paralipsis

Bigger was not better when it came to the Ultima series. Ultimas IV-VII had some great moments, and I was genuinely hooked on U5 back in the day. But from Ultima VIII onwards, the franchise turned to crap, and these days the brand is mud. Trying to bring it back as an MMO again is just silly.

I'd personally like to thank Mr. Mettra for letting me know that in this case it's not just the Ubisoft PR flacks being dismissive of PC gamers, but it's the people actually making the game too. It makes my personal commitment to avoid Ubisoft titles so much easier to justify.

@maveric101

That assumes that a copy of a game gets used in the same way whether it gets traded to another user or not. For most gamers, participation in multi-player spikes for a short time after purchase and then trails off. Each time the copy of a game changes hands, there is likely to be a usage spike that the developer has to account for in terms of their server load, as well as separate account created that expands the size of their database; increasing its complexity, and therefore support requirements. The developer asking for compensation for those services provided seems perfectly reasonable.

Feel free to vote me into oblivion, but I have absolutely no problem with this. As long as it is prominently marked on the packaging, you know what you are getting into.

If you are on the fence about whether you would want to fork out extra for the multi-player after picking the game up second-hand, you are free to try it out, but if you are going to play it for any length of time, you pay money to the developer for the privilege of doing so.

I find picking up a nearly-new game second-hand to be quite a moral conundrum. Knowing I could do so and still pay money to the people who actually deserve it (i.e. those that made it) then I would be a lot less reticent to give it a go.

I'd like to offer another point of view to the "I paid for it" argument. Consider the lifespan of a game that is traded in several times. Each user goes through the normal cycle of playing the game, which for 90+% of games for 90+% of users is measured in days or weeks. Each time the game changes hands, the cycle begins anew and the servers have to support that increased load if the game changes hands several times.

I have big problems with many things that some game companies do (e.g. always-online DRM [Ubisoft]), but charging a one-time nominal fee for access to the server supported online component to all users (it being built into the cost to the first purchaser) is completely fair in my opinion. If it depreciates the re-sell value of a game by up to $10, then so be it.

Okay then. Second chance given. I have re-joined.

A new way to spam social networking sites with stuff nobody wants to read about? What an incredible idea!

Typical Games Workshop bonehead move.

It doesn't seem to have gone too smoothly at all. On the plus side, the servers were finally working long enough for me to get the game up and running. Hopefully server capacity will match server demand soon and things will settle down.

After spending all day downloading the free release of the game, I was disappointed to discover that it won't run because it does a disk check (at least on my Win7 x64 setup), and when I go looking for support it looks like mektek.net servers are completely down.

I don't want to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I'm pretty bummed.