Community Chronicle 23/11/14

It’s the grand finale, the decider, the double points duel in the desert between Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg. Nico did exactly what he needed to do, plonking himself on pole position, but so did Lewis, locking out the rest of the front row for Mercedes for the final time this year.

And as this post goes live, the red lights will go out. Why are you reading this? I’ve got no idea, I know I’m not!

It’s not exactly been the smoothest of sailing for a number of companies out there, with existing problems feeling like they’re dragging on forever. For example, Shawn Layden said during an interview that you can’t effectively test for a game like Driveclub’s connectivity, hence the unexpected issues. Unfortunately, that statement flew in the face of common sense.

Bunimomike popped by to lend us his thoughts:

The moment I read this earlier on today I thought “hang on a moment, that’s utter tripe and a piss-poor excuse at best!”. Destiny has been a bit of a shining light when it comes to running online tests with scores of people enjoying the fun.

If that comprehensive beta meant more delay and more money thrown at it, then so be it. You don’t invest 95% then suddenly think “ah, fu** it… that’ll be fine” or we end up with situations like AC Unity and Driveclub.

It would appear that devs have a lot to learn still when it comes to networking, QA, bug testing and launches. I wouldn’t mind so much if they were small indie devs but they’re not!

Freezebug also hopped back into the game after hearing that the latest patch had helped to fix some things, but sadly could only say, “First race disconnection during lap 2, I just thought. ‘Ooh smart stuff’ and proceeded to the end of the race achieving yet more club XP points down the ‘eau-de-toilette’.”

Driveclub’s sadly going nowhere all that fast, it seems, which is such a shame.

From one long standing calamity to something a little more recent, with Ubisoft’s latest update on patching Assassin’s Creed: Unity to stabilise the frame rate and fix bugs stating that the game out in the wild was acting differently to how it had been internally.

You’d be forgiven a little scepticism, as Kennykazey said, “There’s no way they didn’t notice the poor framerate. Just trying desperately to save some face, by the looks of things.” These issues also seems to be dissuading potential new purchasers from buying the game, with Bennyboyuk saying, “This was a game that I was interested in right up until I saw the number of technical problems that have plagued its release.”

Amphlett, however, has deeper worries about Ubisoft as a whole, opining, “My concern for Ubi would be that the delays in Watch Dogs (and the subsequent graphical downgrades), delays to The Crew and now the issues in AC:Unity all point to Ubi not performing reviews, not acting upon the findings and actions of the reviews, or a mix of all of the above. This tells me that there is likely an unhealthy business culture in Ubi.”

Finally, a hacker group have released a sample list of login details, ostensibly taken from PSN, Windows Live, 2K and plenty of other places, ostensibly doing so to force companies to review their security.

Bunimomike and Youles both agreed that this was not a particularly productive way of raising awareness of any potential issues, with Mike saying, “If I was a hacker and was doing this in the interest of public safety, I’d contact the company privately.” Youles backed this up as he wrote, “How on Earth are they helping any of those people on that list, who may well be unaware and had their personal accounts hacked/lost for good?”

Speaking to the veractiy of the list, Lyts1985 wrote, “The vast majority of supposed logins on that list don’t meet modern password complexity requirements so I’d be a little skeptical to say the least. I’d be very surprised if any of those accounts actually exist or are active.” While MrYd similarly thought, “I’m not entirely sure there’s anything to panic about just yet.”

We’d still recommend changing your passwords on a regular basis, though, and obviously using a unique password for each and every site. Otherwise, you’ll end up in double-o-dave’s hellsih future, in which we’ll “end up contacting the hackers themselves […] to find out what my forgotten passwords are.”

Well, all I can really say is that so many of you have turned your eye to the newer games available to you, after a hectic fortnight of game releases. The number of mentions that Assassin’s Creed: Unity got (despite the flaws and bugs), Far Cry 4, Grand Theft Auto V and Dragon Age Inquisition have been in almost everyone’s consoles.

Then again, there have been a handful of accomplishments, with gazzagb nabbing himself the Red Dead Redemption platinum, thanks in part to the regular co-op sessions he’s been enjoying online. Youles himself is just a single mission away from 100% of the co-op trophies too.

Elsewhere, element666 managed to take the platinum for Minecraft on PS3, while Kennykazey indulged in co-op from half a decade ago, playing through Halo: ODST with a buddy.

I’m sure it won’t be long before some of those new games and their platinum trophies start to pling for you all, so keep plugging away!

Alas, a inferior race’s laptop is still out of action, so there’s no trophy leaderboard update this week, and we’ll have to keep our fingers and toes crossed that he might get a replacement or be able to resurrect his broken machine soon.

So we’re left with the usual submission form below, and I bid you all farewell until next week.