When confronted with the prospect of Ubisoft’s horrific DRM system, which requires PC players to never ever be offline ever, a distressing amount of people shrugged and went “Eh, I have good internet anyway.”
Well, it seems that Ubisoft itself didn’t have very good internet – not in Europe, at least – as its authentication servers went down at around 8AM GMT, kicking some players off their Assassin’s Creed 2 sessions and subjecting others trying to come online to lengthy log-in waits or frequent timeouts.
A Ubisoft UK representative, “Ubi.Vigil” responded to the immediate (and justified) forum conflagration by calling the outages “unacceptable, particularly as [I have] been told [that] these servers are constantly monitored.”
A later status update stated:
Due to exceptional demand, we are currently experiencing difficulties with the Online Service Platform. 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.
“Exceptional demand”? Seriously? That’s just great. And to think that every Ubisoft PC release, from now until they say otherwise, is going to be equipped with this schlock.
And, looking back to their panicked damage-control “response” interview with PC Gamer, they refused to make a 100% commitment to patch out the DRM should they decide to take down the authentication servers entirely, this all seems portentous.
Well, at least someone’s going to fix this, right?
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in!]
Ubisoft DRM Authentication Server is down, Assassin’s Creed 2 Unplayable [Joystiq]
