PC Assassin's Creed II stumbles on Ubisoft DRM server snafu

hey ubisoft: effffffffffffffffffff yooooooooooouu. Your games have gone down sharply in quality, and now you're blocking people from playing them. I hope you go out of business. Of course you'll blame it on us not giving you enough money.

I have little sympathy for those gamers who bought ACII. They knew that there were horrible DRM in place and bought it anyway. This is what you get for supporting something that is meant to hurt you.

@lindallison "exceptionally paranoid" PC piracy is a conspiracy cooked up by Sony, Nintendo and, believe-it-or-not, Microsoft. There is no such thing as PC gamers stealing games. In fact, i have never heard of bittorrent.

The game industry has yelled for so long now that piracy hurts their sales that we have come to believe it like sheep. Only if a semi truck with 50,000 copies ran off a cliff and the games were destroyed on the way to market, they lose money. They always feel they have to justify their changes in the product because consumers don’t like it. They are only hurting themselves more than the pirates ever could.

From my understanding the PS3 is the last system that is really hard to crack, and that is because there are security measures on the Blu-Rays that are not on DVD.

Already cracked, wow. If the publishers made free upgradeable content and made an incentive for gamers to buy the legit copy vs. pushing us into a corner with these horrid DRM policies then we would see sales rise. As of right now these companies are going about it the wrong way.

I almost guarantee someone will file a lawsuit over this. Even though I am sure it is stated that they may take their servers offline at any time for any reason. Not being able to play a single player game is kind of silly.

Also, I am not sure why everyone thinks consoles are so much more secure. Ever heard of Homebrew? I am sure Xbox and PS3 have their own version of the same thing.

i cracked a game once, then it wouldnt play ;)

It's the way of the future...

"Due to exceptional demand..." ? How 'bout: "Due to our exceptionally paranoid dumbf**kery..."

IMO, Ubisoft is one of the worst publishers out there. EA and Activision take it on the nose a lot, and not that they aren't deserving, but Ubisoft's standards for quality and polish is consistently lower than either of the aforementioned. They're the king of releasing products that aren't finished or poorly implemented and sloppy, and they more often than not release games that just outright suck. This is just another example of a terrible idea gone terribly wrong. Sadly, AC is easily their strongest franchise. This title should have been a slam dunk, but the horribly inconvenient DRM along with its poor implementation has solidified Ubi as being consistently poor in handling their IPs.

@icepop4who take a look at 360 and Wii piracy rates. Rising on each big release. MW2 was huge.

And companies wonder why people pirate games...

What's the point of releasing games for the PC? people are going to steal it anyway. Like the former Epic Games chief said, the same people that can play graphical intensive PC games are the same people who can torrent.

@WALLIX well you cannot play multiplayer games with cracked version.So someone should try to use that simple serial protection for online in single player.

They should be ready before attempting something new...

And Ubisoft fails yet again. That's what you get for screwing over PC gamers. I hope no one buys any of their stupid $60 games with terrible DRM.

I knew they would have problems with the servers...

This has been expected ever since announce.

@Ebougile It's kind of naive to think that the same (or worse) DRM doesn't exist on the consoles...

Well I've experienced no problems other than waiting a minute and a half for it to load once...I can live with that for a game that is excellent yet to test my game safe on another pc yet but will be soon.

Once again the paying customer gets screwed by DRM. I stopped buying PC games about two years ago now because I was starting to disagree with the copy protection involved. Now I game pretty much exclusively on the consoles and am putting my money there.

You can't win Ubisoft. You just can't win.

Pirates will always be around. Shame on Ubisoft for punishing the many for the actions of a few. The only way to beat PC piracy is to simply stop making a PC version. And if they do that, then the pirates will all start hacking their 360's. Retail stores take, "Shrink" (aka everyday loss) into account for all their books. Most PC publishers do the same. I'm not sure why Ubisoft thinks they can beat the system. We'll all see soon enough that they can't.

''Ubisoft's new DRM system had already been cracked'' HAHAHAHAHA YOU FAIL UBISOFT! They'll crack EVERYTHING (note that Bill Gates stated that Vista ''will be uncrackable", it was actually cracked in one day), so the developers may stop putting some crappy protections if they can't even protect the software right. *sigh*

Pretty much figured something like this would happen. I understand the need for DRM but Ubi's system was bound to be problematic from day one.

Ubisoft with defend this until they day they die with blood if necessary, even though the idea and execution (as well as technology) is incredibly infuriating. People warned them of this and they refused to accept the fact that internet connections aren't perfect and people are going to get really angry. Instead, Ubi gave the old "up yours" explanation that they believe this will stop pirates and that they'll make sure the servers are running and able to handle the game and that it's all for our best interests. I'm only surprised that Ubi is even responding to pirate claims. They're obviously afraid that it has indeed been cracked, and I'd bet money that the reason it was cracked so soon is that the people who even legitimately paid for the game knew this would happen and wanted a way around it.

they can make some damn good games but that doesn't mean they can't make stupid decisions...

One of those things that would work in theory, but the practice is lacking. Considering I had a similar issue with playing AC2 a week ago due to the PS3 bug, however, I propose a ban on all kinds of protection that require connection to the internet, especially as this DRM will no doubt be definitively cracked in a week or two, tops. You're only hurting paying customers, Ubisoft.

More like Newbiesoft, amirite?

Although I'm all for anti-piracy methods, it looks like it's definitely a work in progress for game companies. Funny thing is that DS games are highly vunerable of being pirated and uploaded onto torrent sites.

Ubisoft = Fail