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Halo Online modders working to strip micro-transactions, release worldwide
- Thread starter mocoworm
- Start date
- Status
This is cool
RandomExpletive
Member
Didn't expect them to get this far this fast... 
FyreWulff, post if you're ok.
I know right? Whoever could have seen it coming?
This is pretty amazing. Microsoft should just release this free to play and charge for cosmetic crap like League of Legends.
Didn't expect them to get this far this fast...
PC players REALLY want Halo and are willing to work to make it happen
thehillissilent
Member
All MS has to do is bring it here in the US with just cosmetic DLC. It would still make money. The gun rental crap and buffs need to die in a fire.
Abinash117
Member
I wonder what MS is gonna do.
RandomExpletive
Member
guess I should hop in that IRC channel more often, we went from "dude the h3 menus are still here" to "yeah so multiplayer 'works'"
Very cool, very exciting
The Lamonster
Member
If they were smart, they'd scramble to finish this game and sell it worldwide.
MrGreencastle
Member
Hopefully release the game where people can give them money for it. It's about the only thing they can do. Can't stop this. It's done.
Gareth Bale
Member
The smart thing to do would be to listen to why the fans of their game are so interested in this.
But this is Microsoft so who knows.
LightningXCE
Member
Ha, neat.
It's forge mode and they got MP elements shoehorned in. Rather snazzy
It's forge mode and they got MP elements shoehorned in. Rather snazzy
Zomba13
Member
It's pretty cool they got it working. Hopefull MS takes not and sees the demand for this outside of Russia and releases it. I don't really see how it could take sales from Halo 5 because the Halo 5 MP will be different and a big draw of Halo 5 (at least for me and a bunch of other people) is the single player campaign. People might even play Halo Online, find it fun and go looking at an Xbone for MCC or Halo 5 to experience similar gameplay in a single player campaign.
If they don't then by the time Halo Online is out in Russia modders would have their own private servers set up with a way to get the RU client working. If MS announce that it will come out world wide then people will likely wait than play is unofficial servers that could be unstable or not up to date with the official RU release.
If they don't then by the time Halo Online is out in Russia modders would have their own private servers set up with a way to get the RU client working. If MS announce that it will come out world wide then people will likely wait than play is unofficial servers that could be unstable or not up to date with the official RU release.
dancrane212
Member
I think this makes far more sense than folk saying that putting MCC on PC could get people interested in buying a console for Halo 5. A free game with low system requirements that offers something similar to but not exactly the "traditional" Halo experience would certainly attract more folk than a $60 release. Offering a taste of the series to get someone interested.
NaDannMaGoGo
Member
Well that was quick. Is the entire gamecode available locally? Meaning, is online multiplayer p2p or what? If so, then MS should've seen this coming from miles away.
JigglesBunny
Banned
The best move Microsoft could make right now is to make an announcement stating that they're bringing Halo: Online to other territories shortly in Beta form and are open to changing the way microtransactions operate based on fan feedback from the Beta.
But they won't do it so I guess it doesn't matter.
But they won't do it so I guess it doesn't matter.
Dictator93
Member
So... anyone know where one can find an archive of it? The channells was blammed. .
Mufausa The 3rd
Member
Honestly, you can call it piracy if you want. Either way, I'm glad that these guys are doing this. If Microsoft wasn't so heavily focused on their Xbox division which we all know they are gunna sell, they'd have a more new Halo game on PC already and this wouldn't be the case with Halo Online.
It's not piracy. For the last time.
ElDorito does not let you get around or even provide a path to avoiding microtransactions or getting microtransaction weapons or powerups for free.
If this is piracy, then
Open Sauce
https://bitbucket.org/KornnerStudios/opensauce-release/wiki/Home
and DSfix
http://blog.metaclassofnil.com/?tag=dsfix
and XlinkKai
http://www.teamxlink.co.uk/
are piracy.
There's no coyness, there's no secret agenda. A part of this is a shim DLL and other tools that lets you interface -existing- tools -provided by Microsoft, for free- for previous Halo games for this one, in addition to other community created tools.
It's really weird to see the modding community praised for every game ever and then suddenly have everyone turn on them for supposedly pirating microtransactions that won't even exist in the official game until it's out of beta. There's nothing to pirate here. The game is 100% free. The payment options for the game don't even exist yet, and client side modding will never let you get around them.
