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I have written about system in the past. It’s pretty much the worst of the major digital “platforms” out right now. Even Origin pretends to have features and a digital storefront, but UPlay is nothing more than naked DRM with no sugar coating. I last dealt with UPlay back in January, when I tried to play Far Cry 3. Here is that saga as I related on Twitter: Gah.

Far Cry 3 is linked to Uplay, Ubisoft's latest wishes-it-were-Steam. And of course it's hideous. — Shamus Young (@shamusyoung) Oh come on. I have to log in to a 3rd party service to play a Steam game. Is it 2008 again? — Shamus Young (@shamusyoung) Uplay: If I log in with email, then WHY DO I NEED A UNIQUE USERNAME? Related: 'Ubisucks' and 'Ubisoftsucks' are both taken.

— Shamus Young (@shamusyoung) Other taken usernames: 'uplaysucks' and 'uplay blows'. — Shamus Young (@shamusyoung) Uplay TOS has no line breaks, paragraph breaks, or other formatting. It's a solid rectangle of packed text. — Shamus Young (@shamusyoung) For joining UPLAY, I get 10 BS points. Which is enough to buy a WALLPAPER that was a GIS away: MY TIME IS WORTH MORE. — Shamus Young (@shamusyoung) The last step was a huge slap in the face. They give you 10 UPlay points, which you can use to “buy” a promotional desktop wallpaper. Physiotools Download Crack Fifa.

That’s fractally wrong: Even the wrongness has little sub-wrongs that branch off into more wrongs. I shouldn’t need to register to play a Steam game. And if I do, it should be easy. And if it isn’t, their “reward” at the end should be 100% painless to obtain and shouldn’t involve a store with some kind of shopping cart and meta-currency. And if it does, then the reward at the end should be valuable to me.

And if none of that is true, then at least UPlay should have enough tact to not attempt to charge me worthless un-money to use my desktop as advertising space. But that’s all in the past. Water under the bridge. I haven’t thought about UPlay since then. I forgot the service existed until I got this email today: Dear Member, We recently found that one of our Web sites was exploited to gain unauthorized access to some of our online systems.

We instantly took steps to close off this access, investigate the incident and begin restoring the integrity of any compromised systems. During this process, we learned that data had been illegally accessed from our account database, including user names, email addresses and encrypted passwords. Please note that no personal payment information is stored with Ubisoft, meaning your debit/credit card information was safe from this intrusion. As a result, we are recommending that you change the password for your account: [redacted] To enter your new password, click the link below: [redacted] Out of an abundance of caution, we also recommend that you change your password on any other Web site or service where you use the same or a similar password. You can find more information here.

For any additional support enquiries, please contact our customer service via our support web site at We sincerely apologize to all of you for the inconvenience. Please rest assured that your security remains our priority.

The Ubisoft team Awesome. UPlay has one purpose, which is to ALLOW people to play their legitimately-purchased games. And they couldn’t even accomplish this without creating a security threat for their customers. I think the more interesting case (and one that couldn’t be achieved by just integrating that reward system into the actual game layer) is that I can use the ‘UPoints’ from Driver:SF on the 360 that I had not cashed in to unlock the extra two puzzle tombs for Assassin’s Creed 2 on the PS3 or PC as soon as they were available in my AC2 game progression. In general there are no rewards for achievements and certainly none that transfer between games (but the next Xbox changes that?) but UPlay does do that with their achievement layer. That’s more interesting than the other achievement systems (baring the Steam sale achievement stuff that they have given up on due to not having a secure model to ensure people couldn’t game the system or hack their way to what they wanted). Do we want cheats and content unlocks hidden behind a wall of achievement point and so on?

I’m voting for no but at least it wasn’t just cloning existing functionality already in the ecosystem for no reason other than to say you had that identical system coded in-house. UPlay is pretty dumb, the stuff they had before everything worked with the offline mode was unacceptable (I’ll never sign up for always-on DRM, it just doesn’t work and removes my ability to play games I paid for when I want), and getting their database dumped is not good. But they’re being a bit novel with implementing things we probably don’t want in our games.

I’ll give them half a pass on the database dump. When it comes to being hacked the issue is a matter of when it will happen not if. At least they weren’t storing their customers credit card data in clear text and the passwords were encrypted, which indicates that they took steps to mitigate the damage before it could happen rather than having to run around like headless chickens after being successfully attacked. I like that the Uplay points give you tangible benefits instead of just being another useless milestone like PSN trophies and Xbox achievements.

Just wish they made it possible to purchase the Uplay DLC rewards outright instead of locking them behind the the upoints system. I’d also like to note that last night when I went to log in to my Yahoo account I was barred from doing anything until I changed my password. On top of that I had to use trickery to use my new PW scheme since the new password too much resembled my old one. The only justification I was given is that there was suspicious activity on my account recently. Funny, because Google will give me details such as “Someone attempted to log in to your account from IP address umpty-squat in China.

