Quote:
Originally Posted by urfisch
i second that question...
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I can only speak of my own experiences.
I have been a long player of the Ghost Recon series.
And the Rainbox Six series.
Both have been handled by Ubisoft and the track record is, sadly, quite bad.
I am here talking of years of play. Not just the last or two last years.
RB6 also known as "Ravenshield" I was part of a clan called KA (Kicks Ass)
and we were a respected and feared gang of players on online play. We did kick ass. We played fast, very fast and we stormed anything be it other players of the game AI at maximum level. At that time, the server was player side. We used good, powerful and reliable machines on the biggest Internet connection we could use. And it worked fine. We tested each custom map and had our own selection of high quality. Those were the golden years.
As we wanted something harder we moved on to Ghost Recon which was a much harder game. Essentially : one bullet, you're dead and you got to fire first of you're history. Simple as that. Again, server was a client side thing but... in order to play we had to first connect to Ubisoft service, then we could connect to our own machine server. And from here, it went downhill to the gutter.
About half of the time, you could not connect to the Ubisoft server. So you had the IP address of your own private server but could not reach the dialog to enter the IP address and password because of Ubi's poor authentication service. You would also get kicked out of the game if for any reason you lost connection with the Ubi's server.
Of course, trying to reconnect did not work : since you had lost the connection with the Ubi server while playing, it could take up to one hour for the ghost connection to die so you could connect and play again.
This made Ghost-Recon based tournaments so hard that most gave up on them...
Years later, Ubisoft released GRAW2 (Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter) which is the sequel to Ghost Recon. Seriously, it is a kick ass game. A piece of art. The graphics, the gameplay, the very high difficulty level and the "you take one bullet you're dead and won't even understsand what's happened" was incredible. I played the solos missions and I was on my knees... And when we moved to play online and thanks to Ubisoft poor servers reliability again we were plagued with problems. Again. About 10 % of the time you could not connect. You could try the whole day it would not work (probably some IP ban stuff that isn't recycled often) and when it did work, about 1/3 of the time the server was up but you would either not see it (while all other players would) and if you do see it, it would remain stuck on the connection screen (while all other players connected fine). Most of the time it worked, but sometimes you would just remain stuck outside. I do recall entire evenings spent outside the server for 2, sometimes 3 hours trying to connect to no avail.
So much we had to give up on Graw2. Fed up with Ubisoft crap, we moved to SWAT4 which was absolutely incredible. Great fun playing (tasering to the death a terrotist, having to respect the law and do warnings before any force use.. The game is great and some maps are absolutely terrifying.. think Silence of the Lambs and attacking a sect cult building with terrorists hiding among hostages..). Server was our own machine, worked fine. No problem.
Ubisoft has a very poor track record when it comes to online play. Their servers are satured even on games with less players (today, GRAW2 has been replaced by a sequel and there's much less people on the GRAW2 server and half of the time you can't connect...). Even when you're able to connect, they have poor reliability and you get kicked out of games for no reason while you Internet access is still there and working (we play with Teamspeak so if the game goes down while Teamspeak doesn't you know you didn't get kicked because of a connection loss).
When Vegas 1 came out, we all bought it and played it. Great game.
Again, we stopped because of Ubisoft's servers unreliability. When Vegas2 came out, I think only 3 people bought it on our clan (which has been destroyed because players were so fed up of buying buggy games they could not play that they just stopped and about half went console...).
This company has not shown the capability to offer online servers that work properly or are reliable. Some of you are posting that there could be problems if you lose the connection on your side...
That won't be the problem. Based on our own experience involving over 4 Ubisoft games in previous years, having a rock solid Internet access doesn't change anything. You will have connection problems, unreliable servers and the Ubisoft support service is rated very low.
I contacted them, opened about 10 tickets just for Vegas whose DRM was not able to recognize my CD and I could not even launch the game. They told me to buy a new PC (while I had bought one just one month before), they told me to buy a new DVD reader, and to use the previous one. I did move the previous one into my PC : didn't work. I did buy after one month an external DVD reader/writer plugged on USB (Ubisoft being unable to even tell me what model to buy that would work, either internally or external) and it did not work. They offered no solution, nor cared. I contacted Securom which offers a support service if you have those problems. They never answer nor contact you. You do what they tell you, you use a program to send them a kind of hardware report, and then. Nothing. After monthes they never reply even after creating about 10 requests. When you contact Ubisoft about this, they close the ticked without even answering.
Poor track record, no support service that can be called as such, not reliable servers. That's the experience record of Ubisoft online games over 20 people whose only 3 are still in contact and all others have given up and left.
And we do know of about 6 other gaming clans that went the same way of the Dodo as us.