It took 2 weeks to make assasin creed playable (no savings just open world). In another 4-5 weeks fully working crack was released. Settlers 7 took only 1,5 week to be cracked.

So yeah pirates wait for fev weeks to play their game when people who bought this game need to suffer from day one for being honest and supporting their game makers.

Not to mention vast of singleplayer gamers who need to pass on the game because they dont have stable connection.

Like zhen said: all of us arnt so lucky to have asdl2+ or fibre at their homes, or so stupid to support companies who screw you soo badly for doing the right thing.

Monk its really up to you mate if you like to get f.. in the a.. for doing the right thing. I wont discuss ur preferences here.

Summarize:
Current ubisoft 'unbreakable' scheme did nothing more then delay pirates for 2-5 weeks, reduces their client base and increase piriting of their titles (only option to play for people without stable connection).

Any good sides? I really cant see any...

@the_Monk

This has already been stated by others but what the hell, I'll give it another go.

Mainly the people complaining aren't complaining about DRM in theory or a companies right to protect their shit. Everyone agrees intellectual property should be protected and the people who make it should get paid. Even Hard-Core Pirates accept that. Even the most Hard-Core, Money Grubbing, Miser of a thief, in the world doesn't want to see the game makers shut down or go out of business. They don't pirate games to make companies loose money.

The people who are complaining are mostly the people WHO DO WANT TO BUY and Play the latest Ubisoft games but they DO NOT have Reliable Internet connections. I sympathize with them as for almost 11 years I lived in a area with next to No Internet. If you had Internet in my old neighborhood you either had Dial-Up (which was spotty off and on) or you had Satellite Internet (which goes out every time a cloud passes over). The ONLY Reason I my-self haven't bought the last three Ubisoft titles is because I'm afraid that some-day I may have to move back out to a area like that. If I had to move back out there I wouldn't be able to play any of those games because I wouldn't be able to maintain a stable connection.

Personally, I LOVE Ubisoft games, but, I refuse to support a DRM scheme that punishes it's paying customers.

I keep up with the news inside the "Scene" community. I also have a "test system" set up to look for viruses in pirated software. From what I've found, AC2, Splinter Cell Conviction, and Settlers 7, have all been cracked and are working fine Without the DRM. So now, the pirates are playing the games without being hassled like the people who paid for the games are. Paying customers are being punished with draconian methods while the thieves are getting away with a working product without any of the hassle of dealing with the company and their bullshit servers. Is that "fair"? Not to me it's not. As we've already established though, life isn't fair. It's not fair for the people paying for the games. It's not fair for the companies making the games. It seems to be fair for the pirates though.

All the buzz in the "scene" right now says that the Pirating Groups are heralding a "Return to the True Days of Cracking" as it now presents more of a challenge. It isn't just a recompile of any "multi12-binary" bullshit or a hacked "Solidshield VM code". Now titles once again have to be cracked on a per-title basis instead of being able to be automatically cracked by a program designed to do just that, btw, yes there Are programs out there that can crack a game's DRM automatically and lazy scene crackers use them.

With this new-found invigoration among the pirate scene Ubisoft is just begging to have their games ripped. In the long run this new DRM will do far more damage then good as the people who are keeping Ubisoft alive, the paying customers, are the ones who are being hassled and won't spend any money in the future. They'll go out and pirate a version of the game with no DRM so they won't have to see a "Can't Connect" error and they'll be able to play the game any time they want. If Ubisoft doesn't switch up their DRM scheme I can see them slowing being forced out of business due to loss of income from driving away their paying customers. Whether they are meaning too or not Ubisoft is driving people to pirate their games in droves just because those people who would otherwise have paid for their games don't want to have to deal with being always on-line. In that respect, Finally, they won't be LYING when they say piracy = lost sales. Normally pirates don't plan on paying for games so that's not a lost sale. Now it is a lost sale because people still want the games, they just Don't want the Bullshit that comes with them.

Let's get something straight the_Monk.  Yes, I have pirated things.  However, I actually have a large library of purchased games on both Impulse (and these games could be easily pirated BTW) and Steam, as well as boxed versions of Dragon Age, Supreme Commander + Forged Alliance, and Dawn of War with all three expansions (I have BF2142, Demigod, and Guild Wars too, but multi-only games don't count), plus a perfectly legal copy of Windows XP w/ SP2. I will only buy a game if I feel the developer deserves the money, and that has happened a lot with me.  Oddly enough, not very many pirated games last long on my PC since they just aren't worth the money to buy, which means my opinion of the game is somewhat low.  It gets axed from my drive, and I forget all about it.