Please change your password and consider using a stronger PW scheme.” UbiSoft at least owned up to what happened and proactively notified its customers instead of just forcing a PW change at next log in with no explanation. –but Valve is also really good at playing nice with publishers, even if those publishers have their own fake version of Steam and insist on shoveling it into the Steam version. That’s why GFWL is allowed to infect the Steam versions of Arkham City and Red Faction: Armageddon. (I have owned both these games for a year or more, and have only ever played one of them, due to GFWL BS) This is part of the reason that basically anything worth having is typically available on Steam. It’s the price they pay to carry nearly everything. Am I the only one praying for the day when we can have more digital distribution platforms, that aren’t trying way too hard to be a crappy version of Steam? Don’t misunderstand; I love Steam, but I also love competition, innovation and variety.

These things are in short supply. As for me: I don’t think you’re the only one praying for that day, but I’m not in for that prayer. My personal prayer would call for the day when all games can finally be played without having to be bound to an account with any of the distribution platforms. No Origins, no UPlay, no GFWL, no Steam etc. I still don’t get why there are so many people saying “yeah, but Steam is great because it sucks less than the rest.” I remember a few days ago, Daemian Lucifer said this about the Witcher: The thing is:It doesnt matter if something bad is not as bad as other things.It still is bad.

(Thx for this awesome quote, btw;-) ) To me, the sugarcoating is more the inverse version of what Shamus wrote here: To me, this does feel as if someone (Valve did it first, I guess) realized it’s more effective taking a turd and, as has been said, sugarcoating it instead of dipping the popsicle into the excrement. You see the nice coat first, taste it and one day you say: “Well, that’s the tradeoff: if we want to lick the candy, we have to “chow down” the innards. The bad thing for me: I’m not even that hostile towards DRM itself-I just hate having to register with bank information, installing software that I don’t like and that may possibly interfere with my system. Their shop may be as nice as can be-if I’m obliged to register just to play games I might have bought as retail versions, I don’t like it. It’s not so much “it sucks less” as “we know part of this sucks, but if it’s 75% off, do you really care?” Most of the time, Steam provides a good (in my opinion) balance. The DRM, security, and privacy problems are made worthwhile by the abundance of cheap games (I almost always wait for sales, so the prices beat the competition by 50% or more), combined with an online backup service that means I don’t lose track of or damage my old games (I’ll probably never figure out where I put those Impossible Creatures CDs, but I can find Gish or Overlord in seconds).

There have been a few times (okay once) when I’ve been annoyed at needing to use Steam. That time was when I got a deal on a physical copy of Portal 2, but needed to register it with Steam anyway. In that one instance, I got the bad parts of Steam without most of the good.

TL;DR: It’s not perfect, but with those benefits do you really care? I feel it only fair to point out that the game I originally planned to use as an example of “lost” copy was found within 10 seconds by instinctive navigation. My argument has been weakened by approximately 30%. Steam is great because Stockholm Syndrome. We (via our hobby) are being collectively held hostage by a posse of no-goodniks, but while the others spend their time kicking us in the ribs and extinguishing their cigars on our foreheads (EA, Ubisoft, etc) Steam is bringing us tea and cookies (great sales, various social features) and asking if our bonds are too tight (constantly improving offline mode). Therefore we bond with Steam, even if strictly speaking we ought to still be outraged by the whole ‘hostage’ thing.

Whoa, Win 2k? I’m guessing it wasn’t exactly last year that machine gave up the ghost.

Steam has continued to improve over the years; I feel that these days it offers real value in exchange for the minimal pain it inflicts. If I buy cross platform games, Steam lets me install it on any of them. If my computer is stolen, destroyed, or just replaced; I don’t have to worry about my library of games. I just install Steam on another computer, log in, and pull them down. Games are insanely cheap on their service. Anyway, to each their own; but I’m still thankful that Steam has freed me from the tyranny of lost and scratched discs.

I have throw away email accounts for such nonsense. Spamgourmet.com has them for free and it’s super easy to use. Somewhat related, one time Blizzard told me I had to change my account information to their new system. The new system had some sort of offensive clauses in their ToS (that I no longer recall). So I decided I didn’t want to participate and wanted to remove my credit card info from their system. I tried phoning them and they couldn’t do it over the phone. Turns out the only way to remove your credit card was to first agree to the terms of service.

So in order to decline their terms of service, I had to first agree to them. And then I was subject to their new cancellation terms– the reason why I wanted to terminate. I love the Kickstarter trend to bits, but this is becoming a problem with each passing project. Logic Pro 9 Crack Tpb Se. Even for the simplest reward tiers, where all you may need to receive is a redeemable digital distribution key, there are still devs that feel the need to compel you to create an account on their custom site. For these cases, a simple e-mail or Kickstarter private message would be plenty sufficient.

