this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
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Apparently the Ubisoft servers are down so I cannot play SINGLE PLAYER Breakpoint.

I don't even want to play the game online. I just enjoy running around in single player. Why they haven't dropped an offline patch yet?

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[–] micka190 63 points 8 months ago (1 children)

EA did this thing a while back where they saw people were still playing Bad Company 2 on PC on community servers. They updated the game to require a login to EA's server on boot, then took those servers down. Always online is cancer.

[–] Psythik 9 points 8 months ago (2 children)

They finally killed off BC2? So I can finally give up on the futile effort of reinstalling the game every year, in hopes that maybe I'll find a populated server this time around?

I miss that game so much. Rush was so much fun. The maps were designed perfectly for that game mode, unlike future BF titles where it's a tacked on feature. It was so good, that I found out the hard way that I actually don't like Battlefield games, after wasting money on BF3, 4, and Hardline, and hating all of them. I just want more Bad Company games.

[–] Delusional 7 points 8 months ago

Yeah it feels like after BC2, they just didn't even try any longer with the map design. It was the last good battlefield game.

[–] micka190 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It was dead last time I tried playing (because of the login thing). Unless someone made a community patch to bypass the login prompt, I guess.

You're pretty much in the same situation I'm in. BFBC2 was the last Battlefield game I liked, and it was because Rush was so much fucking fun in that. I hate how much the newer ones kind of mostly focus on Conquest, personally.

[–] Psythik 5 points 8 months ago

Conquest is not my idea of fun, either. It's a lot of running back and forth between the same objectives over and over again until someone wins. To me there's no thrill in that.

I like the concept of "push/bomb/capture the objective and move on to the next phase of the map" in any game that has it. Used to play a lot of Team Fortress 2 and Overwatch because of it. But now I've moved past those games as well. Overwatch has an issue where the meta evolves faster than I can keep up, and TF2 has the opposite problem we're the meta doesn't evolve at all because Valve doesn't update the game. So I've stopped playing shooters for now until something new comes out that satisfies my desire for this kind of gameplay.

[–] [email protected] 59 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I hate to break it to you, but by Ubisoft's terms and conditions, this is not your game. 🫤 you have never owned a copy of it.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 8 months ago

That's what every game company has said about every game for decades though! A game disc which installs and plays the game was legally still some nebulous "this provides a licence to play the game which can be revoked at any time", it's only now that the companies actually have the power to revoke them at any time.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

👨‍🚀🔫👨‍🚀Always has been. You never owned the software. Even when games were on cd or cartridge. The only thing that is your legal possession is the physical CD or cartridge and the license that came with it.

[–] grue 25 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Always has been a blatant motherfucking lie, you mean.

Saying you don't own a game you bought is exactly as batshit insane as saying you don't own a paper book you bought. We wouldn't put up with this shit for that, so we shouldn't put up with it for games either!

Stop letting the copyright cartel steal our property rights and drive us into serfdom.

[–] jqubed 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

There are two different ownerships that are being conflated here. When you buy a book, let’s say it’s a new book, just released, and rapidly becoming a best seller. You own your copy of the book, you can read it, you can make notes in it, you can lend it to a friend but while your friend has the book you can’t read that book yourself, or you can sell the book again but once you sell it you won’t be able to read it anymore until you purchase another copy or go to the library. What you’re not allowed to do just because you have the book is make copies of it to sell or give away (which is somewhat challenging to do anyway with a physical book that has hundreds of pages), you’re not allowed to make and sell an audiobook recording of the book, you’re not allowed to go and make a movie based on the book. You’re not allowed to take the characters and write a sequel to the book and sell it. The author still owns the rights to the contents of the book.

In the early days of books, especially the 19th century as books became easier to produce and more people could read, a lot of this started to become problems. People with printing presses would see a book people like, get a copy, and start printing and selling copies on their own. They made translations and sold copies in other countries. People would produce plays based on the books, and depending on where it was performed the author might never know about it. This was all usually done without the involvement of the author and the author often was not paid from these. A surprising number of highly regarded and top selling authors wound up making very little money from their books because they weren’t being paid for most of the copies being sold. Many died poor. This led to the development of the concept of copyright and various other associated rights.

These rights became more complicated as media progressed. With audio recordings there are multiple rights involved: the person who wrote the song has a copyright on the actual music and lyrics, and the person who performed the song has a copyright to the recording of their performance. Sometimes these are the same person, sometimes they’re different.

The laws kept getting more complicated. With software, the developer or publisher owned the software, often because the developer was working under contract to the publisher or sold the software to the publisher. It’s kind of rare to sell the actual software to a customer, and is usually done only for corporate or government clients. In that case the entire rights to the software are transferred and the publisher/developer can’t sell another copy to someone else. Much more commonly only a license to the software is sold to many different customers, and what exactly that license involves can vary widely in the legal terms of that license (which most people never read). Some are very restrictive. It used to be that a lot of licenses specifically tied the copy that you purchased to the hardware you first installed it on. If that hardware died or you purchased a new model, too bad, you’re now supposed to buy a new copy. Some licenses said you’re not allowed to change the code of the software, some licenses allow it. Ten or fifteen years ago people didn’t really think about the idea of streaming gameplay and creating a video from a game was considered a derivative work and not allowed, like making a movie from a book. Now a lot of licenses explicitly allow streaming gameplay, but some older games that weren’t planning for it might not have the rights to stream the music from the game.

