Thousands of For Honor players are threatening to boycott the very flawed fighting game they nevertheless love. Today, Ubisoft addressed some of the most frequent complaints, but not everyone is satisfied just yet.
This morning, Ubisoft updated For Honor‘s currency system, increasing steel income by 25 per cent across all matches. A map players liked is getting reinstated after Ubisoft removed it earlier this month, and 12 outfits were added. The dev team will detail further upcoming changes tomorrow on their livestream. In an email, a Ubisoft representative said that today’s changes were planned before players started threatening to boycott the game.
Since For Honor‘s February release, players have compiled a laundry list of complaints including multiplayer connectivity issues, imbalanced heroes, poor matchmaking, and combat glitches. Players have also pointed out that For Honor‘s unbalanced in-game currency system makes it impossible to unlock all the items and emotes. The high price of items and frankly pitiful currency gains after matches proved especially frustrating for players, fuelling a micro-transaction economy they were not thrilled about.
Today’s patch may help fix some of these problems, but before the latest changes, players had threatened to take action. Yesterday, Redditor Jbaayoun proposed a “blackout”. For 24 hours, from 8:00PM AEDT on April 3, For Honor players would boycott the game. 11,600 people upvoted the post. A list of proposed changes followed it. On top was “Communication”.
“I personally find no use in spamming Reddit with the same issues,” Jbaayoun told me in an email. “It’s very redundant and Ubisoft is already aware of the problems we are having.”
Several commenters joked that they were already participating in the “blackout”, having quit the game out of frustration. Many others expressed support or reiterated complaints they’d expressed on other posts over the last month.
The strong, vocal support of Jbaayoun’s For Honor boycott got Ubisoft’s attention. A Ubisoft rep on /r/ForHonor confirmed that the For Honor team “went through all the points you raised and we will be addressing them”.
Jbaayoun is happy with today’s patch, but points out that it doesn’t solve everything: “The Steel and lost content [have] been addressed, however the majority of the issues have not. However, those changes require more time.” He questions whether the community will go through with the blackout, but adds that “it may be difficult [to stop] now as many people seem to be all for the initiative”.
Why would a community continue to play a game that they’re willing to boycott? Why not pick up Nier or Zelda or any of the other huge 2017 releases? “I love For Honor,” Jbaayoun told me. “It is by far the most unique game out there in terms of multiplayer. For Honor has something that no one else has with its creative combat system, great maps and in general a great idea for a game.”
Individuality isn’t really a redeeming quality, though. Jbaayoun admits that the main reason why he’s holding out hope for a better For Honor is because of Rainbow 6 Siege, a Ubisoft game that started off on rocky footing but grew quite popular as the developers patched and tweaked it in the months following launch. “I have seen that game evolve from having similar issues to being one of the most successful FPS titles for the past two years,” he said.
Comments
7 responses to “As For Honor Players Threaten A Boycott, Ubisoft Offers Some Changes”
Probably the most blatant micro transaction based game I’ve ever seen. The single player “campaign” is a filler for what’s effectively a multiplayer game aimed at getting people to spend more and mote money for crap.
It doesn’t help that a lot of people came into FH thinking that it was going to see the same level of love as Siege (heck there were interviews where they said they wanted to model all games on Siege going forward), this was quickly shown to be untrue when community interaction became just about zero.
It doesn’t help that the Siege comparison leads people to expect a community manager like Its_Epi (Siege’s incredibly popular community manager, who is somehow a more active version of Deej), but instead were given whoever has posted only a handful of times and its normally nothing super useful.
“Individuality isn’t really a redeeming quality, though.”
Nonsense, of course it is. A unique game is pretty impressive in a sea of repetitive shooters etc. For Honor has unique and in depth gameplay at its core. Give this game time, it will continue to be supported and improved I do not doubt.
There are plenty of unique games in the world, doesn’t mean some of them aren’t shit.
Out of all those up votes how many will follow through? 2 maybe 3 people.
Maybe vote with your time and wallets rather than carrying on like entitled bitches. Just a thought.
They are literally doing exactly that