As of right now, it's like all the people that wanted the option of zero bloom in Reach or a different DMR for Halo 4 for custom games are being called pirates. Or for another game example, calling people that want to run vanilla/nohat/nocrit servers on TF2 pirates. Everyone in here has actual technical people from the Halo community telling you what this does and we have journalists that happily regurgitated an outright lie from Microsoft telling you incorrect bullshit that they don't even try to bother to understand.
Not a Jellyfish
but I am a sheep
So not going to so where but....this is out there and up for use.
There's videos of people playing it online. You're gonna have to let the "it's just like DSFix!" stuff go... because at this point it's just ridiculous. DSFix helped sell Dark Souls. It's didn't help replace the need to pay for it.
If the transaction stuff is ever released for free that would make it piracy. Also, do we know what the structure is yet? maybe only matchmaking is free and then you have to pay to access the custom stuff for map packs. That would make being able to just pick and play piracy. hell, maybe it is going to be along the lines of hearthstone with paid entry into elimination style Matchmaking, and buying booster packs. if any of that is at any point compromised, then it would be piracy.
Additionally there is the fact that this was never released, but was stolen, then modified going against the EULA if they had a chance to put one in yet.
Maybe the word piracy does not apply correctly, but what happened here is clearly wrong and illegal on at least some level even if it is only breaking contracts and NDAs.
This is not commentary on how MS should be handling any of this, but rather just an objective view of the situation.
LordOfChaos
Member
Isn't stripping micro transactions from a premium game tantamount to piracy? No one *has* to buy them of course, but they're the revenue stream of the developer, stripping them out and giving away a package without them seems just like cracking a game to me...Not trying to start some moral crusade here, but anti-piracy Gaf suddenly being ok with this?
MrGreencastle
Member
It wasn't stolen. The files were made available on their official website. If they didn't intend to release it, fine, but it wasn't stolen from them. You can't just open the gates to something they aren't even intending on selling anyway, say oops, and then call everyone who grabbed it thieves. But this is Microsoft we're talking about. It was probably part of their "14 day buy and play" promotion right?
NullPointer
Member
Just curious but what does this mean? They made it public and said people could download it? Or was it mistakenly put somewhere that happened to be open to the public?
I guess I wonder whether taking those files are the equivalent of taking someone's trash left outside on the curb or more like taking a pie cooling down on a ground level window sill. The first case isn't stealing, but the second one is.
MrGreencastle
Member
From what I understand, you could sign up for the Alpha, and then download whatever it is they're using in all these videos. Though I don't have any first hand experience doing it (edit: you at the very least needed a Russian VPN, and then Google Translate if you weren't fluent), so I can't say for certain, but that's what everyone is saying happened anyway.
It's more like they started giving away free doughnuts, and the manager said "whoa whoa whoa! Those doughnuts aren't final! Stop giving them away! We're supposed to be giving them away next week".
Calm Killer
In all media, only true fans who consume every book, film, game, or pog collection deserve to know what's going on.
So what about neogaf policy where we can't talk about pirated games here. The fact that this thread exists would prove that its not consider piracy. At least according to neogaf mods right?
Um, Halo Online is free. And none of ElDorito will let you bypass any of the paid transactions. Once again, how does getting a free game to work online avoid paying for a free game?
You're basically expecting to be able to run a Half Life 2 Source mod that, once you fire a gun, it'll add a new copy of GTAV to your Steam library.
Meanwhile, people are openly using VPNs on GAF to pay less for GTAV PC. I don't see any responses in there hand-wringing that it'll endanger further Rockstar PC releases.
By the way, if DSFix helped sell Dark Souls, ElDorito will help sell microtransactions to Americans that want to play Halo Online. They're both DLL shims that add user functionality to the game. Neither allow you to get paid content for free. Also, remember that DSFix got DMCA'd.. except in that case, people obvious saw the DMCA abuse and didn't take a company's action at face value, and got it restored.
You simply signed up for the alpha and it gave you the game.
ElDorito does not strip microtransactions from the game. Again.
I'm not sure if you're just incredibly naive... or if you're just purposely ignoring available information because it conflicts with the stance you decided on a long time ago. One more time... THE GAME IS NOW BEING PLAYED ONLINE. It's not being played online on Microsoft's servers, people are playing the game via p2p methods.