If you violated those rights in the past, the terms technically said those rights ended and you were supposed to stop using the license. In practice this was on the honor system and the licensor would rarely know about it, unless they sent an auditor to check compliance, which was usually only worth doing at large companies. With the internet, companies now have the ability to actually access your computer and monitor your use of the software you’ve licensed. They can even disable your access to this software. Unfortunately, of course, a lot of companies have gone the greedy route and used this to their own advantage and at cost to the customer. Not everyone does, though. It’s really important to know what the terms of the license say. If they say they can delete the game you’ve bought and not refund you, don’t buy from them. Don’t give them money for this crap. Let the game flop, even if it otherwise looked great. Support the developers and publishers who want to support the customers. Read the terms on your software; you should always have the option to say you don’t agree and get your money back if you don’t go through with installation. And the laws that allow bad licenses don’t have to stay as they are; some jurisdictions are friendlier to consumers than others.

[–] I_Clean_Here 0 points 7 months ago

No one will read this wall of text

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

It’s the same with paper books though. If you buy a paper book you don’t automatically own the rights of that work. You own the copy and can sell that copy or even make a copy for private use. But you can’t make copies of that book to sell, since you don’t own the copyright

Copyright is definitely being abused by the big corporations but without copyright small artists/software developers would constantly get their work stolen by those big corporations.

[–] grue 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You own the copy

...which is the entirety of the important part. Once the store sells you the copy, that's it: the copryight holder has no more right whatsoever to say what gets done to that copy. In particular, it does not have the right to dictate to you when, where, or how you may use your property, e.g. by requiring an Internet connection for the fucking thing to run!

The copyright holder's temporary monopoly privilege should not be allowed to supersede or infringe upon the copy owner's actual property rights in even the slightest way. Full stop, end of. The publisher's business model is its own damn problem, not the customer's. If it relies on destroying the latter's rights in order to achieve profitability, the business deserves to fail!

[–] Cybersteel 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You wouldn't download a car

[–] grue 1 points 7 months ago
[–] leave_it_blank 3 points 8 months ago

You're absolutely right, what pisses people of is that you can't do shit without launchers today anymore, except for gog.

The Discs are yours, regardless if it's a license or not, they just work whatever the publisher says.

Always on, Games as a service and game launchers and all that shit is a cancer that has to be cured.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 8 months ago

if you want to own/keep owning stuff, consider supporting with the push of a button.

Stopkillinggames is trying to change this in a huge effort spearheaded by one stubborn individual.

[–] Pixlbabble 28 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I am not buying Ubisoft games going forwards.

[–] ricdeh 13 points 8 months ago

You should have made that decision a long time ago, but you know what they say, better late than never!

[–] [email protected] 25 points 8 months ago (2 children)

For the same reason that YouTube music refuses to play offline content stored on your phone until there's a live internet connection - particularly helpful when you're outside of coverage.

That reason is that you are the product and playing without being tracked doesn't make any money.

[–] grue 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

No, it's not the same; not even slightly! Youtube Music is a monthly subscription, whereas Ubisoft presents the transaction as a sale. Ubisoft has no right to gatekeep your property away from you.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

I'm not saying that the two are the same.

I'm pointing out that you are prevented from using either service offline because they want to track your behaviour in order to monetize your data.

[–] Alpha71 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

For the same reason that YouTube music refuses to play offline content stored on your phone until there’s a live internet connection

Yeah, I get by that by downloading the song and listening to it offline

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Unless something has recently changed, I was unable to play music that was downloaded inside YouTube music but refused to play if there was no internet access.

[–] Alpha71 5 points 8 months ago

I mean I copied the link of the music, used a youtube downloader and listen to it that way. The Youtube music App is broken AF.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (2 children)

You need to be a YouTube Music premium subscriber for true offline playback.

[–] Aielman15 11 points 8 months ago

I recommend buying music on BandCamp instead. You get to own the music you buy, and support the artist at the same time.

Fuck subscription services.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I’m an Orpheus subscriber, which fixes al that for free!

RIP what.cd

[–] slazer2au 23 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I see you fell for Ubi blatant lying that the game is single player when it should be classified as Live Service.

It truly does suck that there is no offline mode just like The Division.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Live service and always online are two entirely different things, and the former isn't inherently malicious, unlike the latter.

I'd, for example, consider all Paradox grand strategy games as live service with major updates dropping once or twice a year (followed by like twenty bugfix patches cause they fuck up every time, but that's besides the point). Sure, every major update comes with a new dlc that isn't exactly cheap, but you also get a lot of free content with each release. All their major titles are entirely different games now than they were at the 1.0 release.

What ubisoft does is just a tacked on battle pass that gets a few worthless items/skins so they can call it live service and have a justification for their always online verification model. That's purely an anti piracy measure that fucks legitimate players more than pirates.

[–] ampersandrew 7 points 8 months ago

In the Paradox case, nothing is live, and they aren't pretending it's a service. They just put goods out at a rapid clip that you choose to buy or not. That's why live service games are always online. If Paradox counts, then so do board games, and that's absurd.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Sadly purchasing digitally apparently affords consumers less rights. I would recommend finding a cracked version for the future just in case

[–] grue 4 points 8 months ago

We need to show up at the FTC chair's house with torches and pitchforks until he agrees to start enforcing the Doctrine of First Sale again.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago

Sail the seas transfer your save If you're on PC

[–] leave_it_blank 11 points 8 months ago

Well, they will kill the servers sooner or later, and you won't be able to play it ever again.

Except you look for other ways, maybe you're in luck.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Almost as annoying is DS1, 3 and Elden Ring booting you to the main menu just cuz you got disconnected. But at least they can still be played, it's just annoying to be pulled out of the game for that when it's mostly just for bloodstains, messages and being invaded.