Ubisoft's new online DRM system . . .

I've just bought Assassins Creed 2. I feel dirty.
 
stemot said:
I've just bought Assassins Creed 2. I feel dirty.
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Well I intend to buy it plus Silent Hunter V but I'm waiting a few months to drop in price. If I have to buy the game, I wont pay full price.
 
Shakermaker said:
Don't say 'Shame on you' then. Don't think you are taking the moral high road by supporting some Don Quixotian boycott. Keep in mind that this draconian DRM scheme is the result of people downloading games and not paying for them, not because Ubisoft are an evil company. I'd rather support (PC) gaming as a whole by buying games, than oppose DRM by not buying any. This is my choice. There is no need for you to morally judge that.

Another reason for me to support Ubi Romania in particular is that it is the only game studio out there still making semi-decent sub sims. This genre is about as ubiquitous (pun intended) as the space sim, so I am doing my little part in keeping the genre alive.
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They are forgetting that they're supposed to be serving the consumer, not themselves. It's the end of all major corporations; when they start thinking that playing their games or buying their products should be a privilege, not a right, for paying customers.
 
Shakermaker said:
Don't say 'Shame on you' then. Don't think you are taking the moral high road by supporting some Don Quixotian boycott. Keep in mind that this draconian DRM scheme is the result of people downloading games and not paying for them, not because Ubisoft are an evil company. I'd rather support (PC) gaming as a whole by buying games, than oppose DRM by not buying any. This is my choice. There is no need for you to morally judge that.
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1. Support the DRM. Ubisoft keeps using the DRM
2. Don't support the DRM. Ubisoft keeps using the DRM.
3. Don't play Ubisoft games. They can't blame pirates if no one pirates the games.

I like option 3. I support good games...Ubisoft does not make good games.

Shakermaker said:
Keep in mind that this draconian DRM scheme is the result of people downloading games and not paying for them
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Wrong. This is about removing rights from the consumer. The DRM scheme has already been cracked so it's usefulness has been diminished to nothing in a matter of hours (oh lawls it hasn't is not an argument, the mere fact you can play these damn things at all proves their DRM is being defeated. Crackers have an unlimited time to develop their cracks whilst Ubisoft has a limited time to create their DRM). These DRM schemes will never work because they cannot be incorporated into the development process without severely hindering progress of said development. So why spend all that money when it doesn't stop pirates? How can it possibly be a result of piracy when it has no effect on piracy? Explain this to me.

I hear this talk about it downloading levels. What the **** is this shit? I buy a product I expect a COMPLETE product not some half arsed attempt to stop piracy.

Shakermaker said:
not because Ubisoft are an evil company.
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Where the hell have you been for the past few years? Ubisoft are evil. They bought up the studio who make a game I love and ripped the multiplayer out to sell a bloody expansion pack with MP. **** Ubisoft.
 
Kyorisu said:
The DRM scheme has already been cracked
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No it hasn't. Read the RPS link I posted.

Kyorisu said:
How can it possibly be a result of piracy when it has no effect on piracy? Explain this to me.
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It works the other way around. Games get pirated so companies add DRM. It is immaterial if it works or not. No pirating means no DRM. In theory, it is as simple as that.

Kyorisu said:
I hear this talk about it downloading levels. What the **** is this shit? I buy a product I expect a COMPLETE product not some half arsed attempt to stop piracy.
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The product functions as intended if you play it as it as intended. And atm it works to stop piracy. I have no illusions that it will be cracked in the future, but according to RPS the only way for crackers to work around it right now is to actually play the whole game. Which adds a lot of time to the whole cracking process.

Kyorisu said:
Where the hell have you been for the past few years? Ubisoft are evil. They bought up the studio who make a game I love and ripped the multiplayer out to sell a bloody expansion pack with MP. **** Ubisoft.
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Yeah, they'd rob a toddler of its lollipop.
 
And atm it works to stop piracy.
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By your own admission it will inevitably be cracked, sooner rather than later. In the meanwhile, it also works to stop me from pulling out my wallet.

I'm not sure if you're just accepting this kind of system grudgingly or if you think it's a perfectly reasonable response to piracy.
 
I remember this old war game I would play on our Mac2 that required a specific word from the manual to play every time the game was started. The manual was eventually lost and I was no longer able to play the game.
DRM has been around for a long time and it has ALWAYS sucked. I hate it and wish companies would stop wasting their time and ours with this stuff.

People who are going to pay for the game are going to pay for it, those who won't, won't. The money spent making DRMs would be better spent on making it so people WANT to buy the games.

