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Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

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Re: Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

#281

Post by dijit »

siva7 wrote: post #218
ipaddr wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good point but odds are gmail won't be around in 20 years. The most popular email 20 years ago was aol later hotmail. Most popular search yahoo, altavista are gone. ICQ is mostly gone. Myspace is gone. Facebook is dying slowly hopefully to be replaced with some form in the meta world. To make it 18 years is special but it's going to take a lot of reinvention to keep up for the next 20 years. They have the be…

Those services existed only for a few years before fb, google etc took over

AOL had been around since at least 1991 and was still extremely popular well into the mid 00's.

Hotmail launched in 1996 and GMail didn't get popular until at least 10 years later. (IMAP was added in 2007~ and the beta was lifted in 2009 iirc).

That's a lot of time to be relatively dominant, but they're reminiscent of zombies these days.

Re: Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

#282

Post by bryanrasmussen »

tdrdt wrote: post #213
endisneigh wrote: post #15

This article is a great example of why we need legislation around ownership of digital items. I generally hate getting the government involved in things, but if you're paying money for goods, there needs to be a way to be credited or receive your digital goods in a way that still works without your "account". Personally I always get kind of nervous around buying things on PSN, Xbox, Stadia, Steam, Oculus, etc. If the…

I think one simple legislation could help a lot: forbid to use the word 'buy' in this context. Instead it should be 'hire' or 'lease' or something. Once I 'bought' an e-book that was copy protected by Adobe (my fault I didn't read the specs before buying). But because you can only read it when Adobe's servers are online no ownership is transferred to you as buyer. You buy rights to read the book on their terms. 'Hire…

>I think one simple legislation could help a lot: forbid to use the word 'buy' in this context. Instead it should be 'hire' or 'lease' or something.

right, if I signed a contract to lease a game for 6 months and then my account was suspended for 5 months so I only got one months usage for my lease I would totally be like "that's so fair! Because word usage!"

Re: Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

#283

Post by lnxg33k1 »

regularjack wrote: post #239
birracerveza wrote: post #222

Decentralized ownership and file storage using NFTs on low energy blockchains would solve this. But no, let's keep complaining about the same problems over and over while we keep chanting that crypto is evil and can't be used to solve said problems.

Downloading the files to your hard-drive solves this, which we've been able to do since always, and yet here we are. It's not a tech problem.

Does it? Because I was just thinking that it's not an issue with digital goods only, they can do the same thing if you have a physical disk and need to activate the right to it using a key, they can just disable the key and that's it, about the guy about talking about NFTs and problem, this is not a problem that happened and needs to be solved, this is a problem for users that has been implemented, I'm sure they would find a way to make it exist even if the ownership was blockchain based.

Re: Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

#284

Post by josefx »

mattdesl wrote: post #257
endisneigh wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're being very vague. If the game is centrally located there's absolutely no point of using a distributed ledger to begin with. The same place the game is stored can store your license.

The OP thread is about the centralized entity revoking your digital ownership over these licenses at their will. The parent you are replying to is imagining a hypothetical future where licenses around digital ownership are not merely private records on centrally owned and mutable ledgers, but rather, public records on decentrally owned and immutable ledgers. This has nothing to do with files/media and of course it is…

so you have a license. The data you license is still centralized.The owner of that server rejects your license or simply shuts down the server. How does your blockchain help you? Note that downloading your data elsewehere is still infringement and hacking the DRM is still circumvention.

Re: Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

#285

Post by saargrin »

endisneigh wrote: post #15

This article is a great example of why we need legislation around ownership of digital items. I generally hate getting the government involved in things, but if you're paying money for goods, there needs to be a way to be credited or receive your digital goods in a way that still works without your "account". Personally I always get kind of nervous around buying things on PSN, Xbox, Stadia, Steam, Oculus, etc. If the…

we let it happen with music before, where apple and spotify and others can just delete stuff you purchased from your library...

this actually sounds like the only beneficial use for NFTs i can think of

Re: Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

#286

Post by ivegotnoaccount »

Aeolun wrote: post #274
endisneigh wrote: post #15

This article is a great example of why we need legislation around ownership of digital items. I generally hate getting the government involved in things, but if you're paying money for goods, there needs to be a way to be credited or receive your digital goods in a way that still works without your "account". Personally I always get kind of nervous around buying things on PSN, Xbox, Stadia, Steam, Oculus, etc. If the…

> If they ban me, do I lose my thousands of dollars of games? I can kind of understand if you were legitimately in the wrong (e.g. sending death threats to other users, getting a warning, and then doing it again), but in the situation where you are simply inactive for some period of time I think it’s unreasonable.