EDIT: The point of all this is that a company that wants my money better make a game good enough to make me on a limited income shell out the $40-60 for it.  Starcraft 2 looks tempting, but I'm not going to buy it at its current MSRP of $59.99.  I won't pirate it either out of respect for Blizzard though.

@ SpardaSon21

So I eat a meal at a restaurant and decide the restaurant doesn't deserve to be paid for the meal, or walk down the aisle in the department store and decide the store doesn't deserve to be paid for the BBQ I'm about to wheel out of the store.   Are you kidding me?

Or what?   You won't GO WITHOUT as you should since you can't actually really afford it on your limited income?!?

....sigh.....the entitlement-generation strikes again! 

Actually, I am going without.  Latest thing I tried was BC2.  If I was going to seriously play it, yes I would buy it.  I haven't bothered to pirate SupCom2, C&C4, or AC2 simply because I know they're not worth the money or bandwidth.  Me pirating is me trying before I buy, as my legally purchased copy of Sword of the Stars attests to (which I happened to pirate before realizing it was awesome and buying on Impulse).

And no Monk, I wouldn't eat at a restaurant and not pay, simply because the food they sold me is now food that can't be sold to someone else.  There's actual physical consumption and loss of physical property going on.  If I pirate a game, there is no consumption (usage, but not consumption), so by me pirating the developer loses nothing since a game I am pirating is not a guaranteed sale were it not pirated; however he has much to gain if I like what I've pirated, in which case I will purchase it to compensate him for his effort.

what the hell are you talking about? Where are you buying your tools. If you take a tool home and it doesn't work or isn't worth the money, you take it right back and get your money's back. Let's see how does this work with software... oh right. It doesn't. Maybe the people who haven't been able to play Settlers 7 in for weeks, that's right, weeks, might not have as much to complain about, probably still complain since you know products you sell should actually work, if they could get their money back. How about all the people on PS3 who can't get the DLC content to work because of DRM... for weeks. The only part of the DA that is DRM is the DLC and guess where most the problems are. But hey, keeping making poor comparisons, it works great. As for me, my tools are not only refundable, they have lifetime warranties.

First of all.  I didn't say the tool didn't work.  I said it "sucks" (ie. doesn't work as well as I might want it to) or didn't work/function as advertised (we all know advertising is hype.....just like with video games).  I could most certainly (with proof of purchase) expect to return a non-working tool, but to return a tool simply because it doesn't do the job as well as I'd imagined?  I wouldn't dream of it.  My mistake for buying it, a mistake I wouldn't make a second time.

Second.  You're actually proving my point with your counter argument.  You're not resorting to stealing all other tools made/marketed by said initial company rather you're using the allowed method (of returning merchandise) by that retailer to deal with your dissatisfaction.  Not unlike a "clearance sale" where you cannot return items you're dissasfied with most software retailers will not "take back" their software and refund your money.  Of course people copying said software and then returning it to the retailer for a full refund is largely responsible for the current stance of the retail market towards software returns, but here I go again blaming faulty society.........sigh.

the Monk

Haven't played a Ubisoft game in a long time.

I complain about DRM because it is stupid and punishes me. I've never pirated a single game, but it drives me mad that I get punished for buying a game legally with an inferior product while the pirates get to play a far superior version for free.

It's insane, and will only push people like me to piracy and/or to not buy games with such excessive DRM.

Sure you'll have some people using the feeble excuse that they pirate to try out a game, or because the developer doesn't deserve it/the game's not good enough, and that's wrong. But DRM does NOTHING to stop such piracy - no matter what DRM's been used, it's been cracked, meaning it only affects those people legally purchasing the game. In fact the irony is that DRM encourages piracy and discourages legal purchases.

Well said.

I did, because I couldn't install the network drivers to have internet in the first place. It's more common than people think.

I have a pretty good idea of how many people have pirated stuff I've worked on (it's not hard, it's a google search to see how many installations exist, then a comparison with the number of licences sold for that version) and it's usually not because they dislike the DRM. They just don't want to pay. That's a shame but it's true.

We could all stand to be a little less worried about consumer piracy. I'm a paying customer, and I pay for the things I like, and I don't use the things I dislike. The legally correct response to someone producing a product you do not like is not to purchase it, and to persuade as many people as you can not to purchase it.

