RogueSix wrote on Mar 22, 2023, 14:37:
The telemetry excuse is some extremely weak ass weird shit. As someone already said, they could have easily made that an opt-in (not opt-out!) choice when first launching the game or somewhere in the settings menu.
Oh well, 'tis another good reason to give this game a hard pass - for now, at least. If the reviews are unanimously positive, I might check it out again when the GOTY goes on sale for $9.99 one fine day. Until then: Fuck you and your spyware, Arkane.

I still think it has to be anti-cheat if you can take characters between online and off, right? Even if that isn't what was said.

To your point, if you have everyone that is online report back, or even do it opt-in, you get the same data. A representative sample is fairly small. Let's say the game sells 10M units. In order to get a 99% confidence level with a 1% margin for error, they only need 17k people reporting back. It's a bit messier with hardware issues, as everyone is somewhat different, but not enough to mandate online to see what is and is not working.

How many people wouldn't be online while playing? 1%? 5%? Definitely 1% if you have the ability to report when online. If you make it opt-out, how many would still be opted in? 75%? 85%? If you make it opt-in, you're probably down to 20%, which is still enough.