Having sorted out the issue involving the password length in my old post and having set Uplay to both "remember me" and "start offline automatically" I had been happily playing FC3, Blood Dragon and Assassin's Creed: Revelations without a hitch. I took a break from all of these until today and found that Uplay was asking for my password - which I dutifully inputted.
Uplay didn't like my password.
I tried several times, making sure my long password had not inadvertently been mis-typed, but to no avail. A little annoyed, but not particularly so, I figured I must have changed my password without remembering and went through the account recovery steps. This was relatively painless but once I had performed the password reset I returned to the Uplay client to find that this, too, was not accepted. Now I was a bit stumped. Was their authentication service offline? I went to Uplay.com - there's no information there about the availability of their service or whether the servers are okay or having scheduled maintenance or anything... which is terrible.
So I tried logging into the website; my new password worked.
Now, thoroughly confused, I returned to the client and it decided it needed to update. AH! I thought, This is why it was acting up, the client hadn't been able to update itself for some unknown reason! Trying my password again resulted in the same situation: the password wasn't recognised.
Angry now, I went into the settings that are available from the log-in screen and the only thing I could see that could potentially be hampering my connection (assuming the servers were working) was that "start offline automatically" tick box.
I un-ticked the option and logged in successfully.
So why does Ubisoft make it so that a) the client forgets the password after some unknown amount of time and b) have a setting that means that the client can't and won't connect to the servers to be able to log in once the client has logged itself out for the player? It's completely backwards! Steam manages this perfectly, if (and I've never actually encountered this myself as I usually end up logging in after at least a month of being in offline mode) the steam client is logged-off, it automatically disables offline mode meaning that you first have to sign in whilst connected. It's such a simple piece of logic that appears to have escaped Ubisoft's engineers...
Now I'm sitting here, annoyed, not wanting to play a Ubisoft Uplay-enabled title and having spent 20 minutes trying to figure out the problem and then another 10-20 minutes complaining about it on here*. A less technically-inclined person might not have managed to figure that out in such a short time period... and people wonder why other people prefer consoles to PC?!
Ubisoft, sort yourselves out!!
*Though that's my choice, I'm still going to complain and let other people know!
