Ubisoft’s misguided and universally despised Digital Rights Management system proved itself a complete failure last week, depriving rightful owners of Assassin’s Creed II and Silent Hunter 5 the ability to play the very games they paid for. It would appear Ubisoft’s servers failed, an event everyone knew would happen sooner or later as a perfect illustrative example of DRM nonsense that harms no one but the paying customer.
Ubisoft, is all this bad press really worth these daily articles? Can you truly say you’ve sold more copes of Assassin’s Creed II and Silent Hunter 5 because of your new DRM scheme? Or have you pushed away even more customers and alienated loyal fans? It’s not too late to call the whole thing off and return to creating stable, relatively bug-free games that merit a purchase.
Last weekend, two statements were issued from the UK Community Manager:
Ubi.Vigil (UK Community Manager): I don’t have any clear information on what the issue is since I’m not in the office, but clearly 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. I realise that’s not ideal but there’s only so much I can do on a weekend as I’m not directly involved with the server side of this system.
Ubi.Vigil (UK Community Manager): 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.
Revolt is a twin-stick shooter (or twin-thumbs if you’re a stickler for accuracy) featuring some of the best graphics yet on the iPhone. Gameplay appears pretty solid for this type of genre and the feature list is very promising. Perhaps most impressive is that Revolt was made by only two people over 10 months of time.
If you happen to own a PS3 or Xbox 360 and are looking for great media-streaming software, then TVersity is a worthy option. It’s fast, stable and free, my three favorite words when it comes to media-streaming. While it doesn’t support as many formats as Java PS3 Media Server, it does benefit from having a simple design, making it more accessible for your average consumer.
TVersity has just been updated to a new beta version and with it comes some pretty cool new features.
Completely new off-screen browser, based on Google Chromium: runs out of process for increased stability and solves all the known issues with premium content (it used to occasionally fail to start on some systems).
Premium content site are now defined in an external file (osb.xml), advanced users can easily add their sites.
List of supported websites can now be updated without requiring a new release, so expect many new sites to be added and pushed to you from now on. (Advanced users should send us their additions since from time to time we overwrite your osb.xml automatically).
Update and expand YouTube support to include subscriptions, favorites and playlists by user (in addition to user video uploads which were previously supported). Also support adding YouTube content by search queries (replaces the “by tag” category which YouTube has obsoleted).
Countless people lose control of their World of Warcraft accounts on a daily basis, whether through good old-fashioned hacking, falling for phishing scams, clicking on bogus email links, etc. In answer this ever-growing problems, Blizzard released the World of Warcraft Authenticator at an extra charge, offering participating players a solid layer of security between their passwords and WoW account. Up till recently, the WoW Authenticator proved robust and secure, but has since been the target of a successful hacking attempt.
Blizzard suspects a keylogger may be involved. A Keylogger is a nefarious bit of code that sits on your computer and reports all keyboard interaction, ultimately ratting out your passwords so a hacker.
So the Authenticator is not a fail safe way to keep accounts safe but it is still a very good investment. If you want to check to see if you have the virus just search for the file “emcor.dll” on your computer. If you have it then your account most likely has already been hacked.
Tools like the Authenticator can only do so much. It is really unfortunate that people are getting hacked even with this security measure but it all comes down to the user. Safe browsing habits, a good anti-virus, common sense (against phishers) and things like an Authenticator can make your account virtually hack proof.
A small group of loyal King’s Quest fans have been toiling away on a fan-made sequel to the classic adventure series for eight years. Eight years! At one point, Vivendi, the IP rights holder, got all uppity and made an attempt to shut the project down, but an agreement was reached that allowed the team to continue working on the project. Known as “The Silver Lining”, the team hoped to release the game, for free of course, at some point in 2010.
Unfortunately, Activision recently came into possession of the King’s Quest IP and are now acting like big, throbbing dicks. That’s a technical term, look it up. Activision has demanded that all materials relating to King’s Quest be removed from The Silver Lining Website, in effect destroying eight years of dedication and labor…and for what? They weren’t going to make any money from this project. The Silver Lining was made for fans by fans. No threat whatsoever to Activision’s license.
A sad turn of events that makes Activision the Darth Vader of the gaming industry, at least until the next corporate snafu comes along and pisses me off.