Shakermaker said:
Yeah, they'd rob a toddler of its lollipop.
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Yes they would.
 
I think DRM is valid, but if you want it to work, you try not to make the customer feel like he's getting ****ed in the ass. Steam is a DRM solution by itself. But despite some groans here and there, I don't feel like the program is raping me. In fact, I like using it because of the ease of use and features it provides I wouldn't have with a cracked copy.

I fully expect companies to protect their products in one way or another. But I'm both flabbergasted and infuriated that after years of watching each new DRM monstrosity piss off consumers and fail to thwart piracy, the industry's response is to introduce more and more unappealing methods for controlling their product. There wouldn't be any DRM if there was no piracy, but at this point it's turned into nothing but a perpetual vortex of sadomasochism for both publishers and customers.

But hey, maybe this is the future of gaming and we're all ****ed. Get your lube out, folks.
 
You guys touch on a lot of points that I wanted to go over as well.

The first thing you learn in retail is that "The customer is always right." There are exceptions of course, but when tens of thousands of video game players are vocally outraged by intrusive DRM, they ignore it.

The main thing I want to do is to put what they're doing in perspective. Imagine -

You must remain connected to the internet to:

- Read a digital book
- Listen to an Audio Book
- Listen to a CD or MP3
- Watch a DVD or BluRay

As I already mentioned, my internet connection is too unreliable to even allow me to play their game. Yet still, I would never support something like this, on principal alone.

They have taken away reasonable use of something you pay for.
 
Absinthe said:
By your own admission it will inevitably be cracked, sooner rather than later. In the meanwhile, it also works to stop me from pulling out my wallet.

I'm not sure if you're just accepting this kind of system grudgingly or if you think it's a perfectly reasonable response to piracy.
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Accepting it grudgingly. But not irritated enough to make a fuss about it.
 
Putting my tinfoil hat firmly on, I find it increasingly difficult to believe that something so obviously, incompetently flawed could have been cooked up without it being an act of intentional sabotage. It's not exactly far-fetched to suggest that certain minds at the larger publishers see the PC market as irrelevant, and anything that creates the kinds of sales figures that further that opinion will probably be welcome.

Well, insofar as bad DRM publicity has ever wounded sales, people who keep up with bad news in PC gaming being a niche of a niche. So yeah, just plain old stumbling buffoonery.
 
I'd just like to say, I do not accept this DRM and the sooner it is cracked the better, simply because I like an offline solution for all my games BUT after spending some time with Assassins Creed 2 with an internet connection that is quite unreliable in terms of keeping connected, I have yet to have a single problem with it. I understand this doesn't help with the "YOU MUST BE CONNECTED TO THE NET ALL THE TIME" aspect, but in terms of peoples worries that the game would drop frequently I have yet to experience anything different to if I was playing a game offline. I have done 35 minutes of video for Youtube without a single edit and not once was there a connection problem.
 
For some people like Virus-san, this is a problem, for others, it's a matter of principle.
 
Shakermaker said:
No it hasn't. Read the RPS link I posted.
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Maybe you should actually read my post? I addressed this issue already. The RPS article doesn't provide any evidence to claims made. I fail to see what meaningful data would need to be downloaded when the minimum required internet connection spec is 50 kbps.

Shakermaker said:
No pirating means no DRM. In theory, it is as simple as that.
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Oh how wrong you are. DRM is used to give the illusion of protecting ones IP. Even with no piracy DRM would still be used, you are a fool to think otherwise. There is the attempt at killing the second hand games market as well.

Ubisoft DRM coming to a console near you.

Shakermaker said:
The product functions as intended if you play it as it as intended. And atm it works to stop piracy. I have no illusions that it will be cracked in the future, but according to RPS the only way for crackers to work around it right now is to actually play the whole game. Which adds a lot of time to the whole cracking process.
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Some Starforce titles took weeks to crack either because it was difficult or nobody cared enough to do it. The fact is it was cracked and having to play the game at most adds a few hours to a release. A competent release group will test the release anyway to make sure there isn't a hidden trigger they've missed.

As for the product functioning as intended. Not going to happen often where I live. I'm lucky my ADSL1 connection is stable (sort of) but anyone on a RIM is going to experience connection issues like crazy at peak times. I see no reason to buy a product that may or may not work. Go check out the Ubisoft technical forums. Legitimate customers are having to suffer because of this platform, unacceptable.
 
Kyorisu said:
Maybe you should actually read my post? I addressed this issue already. The RPS article doesn't provide any evidence to claims made. I fail to see what meaningful data would need to be downloaded when the minimum required internet connection spec is 50 kbps.
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Think of the game as a puzzle with a thousand pieces. Most of those pieces are installed but the DRM seems to download a couple of those pieces during various stages of the game. The DRM is cracked in the sense that you can start playing a game, but right now you can't finish it.