Raven, in the past you have argued that piracy can "help" a game for a variety of different reasons. If you believe that to be true, and there is some merit in what you have said, I suggest that you advocate that people "not" pirate a game, to deny companies that abuse paying customers even the satisfaction of having people enjoy their game. If a game is made unplayable by corporate policy, it should be consigned to the dustbin, relegated to the "not noteworthy" deletion section of wikipedia, and shunned.

I don't know, but this seems to be a pretty basic idea to me. If you want to win an argument with someone, you will not win it by being their enemy. If we the consumers want to "win" the argument about DRM, we will not win it by being pirates. We'll win it because we won't put up with this sort of garbage.

Did Vista get replaced by Windows 7 because a million people pirated it? No, it was replaced because the consumer hated it, the media hated it, the people who Microsoft wanted to sell it to outright refused to buy it.

Agreed, and I think my statement was a little incorrect as well. I shouldn't have said "most of", I should have said "some of". The thread I saw over at the Ubi forums that was deleted was all mainly people who said they didn't have reliable Internet where they lived.

I also think you're right about the assessment of what people come to expect when buying software. This comes from us viewing our computers as separate entities that only allow us to run software. Once that software is on "our computers" we tend to view it as "ours", especially because of the format. For PC programs files have to be installed and left accessible to be able to work. These files are little "pieces" of the product. I think if they somehow changed the format, and that after a installation the user only saw a "disk" on their hard-drive that they couldn't access in any shape or form, this would change how people view software and even from a virtual standpoint it would be viewed as a "physical disk". People would view it as a "object they own" rather than a program made up of "a bunch of little pieces I own". Sadly our technology doesn't work that way and would need to be redesigned to do just that.

I also think Aractain's food analogy below is quite accurate except he forgot one thing. Someone might want to take the banana home and make "banana bread" or "banana pudding" etc etc as being "use options". This goes hand in hand with what I say about programs being viewed as a "bunch of little pieces we own" as people use them to make other things like Mods or to tweak them to work the way they want. 

Excellent Analogy.

This is true and well said. I think my argument to piracy being "helpful" though is rather limited to specific situations. Like I've said before, the first Stardock game I ever played was a pirated version of Gal Civ 1. Since then I've spent more money then I care to count up right now on Stardock games and programs. I'm not saying people Should pirate things or the new Ubisoft games though. You're quite right in saying we should speak with our wallets, as I have, and not purchase the new games with this particular DRM. For me it was all about the storyline for AC 2 anyway. Sooner or later someone will post all the in game cinematics on Youtube or somewhere else and I'll see what happened and Ubi won't get my money for me to find out. I'm not advocating piracy though.

Honestly though because Ubisoft does make quality games they are often targets for piracy. Now with this new DRM nonsense they're using they ARE going to push people who Would Have Paid for their game into downloading it online for free. Internet Piracy is the easiest crime on Earth to pull off and everyone knows it. Until it's harder for the general public to learn how to do it, or if some actual technical skill needed to be learned to pirate games, people are going to do it in droves because it's seen as a "faceless crime" that only hurts big business. In the cases of Ubisoft's new titles, for once, piracy will equal lost sales more closely because a lot of people who would have bought them are going to pirate them because they still want to play them. I'm not advocating it, but if it hurts Ubisoft financially, then maybe they'll wise up and go back to a better method of DRM. Everyone expects some kind of DRM, but NOT the Bullshit they have now.

When it comes to Vista, I have a funny story there....

I tried Vista and hated it just like everyone else. I tried it on my test system and got it off a disk a friend gave me. This is the same friend who gave me that copy of Gal Civ 1 back in the day btw... I didn't know if it was a cracked copy of Vista or if it was the Demo Edition put out. I was only using it on my test system to see if I liked it. I'd recommend even to the biggest thief on Earth who downloads and steals everything else to AT LEAST Pay for you're OS. Without a properly licensed OS it's real hard to get tech support.

Anyway, I tried Vista for about 3 days on my test system and thought "Yeap...this is crap. No thanks Microsploodge" and I stayed with XP until Win 7 came out. Even if I would of liked Vista though and decided to continue to use it, I would have bought it because a Legal OS isn't really one of things in my eyes any PC owner can do without.

I understand exactly where you're coming from though and I agree.