Ubisoft DRM Servers Attacked

Remember back in late February when we brought you the story about Ubisoft DRM? The idea was to combat piracy and provide a better gaming experience to its users so Ubisoft would require an always on internet connection to its servers so you can play their games? Well over this past weekend the DRM servers went down due to overload because of the recently released PC version of Assassin’s Creed II or at least that is what we thought it was.

ACII was one of the first games to utilize the new DRM policy and it has been plagued with many server issues. Posters on the ACII forums complained of connection outages and not long after the DRM servers went down not allowing anyone else to connect to them and play.

An official response on the Ubisoft forums 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.”

At this point it looked as if Ubisoft had just underestimated how much traffic they would receive and was underprepared for the server load then this tweet appeared on the Ubisoft twitter page.

“Apologies to anyone who couldn’t play ACII or SH5 yesterday, servers were attacked which limited service from 2:30pm to 9pm Paris time 95% of players were not affected, but a small group of players attempting to open a game session did receive denial of service errors.”

So it looks as if someone or someone’s were not happy with the new DRM policy and launched an attack. Later an official gave a statement to IGN saying:

“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.”

Well I am glad most of you fans of Assassin’s Creed were able to play but the fact remains that the DRM servers had issues before the attack. Simply put, people are not happy and I have seen more frustration than praise from the playerbase.

Ubisoft can boast about no cracked versions of their games being on the net, but what they should be talking about is how to make sure that the 5% who did not get to play will not have to worry about outages, connection issues and attacks in the future.

It’s gonna be a long road people.

Let’s hear your feedback ACII and SH5 players, how did playing on the Ubisoft servers fair you this past weekend?

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