In 2005, Phoenix Online Studios received a Cease & Desist letter from Vivendi Universal, the owners of the King’s Quest IP, in regards to our work on The Silver Lining. We complied with the request, and over the months that followed, we were able to work out a non-commercial fan license with Vivendi that allowed us to continue our work on the game.
We have spent a lot of time recently reworking the material of The Silver Lining into episodic releases, with the first out of a planned five episodes completed, and submitted for review, and had hoped we would be able to bring our game to you, the fans, in the Spring of 2010.
Recently, however, ownership of the Sierra IP changed hands and became the property of Activision. After talks and negotiations in the last few months between ourselves and Activision, they have reached the decision that they are not interested in granting a non-commercial license to The Silver Lining, and have asked that we cease production and take down all related materials on our website.
As before, we must and will comply with this decision, as much as we may wish we could do otherwise.
We cannot say enough how much we appreciate the support we have had over these years from our fans. Without you, we would never have gotten this far. There would be no game to develop, and no one to develop it for. You have been amazing and steadfast, and we will always remember that and appreciate it more than we can say.
Sadly, after eight years of dedicated work and even more dedicated fans, The Silver Lining project is closing down.
What the future holds for us, as individuals or a team, we cannot say. We have an amazing development team, however, filled with talented and hard-working individuals, and we hope the teamwork and rapport we’ve developed won’t go to waste. We hope that when we do know what the future holds for us, our fans will be there to enjoy what we can give them still.
Again, thank you all so much for everything. This has been a long and crazy road, full of more twists than we could’ve anticipated, but more triumphs and wonderful memories than we could’ve ever hoped for. And for that, to all of you and to everyone on our team, we will always be grateful.
Blizzard is rolling out a new patch for the StarCraft II beta and, like most Blizzard patches, it takes a jackhammer to various skills, in some cases removing entire entire skills from units considered overpowered. Changelog below:
Balance Changes:Terran:
Viking:
The armor value for this unit in Fighter Mode has decreased from 1 to 0.
The damage done by this unit in Fighter Mode has changed from 6 (+8 armored) to 10 (+4 armored).
Reaper:
The damage done from D-8 Charges has decreased from 40 to 30.
The delay between attacks for D-8 Charges has decreased from 2.5 to 1.8.
Orbital Command:
The build time for this upgrade has decreased from 50 to 35.
Protoss:
Observer:
Gravitic Boosters: The cost of this research has decreased from 150 Minerals and 150 Vespene Gas to 100 Minerals and 100 Vespene Gas.
High Templar:
Phase Shift: This ability has been removed from the game.
Feedback: New Ability. Drains all energy from the target unit and causes damage equal to the amount of energy drained.
Colossus:
The building pathing radius for this unit has decreased from .75 to .5625.
Mothership:
Vortex: The energy cost of this ability has increased from 75 to 100.
Vortex: The target radius of this ability has decreased from 3.0 to 2.5.
Temporal Rift: This ability has been removed from the game.
Wormhole Transit: This ability has been removed from the game.
Mass Recall: New Ability. Teleports all of the player’s units in the target area to the Mothership.
Gateway:
The build time of this building has increased from 50 to 65.
Zerg:
Infestor:
Fungal Growth: The damage done by this ability has decreased from 48 to 36.
Fungal Growth: This ability now prevents affected units from burrowing.
Neural Parasite: Functionality changed. The Infestor now channels this spell, which lasts 10 seconds or until the Infestor is destroyed. You can now target all units with this ability.
Terran Infestation: The ability’s energy cost has reduced from 50 to 25 and Infested Terrans now spawn 1 at a time.
Bug Fixes:
Addressed an issue causing people to receive an “Internal Battle.net Error” message with their game client.
Muting your microphone will no longer cause your microphone to be turned off in the operating system once the program has exited.
Please note that the voice chat functionality has only partially been implemented. There are many known issues with voice chat that we expect to address in a future patch.
The “Medium” graphical settings were reconfigured to work better on appropriate machines. The video settings “auto-detect” functionality has been reset as a result.
Added a frame rate limiter to the game menus to prevent some graphics cards from running at higher frame rates than necessary.
Added GRB rating tags to the login menu for the Korean version of the Beta client.
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