Almost a month ago, I posted about how Ubisoft’s DRM servers for Assassin’s Creed II had gone offline, meaning that nobody who had paid for the game could play it.  The reason Ubisoft later gave for this outage was a deliberate attack on their servers.  But honestly, who cares why the servers went down?  The fact is, Ubisoft’s DRM has a single point of failure, and that point of failure can prevent everyone from playing their legally purchased single-player game.

Well, on March 25, Ubisoft released a third game using their always-connected-internet DRM, Settlers 7.  The following day, users all over the world again started reporting a complete inability to contact Ubisoft’s authentication servers.  As far as I can tell, these problems still persist a week later.

So, Ubisoft, do you still not realize how stupid your DRM scheme is?  You’ve already lost your sale of Assassin’s Creed II to me; I’ve been curious about Settlers, but I won’t be buying that either, for the sole reason that it uses this insane DRM.

Ubisoft, does it matter that pirates can’t play your game, if your customers can’t play either? Do you really not see the problem there?

I’ll state this clearly, Ubisoft, so you can’t misunderstand: for the sole reason that they use this DRM, I will not buy your games, nor will I pirate them.  You cannot blame piracy for not getting my money – you have only your own DRM to blame.

I saw several reviews of C&C4 yesterday indicating that the single-player mode of C&C4 is absolutely horrible.

I got it in the mail today.  I’ve played part of the single-player campaign now… and I have to say, it’s even worse than the reviews have said.

There is virtually no background given for what’s going on.  We’re given no explanation for why GDI and Nod have both, simultaneously, completely and fundamentally changed the way they do war.  The cutscenes are far worse than anything they’ve ever done before – atrocious acting, cardboard characters, awful script…  even Kane himself isn’t a very compelling character (though I blame the terrible writing, not Joe Kucan).  There is very little tying one mission to the next – contrast this with C&C3, where each mission has clear implications on what’s going to happen later on.

You can enable subtitles during cutscenes; I make a habit of doing this in any game that has the option, so I don’t miss anything.  Unfortunately, the subtitles in C&C4 are in serious need of proofreading.  There are numerous misspellings and typos, sometimes of the most obvious sort.  It’s obvious they didn’t do any QA whatsoever on the subtitles.

A minor spoiler: After you play the introductory GDI missions, you’re given a choice whether to continue with GDI, under Colonel James, or to join up with Nod under Kane… except it’s very unclear exactly what’s happening.  GDI doesn’t know Kane has betrayed them, and apparently GDI doesn’t realize you’ve left them for Nod.  Somehow.  Even though you no longer show up for work at GDI HQ.

Whatever.

The whole plot with your character’s wife is completely tacked on, cheesy, unnecessary, and stupid.  During the Nod missions, at one point, you inexplicably show some doubt about betraying GDI – and suddenly Kane is threatening your wife’s life in exchange for your loyalty.  Didn’t you already betray GDI?  Yes, you did!  You’ve already betrayed GDI, so there is no logical reason your character would hesitate about doing it some more.  The next few cutscenes don’t even mention Kane holding your wife hostage.  (This tacked-on feeling persists all the way through the final cutscene for both factions, believe it or not.)

The single-player missions themselves are extremely difficult solo, even on “Easy” difficulty.  Based on what I’ve played, I’d bet they’re far more doable in co-op; solo, you can’t really hold more than one objective point at a time, which makes objectives like “capture all five anti-air batteries” nearly impossible.  Your command point limit is absurdly low, and your tech level is consistently lower than that of your enemies.  One mission I beat by literally spamming Engineers to capture enemy Avatars and keep them healed while they took a beating from a large number of enemy units.

Other glaring issues with the game include:
- It freezes if you alt-tab during the video that plays when the game launches.
- The menu background is, quite frankly, garbage.  2-D sprites as ships, pretending to orbit by moving horizontally, and not even moving smoothly?  Why on earth couldn’t they even make the movement smooth?  It’s not exactly quantum mechanics!
- In stark contrast to every other C&C game ever made, the installer for C&C4 is a bog-standard Windows installer.
- The soundtrack has far too few songs; it gets far too repetitive far too soon.

I won’t even go into how unbalanced multiplayer is, but we’ve known that since beta.

Oh, and remember how I’m boycotting Assassin’s Creed II because of its “you must be online all the time” DRM?  Turns out C&C4 has it too.  If your internet connection drops during the single-player campaign, you lose any progress you’ve made.  Had I known about this, I would not have made the purchase, last C&C game or no.

Overall, my impression is as follows: “EA, why do you hate us so much?”

