Uplay

[toblix]

What a worthless fucking piece of shit Uplay is. Oh, what a brilliant idea, Ubisoft! A service that links all your shitty games together in a ugly, annoying web of annoying marketing, a useless fucking currency for buying, what, wallpapers?! Sweet, another fucking achievement service on top of everything else. ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: CREATING AN ACHIEVEMENT NOTIFICATION EVEN UGLIER THAN THE XBOX ONE! Oh no, your one unstable, shitty single-point-of-failure login server is down? No problemo, signor! Everyone can wait until you're back from your siesta to hit the reset button. In the meantime, just tell everyone their username or password is incorrect. OH SHITTE I WONDER WHY WE ARE LOSING MONEY! MAYBE ZERE AREN'T ENOUGH SERVICES AROUND OUR GAMES.!!!!

[JonCole]

Yeah, pretty much. While it doesn't inconvenience me more than the occasional server issues and couple of extra seconds launching the UPlay launcher prior to my game, I'd still rather it be wiped off the face of the Earth for providing zero value.

[Nappi]

I agree with this statement. Well put toblix.

The only thing I like about Uplay is that it displays the amount DRM data (?) transferred every time you open a game for no reason at all. The progressbar is there for less than a second and exact value is in bytes (if I recall correctly). It always makes me feel like Uplay is in fact some kind of no-CD crack or something. And a poor one at that.

[Raff]

I worked for an incompetent loss-making french software company for a year and in my mind the Ubisoft headquarters is identical. I'm imagining the tone-deaf strategy meetings and clueless managers with no real understanding of the what their company produces presenting their responses to last year's vacuous industry fads. Cavalier attitude to any criticism or doubt expressed by customers. Quite good cantine food.

[toblix]

https://twitter.com/#!/search/uplay

The sad thing is, these companies have never cared about these complaints, because they don't need to. Once it's back up people will quickly forget about it, and then Far Cry 3 comes out.

[elmuerte]

And I was almost considering buying Ubisoft games again.

[Lechimp]

At least GOG has started selling Ubisoft games DRM free like Far Cry 2. So I guess I just have to wait 5 years before I get to play Anno 2070.

[Orv]

At least GOG has started selling Ubisoft games DRM free like Far Cry 2. So I guess I just have to wait 5 years before I get to play Anno 2070.

None of the games GOG is selling had Uplay to begin with.

[Twig]

Uplay's cloud-saving (which is on by default, fair enough IF IT ACTUALLY WORKS) forced me to play the first few hours of Assassin's Creed 2 three times before I figured out what the fuck was going on. |:

[Codicier]

I wonder if Valve has enough clout now in the PC digital market that it could put it's foot down on things like this and GFWL.

[Gwardinen]

Uplay's cloud-saving (which is on by default, fair enough IF IT ACTUALLY WORKS) forced me to play the first few hours of Assassin's Creed 2 three times before I figured out what the fuck was going on. |:

I think it may have actually lost me my Assassin's Creed: Revelations save. I was about two thirds of the way through, intending to finish it before AC3 is released. I really have no interest in replaying all of that because this has been the weakest game in the series for me in some senses anyway. I will probably YouTube skim the rest of the game to make sure I'm not missing anything major, and wait for AC3.

[Twig]

I think it may have actually lost me my Assassin's Creed: Revelations save. I was about two thirds of the way through, intending to finish it before AC3 is released. I really have no interest in replaying all of that because this has been the weakest game in the series for me in some senses anyway. I will probably YouTube skim the rest of the game to make sure I'm not missing anything major, and wait for AC3.

What fixed it for me was literally just turning off cloud-saving, and my old save was still present. I can't guarantee it'll work, but you can try it!

[toblix]

In March, Ubisoft said they wanted to offer PC gamers so much value the need for DRM "goes away." It seems like they think they're doing that by disguising the DRM as a service that provides wallpapers and cloud saving.

[OJR]

Again it's just another stupid inconvenience to the consumer. I'm not a fan of any DRM or always-on system by principle, but I'll take it if it's stable and doesn't get in the way. Valve could, theoretically, just pull the plug on all the hundreds of games I've bought from them, and I'd have to go to court to get my property back, but it's not in their best interests to do such a thing. They've made their DRM so unobtrusive and shoved in so much extra support and content for things like modding that it's worth the trade-off.