Kyorisu said:
Oh how wrong you are. DRM is used to give the illusion of protecting ones IP. Even with no piracy DRM would still be used, you are a fool to think otherwise. There is the attempt at killing the second hand games market as well.
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On this point our opinions differ.

Kyorisu said:
Some Starforce titles took weeks to crack either because it was difficult or nobody cared enough to do it. The fact is it was cracked and having to play the game at most adds a few hours to a release. A competent release group will test the release anyway to make sure there isn't a hidden trigger they've missed.
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Apparently you have more experiences with pirating games than I have. I wouldn't know. I do know that it will take a very long time to crack the DRM in the specific case of SH5 due to the nature of the game.

Kyorisu said:
As for the product functioning as intended. Not going to happen often where I live. I'm lucky my ADSL1 connection is stable (sort of) but anyone on a RIM is going to experience connection issues like crazy at peak times. I see no reason to buy a product that may or may not work. Go check out the Ubisoft technical forums. Legitimate customers are having to suffer because of this platform, unacceptable.
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I am only discussing the case from my own perspective and I haven't had any troubles with it.
 
Shakermaker said:
Apparently you have more experiences with pirating games than I have. I wouldn't know. I do know that it will take a very long time to crack the DRM in the specific case of SH5 due to the nature of the game.
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All it takes is four, maybe five hackers pooling $50, catching/copying the necessary files as they're downloaded, and a week to crack it.

Shakermaker said:
I am only discussing the case from my own perspective and I haven't had any troubles with it.
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That's probably because Amsterdam, and you (I assume), are relatively well-off and have good internet infrastructure. Imagine how frustrating this DRM would be for someone still on dial-up, or someone with problematic cable or phone lines in their house or neighbourhood, or even someone who uses a wireless network card instead of a CAT5 cable.
 
Stigmata said:
All it takes is four, maybe five hackers pooling $50, catching/copying the necessary files as they're downloaded, and a week to crack it.
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Like I said, it is probably possible and I have no doubt it will be cracked in the next couple of weeks (especially now this has become somewhat of a challenge), but it will take quite some effort.

Stigmata said:
That's probably because Amsterdam, and you (I assume), are relatively well-off and have good internet infrastructure. Imagine how frustrating this DRM would be for someone still on dial-up, or someone with problematic cable or phone lines in their house or neighbourhood, or even someone who uses a wireless network card instead of a CAT5 cable.
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Yes, I can imagine that. But because someone else might have trouble with it, I am not going to hold back on buying one of my most anticipated titles of the year. I guess I don't have an activist personality.
 
Your position makes no sense to me Shaker. You accept and defend Ubisofts decision to severely hassle legitimate customers, simply because its a response to piracy?

Thats like saying its ok for exterminators to light someones house on fire because bugs were in there.
 
The argument of how long it's going to take to crack the game is a very moot point. Who the hell cares an extra week? I think anyone pissed off enough who waited this long after the console release could wait a lot longer than it will actually take to crack this stupid thing too.
 
Ubisoft DRM servers go down for many hours.

Best argument against this DRM yet: Instead of putting the playability of your product at the mercy of Ubi's hardware reliability, and them having the ability to "make it better" if their hardware craps out, this DRM leaves your games at the mercy of something very easy to do and completely outside of Ubisoft's control.

[edit] This is assuming that the servers are under a DDOS attack, which is pretty likely given how long the servers have been down now.
 
Stigmata said:
Ubisoft DRM servers go down for many hours.

Best argument against this DRM yet: Instead of putting the playability of your product at the mercy of Ubi's hardware reliability, and them having the ability to "make it better" if their hardware craps out, this DRM leaves your games at the mercy of something very easy to do and completely outside of Ubisoft's control.
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People don't like to be restricted, oppressed, told what to do, forced to do things. People like to be a part of something and have control. One look at 'anonymous' will tell you that. Publishers don't seem to understand the psychology behind human behaviors like what happened with Spore, for example.

Instead of DRM, they should put a message out -

"We cut out the DRM, so we can sell this product for less. Our advisers wanted to charge $59.99 (US) for it, and slap the most restrictive DRM on it. But we ignored them. We save you money by cutting out the DRM.

This hot new game will launch at $39.99 (US), with no restrictive DRM, no activation restrictions, and no hassles. Our advisers told us this was insane, but let us prove them wrong. Here's a list of places where you can buy this hot new game right now, and here are some authorized pay to download links."