This is completely incomparable to something like DSFix and does bypass the game's payment model. Even a free player is part of the payment ecosystem when playing on MS' servers, as they become the baseline that the paying player is paying to gain an advantage over. With something like DSFix, the user has already paid for the game prior to using it. With this, playing on a virtual LAN removes the possibility for you to pay anything towards the game, and there's simply a trainer that allows you to play using any of the items that usually require payment. So no, it isn't "helping to sell microtransactions", because it honestly can't. If someone in the US want to play Halo Online on MS' servers, they'll need a VPN, not ElDorito
In some ways it's worse than standard piracy, as f2p games live or die by their playercount, including those playing for free. You need a consistently large players base in order for the few whales to exist that pay the bills. Pirating a standard game has an isolated effect on the product because if say your friend wants to play it with you, he may just buy a legit copy. In this case however, there's no copy to buy, but if your friend wants to play with you, and you're playing via virtual LAN, removed from the MS servers and their ecosystem, then your friend will have to do the same too. Every player that's playing using the modified client is directly strengthening that client, whilst weakening the official product. You cannot say the same for DSFix, or pretty much any other standard "mod" out there.
Not exactly. There are a few edge cases that I've seen that manage to survive here despite definitely being piracy. Let's take for example the Supermodel emulator for Sega's Model 3 games. When a version of that popped up that could run most games really well, there was a thread about it where everyone was discussing setting it up, and how various games where performing on it, sharing screenshots etc. Now, are we supposed to assume each of these posters just happens to have Daytona USA 2, Scud Race and Virtua Fighter 3 arcade boards simply laying around at home, waiting years for an emulator to run them? No, it's quite clear that they were pirating them. Even in other threads where we'd be complaining about certain games that were ported, and I'd suggest something like Daytona USA2, I'd get a response along the lines of "just use Supermodel, it works perfectly there now". So, basically telling me to just pirate it rather than hope for a legitimate version which would allow me to pay the publisher.
FunkyDealer
Banned
Imagine if Microsoft released this Halo Online worldwide as a 29 USD digital release without any pay2win bullshit. Surely that would have been a much bigger success?
This is what I've been wanting on PC for so long. Just give me that Halo 3 multiplayer experience without the bullshit weapon rentals. Cosmetic microtransactions is all they need, even I would consider buying some to support it.
Considering how much of a shift the industry has been making towards f2p... probably not.
Not really, Halo doesn't mean anything in Russia as a brand, and there's been plenty of F2P failures within those countries (see Tribes Ascend, Defiance, Dawngate, Planetside 2 to a lesser degree). Some multiplayer games are definitely more valuable at traditional pricing.
Yea, there's no definite outcome either way, but I'm not convinced Halo Online would remain Russia-only permanently. I think globally, it'd have a pretty good shot at becoming pretty big. A standard priced version would typically have less potential, as that price only really holds for a limited time window, before it needs to be drastically lowered to gain new players.
"Someone tells guy that explained to a 343 employee and wrote documentation for said employee on how the Reach version of the Halo engine worked naive"
Via LAN emulators. Which people have been doing for every single Halo that has existed. ElDorito is not a network emulator nor are people playing Halo games online by sidestepping Microsoft's official online service new. The online you are seeing people play are because the Halo 3 LAN mode was found to still be inside the game. It simply lets you bring up the menu that starts LAN from inside the hallowed husk of Halo 3's codestack.
So something that lets you change how a game functions is different from letting you change how a game functions?
Also, Halo Online does not have a payment model at this point. You're not bypassing any payment model. In fact, Microsoft actually came out with a statement and they're not even using the word piracy, but rather saying they're trying to prevent negative impact from Americans using Russian servers during testing:
Microsoft said:
Microsoft actually does NOT want Americans on the official servers right now!
As I just pointed out above, Microsoft doesn't consider non-Russians potential lost players in their own words.
Because Dark Souls costs money. Halo online is free.
I think this is more impacted by the fact that you literally can't pay for anything in the game right now, and we can more than likely safely assume they're going to block American CCs from buying anything for the game. Most non-Russians playing the final product will probably have to stick with what the game give you for free unless you find a way to give MS rubles.
So ElDorito simultaneously lets you get around microtransactions that don't exist in a game that is 100% free, infiltrating a payment token system backed by gigantic processing companies but won't let you get around a basic region check?
Also, how would any trainer get around the very basic server-side authentication checks that would prevent you from equipping any paid content? If it was that easy then no F2P game would make money.
