OK, here's my official "I can't f^%#& stand U-Play" thread - the FC4 version

[Dweller_Benthos]

Seems like Déjà vu all over again, here we are another game that's forcing me to use U-Play and I've got problems with it, so what else is new?

As Art knows, I (tried to) install FC4 this morning. The best part of that experience was chatting with Art in the U-Play chat thingy. Everything else? Well, here's the rant. Not quite as long as the one for FC3, but still....

I pop in the first disc, and it copies, pop in the second disc and it copies, third disc the same. U-Play comes up and I put in my activation code. It gives me the usual, "Are you sure you want to register this game on this account?" deal and such and such. So I go ahead and hit the submit button.

"An error has occurred with U-Play service, please try again later"

:D :D :D :D

OK, so I wait a few minutes and hit the button again.

"An error has occurred with U-Play service, please try again later"

>:(( >:(( >:(( >:((

Cancel and close U-Play. Re-open the stupid thing, and see the game icon in the games list, so I click on it. Brings up the activation box again, and I put in the code.

"This code has already been registered with this account"

:'( :'( :'( :'(

Close that dialog and try clicking the game icon again. Activation key dialog comes up again, type in the code which I've now memorized because I've typed it in so many times, and again:

"This code has already been registered with this account"

:( :-( :( :-( (I'm running out of sad face smilies)

Close U-Play again and wait a few minutes and run it again, click the game icon and it brings up the game launcher, YAY!

Not so fast.

"Far Cry 4 will now search for updates"

I figured this would happen, and was ready to let it run a bit, then it comes up that there are over 3GB of "updates" to download. That would take 35 hours on my connection and eat of the rest of this month's bandwidth allotment and a good chunk of next month's. So that ain't happening.

I go to lunch and think on it. What I usually do with Steam games is download it at w@&k, and use the Steam backup to create a save file, bring that home and restore there, easy as pie. Of course, U-Play, being the complete hunk of turd that it is, has no backup and restore function, so I'm stuck looking at forums to find a solution. Apparently, some people have had success downloading on another computer and copying over the files, doing some shenanigans with folders and registry settings, etc.......

My only other option is to lug my computer into w@&k and run the update from there. Not easy with the monster that it is.

So, no Far Cry 4 for me this weekend, maybe sometime this week....

[Art Blade]

I didn't expect that to happen when I had that nice little chat with D_B..  :(

Far crying out loud, that really is a tad too much.

[Binnatics]

Incredible how U-play succeeds in giving all of us massive frustration before we can play their games.  :-\\ Hope you find a way to get the bloody updates D_B!! ;)

[PZ]

Dang, that's a shame, D_B - hope you get it sorted soon

[nexor]

Hope you do find a way D_B, as I posted elsewhere, I have a 4 GB uncapped broadband and UPlay's little update took about 6 hours ???

[Dweller_Benthos]

Well, I've got it installed here at w@&k, and it's downloading the "patch". I really think games these days, when you buy physical media, just leave off the last disc and make you download it. When I installed the new Wolfenstein game, it was on 4 or 5 discs, and still needed to download 10GB after that was all done.

I hear it's worse on consoles, one guy was saying in a video when he installed a game, that it then proceeded to download 40GB!!!!! of data. He mentioned that the disc must contain the unlock code and nothing else.

[Art Blade]

yep, happened to me once, before I started to use steam "seriously." I bought a retail version on DVD, slapped that disc into my drive, and it basically only contained the redeem code -- I had to go online, activate and download the whole fucking game.

[JRD]

It is truly a pain in the arse. When you buy something you expect to have a whole product, not just a package with a few parts inside and many others you need to have delivered to your house!  :D

It's like buying a car but having the steering wheel delivered to you in 3-5 business days.  >:((

One good side of purchasing only STEAM games is that the file I download is, or should be, with all patches and fixes available at the time so when I'm downloading a new game it will download it all at once. It just happened to me this weekend, I bought Black Flag and STEAM downloaded 22.1GB of data at once. I clicked on the "play game" icon, it took 5 minutes to "prepare for first launch", Uplay verified my code and I started playing the game, no further delaying. On the other hand I am forced to have Uplay just like anybody else but I don't have a physical copy of the game - I can make a back up of the game files but I never tried to do it and then trying to install on another PC to see how it works. I assume, since it is a software I purchased, I can install it as I will provided I'm not selling or copying to third parties but I am one hundred percent sure I would have a bad time trying to pull it off if I ever tried to do it. Besides, with 55 games on STEAM I would lose several months doing so.

