{"id":20267,"date":"2013-07-02T13:09:42","date_gmt":"2013-07-02T18:09:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=20267"},"modified":"2013-07-02T13:09:42","modified_gmt":"2013-07-02T18:09:42","slug":"a-note-from-uplay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=20267","title":{"rendered":"A Note from UPlay"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have written about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.escapistmagazine.com\/articles\/view\/columns\/experienced-points\/9405-Ubisoft-vs-Ubisofts-Customers\">the horribleness of Ubisoft&#8217;s UPlay<\/a> system in the past. It&#8217;s pretty much the worst of the major digital &#8220;platforms&#8221; out right now. Even Origin pretends to have features and a digital storefront, but UPlay is nothing more than naked DRM with no sugar coating. <\/p>\n<p>I last dealt with UPlay back in January, when I tried to play Far Cry 3. Here is that saga as I related on Twitter:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\n<center><\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n<p>Gah. Far Cry 3 is linked to Uplay, Ubisoft&#39;s latest wishes-it-were-Steam. And of course it&#39;s hideous.<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Shamus Young (@shamusyoung) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/shamusyoung\/statuses\/289987446576390145\">January 12, 2013<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n<p>Oh come on. I have to log in to a 3rd party service to play a Steam game. Is it 2008 again?<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Shamus Young (@shamusyoung) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/shamusyoung\/statuses\/289987939453251584\">January 12, 2013<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n<p>Uplay: If I log in with email, then WHY DO I NEED A UNIQUE USERNAME? Related: &quot;Ubisucks&quot; and &quot;Ubisoftsucks&quot; are both taken.<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Shamus Young (@shamusyoung) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/shamusyoung\/statuses\/289989297757646848\">January 12, 2013<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n<p>Other taken usernames: &quot;uplaysucks&quot; and &quot;uplay blows&quot;.<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Shamus Young (@shamusyoung) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/shamusyoung\/statuses\/289990140380725248\">January 12, 2013<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n<p>Uplay TOS has no line breaks, paragraph breaks, or other formatting. It&#39;s a solid rectangle of packed text. Just saying.<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Shamus Young (@shamusyoung) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/shamusyoung\/statuses\/289990816158597121\">January 12, 2013<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n<p>For joining UPLAY, I get 10 BS points. Which is enough to buy a WALLPAPER that was a GIS away: <a href=\"http:\/\/t.co\/DYMAxua4\">http:\/\/t.co\/DYMAxua4<\/a> MY TIME IS WORTH MORE.<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Shamus Young (@shamusyoung) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/shamusyoung\/statuses\/289992210462699521\">January 12, 2013<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p><\/center><\/p>\n<p>The last step was a huge slap in the face. They give you 10 UPlay points, which you can use to &#8220;buy&#8221; a promotional desktop wallpaper. That&#8217;s fractally wrong: Even the wrongness has little sub-wrongs that branch off into more wrongs. I shouldn&#8217;t need to register to play a Steam game. And if I do, it should be easy. And if it isn&#8217;t, their &#8220;reward&#8221; at the end should be 100% painless to obtain and shouldn&#8217;t involve a store with some kind of shopping cart and meta-currency.  And if it does, then the reward at the end should be valuable to me. And if none of that is true, then at least UPlay should have enough tact to not attempt to charge me worthless un-money to use my desktop as advertising space.<\/p>\n<p>But that&#8217;s all in the past. Water under the bridge. I haven&#8217;t thought about UPlay since then. I forgot the service existed until I got this email today:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Dear Member, <\/p>\n<p>We recently found that one of our Web sites was exploited to gain unauthorized access to some of our online systems. We instantly took steps to close off this access, investigate the incident and begin restoring the integrity of any compromised systems. <\/p>\n<p>During this process, we learned that data had been illegally accessed from our account database, including user names, email addresses and encrypted passwords. Please note that no personal payment information is stored with Ubisoft, meaning your debit\/credit card information was safe from this intrusion. <\/p>\n<p>As a result, we are recommending that you change the password for your account: <code>[redacted]<\/code><\/p>\n<p>To enter your new password, click the link below: <\/p>\n<p><code>[redacted]<\/code><\/p>\n<p>Out of an abundance of caution, we also recommend that you change your password on any other Web site or service where you use the same or a similar password.  <\/p>\n<p>You can find more information here <a href=\"https:\/\/support.ubi.com\/en-US\/FAQ.aspx?platformid=60&#038;brandid=2030&#038;productid=3888&#038;faqid=kA030000000eYZ2CAM\" title=\"https:\/\/support.ubi.com\/en-US\/FAQ.aspx?platformid=60&#038;brandid=2030&#038;productid=3888&#038;faqid=kA030000000eYZ2CAM\">https:\/\/support.ubi.com\/en-US\/FAQ.aspx?platformid=60&#038;brandid=2030&#038;productid=3888&#038;faqid=kA030000000eYZ2CAM<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p>For any additional support enquiries, please contact our customer service via our support web site at https:\/\/support.ubi.com <\/p>\n<p>We sincerely apologize to all of you for the inconvenience. Please rest assured that your security remains our priority. <\/p>\n<p>The Ubisoft team\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Awesome. UPlay has one purpose, which is to ALLOW people to play their legitimately-purchased games. And they couldn&#8217;t even accomplish this without creating a security threat for their customers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have written about the horribleness of Ubisoft&#8217;s UPlay system in the past. It&#8217;s pretty much the worst of the major digital &#8220;platforms&#8221; out right now. Even Origin pretends to have features and a digital storefront, but UPlay is nothing more than naked DRM with no sugar coating. I last dealt with UPlay back in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20267\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}