The gawd-almighty merged DRM in Silent Hunter V thread

[matsterman]

Just dont buy the game people...its that simple.

I could play the other games from now until the end of time. I am not going to jump through the hoops just to get a few more pieces of eye candy and scripted missions.

A year from now, the game will be w/o this stupid requirement and I will pick it up for 10 or 15 dollars new somewhere.

Unlike alot of you impetuous children who "just have to have it now", I can wait.

It usually take 2-3 months to work out the initial bugs anyway...

[Onkel Neal]

Originally Posted by matsterman

Unlike alot of you impetuous children who "just have to have it now", I can wait.

Come on, now that's not necessary.

[jtm55]

Hi All

while not being happy about UBI's DRM scheme, I will purchase SH5 when released. I will tell you why. I'm looking forward to SH6, SH7, SH8, well you get the idea. If SH5 is a flop, UBI may decide that it isn't in their best interest to continue the series.

There isn't a bunch of Developers or Publishers knocking down the door to make SubSims. I feel that even though there are aspects that are disappointing I'm willing to take a leap of Faith if you will, that in the end between UBI & the Great Modders of this Community will make it another Great SubSim

[Diopos]

Originally Posted by jtm55

...
There isn't a bunch of Developers or Publishers knocking down the door to make SubSims. I feel that even though there are aspects that are disappointing I'm willing to take a leap of Faith if you will, that in the end between UBI & the Great Modders of this Community will make it another Great SubSim

Well you can't argue about matters of Faith, can you eh!!!

I wish, you know who, had some faith towards its prospective customers though...

[Méo]

Originally Posted by matsterman

Unlike alot of you impetuous children who "just have to have it now", I can wait.

I don't know where you live, but in my country people are free to spend their money on whatever they wish.

Seems like it pisses you off.

[Jimbuna]

Originally Posted by Méo

I don't know where you live, but in my country people are free to spend their money on whatever they wish.

Seems like it pisses you off.

Each to their own matey....each to their own

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Méo

I don't know where you live, but in my country people are free to spend their money on whatever they wish.

Seems like it pisses you off.

I like to call this the "I'm right and you're stupid" school of debate. Some people don't realize that no matter how passionate they may be about something, there is a chance they might be wrong.

[Reece]

Hey the thread's open again!! Cool, I can carry on beating that dead horse!!
Well after viewing some of the threads here it looks like SH5 is just a rehash of SH4, complete with the many bugs it had!! Now add OSP, only type 7 boats, and war end of 43 it certainly isn't worth purchasing IMO, to those who have purchased it, I can only hope they release a decent patch and modders can fix the rest to a state better than SH4, though I doubt it. I think UBI has lost the plot!

[theluckyone17]

That's the part that sucks... I see the bugs, "only type 7 boats, and war end of 43", and I see promise. Something the modders can pick up and do something with. Yeah, it'll take some spit & shining, but I bet they/we can do it. I got faith in 'em.

OSP is the deal breaker for me, though, so it means all that's for naught.

My only hope is to continue to state my position, hope enough subsimmers stand by me, hope AC2 flops badly enough so that Ubi doesn't just assume nobody wants to buy SH5 because it's a sub sim, ad naseum...

... until Neal tells me to shut up. At that point, I'll chalk it up as a lost cause, and go back to SH4. Won't ever buy another Ubisoft product, but hey... think of the money I'll save!

[KlassenT]

I haven't chipped my two cents onto this dead horse quite yet, but after a fair bit of research there are still a couple of concerns that I have.

First, taken from the Official Ubisoft OSP FAQ

What will happen if I lose my Internet connection when I play the game?

If you lose your Internet connection the game will pause while it tries to reconnect. If the Internet connection is unable to resume, the server will have stored your last saved game and you will be able to continue from where you left off once your internet connection is restored.

My problem here is that if the server can CREATE a savegame when you lose connection, it's doing so with data that would not normally be available after losing connectivity. After all, if your ethernet cable pops out of your machine, that's an unpredictable event, so the Ubi servers can't feasibly request the data required to store a savegame. What does this mean, ultimately? Unless I hear otherwise, or I hear that the above statement from the website is incorrect, then you are constantly streaming gameplay data to the Ubi server cloud. Inherently, there's nothing wrong with that; it's not personally identifiable or private information, and it could feasibly be used to help support patch and troubleshooting efforts. But, with that said, I do not have that kind of faith in Ubi's servers. We're talking about every player currently running SH5 streaming a mirrored copy of gameplay logic to the same server cloud-- That alone is enough to shake my faith in a single company's server infrastructure, but then you add in every OTHER game that will be supported with OSP? No chance. I could foresee major server stability issues snowballing with every future OSP release.

