By the way, don't you think that min. of civilised approach by Ubi would be specification of needed "outgoing" and "incoming" speed of connection - at official site ?
...or specification of FAQ ?

( ...instead of bull****t on WW2 battleships - who would guess that Bismarck participated at Atlantic? )

They did, in a way. ADSL is 56kbps up, 768kbps down (peak ratings).

:yeah: Well put!

Ha! That's what you get for living in a socialist hellhole! Here in the States, we recognize the God-given right of Corporations to screw over their customers any way they can. Best government money can buy. :yeah:

Touche! :D

Just wanted to throw this in. Bioshock 2 is out and many are very disappointed because you can't even save your game unless you are online! That's right, if you play the game for hours and cannot save your progress because of a bad Internet connection you're SOL. Brilliant!

I really hope this trend dies a quick death.

Boh Wulfmann in da houz

:yeah:

Nice to see ya Wulfmann!

I didn't just say your analogies were broken, I pointed out exactly where and why they are broken. Something tells me you two will have trouble doing the same with mine. :O:

You'll notice I was making a point out of the fact that I am not barking or bitching at Aston Martin. :03: Still, if you have poor internet then I can understand you being upset and venting that frustration. I'm a bit tired of the rhetoric and broken analogies and claims of "wrong doing" but I do sympathise with those who just won't be able to play the game due to circumstances beyond their control.

:rotfl2:
:)

Don't forget about all the people with high speed connections but very limited bandwidth. Most people I know have 5-25GB limits and that's all they can afford or are offered in the plan(mine is 90GB, $60 mo.). Most of my Aussie clan mates go through their limit in less than a month.
How do you play SH5 now with your dial up or equivalent connection?
No bandwidth=no game. And this is a single player game.
I live in Canada where almost everywhere you can get good internet. My Bell DSL is fast and never down yet. But..... The majority of people online here are using cheaper plans with limited bandwidth due to cost.
It's not hard to use up alot of bandwidth these days.

Again its not having to connect that is the problem, its being connected the WHOLE time and the consequences of that. Put in an offline mode and that should be sufficient. I am not prepared to trust UBI servers yet.
You cannot compare WOW servers to UBI. Apples and Oranges. UBI has a history of bad servers and worse customer support and not much experience.

Control...

thats part of it.
Ubisoft KEEPS control. they shut down the service, yer screwed.
and that puts everyone who bought it in the "bent down, looking for the soap" position i recon.

and dont tell me that wont happen sooner or later...:nope:

poor souls, those who still buy it without being able to go offline...

You sure like being led by the ring in your nose don't you.:hmmm:

There is, of course, a counter-argument to this. The point of view from EA is that they are trying to protect their investment. What gives you the right to demand that they shouldn't protect their product in a way they deem fit?

The anti DRM argument, in a way, is similar to asking a bank to leave the vault open for your convenience, because "you are not a thief". Frankly, they know this -- the DRM isn't here to offend you, or treat you like anything. Nor is the bank vault there because they want to treat you like a thief. The reality is, however, that thieves do exist, and they wish to protect their interests, and investments.

Part of this, perhaps, is not understanding the scope of piracy in the gaming industry. To demonstrate, I have some articles below. The first is a non-official survey of game downloads in 2009:

http://kotaku.com/5435876/report-the...-games-of-2009

MW2 had 4 million downloads. As they note, each doesn't necessarily represent a unique download, or a lost sale, but it is interesting to note. The Sims 3 has just over 3 million downloads.

Here we can see sales of MW2 on the PC in November, at about 300,000 copies, an estimated toal including Steam sales. Let's assume that in December it sold another 300k copies (very unlikely). So, 600k copies sold total.

http://kotaku.com/5426474/report-mod...00-in-november

As you can see, the game may have been pirated sixfold over purchases -- a massive difference. Even if only 1/8th of all potential downloads were actual lost sales, this still means only half of potential sales were made; a big difference for an industry with high development costs.

The Sims 3 may be a better example as the game was only released on PC.

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/...atures;title;2

From this, we can see that through Jan of this year, 4.5 million copies sold -- not bad at all. However, there were 3 million potentially pirated copies; if even a quarter of those potential downloads were lost sales, you're looking at pushing sales over 5 million copies, or forty-million dollars (assuming $60/unit, 700k units).

I'm not a big fan of DRM either. I buy all my music from Amazon or Beatport, because those sites sell with no DRM. I use Good Old Games because they offer great support with no DRM as well (<3 IL-2). But, you need to realize that even 200k lost sales due to piracy at $60 a unit is still a whopping twelve million dollar loss.

If the PC industry can't control piracy, it will die. The cost of developing for PC, along with a comparably low playerbase makes development a rather lousy business venture. It is possible that this move, requiring online verification, will curb piracy by a reasonable amount. PC piracy is easy compared to consoles, and this shows in the data above -- MW2 was potentially pirated on XB360 1/4 as much as PC, despite the fact that consoles are a more popular means to play those games. They need to make PC piracy hard enough to strongly discourage it among the general population, and to make PC game development a reasonable venture.

How is having an unreliable internet connection any different from not meeting the minimum system requirements? If you buy a game that plainly says you need a Wazoo 3000 video card or better to play when you only have the Whizbang 50, do you rant and rave and demand the company reduce the system requirements?

Other DRM issues aside, if the system requirements say you need a constant internet connection and you don't have that, you don't meet the system requirements.

so you basically think this is going to work?
They can protect all they want...
but if their product always depends on their goodwill to work, is that still "protection"?
Hell no...