Authentication system

Am I correct that, the way this works, if DCS goes out of business and/or you lose access to them on the web (which is a distinct possibility for all American players now that net neutrality has been repealed) we have 3 days until our game won't even work offline anymore? Please tell me that's not the case.

Also, anyone know what's up? Can't play online due to this.

Top of the forums should be a maintenance notice they are currently doing on the servers. So that is why it is currently down.

Dear users!

Due to second and the last in this year scheduled maintenance of the primary server, the DCS website, Module Manager, and Multiplayer (master server) services will be unavailable on Tuesday, December 19 starting at 06:00 UTC for a period of no more than 3 hours. The server's IP address will change, so we highly recommend that you update your DNS cache (run "ipconfig /flushdns" in Windows).

 

Our apologies for the inconvenience.

ah, cool. I just got the same. Thanks!

Yeah, I'm in now though it seems to have gone down again and other players behind me can't get in.

Was this scheduled maintenance? Where are these things announced? It should really be a push rather than us actively having to search for the news.

But far more importantly, am I correct in my interpretation that this behavior means if ED/DCS ever go away, all our front ends die three days later?

Was this scheduled maintenance? Where are these things announced? It should really be a push rather than us actively having to search for the news.

It was at the top of the forums sense last week.

It was at the top of the forums sense last week.

Wasn't in the weekly newsletter. I think that would be a more appropriate place for it rather than hoping players will be lucky enough to stumble on it here.

And there's so many individual forums I certainly don't go through them all. And I just looked in Community News and I don't see anything.

Oh, NOW I see it. It's not even a forum post but above the top of the list. Stuff I was just filtering out. (If I even looked at that forum at all, which I doubt I did -- not knowing it was my job to actively hunt for important service interruption announcements.)

Anyway, back to the far more serious issue. Do we own our licenses for this software or just borrow them?

And related question. When support for 1.5 is abandoned come the 2.5 merge in late January, will we still be able to play it online or is the Multiplayer authentication part of the "support"?

1.5 will be supported for some time still. Eventually it will be abandoned like all older versions of the sim.

Wags said "support" for 1.5 would be abandoned as soon as 2.5 drops. What I'm wondering is, is the authentication system part of that support? I would hope not, as there's no need to offer support for a product that won't launch anymore, and if that was the case he could have simply said "1.5 will stop working three days after 2.5 is released". But I don't rightly know, it's been unclear, at least as far as what I've read.

Okay, so the authentication server 1.5 relies on to run isn't "support"? Good.

Currently only 2 modules are effected by the new DRM, those will work, one of them isnt something that even runs on 1.5 as its a Normandy Campaign. The Harrier will be fine, it doesnt care what version you are running it in, unless you try to use a version earlier than it's release.

The screen captures I posted at the top would seem to disagree with that. As I interpret the messages in those dialog boxes, if their authentication sever ever stops talking to 1.5, 1.5 will stop working 3 days after. Offline as well as online and for all planes.

Would love to be wrong about this but just taking them at their word.

Right, but these weren't module messages, it's the front end itself saying it had less than 3 days to live if it didn't get to speak to mother. ;)

I'm not sure how to be more clear, Sith.

Am I correct that, the way this works, if DCS goes out of business and/or you lose access to them on the web (which is a distinct possibility for all American players now that net neutrality has been repealed) we have 3 days until our game won't even work offline anymore? Please tell me that's not the case.

 

Also, anyone know what's up? Can't play online due to this.

 

 

I have neither of those modules so obviously the particular planes, etc, have nothing to do with it. And my concern was/is, does the support they're soon going to end for 1.5 include this authentication system that the game itself needs in order to launch?

Anyway, doesn't matter, they obviously do whatever they do and we have to live with it. Thanks.

As for net neutrality, imagine this...

"The protocol you're trying to connect to is not supported by your current internet plan. Please upgrade to our Deluxe Plan access this service."

(But that's not ED's fault, of course. Obviously they have to build the game assuming the net works as it was meant to. But it's just another potential failure scenario to consider. Offline play is important to a lot of the community. Not so much for me personally, I prefer online play, but a healthy, active community is important to me.)

I didn't ask a question regarding net neutrality. I simply provided it as one of the plausible network failure scenarios. There are several other scenarios I didn't mention that are probably far more likely but it would be against the forum rules to mention them so I provided that example in their place.

Another plausible scanario would be what happened to another software company

doing a similar DRM scheme to what ED is trying out when they got DOSed

for a long time solidly

No paying customers could use the software at all during that period

Hi gents!

I have a question:

No support means no futher developements I understand. But I expect the 1.5 to continue to run on my laptop without any web access. So, considering that I have no plan to move on 2.0 nor 2.5, will the 1.5 be still usable and working (without internet acess since it wasn't required when I bought my module) after the 2.5 release?

Regards, and thank you for answers.

As long as you are not using the Harrier I would "assume" so