Ultimately, it brings me to the last item on the above FAQ:

Why is Ubisoft forcing their loyal customers to sign up for a Ubisoft account when they don't want to give their private data and only play single player games?

We hope that customers will feel as we do, that signing up for an account will offer them exceptional gameplay and services that are not available otherwise.

I find it to be a bit of a catch-22; 'exceptional gameplay' doesn't mean much of anything when a taxed server cloud and even intermittent network downtimes can crush that gameplay experience. I'm ashamed to admit it, Radio Room, but I've been an awfully unfaithful skipper lately. SH3 and 4 have paled in comparison the past few weeks in favor of taking up arms with a few buddies in CoD:Modern Warfare 2. For those of you that don't keep up with FPS games, this latest installment in the Call of Duty franchise uses SteamWorks in a very similar manner to OSP. If you lose connection to the Steam server cloud, then you're booted back to the main menu, greeted only with "Lost connection to Steam." The problem? That happens about once every hour during peak periods. But, that's not the real hell of it... Most of the time when that happens, the connection never got dropped. My buddies and I are able to communicate just fine using Steam Friends. Aaand, let's not forget the times when the servers are down for maintenance. You can have something planned fairly well in advance, everyone meets up, and... "Oh, the servers are down. Well, at least I've got a few hours freed up on my schedule."

Those kind of interruptions are already having me curse both the developer, Infinity Ward, and Valve's entire Steam network up and down. Really, for all the hell I usually give it, I will admit one thing: Valve's Steam Cloud is one of the most robust and successful content delivery networks in the gaming industry, and it's got to have one hell of an infrastructure backing it up. And it still fails. I'd bet dollars to donuts that Ubisoft doesn't have nearly the same resources in place, and I can only see it getting worse and worse as they add more releases onto their proprietary OSP backbone.

---

Lastly, a note to any manner of software developer that might be listening; the only effective rights-management scheme is to offer a fair price for the quality of your product. Anything beyond that should never come at the expense of user experience. Serials are fine, I especially don't have a problem with online serial activation, as long as protocols are in place for offline users, and those wishing to recover a lost installation. But honestly, this is really going too far. There IS no unbreakable copy protection scheme. Ever. Period. At the end of the day, every application boils down to instruction calls to the CPU to add one register to another, copy a memory location, or read something out of the process block. Extremely clever verification functions can be effortlessly rewritten to always return true, entire calls can be omitted or rerouted, and even hardcoded server URIs can be modified within the program declarations. But when you ask "market value" for a product that still needs more than a little extra time at the detailing shop, then protect that same software with DRM that can cripple the user experience you were aiming for in the first place, I wouldn't be surprised at all to find that your protection scheme fails-- just as disappointingly as the resulting sales do.

[theluckyone17]

Originally Posted by KlassenT

...What does this mean, ultimately? Unless I hear otherwise, or I hear that the above statement from the website is incorrect, then you are constantly streaming gameplay data to the Ubi server cloud...

From what I've heard, this isn't true.
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...2&postcount=12

I'll do some more searching later today, but I remember somebody saying that the constant connection actually used little constant bandwidth, which would imply that it's not constantly sending save game data.

The option to disable online saved games is there, however... one of my beefs is that there's no option to save the game before the OSP kicks you out to the main menu if it senses a disconnect.

[Apos]

[IanC]

Save us Captain Crack Patches!!

[pluskat]

Just read on the ubi site about a constant connection to
the internet,well that means I wont buy the game,I will buy
it when and if they do an offline version in the future,and my save
games are kept on my own computer,So looks like its back to
Gwx I cant believe they shot themselves in the foot like this,
Ubi may be the natural parent of silent hunter but GWX did
a much better job as an adoptive parent and seems to have
done all the up-bringing


http://silent-hunter.uk.ubi.com/sile...quirements.php
then look at the bottom left of the page and click on white sticker
links to link below,if I have miss read I will eat my submarine

http://support.uk.ubi.com/online-services-platform/

[Letum]

Originally Posted by Apos

Ahh! Too much truth in the humor!