Offline Mode

Suggestions and Contributions
1

Dear everyone, thank you for taking the time to read this. I hope you fully understand this suggestion as i have imagined it.

The suggestion of this topic would be to add a new mode called offline mode

How Could Staff Implement It?

a few lines of coding that would detect the “server” being online as long as your computer was on. as long as you were playing the game, it would say “1 player online”. if online was detected as false for the main server, it would fetch offline mode as true. this would be nothing major like rewriting all the codes. it would be like implementing the new fairy type, easy yet it would take some time

How Would This Be Useful To The Player

you would be able to play and do what you want while your A) waiting for the server to come back on, especially if its in maintence or gm mode B) you have no internet connection due to a power outage, your in a location that doesnt have internet, or for some reason all the bandwith is being used by other devices.

you wont get rusty while playing offline. you can also hunt for items you have glued in your brain (such as the TC item routes)

What Would Happen If I Made Progress Offline But Want/Went To Go Online

one of 2 options. 1) Rollback, meaning any progress you made offline wont be applied to online 2) a secondary save is created that functions for offline mode and has no effect on the online portion

What Are The Downfalls

1)this response would be here if #1 from the previous question was applied 2)you would have something to do while you wait to get back online 3) you cant apply any newer updates while playing offline

How Would I Be Able To Find This In The Client

1)offline mode is made as a new button that is located under team slot 4 and to the right of your selected pokemons stats. the button would be red when its disabled and turn green when its enabled. 2)at the login screen, you would notice some text to the right of “server status”. this text would say “Mode: ___” for which mode is currently active

Why Are You Complaining

thats a good question. dont think of this as a complaint, think of it as an improvable suggestion. i got this idea after noticing how long the server has been down. plus, im sure others are very antsy to get back into their routines they had before

now that you have read this suggestion. please leave feedback. if you have a question, please ask. i also understand the staff is very busy with the server and whatnot, maybe they could add this with their to do list

[answer]im expecting 75% of the responses to be no"s[/answer]

i have also asked a few of my friends and some staff and they said the liked this idea and that it worded good

2

I guess it’s an okay idea, but I can see where complaints could come if all the process made on the offline mode didn’t transfer onto online mode. The secondary save file aside from online mode would be a bit more better in my opinion, since you could actually progress.

Other than that, I find this a pretty neat suggestion, especially for speed-runners that want to play the game offline. :3 Anyways, I’ll approve.

3

Wouldn’t this possibly allow the Staff to create a story? Maybe?
Storyline?
I dunno

4

I actually like this idea and if I interpret this right ppl see you as offline so you can play without ppl annoying you its like a instantaneous vanish seed I like it.

5

I love this idea!

6

Well I really like this idea.

7

Problem, there are still the maps and everything else that PMU runs on that isn’t on the Client. Notice how Mappers and Developers+ can make NPCs or edit maps without requiring an update. That seems to signal that most of PMU is not on the Client downloaded onto your PC/laptop and needing to download a thousand maps and dungeons to me seems like downloading a hundred Gigabytes or so. :@~@:

If the staff team got that down, there is still the possibility of players hacking. When you are ‘offline’, you aren’t connected to a server or to players. So when there happens to be a server shutdown, someone could just ‘find’ a hack or glitch, then abuse it. No one could tell that they had abused besides the fact the server may have ‘messed’ with them.

To me, it’s a good idea. The only problem is there seems to be a lot of holes that need to be patched up first.

8

I don’t think that it would be possible to function without the server. For instance, maps and NPCs and all, even player data is stored on the server so even if it was possible to play “offline” (which I’m pretty sure it isn’t, all things considered) then you’d have no game to play.

9

f the staff team got that down, there is still the possibility of players hacking. When you are ‘offline’, you aren’t connected to a server or to players.

I say no for this very reason alone. It’d be much, much easier to exploit the game without a server to check for unusual activity… =/

10

would that really matter though? I mean it’s an offline version of pmu a.k.a a single player version a.k.a why should you care what happens on a game that you aren’t playing?

I don’t care much for this idea. It gives players something else to do in cases of server shut downs and what not, but I also don’t see the point in wasting whatever time it would take to code. On another note, I don’t imagine this offline client would connect to the game at any period, so you probably wouldn’t be carrying over your online account to the offline edition.

11

would that really matter though? I mean it’s an offline version of pmu a.k.a a single player version a.k.a why should you care what happens on a game that you aren’t playing?

I assumed it would sync up with the server after going online again. If it didn’t, why not just play the official single-player games? Hence why I stated hacking would be a problem as I assumed the system wouldn’t be completely pointless in the first place. =P

12

That’s why I suggested that there could be a completely separate save file that’s completely unattached to the online mode. But I can see it would be problematic despite it being separate.

13

I think this idea would be great, well , almost.
The Offline-Mode progress should be able to be continued when playing multiplayer.
I don’t see any point of playing alone PMU without containing your offline character in the multiplayer game,
there is PMD for a reason.

