Fuck Ubisoft, Or, How I Learned To Stop Complaining And Start Bitching
I’ve played the entire Rainbow series in the past and loved it, but yesterday I finally got my hands on Rainbow Six: Lockdown for PC. To sum up the disappointments: You only get three teammates, they really did give up pre-planing all together, ladders, dumb hostages love to enter rooms first, teammates always walk in front of you when you are shooting, and did I mention ladders?
There are also in game advertisements (Screenshots 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9). Why must they place advertising within a game that I had already paid $50 for? I bought the game, you have my money, now leave me alone. I doubt the profits made from these ads will benefit Ubisoft from the decreased sales of later games, but it just goes to show how easily they are willing to screw over there very own customers. After doing some research on Google I discovered a very simple solution: Add these four lines to your C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file, this will prevent Rainbow Six: Lockdown from connecting to the Massive servers and retrieving the advertisements:
127.0.0.1 madserver.net
127.0.0.1 ad.madserver.net
127.0.0.1 imp.madserver.net
127.0.0.1 media.madserver.net
And as if that wasn’t bad enough, upon launching the game a “StarForce Protection System” checks your CD for integrity. After immediately seeing this window for the first time I almost went back to the store and returned the game. It’s called Digital Rights Management, and for those of you who have no clue what DRM is, do some research. StarForce is designed to interfere with your ability to use your software as your rights to it are diminished to almost nothing, and it is not uncommon for StarForce to cause issues for legitimate game buyers. So let me make this very clear to programmers, the music industry, and my government:
Ubisoft has low standards, but at least it’s not as low as Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage. You have been given a vision of the future, and it’s because of shit like this I use GNU.