Put a face behind it too:

"Our developers (image of them all standing in the office - group photo) worked hard to make this game the best they could. Let's support them so they can continue to make the games you will play tomorrow, and in the future."


Call me crazy, but personally, I think that is the best 'DRM'. You might be shocked to see how strongly people will support such a strong gesture towards customers. (You know - customers - the people that ensure you have a job tomorrow).

Yes, people are going to still pirate it, but they will regardless of anything. Much of the increase in [general] piracy is due to poor, developing nations (who obviously can't afford such things anyway).

piracy5.jpg
 
Damn, I would have said Americans would be really high. You guys sure showed us. I bow in respect to your criminal ways.
 
http://www.geek.com/articles/games/...yable-as-ubisoft-drm-servers-go-down-2010037/
Ubisoft executive to stock board of directors, clearly improvising at 3 in the morning: H-hey, guys! We really ****ed up this time!


What nobody seems to realize is that if they ever wanted to save time and money, they could disconnect the servers. What this essentially means is that if they ever run low on money because their shitty drm put them out of business, they can basically take away your ability to play your rightfully purchased game simply for the fact that they need more money.
Let me make this clear: this is a corporation. They will cut corners, and do not care about customer satisfaction so long as they get massive amounts of profit in the meantime. Hopefully, they will realize that this was a bad idea and stop implementation of this service in the future, but in the meantime they'll simply try to make sure this sort of thing never happens again. The result of this is cutting off servers of lesser played past games sucking up valuable maintenance, and disallowing you the right to play the games you have purchased.
I'm sorry, the games that you "purchased the right to play under the terms agreed to above." Gee guys, this is screwed up.
 
the cow says moo said:
Seriously? Asia is fourth?
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Krynn72 said:
Damn, I would have said Americans would be really high. You guys sure showed us. I bow in respect to your criminal ways.
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the cow says moo said:
Middle East/Africa is third?!
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Source:
PC Game Piracy Examined

Author: Koroush Ghazi
Last Modified: February 2010
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Very long, and very thorough article, though I don't necessarily agree with all of the conclusions.

http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html
 
Why am I not surprised that the system failed this quickly? At least most DRM systems are transparent, but even those who usually don't give a shit about DRM will wake up after seeing this fiasco.

Krynn72 said:
Your position makes no sense to me Shaker. You accept and defend Ubisofts decision to severely hassle legitimate customers, simply because its a response to piracy?

Thats like saying its ok for exterminators to light someones house on fire because bugs were in there.
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It's more like a car dealership sabotaging a car you bought that previously worked because someone could reverse engineer it and sell it somewhere else.
 
It's more like a door-to-door vacuum salesman who knows that there are a bunch of shady folk who are somehow making free copies of the vacuum he sells, so after he sells you one he watches your house day and night waiting for the point where this metaphor starts to make sense.
 
Krynn72 said:
Your position makes no sense to me Shaker. You accept and defend Ubisofts decision to severely hassle legitimate customers, simply because its a response to piracy?

Thats like saying its ok for exterminators to light someones house on fire because bugs were in there.
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I accept that Ubi will try to use DRM to stop people pirating its games. I am not saying they've made the right decision with this particular kind of DRM and I am not defending its use, but as stated before I simply grudgingly accept it.

I do want one thing of my chest though. In general, people seem to be very fierce in attacking all kinds of DRM, but what I would like to know is how they would handle piracy.
 
The old system is good enough (cd keys, disc checking) to keep the super retards off of it. But if people want to crack stuff, they will. If the game is good, it will get more than enough sales to justify itself (like Borderlands, Mass Effect, tons of examples). Developers: make good ****ing games and you don't even have to worry about it.
 
DEATHMASTER said:
The old system is good enough (cd keys, disc checking) to keep the super retards off of it. But if people want to crack stuff, they will. If the game is good, it will get more than enough sales to justify itself (like Borderlands, Mass Effect, tons of examples). Developers: make good ****ing games and you don't even have to worry about it.
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That is the usual knee-jerk reaction and it also doesn't answer my question. If you were Ubi or any other publisher, how would you combat piracy?
 
Stop paying so much unnecessary attention to it. Because that's what it is.
VirusType2 said:
This hot new game will launch at $39.99 (US), with no restrictive DRM, no activation restrictions, and no hassles. Our advisers told us this was insane, but let us prove them wrong. Here's a list of places where you can buy this hot new game right now, and here are some authorized pay to download links."
Click to expand...
Do you realize how much sales would spike from something like this? Valve has already proven it with steam sales.
 
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