[nerdjon]

This has now been posted multiple times and what you said is my biggest issue with this, its super vague and its mixing up multiple issues.

On the link for this post, if you click through to the actual initiative it is primarily talking about phoning home and yet apparently it also applies to actual online games.

In no way shape or form is World of Warcraft just "phoning home".

In the last time this was posted I was trying to discuss this with someone and they were trying to make the argument that apparently WoW gets an exception because it has a subscription but Guild Wars 2 doesn't because... it doesn't have a subscription? They are both MMO's. That makes zero sense from a technical explanation for why doing this may not be a reasonable expectation. Even if somehow that is an exception that we are going to give, where is that at all concretely explained?

Looking at the website. Lets look at this quote:

> So, if a server could originally support 5000 people, but the end user version can only support 500, that's still a massive improvement from no one being able to play the game ever again.

That is such a simplification of what a "sever" is that I am convinced no one technical was involved in writing this. There can be multiple components that may need to be scaled differently, external resources, etc etc. Maybe some are but it isn't like a "server" is just a single, launch this app with this amount of resources and your good to go. That is before getting into the complication of if a system was built to create on demand resources, maybe it spins up a server, container, etc when an online game starts, someone goes into an instance, etc etc.

To me this should be 2 things. First, no just phoning home for single player games. Thats easy and I doubt anyone is going to argue they are a good thing. Second, once a game does shut down attempts by the community to bring it back can't be challenged legally.

Anything beyond that, is not going to have issues from a technological standpoint. Like you mentioned, re-using systems, code, etc. It is not reasonable to expect that all of that will just be put out for anyone to use. I would not be surprised if there are major parts of FF11 that were used in FF14. So if FF11 shuts down, why do we expect parts of 14 to basically be put out?

I am all for not killing games but lets be realistic about what an online game actually is and the reality of the company putting out all of the resources for it to be playable after shutting down the servers. Particularly assuming could they even legally depending on what components they license.

[Hamuko]

World of Warcraft is probably the murkiest example since you had to buy a copy of WoW to play the game, but the packaging clearly said how the box only includes a month of gameplay and you need to pay for any additional time after that. So it was never really advertised as a full and complete game, even though you had to buy it.

If World of Warcraft was just a subscription without having to buy the game, then I think it'd be a lot clearer. You pay $12 for a month of WoW and you get a month of WoW, nothing more, nothing less.

It's quite a lot different from a game like The Crew, which is sold as a complete game, even though it stopped working when Ubisoft axed the servers and was even retroactively removed from players' game libraries.

[nerdjon]

Thats why I started to feel like that no one had a good explanation of what exactly they are going for here. The person I was discussing with seemed to imply the information they were presenting was from youtube videos.

My impression was that they were somehow trying to argue that there being a subscription is the only way that a consumer can understand it is an online only game. But, yeah you still have to buy the expansions and the base game (sometimes). Same with FF14 and other MMO's.

This just felt like a arbitrary designed exception that has no basis on technology. The difference between WoW and FF14 and games like GW2, Destiny, and other similar games is minimal at best from that side of things. Obviously not he same code and not designed the same way, but still systems meant to handle similar large scale things.

I just don't understand how you can argue that a consumer understands that with a subscription but if they pick up an online only game like GW2 or Destiny that they somehow don't understand that?

Regarding The Crew. I honestly still don't understand what the situation with that game was since I never played it. Was it a truly online game that required interactions with a server (not phoning home) to fundamentally work and interactions with other players to fundamentally work. Or is it like Forza where the online component was a layer on top of a single player game.

That distinction is important and are very different discussions about the impact and realities of something like this.