Ask about Blacklist’s servers one more time and you’ll be blacklisted.
Update: Ubisoft has released a statement to Kotaku that the post in question was fake and not written by a representative of Ubisoft. They did not explain why the post was stickied on the forums by moderators to appear to be legitimate.
Ubisoft representatives now tell Kotaku that the post had actually been made by a user, and has been deleted. Further, sources also tell Kotaku that the likely suspect was a player who had been spamming support—precisely the problem raised in the post—and has been banned for it.
Original Story: Ubisoft has people angry again, and this time it’s over Splinter Cell: Blacklist. The 2013 title has apparently broken on more current versions of Ubisoft’s launcher, at least in terms of online connectivity, and the French developer has no plans to fix the issue due to “the age of the game in question, and the relatively inactive player base”. Blacklist released in 2013 on the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3.
What has players extra angry about the whole ordeal however is that the head of Ubisoft’s customer relationship center Tara Johnson Reichley took to the Ubisoft forums to issue a rather disproportionate and unprofessional threat to paying customers. Any support tickets regarding Blacklist’s servers going forward will be met with a seven day account ban preventing users from purchasing, logging in, and playing online. A ban that will absolutely not be reversed.
Any support tickets submitted regarding this issue in the future will be met with a 7 day ban. During this period, you will be unable to make purchases through the Ubisoft store, log in to Ubisoft websites, log in to your Ubisoft account or play through the Ubisoft Connect client. However, you may still play offline. Customer support will not be able to lift this ban.
Further offenses will be met with a permanent ban.
Additionally, some intrepid players had figured out how to avoid updating the Uplay client which allows Blacklist to continue working online. In response to that issue, Reichley stated that any users found utilizing an old version of the client to play Blacklist will also be banned out of some nonsensical claim of concern for the user’s own account safety.
In addition, any users found to be intentionally using an earlier version of Ubisoft Connect or Uplay launchers in order to workaround the issue will be banned. Older versions of Ubisoft Connect are no longer secure, and continuing to make use of them could result in security breaches to your Ubisoft account or Ubisoft as a whole.
Response from the community over the servers being broken so far has been a smattering of negative reviews on Steam.
Sure Splinter Cell is eight years old. As head of customer relationship, Tara Reichley should know better than to put forward such a hostile, tone-deaf, insulting message to customers. Let alone threatening the accounts containing games people paid for just because your office doesn’t appreciate getting asked the same question repeatedly.
And then we can deal with the fact that Splinter Cell: Blacklist is now being fraudulently sold on Steam, advertising features that are no longer actually in the game.
MMO Fallout 