Ubisoft, EA and Blizzard/Activision are absolutely heinous at inconveniencing new players. Pirates offer a more tempting service by having their price point at 'free' for starters. But these companies are not going to beat the pirates even marginally by locking off content and instigating draconian DRM and code entry stipulations. And the whole war on the pre-owned market is going to kill retro-gaming from this console generation onward, where the only way you'll ever be able to get all the content for a game is to pirate it, as most of it would be locked away behind codes or held as retailer exclusive content. And DLC will only be on their servers for a limited time. If I go buy a copy of Ace Combat 2, one of my favourites, from eBay I know I'm getting all the content. If I did that with Ace Combat 6 or Assault Horizon in a similar number of years in the future I'm never going to be able to have the whole game, even if I were willing to pay for all the extra content.

Companies have no incentive but customer goodwill to take into account things like convenience and potential retro gaming. Companies like GOG help, with DRM stripped versions, but this can't be done for all games. They want control of the content, even after you have paid them, like a one-time rental payment where you actually own nothing. And with the percentages the actual developers get most of the time I'm almost loathe to part with my money sometimes. So I'll wait for sales and swallow my woggle and fork over as little cash for games I want from companies whose practices I don't agree with because, dammit, I want their product, but they don't deserve the asking price for their audacity and I don't want to pirate their software.

I speak with my wallet. You put draconian DRM in your game and charge £40 for it? I'll wait until it's £10 and buy it then, and screw your first week sales figures. You'll probably release a Game Of The Year Super Special Gold Edition for half the price of the original, if I'm lucky.

[Gwardinen]

It's funny how cyclical my relationship with the cracking community has become. A decade or so ago, I would buy games legitimately and then download No-CD cracks for them so that I didn't have to keep swapping discs in and out of my PC. Then there was a brief golden age in which companies began to patch their own games to not require discs in drive, or in some other way the PC standard became not requiring physical media all the time, and now we've gone back to having a bizarre and inconvenient DRM solution. So, once again, I often turn to the crackers to crack my legitimate PC games so that I don't have to deal with that shit.

Yes, even Uplay and GFWL are fully cracked. Obviously. Because there is no DRM system that actually works. They're all just inconveniences. As I believe Gabe Newell has said, the way you get people not to pirate games is by giving them value, not trying to enforce your will upon them. I'm not trying to say pirates are some kind of moral authority, or that developers and publishers don't have a right to try to protect their product, but sometimes you have to be realistic. Catch more flies with honey, and all that.

[OJR]

@Gwardian

Very Yes

[syntheticgerbil]

Uplaywithyourself.

I have a hard time not saying that out loud every time I load up Uplay.

[brkl]

So, hey, Uplay is also a backdoor that hackers can use to do anything they want to your computer if you click the wrong link:

https://news.ycombin...item?id=4311264

No, that's not the wrong link, read that. So if you installed Driver: San Francisco after listening to the podcast, for instance, I could totally be hacking you right now, but I choose not to.

[Nappi]

Ahh.. So that is the the "additional value" they keep talking about.

[Henroid]

Disable the browser plug-in that was installed, right now. From what I'm seeing that'll fix it.

This probably wasn't intended by Ubisoft, as a function of their DRM, but their fucking Quality Control missed it.

[Lu]

Intended or not, why did it even need to install a browser plugin without telling me that it did? How is that okay? All of this makes me supremely uncomfortable.

[toblix]

Shut up and buy games.

[youmeyou]

I'm so mad right now. I'm trying to play Splinter Cell and Ubisoft's servers are barely functioning. Having to continuously restart the game to get it to recognize the patch servers.This is just unbelievable.

[Murdoc]

Only reason why I didnt pick up Conviction during the sale, its just too much hassle.

[youmeyou]

It was a humongous hassle. I even had to forward some ports to get the multiplayer to work. That being said, the multiplayer is AWESOME. Like a more fleshed out spec ops. So I guess it was worth it. Still pretty ridiculous though.