Even with such extreme things, the course of action should be:

- Disable online features on the account

- Fill a complain to authorities if illegal in the user's country (in France, sending death threats online is totally illegal)

But not "Delete the account with its paid content". IMHO, the community part and game library part should not be strong-linked in such a way. If only for false positives.

Re: Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

#287

Post by lnxg33k1 »

falcor84 wrote: post #271
ehsankia wrote: post #145

Ubisoft claims accounts with games on it will never be up for deletion. I could see this being a bug, but could also just simply be that... the person is confused and that specific account didn't actually have a game on it? Could it be a different account maybe? That seems a more likely and simple explanation to me, and this right now just comes down to a he said / she said. Obviously it's not great that the ToS has…

I don't know what your experience with Ubisoft is, but based on mine, I would always default to mistrusting them.

Along the years I also built the same approach, so far, I am usually not a corporate fanboy, but somehow I found myself in the situation that if a game is not on Steam it doesn't exist, and even there I have some publishers I never buy from, like EA, Ubisoft, Bethesda, Microsoft..

Re: Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

#288

Post by robinduckett »

jorvi wrote: post #263
simion314 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Personally I always get kind of nervous around buying things on PSN My PlayStation account was blocked for online games/chat for 2 months with no clear reason, this also wasted 2 months of PS Plus subscription sice I could not really benefit from it. They did not offer any way to dispute this or clarify what exactly was wrong to avoid it. My son was using the console to play Fortnite, he told me that some guy blackm…

Sony is extremely trigger happy with suspending based on messages. I’ve gotten a few weeks suspension for ‘harassment’ because I told someone that kept messaging me I was hacking that that was ‘honestly kind of dumb’.

Is it more likely that the other person reported you a bunch of times and that Sony does not employ people to check that reports are legitimate?

Re: Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

#289

Post by ivegotnoaccount »

akavel wrote: post #186
endisneigh wrote: post #15

This article is a great example of why we need legislation around ownership of digital items. I generally hate getting the government involved in things, but if you're paying money for goods, there needs to be a way to be credited or receive your digital goods in a way that still works without your "account". Personally I always get kind of nervous around buying things on PSN, Xbox, Stadia, Steam, Oculus, etc. If the…

https://gog.com has (nearly?) all games DRM-free, so you can backup (and also actually torrent I believe) any of the games, that's why I choose to buy from them.

The question may be silly, but how does GOG handle multiplayer ?

- Are players that bought the game on GOG able to play with those that bought it on steam/Uplay/other when lobbies are involved

- Are there DRMs for online play that have lobbies ? If so, how are they handled ?

Also, their list is sadly quite limited it seems, for the games many play. No GTA V, no God of War, no Red Dead Redemption, no Call of Duty, no battlefield V, which seem to be some of most selling games of past years.

I know it's not their fault but because of it, it won't fit a huge chunk of the users' needs.

Re: Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

#290

Post by Lazare »

I feel a bit disappointed by the number of people suggesting that an NFT would somehow help here.

An NFT is just a fancy signed receipt. I can mint an NFT saying the OP owns a bunch of Ubisoft games and give it to him, but his account will still be closed. Ubisoft could mint an NFT saying he owns a bunch of games and give it to him, but his account will still be closed. (He probably still has the receipts from when he bought the games in his inbox somewhere, but of course, his account is still closed.)

We can store whatever records we like in a fancy distributed database, but his account will still be closed. The only fix here is Ubisoft needs to not close peoples accounts.

Somewhat amusingly Ubisoft is in the process of launching an NFT system (https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/12/ubisofts-first-nft-pl...) and as anyone paying attention would no doubt expect, it doesn't solve anything related to this; up to an including the fact that if you get banned you...lose your NFTs.

There is no technological problem to solve here.

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