wanna play assassins creed 2? well you can try...

[WarbladE]

Ubisoft's DRM Servers Go Down
PC Assassin's Creed II unplayable for many over weekend.
by Martin Robinson, IGN UK
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UK, March 8, 2010 - Ubisoft's DRM servers were overloaded over the weekend, rendering the recently released PC version of Assassin's Creed II unplayable for many legitamate owners of the game.

In an attempt to combat piracy, Ubisoft announced an extreme method of DRM whereby games required a constant internet connection.

Assassin's Creed II, released last week, was the one of the first games to support the policy, and its first weekend has been plagued by server issues with posters on the official forums telling of connection outages.

"Due to exceptional demand, we are currently experiencing difficulties with the Online Service Platform," said an official response on the forums, "This does not affect customers who are currently playing, but customers attempting to start a game may experience difficulty in accessing our servers. We are currently working to resolve this issue and apologize for any inconvenience."

IGN has contacted Ubisoft for further comment on the news.

UPDATE: Ubisoft has since made an official apology via its Twitter, stating that its servers were 'attacked' yesterday. It went on to say that "95% of players were not affected, but a small group of players attempting to open a game session did receive denial of service errors."

An official statement made to IGN expanded upon this, saying that "All players with an open session during the attack were not affected. We also confirm that, at this time, no valid cracked version of either Silent Hunter 5 or Assassin's Creed II are available."


people are still having issues according to their forums. was funny watching jigoku go in and out then back in then out then in an out..... of the game via steam friends last night...

[Drac]

Legit customers are sodomized and treated like criminals while the pirates are already playing, yet again. Took me all of a few seconds to see that it's already been cracked and a pirated version is being distributed on various websites.

Stay classy Ubisoft.

[Jigoku]

Cracked version is "broken". It only sort of works. This is because there are a trigger point through the game that require code to be streamed from the server.

Currently, it is working as intended.

The server thing was unfortunate. They should have been expecting DDoS attacks ...

Originally Posted by WarbladE

people are still having issues according to their forums. was funny watching jigoku go in and out then back in then out then in an out..... of the game via steam friends last night...

Yep. The authentication servers were being DDoSed at the time.

[shock_]

DDoS attacks are hard to defend against and have a high impact. Therefore their risk managers should have recommended against this DRM strategy in the first place. Perhaps they did and the PHBs ignored them. I wonder if there will be sustained attacks over time? Probably not since script kiddies have small attention spans and more lucrative targets for botnets exist...

[Mighty Brush]

Streamed code isn't an issue either, someone just needs to capture it on the wire - easy done when you find the routine that requests it.

It'll just take them a little time to put together the cracking methodology for it, then it'll be routine like all the other DRM schemes.

[Ned]

Whilst I don't like DRM measures that punish honest people and I certainly dislike Ubisoft's way of using it (although at least you don't require a disk in a drive which is good!!) the blame for problems relating to all of this should go to the pirates. If it wasn't for them DRM wouldn't exist.

[welshman]

Originally Posted by shock_

DDoS attacks are hard to defend against and have a high impact. Therefore their risk managers should have recommended against this DRM strategy in the first place. Perhaps they did and the PHBs ignored them. I wonder if there will be sustained attacks over time? Probably not since script kiddies have small attention spans and more lucrative targets for botnets exist...

with UBI going down this road for all their major releases (I think both RUSE and Splinter Cell will use it) These DDOS attacks are not going to go away in a hurry and will affect all 4 major releases

[welshman]

Originally Posted by Ned

Whilst I don't like DRM measures that punish honest people and I certainly dislike Ubisoft's way of using it (although at least you don't require a disk in a drive which is good!!) the blame for problems relating to all of this should go to the pirates. If it wasn't for them DRM wouldn't exist.

In one way I can agree with You Ned....But software Distributors (Not developers) have another agenda, why they prefer Console development over PC development. Console Piracy is just as Rampant and much more profitable...yet they seem only to recognise PC Piracy.

[Drac]

Originally Posted by Ned

the blame for problems relating to all of this should go to the pirates

So we should also castrate all men at the age of 14 in case they one day rape someone and if they complain we can just blame the rapists?

Yeah, that totally makes absolutely no sense.

The problem here is that most of the people making these calls are bombarded by fear mongering that without anti-piracy measures their game will not make any money. Hell, they even have gamers believing it now!

The last big-budget retail DVD game to ship without any copy-protection was Oblivion. It remained top-seller in PC charts world wide a hell of a lot longer than most other games could ever hope to achieve (except maybe Sims and WoW).

That's not made up fairytale stuff in the slightest, Oblivion had no DRM at all. Zip, nada, yet it's still old sold most current games on the market.

IMO piracy has stuff all effect on end sales, but the companies selling anti piracy tools don't want you to hear that. People who pirate games have either already paid for them (I do this sometimes with delayed releases in Australia) or they're simply never going to buy it. The game industry makes billions every year as is, it's not loosing money to piracy, no one makes money from it, it's not *lost* revenue, it's wishful revenue maybe, but that's about it.

Piracy is also a fantastic scape goat for poor sales, like Crysis.

Crytek were one of the first large companies to speak out about Game Piracy
and in one foul swoop they skull****ed the industry right and proper. Everything Crytek said about Crysis and Piracy was just to save face about poor sales.

The reality is that for years Crytek harped on and on about how they were the savior of PC gaming, while other developers had gone multi-platform, Crysis was promised to hand deliver PC gamers their own personal baby jesus or something, but they failed. Their game, the way they promised it, was only playable for rich kids who had massively powerful computers. They didn't save shit, in fact they pretty much single handedly summed up why it sucks to be a PC gamer having to upgrade when some new overpolished turd of a game is released. So they had a cry when they saw sales were low they did what? Blamed piracy and ran away saying they weren't going to do any PC-only games anymore. Thanks for ****ing nothing crytek, please don't do us any favours in the future.

Although I will admit that piracy is a large problem in certain regions/countries, but Valve were the first to crack that nut. They found that in places like Russia the pirates were translating their English version of their games way before Valve's native Russian releases, thus the pirates were offering their products sooner. Once Valve changed that and released native language versions at the same time they no longer had an issue. Valve took the approach that if you "Offer the better service" you will get the customer in the end, and it seems to be working well for them.

But still most publishes seem content to bash their balls together over and over treating all of their customers like criminals because they've been feed ghost stories about a vast armies of unwashed gamers lurking under their bed waiting to steal everything in sight the second the lights go out.

*Sigh*

So over DRM, let it die already and just give me the ****ing content I paid for.

[Ned]

Originally Posted by Drac

So we should also castrate all men at the age of 14 in case they one day rape someone and if they complain we can just blame the rapists?

Yeah, that totally makes absolutely no sense.

My point was if game-pirates didn't exist we wouldn't be posting in this thread because DRM wouldn't exist.

Game pirates need to be punished harder than developers who use DRM.

Originally Posted by Drac

So over DRM, let it die already and just give me the ****ing content I paid for.

I totally agree. Not only do I want my content DRM-bug free I want to be able to use it whenever I desire!