I am not sure about nobody asking for new and improved filters stuff, again, the most vocal posters are newcomers and surely they could get overwhelmed by existing filters esp. with documentation in current state.
I don’t think anyone objects central online service for storing community uploaded profiles similar to SimXperience, but why refactor the whole system to make it online only. What if I don’t want to share my profile on cloud.
Not everyone is looking for that functionality, or interested in some internet Joe profile, and just want to continue racing in peace and quiet without fear of being cut off completely by network, cloud provider, or service outage.
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This has been thought about. You can decide exactly what profiles you want to share to other users in the cloud. There is an user interface to publish and unpublish your profile for others.
Public or not it still required to be saved on the cloud.
You are making SC2 completely useless without your online service being up.
This is huge anti consumer misstep, how many people would have reconsidered their SC2 purchase if they knew this is gonna happen.
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So in your view, Microsoft Outlook 365, Office Online, Netflix, Spotify, and other online services are also anti-consumer?
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Apples and oranges, you are comparing fridge to the service designed for and depending on online content.
Post a poll and see what people think of always online move.
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Reg. Filters: Most newcomers post questions for a short while, others jump in and help. You get this for free. Arguing for why not to improve and advance filters makes no sense. You will die when the other brands surpass your filters. I wonder where fanalabs is in 1-2 year on those. If you lose that, you lose the die hards and the youtubers.
Reg. online only: Office 365 is different software altogether. It did not make wordperfect, a different product, not work any longer.
Yes, agree 100%. Actual cloud services can’t be compared to a $1000+ piece of hardware and its dependency on an internet connection.
I’m fully supportive of everything being talked about relative to online profiles and can fully appreciate the complexity of solving for managing local plus cloud profiles. But if my internet goes down and I want to mess around in Assetto Corsa offline and I can’t turn on my wheelbase and switch from my default iRacing profile to my AC profile, or possibly even change settings - that’s when I think dependency on the cloud has gone too far.
Maybe a little more detail about the offline experience would help put everything into perspective for us?
With all that said, I’m still looking forward to all of the new features you guys have planned!
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Making it easy to find other’s profiles seems like great idea. Making it required to have connection to cloud service so you can run your 1-5 personal profiles seems like terrible idea. The two don’t have to go hand in hand.
Very odd design decision. Usually you want simple things to remain simple (e.g., running my one main profile without having to contact online service). Having more complexity to do fancier things like automatically finding best profile makes sense but should perhaps be opt-in in my opinion. At least having a fallback position designed in from day one seems wise.
MS Office365 and Teams issues do bite our company few times per month…
You’re really going to take flak if this soon to be required online service is unreliable, or one’s connection to it is unreliable and blocks offline use of one’s SC2.
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- Offline profile management is absolute required and online must be optional.
- Online profile management is enough, but offline backup/fallback would be nice.
- It is best to have everything online for e.g. ease-of-use reasons
0 voters
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I edited the poll, there was one vote that got lost due to that.
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In the midst of this I’ll give you 1.000.000.000 creds for commitment and always active approach. It’s really, truly amazing. No matter disagreements.
(and it was my vote, revoted)
Thank you!
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I must add that the format the profiles are stored on device (sort of a table of settings values), is not really an online-compatible modern format such as json and the .ini file format for local profile imports/exports has its troubles as well. For this reason, we want to migrate to online first, and then study how to make the offline work the best at the same time as online system. It would be best if the device firmware would understand and save things in json format, but a json parser on the firmware side is maybe overkill and profiles would take too much storage space there.
The end of the line is that we want to make it possible to add features, filters, etc. in the future as well, and make it easy and not difficult to maintain the online AND offline system at the same time.
@Mika I love the idea of what you are trying to do here and I’m sure you’ve worked your ass off whilst developing this in the background.
As I have said before, the profile sharing aspect of this will be a big hit but making it all dependant on being always online is going to be a big mistake in my opinion. The reputation of GD will be torn to shreds if users can’t switch profiles due to an internet outage.
People often post “Podium or SC2” type threads over on other forums and when they see SC2 requires an always on connection, people are going to turn away. I know it would sway my decision if I wasn’t already a happy owner.
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me and my SC 2 Ultimate are excitedly waiting 
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Why couldn’t offline use the same format as online (JSON, whatever you choose)? TD presumably would talk to online but could access local files in same format. TD would translate those online format files to device format. That doesn’t seem that much more complex than online only. You don’t need to keep supporting current offline format. There could be a conversion tool perhaps during a transition.
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Conversion tool would take some time to do, but I’m thinking of solution where, when adding an new profile to the online system, user could import an ini file that has an old-style profile.
And you are right, this json-style cache could be the solution, but there would have to be also an offline version of the web app that loads them. Or some type of a new management UI for locally stored/cached profiles. This is exactly the thing we decided to defer to later investigation/development as no best solution was found. And it is not required for initial releases as users can (in the beginning) keep using the old system if they wish.
May be I don’t understand new format problem fully, but don’t we have Import/Export function in TD already.
You can keep internal on board format as is and make that Import/Export take care of converting to and from online format.
SC2 will continue using internal local profiles only as it does today, but you will have an option to Import and Export profiles to and from the cloud, including Community uploaded profiles.
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That would not be as transparent as we want this to be. The goal is to have the online system and community profiles as the integral part of the system, not an add-on feature. There must not be any extra steps to use the online features.
Seems like not many users in the poll are in favor of that.
What does it buy us, it’s not like I am carrying my SC2 from one PC to another or going mobile to have all my profiles online. The maximum I need is probably check once in a while online profiles DB to see if there is anything new and worthy to download and try.
Plus with that service, how are you going to authenticate users, is there some new sign up/registration process planned, what about users with multiple devices or device shared by multiple users.
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Yes
One can create more logins or just use one login to access user’s own profiles on multiple devices.
Logout&Login will work.