I could explain to you in detail of how the Halo engine works, with it's tag system and resource management and client side vs server side functionality, but I annoy HaloGAF with enough of those posts already. If you want a real world example, nobody was able to run around on Live with similar access to the game's data with Bungie flames in Halo 3 or Reach. "hur hur I got flames" was done via modifying films to put the flame chest on your Spartan, and that's because films did not do authorization checks for player armor.
Microsoft does not consider non-Russians lost players or sales, per their statement.
Which Microsoft wants to be all Russians.
This just in: playing on LAN is piracy. Every time you play a game of Team Slayer at a LAN you're taking food right out of Xbox Live's children's mouths.
Every player that is using the mod aren't wanted on the official product's servers. Because they're not Russian.
I don't know how many words it will take, but with the way the engine works and what ElDorito actually does and the statements from the group of modders working on this that outright say they don't want to let you get paid content for free, and the fact that even the "but it'll split the playerbase" doesn't fly because Microsoft considers Russia the only playerbase for Halo Online at the moment and they themselves have not used the word piracy in any official statement, and the fact that I myself am definitely anti-piracy being a developer, I'm not going to stump for the technical side of the Halo community unless I knew what was up.
I didn't say you were about the engine. You seem to be in regards to the effects that something like this can have though.
Nearly all of your defenses revolve around the clause of things not happening "yet". The f2p system isn't in "yet", people outside of Russia aren't considered lost users "yet", etc. All of that is unimportant, because it just means the damage is being done before the product is even made available. It won't suddenly disappear when the product launches, and the weapons people are currently running around with require microtransactions to use. It won't disappear when/if MS looks to expand the service outside of Russia. This is like arguing that broadcasting an unreleased movie is fine, because right now, people can't pay to watch it, so they're not lost customers.
I don't know why you keep talking as if I'm saying that ElDorito will let you use the enhanced weapons on the official server.. I've never said that. I'm also not sure why you're acting like the region checks would be client based rather than based on the connection to the server. ElDorito gets around the region issue by simply not contacting the real server in the first place. Without that connection the game isn't supposed to function. At all.
Final question. Where is Halo Online free right now? Is MS currently hosting a publically available download, no strings attached, no Terms of Service, redistribute all you want, etc, file? Simply trying to handwave it away as "something that lets you change how a game functions is different from letting you change how a game functions" is just silly, as I've said before, you could make that claim with a trial copy of software, and then make a small change that causes it to function exactly like the fully unlocked version. Would this just be a harmless mod as well?
Except that they don't want a worldwide success: currently they're showing that they just want a slice of the Russian Call of Duty Online's pie.
Also, since they can't strangle Xbox live fees out of the playerbase, I'm sure MS would *never* release the game as a single-fee purchase. That means you own the game instead of renting it, and they can't continuously use you as a source of money.
But since the game is not coming stateside as far as we know, I'm just really happy about the chance of having HD halo 3 multiplayer that I can use without plugging in my Xbox nd renewing a subscription
Conkerkid11
Member
snip
This.
Is it in any sort if public release form? *frantically turns on laptop*
Brerlappin
Member
Yeah I cant quite believe this is fully functional online, tho it seems like the halo players have killed evolves servers so you can tplay at the moment.
Played this all afternoon today
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4R6fnYFvWpA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knEzw6RD8sE
I have no idea whatsoever what MS were thinking by releasing this only in Russia. Its the Halo 3 MP component, on PC, it would've made them a fortune had they just released it worldwide
Played this all afternoon today
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4R6fnYFvWpA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knEzw6RD8sE
I have no idea whatsoever what MS were thinking by releasing this only in Russia. Its the Halo 3 MP component, on PC, it would've made them a fortune had they just released it worldwide
legacyzero
Banned
The internet tells me I'm supposed to be angry at this. Yet I'm not?
I'm not because Halo fans have been shouting that the thirst is real for Halo on PC. How does MS respond to those fans? By slapping them in the face with RUSSIA ONLY.
While I dont support piracy, I support community.
I wager that this is something that MS wants to put out worldwide, and least I'm sure it's in the plans. Probably just a beta test in one certain country while they work out bugs and the marketing plan.
I'm not because Halo fans have been shouting that the thirst is real for Halo on PC. How does MS respond to those fans? By slapping them in the face with RUSSIA ONLY.
While I dont support piracy, I support community.
I wager that this is something that MS wants to put out worldwide, and least I'm sure it's in the plans. Probably just a beta test in one certain country while they work out bugs and the marketing plan.
Conkerkid11
Member
snip
MrGreencastle
Member
custom games tunneling != piracy
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