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Watch Dogs 2 got its final patch today, which makes impossible to use mods while online if you’re playing on PC. The game’s publisher, Ubisoft, says that this is. E! Online - Your source for entertainment news, celebrities, celeb news, and celebrity gossip. Check out the hottest fashion, photos, movies and TV shows!

Watch Dogs 2 Modders Hate The Game's Final Patch. Watch Dogs 2 got its final patch today, which makes impossible to use mods while online if you’re playing on PC. The game’s publisher, Ubisoft, says that this is to ensure fair online play, but the game’s small modding community is very frustrated. The 1. 1. 7 patch wasn’t announced as a modding blocker. The features rolled out in it include tweaks to the recently- added four- player party mode, as well as bug fixes for co- op.

Shortly after it was released, some modders noticed and began to complain. If Watch Dogs 2 had been the blockbuster Ubisoft hoped it to be, that complaint might be loud, but instead it manifests as less noticeable venting on places like the increasingly barren Watch Dogs 2 subreddit. There, loyalists who stuck with the game expressed their anger.“As of this morning, I found out that the latest update on PC killed modding,” Deebz__, an active and vocal Watch Dogs 2 modder, posted on the subreddit this morning. Any positivity from my original message has been rescinded. Another Gay Movie Online Putlocker. Instead, I’ll just leave you with the list of a few issues in this utter mess of a game that you have failed to fix.” He listed a half dozen issues, including players on the opposite team being unmarked or marked as “friendly” during multiplayer modes and the game outright crashing when you shoot people.

The Watch Dogs 2 modding community is small. The modding community of WD2 in particular consists of like 1. Kotaku over reddit.

According to Steam Spy, the game currently reaches a maximum of about 1,0. Modders use the game to to fix graphical issues as well as a few bugs. Deebz__’s favorite mod allows players to use the camera mode while in the helicopter. Deebz__ says he helped “pave the way” for modding Watch Dogs 2 and remembers multiplayer for the original Watch Dogs as being a “lawless wasteland,” with most players using mods to cheat.

He says that he and his fellow modders use their mods ethically. Only a few of us know how to mod the game properly, and we’ve all agreed to use our knowledge ethically,” he told Kotaku over reddit direct messages. We only play online with mods that do not give us an advantage, and we never released anything that could be used to cheat.”According to those players, modding was a means to having a smoother gaming experience. Ubisoft, however, says modding has also at times hurt online play.“Though we appreciate that many in our community are very careful about not using mods while being online, this isn’t true of all players,” Kris Young, producer on Watch Dogs 2, told Kotaku over email. In order to create a healthy and fair environment for all our players, we had to fix this problem. You can now still enjoy your favorite mods while playing offline and disabling the [Easy Anti- Cheat] system (though we can’t offer official support for this) or enjoy a more fair online experience when playing online with your friends.”Even knowing they can still use mods, this isn’t an acceptable solution for members of the modding community. The online modes are too much of a part of the game,” Deebz__ said.

Watch Dogs 2, like its predecessor, has passive online modes where other players can invade your game, as well as Pv. P multiplayer, all set in the game’s shared open world. Considering how few of us there are who actually do mod the game, and the fact that we do not release or even use any mods that give unfair advantages online, there really was no reason for this change in my opinion.”Deebz__ was an obvious person to talk to for coverage of Ubisoft’s mod- blocking patch, because Deebz__ has been visible in discussions about this game.

He is the kind of outspoken gamer who uses the tools available to him to tell developers how they can improve their game. When he noticed a problem with the escape key being bound to too many functions in the game, he didn’t just complain about it on reddit, he typed out changes to the game’s code that he said would solve the issue and posted them for Ubi reps who monitor the game’s subreddit to see.“A Ubisoft representative told me that they would not fix this issue because it would allow players to skip scenes in the story that they were not supposed to skip, breaking the game in some cases,” he told Kotaku. He insists that his solution was totally fine. I can say this with absolute certainty, because I actually played through the entire story a second time after using this fix, and skipped just about everything I could in the process.”Deebz__’s problem now may be that Ubisoft says they can’t distinguish between mods that help players cheat and mods that don’t.

This solution was a compromise they had to make, Young told Kotaku. It’s a topic that has been on our minds since it was raised by community members who visited the studio well before the game launched,” Young said. We’ve come back to it several times since, but with the nature of our seamless technology, it’s a tradeoff we had to make to maintain healthy and fair online play.”.

Yes, Google Uses Its Power to Quash Ideas It Doesn’t Like—I Know Because It Happened to Me [Updated]The story in the New York Times this week was unsettling: The New America Foundation, a major think tank, was getting rid of one of its teams of scholars, the Open Markets group. New America had warned its leader Barry Lynn that he was “imperiling the institution,” the Times reported, after he and his group had repeatedly criticized Google, a major funder of the think tank, for its market dominance. The criticism of Google had culminated in Lynn posting a statement to the think tank’s website “applauding” the European Commission’s decision to slap the company with a record- breaking $2. That post was briefly taken down, then republished.