I can’t even make myself go back through this and proofread, let alone try to finish the single-player campaigns.

A few weeks ago I described why I’d be boycotting Assassin’s Creed 2, even though I had (until then) been eagerly waiting for the time I could give Ubisoft my money.

To recap, the reason is that AC2 requires an always-on internet connection to play — and this for a single-player game.  People often respond by saying something like “who cares?  Everyone has always-on internet nowadays.”

One of my objections was this:

What if you just don’t have an internet connection for whatever reason?  What if your ISP decides to shut down your connection for maintenance, or reset your modem remotely, or any number of other things that ISPs like to do which interrupt your connection?

It gets worse.  If Ubisoft’s servers go offline, you can’t play. What’s more, if they go out of business entirely, you can’t play ever again.

(Emphasis added.) As it turns out, I wasn’t wrong – you see, Ubisoft’s authentication servers have gone offline.  Whether the reason is a deliberate attack, a simple lack of sufficient server hardware, or something stupid like a janitor unplugging the authentication servers, it doesn’t matter – this is a perfect illustration of why I can’t support such idiotic DRM.

Joystiq quoted an Ubisoft employee as follows:

[C]learly the extended downtime and lengthy login issues are unacceptable, particularly as I’ve been told these servers are constantly monitored. [...] I’ll do what I can to get more information on what the issue is here first thing tomorrow and push for a resolution and assurance this won’t happen in the future.

First thing tomorrow?  I understand that it’s Sunday, and nobody wants to work Sundays, but if you’re going to force this sort of draconian DRM on your customers you’d better make sure it’s not going to fall apart shortly after the game launches.  Ubisoft, you’ve got hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of irate customers out there right now who can’t play a game they’ve already paid for, and you want to wait until tomorrow to fix it?

Do I really need to point out that anyone who pirated the game doesn’t have this problem?

Let me repeat: Ubisoft’s anti-piracy tool has exactly zero effect on pirates (it was cracked shortly after release), but as of right now is preventing every single paying customer from playing.  Ubisoft, does that make good business sense to you?

Let’s hope this makes them realize how stupid they are so they’ll disable this DRM.  Then I’d actually buy it.

(For the record: I have not pirated the game, nor do I intend to do so.)

I loved Assassin’s Creed.  It was entertaining in its own way, the graphics were stunning, and though the storyline was slightly bland it was not boring.  I bought it on sale on Steam early last year.

I have been quite excited about the sequel.  It’s supposed to come out on the PC next month (it has been out on consoles for a few months already).  From all appearances, they’ve fixed all the problems with the original game’s gameplay, and refined and improved it, until what they had left was pure liquid awesome.

As it turns out, Ubisoft has decided on adding something else to the game: a horrendously draconian DRM scheme.  In order to play Assassin’s Creed 2, you must be online at all times.

What’s worse, if your internet connection drops at any time, for any reason, your game pauses until the connection is restored.  When this happens, Assassin’s Creed 2 will resume at your last checkpoint, which could be anywhere from five seconds ago to five minutes ago (if its checkpoints are spaced anything like the original).

Five minutes might not seem like a big deal.  But what if your connection is flaky?  What if you’re on a weak-signal wireless connection?  It could happen every five minutes.

What if you just don’t have an internet connection for whatever reason?  What if your ISP decides to shut down your connection for maintenance, or reset your modem remotely, or any number of other things that ISPs like to do which interrupt your connection?

It gets worse.  If Ubisoft’s servers go offline, you can’t play.  What’s more, if they go out of business entirely, you can’t play ever again.

And all this for a single-player game.

There is absolutely no reason for them to be informed of every moment I spend playing their game.  And even if they do want to know for some reason, the game could simply cache data until the connection comes back, and allow you to continue playing uninterrupted.

Anyway, I really, really hate invasive DRM, and this rates an 8 out of 10 on the “Invasive DRM” scale.  The only way it could be worse is if they installed CD-ROM-checking drivers even if you buy a digital copy.  (Other games are guilty of that.)

As a result, I’ll be boycotting Assassin’s Creed 2 — a game I was really looking forward to playing, at full purchase price — until such a time as they remove these measures.

Yeah, that Bono.  This has nothing to do with his music which is, generally speaking, decent.  No, my assertion is based on comments he made in the New York Times (which I first saw on Ars Technica).

I have some specific problems with Bono’s statements, so I’m going to tackle them one by one.

the only thing protecting the movie and TV industries from the fate that has befallen music and indeed the newspaper business is the size of the files.

