Yields Falsehood When Preceded » Reviews » Eco
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13 people found this review helpful
Not Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 32.7 hrs on record
Posted: 30 Dec, 2023 @ 11:31pm

Early Access Review
Horribly excessive DRM that only gets worse with each major version. There used to be an option to allow unauthenticated clients or clients with mismatching versions, but both of those are gone now.

Here is a list of all the authentication checks done (that I know of) all of which phone to Strange Loop's auth server:
When you boot up the game, before you can enter the main menu.
When you join a server.
When you host a server.
When someone joins your own dedicated server.
When someone opens the associated web server.
When someone votes in the Government update.

The game needs and should not have any of those, and even the ones that could be justified should configurable by a server host.
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Developer response:
SLG-Dennis  [developer] Posted: 3 Jan, 2024 @ 10:32pm
Hello Yields Falsehood When Preceded,
we are sorry we had several problems with the authentication servers lately.

Our authentication servers not only handle license validation, but also provide all the data about a player (like game tier and the respective features linked to it, twitch drops and identity for voting features to prevent being able to just vote unlimited times and many other things) that is necessary to be available for all features of Eco to function correctly. Eco does not offer a dedicated singleplayer mode, singleplayer works by hosting a local server, as it would also be used for multiplayer servers - which is the reason that singleplayer is affected as well. Eco is available to players outside of Steam, hence authentication is also necessary to validate the license - you could otherwise just download the freely available client and play without any purchase and notable hurdles, given there is no actual hard DRM aside of the server side checks. Allowing server admins to turn authentication off would result in the same thing - noone would have to buy our game anymore. The main menu not working when authentication servers are down is a bug we already scheduled for fix in one of the next hotfixes, it should just inform you of the situation and the impact it has on play sessions.

The player counts quintupled for the last update and additionally we were target of multiple malicious attacks on our infrastructure we are not used to and that took us time to solve. We have already started to gather expertise for that problem, but that was not a simple task during the holiday season. We are working hard to ensure that such problems cannot happen anymore in the future.

I would be happy if you gave the game another chance. We know this is not acceptable and are doing everything we can to remedy the situation.
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