14

how could you exploit? you cant make yourself staff or change anything about the maps

i also thank those who support this suggestion. this can also be the foundation to spot loops and patch glitches that may give you an advantage when playing online.

i also have another question, how can you hack "single player? its like asking “how do you hack a map”?
if your not connected to online wouldnt that be like trying to send a pm to an offline friend?

15

This.

16

If this Offline version is created, then glitches can spread far more easily and quietly. Like what Zebras said, the server is what detects the glitch. So taking it down will cause chaos. Last year, there was an incident which shut the server down for a week and could have had 10+ players banned or jailed. Most of those players didn’t get punished because almost all of the glitching was being done ‘silently’. So adding in the fact that you can’t tell whether something is glitched or not makes catching the culprits much more complicated and harder.

17

i also have another question, how can you hack "single player? its like asking “how do you hack a map”?
if your not connected to online… wouldnt that be like trying to send a pm to an offline friend?

Others explained how the server is the cheat detector. It looks for impossible/unusual data and alerts staff/bans the player.

Sending a PM to an offline friend is like trying to play an online game while the server is down. (In other words, You’re using an online function to defend an offline one.) That is not how what I’m saying works at all; what I’m saying is, IF the offline saves can be used online, there is much less security while using offline mode than online mode.

If this still doesn’t make sense, here’s an irl example:

Think of having high levels/rare pokemon as a valuable diamond that you have to pay a lot of money to buy legally. The diamond is guarded by a locked gate (client encryption) and security officers (server cheating detection). Normally, to steal the diamond (cheat), a person would have to sneak by the security officers and figure out how to climb over the locked gate. However, the security officers can usually tell when somebody is being suspicious (aka detect odd data) and arrest them (Ban them) before they get to said gate.

When you remove the officers (offline mode), a person has infinite time to try to figure out how to climb the gate and steal the diamond. This is why offline mode is a much larger security risk.

Even worse, extra offline security would be extremely difficult to maintain as there would be no logged data if an exploit happens for developers to read. They can’t say “This person did these actions and then suddenly their Blaziken become level 201.” All they would know is “this person’s Blaziken became level 201 suddenly.” Even then, wouldn’t the time spent on frustrating offline security be better used on keeping the server online and updated in the first place?

The only way to stop horrid exploits would be to prevent the offline saves from being compatible with online saves, and even then somebody might find a way to upload those onto the main game. Besides, IF offline saves can’t be uploaded online, then what’s the point in the first place? Just play the official PMD games instead.

For these reasons, I say no and I doubt my mind can be changed. Sorry. =P

18

There are simpler ways to stop cheaters, and these come in two ways.

  1. Make the offline save a different format than the online save data, so you can’t swap either files. that would help. a lot actually.
  2. Create a very simple yet biased cheat detector, using a simple Boolean series, one array checks for the usual data patterns, and the other array check up the players data, if they don’t match…then we have a cheater. very, very, simple way of doing it.

Now I know people are going be like “but it takes billion lines of code to make something like that!”. it doesn’t. but you should have a bool array to check for things really fast. set up for every time the player logs in and when they log out. this would detect your cheaters very quickly. and making the saves of a different format and not located where they should be is a plus. also not having the word save or having the players name on the file. Good way to screw over the cheaters.

19

I should also point out how many files are required to run PMU. Most of the files that PMU runs on are stored on a secure server in order to protect them. Turning the server off would put a brick wall between us and the files.

You are suggesting that we put all of those files onto our laptops and PCs in order to run PMU. Though some have large Hard Drives, others don’t. Also, putting those files onto places where we can access easily will destroy PMU. There are other people out there on the Internet that want to create games that are similar to this one. Putting these files out would rip apart PMU.

Since the server is already down, PMU is vulnerable. It only takes a strong competitor to rip the community in half. Implementing this idea will accelerate that process. The fact that PMU runs on a custom engine should be noted. From what I’ve seen, others don’t have this ‘custom’ engine. The one Pokemon Mystery Universe v7 runs on seems to be more popular than ‘Eclipse’. Which is why I believe competitors (if any) are falling behind.

Glitches can be fixed, this can not.

20

I don’t think so, besides I can have thousands of maps for a few measly gigs of harddrive its not that big the real issue is all the player data it has to manage. that where we can’t host it on a destop. I mean its also why servers lag too, not just the ping, but the rendering as well.

an offline mode could handle the maps and the normal game data, but it could only handle 1 player well if we talk about a pc like mine. This is way less data when you think about it. I mean offline mode would allow you to have fun by yourself, and by keeping the data of your offline save data separate from your online. a different format would ensure it could not be swapped for online save file. of course it would also help if you had to login with your profile in the launcher. But believe me an offline mode sandbox certainly wouldn’t hurt pmu.

It might actually get more people interested if anything. and a custom engine along with custom encryption is next to impossible to figure out how the game works if you don’t know how the encryption works. this is kinda why people try to avoid getting more than one coder. And this is something a friend of mine told me a long time ago.

People don’t even bother to try to copy pmu anyways, because I haven’t found anything remotely the same since my search. That is still working and not dropped.