The blame is somewhat shared, of course: to some extent, it’s a necessary evil, as in many cases there’s really no practical alternative to creating all these standalone account management sites. KS’s tools are manifestly inadequate for most larger projects – i.e. Since the Double Fine induced boom – since there’s the persistent restriction that projects can only send out one backer survey, ever, and further, their inflexible payment options also force developers to create their own systems for alternative methods.

I’m not advocating an all-encompassing third-party system like Steam for this though – it’d be creating a cure worse than the disease – but I do wish the whole end-to-end process could be cleaned up a bit. You mentioned the problems of interfacing with Kickstarter’s tools, but I wanted to clarify: Most of Kickstarter’s tools DON’T EXIST, at least from an automation standpoint. For example, Hidden Path did an entire presentation at PAX Dev about their experience with Kickstarter and their Defense Grid 2 campaign. Kickstarter doesn’t release backer’s email address until the project’s funding is complete, and even then, there’s no way to easily match them to a user. In order to do something as simple as contact a backer with a key to the original game, Hidden Path had to create a bot that would manually refresh the backers page and parse the HTML itself to figure out who needed a key, and then it had to load each profile individually and pretend to click on the “message this user” link. It then pasted the auto-generated message into the text box, filled out the subject, and faked clicking on the “send PM” button. And every time the webpage style updated, the bot would break in some way, one time sending the exact same message to one user about 30 times before they could stop and fix it.

Safe to say, a user account system is not only a necessary evil, but for most teams, the only option to do anything remotely out of the ordinary. The most tragic about this whole UPlay debacle and Ubisoft in general is that, of the trinity of publishing evil (EA, Activision and Ubisoft), Ubisoft is the one taking chances with IPs and trying new stuff, while the other two avoid innovation like the black plague.

Which is horrible, I like the games but I hate the publisher. One of my favorite games from recently was The Settlers 7 with it’s extremely german approach to management and efficiency. I really liked Heroes of Might and Magic VI (or Might and Magic Heroes VI just because). For a fantasy strategy game it actually had a very interesting story, much better than V (but still not quite IV). Then it came the expansion and UPlay BROKE THE GAME. Not figuratively in the likes of “Haven is now OP and thus the game sucks”, it LITERALLY broke the game.

Every time I tried to play it since launch I’ve got variations from Steam that the game isn’t available. I’ve reinstalled the game more times than I can count. I’ve upgraded and purged my system since then and still the game won’t launch. I’ve bought the expansion to try and fix it and no-dice. I’ve asked steam but they tell me the problem is from Ubi.

Ubi hasn’t answered me anything Meanwhile I have RUSE sitting in my Steam library and I won’t install it just out of spite. I know Ubi already got my money but dammit I can’t deal with this DRM bs again. Yeah, I abandoned the series with Heroes VI. The story never grabbed me (maybe I shouldn’t have played Haven first), but what really bothered me was the infinite exponential growth on creep camps. I like to take my time and fully explore each map, find all the little things.

But when I did that I would eventually reach the point of finding vampires and liches in stacks of over 1000, with absolutely no way to beat them short of cheating. This, combined with the lackluster story (for haven at least), and with having to restart because you cannot convert an online game to an offline game, and with all the bugs present at launch that STILL were not fixed two months later, caused me to uninstall and never look back. I can only imagine how much of a development hell Ubi made of the process the bugs that arose from the change of developers is a tell-tale of people fucking with code they didn’t write themselves. Still, I honestly liked the game, just wish Ubi had any other kind of relation with it that wasn’t the abusive parent kind.

Every time it walks in the game walks away more damaged Personally, I had no problem with the stacks of neutral stacks. After you get a big enough army and the right spells you can pretty much beat any number of enemies. Sincerely, King’s Bounty expect you to win much more unfair battles just in order to advance (and hey, for me that’s fine). (Oh, and about the campaign, the biggest thing working against it is that the campaigns have a completely bonkers chronology. The right order is not the order of the faction campaigns nor any order of campaigns. The chronological order requires you to jump from campaign to campaign like a madman and there’s absolutely no in-game hint as to the correct order But yes, the campaigns are interesting after you play in the right order. The necropolis campaign is very emotionally charged, the Stronghold campaign is silly fun, the Sanctuary campaign is an interesting political situation and finally the inferno campaign is a mind twister.

Sincerely, interesting enough to warrant a go through its let’s play: ). Are these different sites actually differentiated internally though? It’s a lot easier to tie all of them into the same account system, than to build seventeen-mumble different independent systems. Or maybe they just stuffed everything into one database table regardless of the site that the login applied to. *Maybe* with an indication of the site, if they wanted to keep them “separated” in customers’ eyes. That’d be less of a single centralized account system, and just a single centralized account database instead.

Which is actually worse.