this game with the expectation that there would be offline mode in the finished version. I, for one, would be very disappointed if the 1.0 version held my ability to play Galactic War and AI skimishes hostage to a steady internet connection.

I've already heard many people voicing negative opinions of Uber's ability to deliver a reliable product. Doubling back on a major Kickstarter promise and repeating a behavior that has led to massive backlash on several different occasions would only make things much MUCH worse.

Assuming thats how its works, plus its probably easy to get around the logon process. You cant get around not having the server.

Hard core pirates will always wait, but normal players that want to the play the game at launch will typically buy it unless there's a easy way to get it for free.

Piracy really shouldn't be a concern. They promised us a DRM-free game and that was one of the most exciting things about it. It's not that I want to pirate this, it's just that I don't want to have to worry about drm. If releasing the server was easy I would be demanding it too, but I'm sure they have a lot of work to do to get something that's meant for AWS to run on whatever server we decide to throw it on.

I'm no expert on how the servers currently work but for the majority of people that say they want to play offline because they have bad internet, won't most of them not have a super computer that could run a server and the game at the same time or a secondary computer capable of running the server? I know groups like Realm will have their own online servers and such for their balancing mods and big clan games but that would still be online, for those that want offline play I'm not sure it is possible with this type of game and the average computer setup casual gamers have... am I wrong to figure that since we are playing a serverside game it takes a huge load of information and processing power off of our computers hands?

They've said before that the server is not actually very resource intensive.

Gonna throw my hat in the ring here.

But I'm first asking for a source. Don't want something ambiguous to become a full-blown nuclear tornado, guys.

when was this said? and not very resource intensive for a server computer or any computer? I've always heard that server computers are sort of beastly...

Well remember, they run MULTIPLE servers at once, and not only one.

true but we don't quite know the number of games per server... or what exactly the server mainly runs on hardware wise. If it using more ram like the program does I really don't think the average gamer could run it...