This claim is so ridiculous it makes me wonder what pharmaceuticals Bono has begun mixing into his food.  File sizes may have been relevant five years ago, but in these days of commonplace multi-GB game downloads, file sizes are nowhere near the top of anyone’s concerns.

1. The newspaper business’ problems have nothing to do with file sizes at all.  Their problems stem from declining classified ad revenue and the increased availability of free information.
2. The music business’ problems have nothing to do with file sizes at all.  Their problems stem from pushing crappy, DRM-laden music on their customers, and their hesitance to embrace a business model that works well with modern technology.  (But despite this, Ars points out that EMI, for example, is actually doing very well with rising revenues.)
3. The movie business’ problems have nothing to do with file sizes at all.  Their problems stem from pushing crappy, DRM-laden movies on their customers.  I’m all for superhero movies, but did we really need to make 10,000 sequels last year?  (Ars points out that box office receipts have been rising over the last three years.)

A decade’s worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators

A decade’s worth of file-sharing has made it clear that the people hurting content creators are the publishers. Independent creators of music and games are finding that they can be far more profitable by distributing DRM-free content on their own and skipping the middleman.

In fact, publishers aren’t even necessary anymore.  It used to be that musicians couldn’t afford to edit and distribute their music without the support of a publisher willing to risk investing in them; nowadays, you can grab a cheap Mac that comes with the software you need to edit your music, and selling it yourself on the internet is essentially risk-free.

the people this reverse Robin Hooding benefits are rich service providers, whose swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business.

… and yet again Bono exposes his ignorance.  ISPs don’t profit from music downloading.  If anything it costs them more, by having to support the bandwidth necessary to sustain it.  They certainly can’t advertise it.  At any rate, ISP profits certainly don’t “perfectly mirror” the lost receipts of the music business – especially because the music business isn’t actually losing money!

We’re the post office, they tell us; who knows what’s in the brown-paper packages? But we know from America’s noble effort to stop child pornography, not to mention China’s ignoble effort to suppress online dissent, that it’s perfectly possible to track content.

It’s technically possible for ISPs to track connections and protocols (but not necessarily content).  However, there are several problems with his comparison:

1. The Post Office is also technically capable of monitoring the packages it processes; is Bono in favor of opening every piece of mail sent through the postal system on the off-chance an envelope contains child pornography?  I certainly hope not!  There’s a reason the post office doesn’t open packages.
2. It’s only technically possible to track unencrypted content.  It’s not feasible.  The trouble is, the solution isn’t to track it – it’s to identify what it is, and if it meets some arbitrary definition of “infringing”, to block it.  There could be no recourse for accidentally blocked connections – it wouldn’t be feasible.  That’s essentially arbitrary censorship.
3. Attempting to implement the system would be prohibitively expensive.  Customers won’t want to pay for it; media companies won’t either.  That leaves either the ISPs or the government shouldering the financial burden; either way, customers are going to end up footing the bill unwillingly.  This would end up being basically a mandatory “music tax” – and I can tell you right now, if they try this, they can be sure I’ll stop buying music to pay for the fees.  That won’t help their profit margin at all.
4. The trivial workaround for content filtering is encryption – it takes virtually no effort to enable SSL on peer-to-peer connections, but encryption makes content filtering irrelevant.  You can’t filter something you can’t read.

The problem then becomes (again as Ars points out) that would-be filterers will then begin filtering based on protocol rather than content.  That’s akin to trying to filter out swear words by banning the entire English language.  It doesn’t succeed at its goal (you can still swear in other languages), and it has huge, unpleasant side effects (we still need English).

In other words, if you block one protocol, another will pop up; and inevitably ISPs will find themselves blocking protocols that have many legitimate uses.  (World of Warcraft comes to mind; it uses peer-to-peer file transfers to speed up patch downloads.  This undoubtedly saves Blizzard gobs and gobs of money on server bandwidth.)

Now, I’ll admit; I didn’t actually read the rest of Bono’s article.  It’s a set of ten unrelated ideas, each independently digestible.  It happens that this one is the only one I care about.

So perhaps you can see why I said Bono is a complete moron – he points out a goal (“save the media industry”) ignoring the evidence that it doesn’t need saving, and then lays out a plan that will do far more damage to society than peer-to-peer ever did to media – not to mention that the plan wouldn’t even increase media companies’ revenue.  And to top it off, he makes a self-defeating comparison with the post office (unless he really is in favor of the post office opening our mail).

It’s almost like he doesn’t know how the internet works.

(If you didn’t read my comments on net neutrality a few months ago, it’s a closely related subject and you should read it now.)