Not the ship itself is "ultra rare" - you need 3200 quicksilver to buy the Void Egg which triggers the quest. It's the quicksilver which is "ultra rare" in SP mode, but can be earned in MP mode.

However - and that is what causes all the grief - said Void Egg doesn't even show up in the "Quincy shop" unless you let the game go online at least once.

What a mess.

And to think i almost bought the game.

Well... still your choice. The Void Egg/Living Ship mission is still non-essential "extra'" or "bonus" content - and it's maybe 0.1% of the game (depending on how you play, of course), and the rest is there, online or not - and IMO pretty great.
Like I wrote, if HG would have announced the Living Ship update as "Here's something nice for all you community players, keeping the game alive", people would still complain (people always complain), but we probably wouldn't have this discussion.

Living ship is quicksilver only... i have never seen one being flown by an NPC so that was talked about quite a bit and cannot be obtained by any other means if the game never once touched online. That said a new player thats never been online would never ever see or hear about the ships or know what they are.

These features were added in by the devs as a patch and facilitated though galaxy. GOG appropriately put a disclaimer on the game as has been previously mentioned. I Don't feel like this is an issue for GOG its a Hello Games issue. As a player reading that I should be aware of my options and possibly buy someplace else... as it stands I have a fully functional experience and if for some reason i don't have internet and the installer backup files then i will never get a living ship (unless i add an egg with an editor)... but also i wont have patches either so its a lose/lose for me.

Its silly to raise a fuss about this with GOG. They want content but only if it fits a certain mold... this is not a GOG issue at all its a Hello Games issue. But is it really, what do they want? any game that patches in content that needs the internet to get pulled from the store? no way thats silly.. the disclaimer is on the page. Thats all GOG can really do, if thats not enough then the user should buy the game from another site. If they want it DRM free offline its there minus the multiplayer only content as with a bunch of other titles on GOG that need multiplier to unlock content.

You can always just mod it into the game, or save game patch in an egg if you really want one.

Those thinking that the solution is removing quincy from offline versions are INSANE.

Why should its removal being better than just freaking unlock all its items in offline mode too? I will never understand such mental gymnastic.

Quincy has just a limited number of items, all of which can be still purchased in offline mode, also, the hotfix mentioned on the game's subforum explains that the hotfix enables BOTH daily quest (quicksilver reward) AND quincy items during offline: all hello games should do at this point would be to automatize this by default for offline installers (using the different values).

And in before someone screams "you can do that by yourself!": there are two issues here:

1) You need someone who plays online telling you the exact values every time the game updates;
2) If hello games changes this relevant part with quincy, you are SOL for good.

Why this is a concern and should be fixed: you can talk all you want about a MP feature, except that it can AND is done mostly in SP anyway (most people seems to farm quicksilver in solo), so not only, the online lock is unneeded, but it's also against GOG userbase principles.

I personally DON'T think this is a form of DRM, as for me this is no different than a GAAS system (no matter how little it is, being dependant on internet to use a x feature for no reason, still ends in this cattegory, no exception), neither of which should be done on GOG.

It also baffles me how many people are white knighting hello games for this choice, seriously, it remminds me of how drm started and now the majority of steam users are fine with denuvo (or how people accepted dlc and mtx which ended up with games being crowded with this BS).

With that said, I remember someone asking if anyone sent a mail to hello games for this particular issue, did anyone try it and if so, did they get an answer?

Your worry about losing access to future patches is exactly what the DRM-free movement wants to prevent. None of us want to be locked out of a game in the future, or be denied access to future important updates.

NMS is unfortunately complicating the situation, and we may not end up with an outcome that will please everyone :(

Personally, I'd like NMS to remove the requirement to be online to unlock all items in the Quicksilver shop. This should be an easy fix for them...

Chandra just said in a different thread, that GOG reached out to the dev. Let's hope that this 'reaching out' was GOG asking for the DRM to be removed and that the update, that Chandra promised, actually does come soon and not "Soon(TM)"

This is an awesome news.

Now let's hope hello games will not do anything harsh or stupid like removing completely quincy, but instead enable it full functionality while offline too.

Actually, in my opinion it's somewhat worrying news.

It depends on when they contacted Hello Games:
1) GOG were told about this issue about a month ago. If they contacted Hello Games back then, it means that they didn't get a reply they're willing to share for almost a month now, which doesn't sound too good.
2) GOG were told about this issue about a month ago. If they contacted Hello Games only recently, it means that they posted their disclaimer on the NMS game page without even trying to get Hello Games to fix it, which is really bad.

While GOG contacting Hello Games about this is promising it doesn't mean that the issue will be rectified anytime soon, if at all. I'll wait until something actually is listed in a future changelog or is announced by GOG.

Yes I know, but still better than nothing.

The living ship event was pretty old already, and nobdy wanted to bring the issue until now: since now more people have been aware of the issue this could work in our favour, hopefully.

Streets of Rage 4 isn't fully DRM free as well, according to the last part of its description:

Please note: The GOG GALAXY Client is required to access online features. Multiplayer is available only between GOG.com users.

Yeah there are lots of games with DRM'd multiplayer here. There's even a (partial) list of them:
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/lists_games_that_need_galaxy_for_multiplayer_and_the_ones_that_dont/page1

Unfortunately I don't think that list points out games that use third party DRM for multiplayer.

Do you (or anyone else) know what these "online features" are?