Soon afterward, Anne- Marie Slaughter, the head of New America, told Lynn that his group had to leave the foundation for failing to abide by “institutional norms of transparency and collegiality.”Google denied any role in Lynn’s firing, and Slaughter tweeted that the “facts are largely right, but quotes are taken way out of context and interpretation is wrong.” Despite the conflicting story lines, the underlying premise felt familiar to me: Six years ago, I was pressured to unpublish a critical piece about Google’s monopolistic practices after the company got upset about it. In my case, the post stayed unpublished. I was working for Forbes at the time, and was new to my job. In addition to writing and reporting, I helped run social media there, so I got pulled into a meeting with Google salespeople about Google’s then- new social network, Plus. The Google salespeople were encouraging Forbes to add Plus’s “+1" social buttons to articles on the site, alongside the Facebook Like button and the Reddit share button. They said it was important to do because the Plus recommendations would be a factor in search results—a crucial source of traffic to publishers. This sounded like a news story to me.

Google’s dominance in search and news give it tremendous power over publishers. By tying search results to the use of Plus, Google was using that muscle to force people to promote its social network. I asked the Google people if I understood correctly: If a publisher didn’t put a +1 button on the page, its search results would suffer? The answer was yes. After the meeting, I approached Google’s public relations team as a reporter, told them I’d been in the meeting, and asked if I understood correctly.

The press office confirmed it, though they preferred to say the Plus button “influences the ranking.” They didn’t deny what their sales people told me: If you don’t feature the +1 button, your stories will be harder to find with Google. With that, I published a story headlined, “Stick Google Plus Buttons On Your Pages, Or Your Search Traffic Suffers,” that included bits of conversation from the meeting. The Google guys explained how the new recommendation system will be a factor in search. Universally, or just among Google Plus friends?” I asked. Universal’ was the answer. So if Forbes doesn’t put +1 buttons on its pages, it will suffer in search rankings?” I asked. Google guy says he wouldn’t phrase it that way, but basically yes.(An internet marketing group scraped the story after it was published and a version can still be found here.)Google promptly flipped out.

This was in 2. 01. Google never challenged the accuracy of the reporting.

Instead, a Google spokesperson told me that I needed to unpublish the story because the meeting had been confidential, and the information discussed there had been subject to a non- disclosure agreement between Google and Forbes. I had signed no such agreement, hadn’t been told the meeting was confidential, and had identified myself as a journalist.) It escalated quickly from there. I was told by my higher- ups at Forbes that Google representatives called them saying that the article was problematic and had to come down. The implication was that it might have consequences for Forbes, a troubling possibility given how much traffic came through Google searches and Google News. I thought it was an important story, but I didn’t want to cause problems for my employer. And if the other participants in the meeting had in fact been covered by an NDA, I could understand why Google would object to the story.

Given that I’d gone to the Google PR team before publishing, and it was already out in the world, I felt it made more sense to keep the story up. Ultimately, though, after continued pressure from my bosses, I took the piece down—a decision I will always regret. Forbes declined comment about this. But the most disturbing part of the experience was what came next: Somehow, very quickly, search results stopped showing the original story at all. As I recall it—and although it has been six years, this episode was seared into my memory—a cached version remained shortly after the post was unpublished, but it was soon scrubbed from Google search results. That was unusual; websites captured by Google’s crawler did not tend to vanish that quickly. And unpublished stories still tend to show up in search results as a headline.

Scraped versions could still be found, but the traces of my original story vanished. It’s possible that Forbes, and not Google, was responsible for scrubbing the cache, but I frankly doubt that anyone at Forbes had the technical know- how to do it, as other articles deleted from the site tend to remain available through Google. Deliberately manipulating search results to eliminate references to a story that Google doesn’t like would be an extraordinary, almost dystopian abuse of the company’s power over information on the internet.

I don’t have any hard evidence to prove that that’s what Google did in this instance, but it’s part of why this episode has haunted me for years: The story Google didn’t want people to read swiftly became impossible to find through Google. Google wouldn’t address whether it deliberately deep- sixed search results related to the story. Asked to comment, a Google spokesperson sent a statement saying that Forbes removed the story because it was “not reported responsibly,” an apparent reference to the claim that the meeting was covered by a non- disclosure agreement. Again, I identified myself as a journalist and signed no such agreement before attending. People who paid close attention to the search industry noticed the piece’s disappearance and wroteaboutit, wondering why it disappeared. Those pieces, at least, are still findable today.

As for how effective the strategy was, Google’s dominance in other industries didn’t really pan out for Plus. Six years later, the social network is a ghost town and Google has basically given up on it. But back when Google still thought it could compete with Facebook on social, it was willing to play hardball to promote the network. Google started out as a company dedicated to ensuring the best access to information possible, but as it’s grown into one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world, its priorities have changed. Even as it fights against ordinary people who want their personal histories removed from the web, the company has an incentive to suppress information about itself.

Google said it never urged New America to fire Lynn and his team. But an entity as powerful as Google doesn’t have to issue ultimatums. It can just nudge organizations and get them to act as it wants, given the influence it wields. Lynn and the rest of the team that left New America Foundation plan to establish a new nonprofit to continue their work. For now, they’ve launched a website called “Citizens Against Monopoly” that tells their story. It says that “Google’s attempts to shut down think tanks, journalists, and public interest advocates researching and writing about the dangers of concentrated private power must end.”It’s safe to say they won’t be receiving funding from Google.

Update, September 1, 1: 5. Yesterday, we asked Google’s communications team for a response to this story.