Hope you have it sorted now D_B and can have some fun with FC4 back home!  :-X

[Dweller_Benthos]

Well, the first attempt to copy from the machine at w@&k to the machine at home was a bust. I had to use two 32 GB thumb drives to get all the files on, and had to split a couple into smaller portions to w@&k on the FAT32 files system that the thumb drives use. Once I got everything put back together on the home machine, Uplay still had issues, said there were 300MB of files that were needed, so I let it update, but it failed almost immediately. Upon trying again, it was back to the 3GB download so I gave up for the night. Now I'm trying a copy directly to a SSD drive that I had around, and will see if that works. If not, I'm going to take out the drive that the game is installed on my home machine and bring it into w@&k and try directly updating on that drive, then bring it home. I don't really want to do that, but it beats lugging the entire computer into w@&k.

[PZ]

 ???

Outrageous what you have to go through, and think of all the poor schmucks that don't have your computer skills!

[Binnatics]

Indeed. And think of the waste of time; if you'd had that time paid by your company, it would've compensated for the game's price. In other words... 8-X

[Art Blade]

damn, D_B, that sucks. I sure hope that you'll get it sorted without having to drag your machine to the office..

[fragger]

Geez D_B, sorry to read about what you've had go through. What a major hassle :D Bloody Ubi. They seem to assume everybody has a whizzy connection and endless amounts of DL allocation. If I was still with my old ISP and I'd read this before buying the game I would have said forget it - by the time I'd get the game happening FC5 would be out ????

I really hate all this online rego, activation and patching business nowadays. Back in the days of yore when there was no internet to speak of, or at least not the way we know it today, game makers would have to get everything working properly and squared away before release. You'd buy the game, take it home, install it, type in the rego code and away you went. I know the devs are concerned about piracy and that's understandable, but why does everybody have to suffer for it these days? And it hasn't done a lot to stop piracy in any case - it's reduced it a bit and made it less easy, but hasn't stopped it.

They do all this "buy now, patch later" crap and force people to DL entire games because they can get away with doing that now.

[PZ]

True - the only people that suffer are the honest ones because there isn't a game that has ever been created that can't be cracked.

The gaming industry reminds me of the legal system (can't really call it the just system because there is so little justice) - the people that it benefits most is the criminal.

[nexor]

There's a massive online cracked game "retailer" here who can sell you any game you want within a month after official release. They been in operation for at least 15 years, even advertising in some newspapers. Farcry 4 cost me ZAR600.00 the legal way (with all the Uplay s#!t). The same game (cracked so you don't need Uplay) can be ordered online and be collected within 48 hours from your nearest Post Office for a mere ZAR150.00 including delivery   :o
 

[fragger]

So much for online security ::)

[JRD]

Same here in Brazil. Only here they sell pirate games and software out in the streets in plain sight Mondays to Saturdays, working hours!  ???  ????  ::)

You can buy pretty much any game for 25% of the price, all cracked, so you don't need any online activation crap.

[PZ]

One of these days all this online crap is going to bite the publishers in the a$$ because it will cause otherwise honest people wanting to pay a fair price to go to the dark side in anger just to "stick it" to the publisher.  After all, if the game publishers don't care about the gamer, then why is the gamer caring about the publisher.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Thanks for the sympathies, guys.

Tried again last night with a full copy off the SSD I brought to w@&k and it still thinks it needs an update. I'm thinking there are some settings in the Uplay install folder that I need to copy over as well, so I'm taking that folder home tonight on the thumb drive, and we'll see how it goes.

[Art Blade]

good luck, then, D_B :)

[nexor]

Hope it works D_B  ::)

[PZ]

ditto  :-X

[fragger]

I admire your persistence D_B :) :-X

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yep, got it working. Copied the entire Uplay folder onto a thumb drive and brought it home. Did the one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other game with Winmerge to help and compared the files. Uplay stores the info in folder with number assigned to each game. FC4 is 420, go figure. There's a manifest file that I presume stores the install progress of the game and is what Uplay uses to decide if you need to update or not. The actual game files you have installed are ignored from what I can tell. So, I copied over that manifest file, deleted some folders that contained install stuff and it worked.

Still hate Uplay.

[Binnatics]

You smarted out Uplay, doesn't that feel good after all ^-^

+ :-X for your persistence  ;)