I think I figured out part of my frustration with online gaming as a whole: I love the concept, it usually works great, and you can lose yourself in an alternate universe for hours… and yet, it often just doesn’t work for me. Either the game is broken in some way, or lags too much; either my friends and I can never get online at the same time, leading to unfulfilled promises; or the game grows stale too quickly and others lose interest while I still want to keep going.
I wish I could enjoy multiplayer game so much more. The potential is there, but the problems or availability of the players quickly add up to something that makes it unfun.
Lots of stupid ideas have come out of the gaming universe over the years. Here’s another one.
It’s been known for a while that some companies like Ubisoft have added a “feature” in their PC releases that makes the game “phone home”. If your Internet connection gets cut for any reason, even for an instant, your game quits without even saving. The goal of this thing, of course, is to limit game piracy by making use that all players have a valid license. The dumb fact is that this applies to single player mode too, which means you can’t play when you don’t have a link to the web. This, and previous anti-piracy measures that go completely overboard, make me boycott Ubisoft’s games on the PC. There are plenty of other companies making games that I do want to play while they respect me as a paying customer.
Even dumber, in my opinion, comes from a major mobile gaming company that I won’t name here. I purchased and installed one of their big titles on my cellphone to play on the go. However, again as an anti-piracy measure, the game phones home once every few days. That means that it connects to a server of the company to ensure that my installed copy is a valid one. If it can’t establish a connection, it’ll force itself to quit. The problem is, I don’t have a data plan as it’s too expensive for what it’s worth. As such, unless I remember the launch the game at home every few days (where I’ve got a Wi-Fi connection), the game becomes unplayable. This is incredibly backwards as I’ve got that game to play it on the go only, NOT when I’m at home! Furthermore, I’ll often try to play it in the city’s subway system, where even a data plan wouldn’t help me. By trying to preserve their sales, the company is only hurting itself as I’ll think twice in the future about making another purchase.