Ubisoft pulled a terrifyingly anti-consumer move as they threatened users with bans, should they keep reporting the broken state of the Splinter Cell Blacklist's online services.
Update: The threat appears to have come from someone who impersonated a Ubisoft employee. The company released a statement about the situation: "Unfortunately, a forum user impersonated one of our employees to spread false information about our customer support policies. The post has been taken down, the user has been banned, and our customer support services are operating normally. We apologize for any confusion this caused."
The original article is as follows.
Splinter Cell fans are still hoping for a new entry in the series while Ubisoft are seemingly trying to ruin the franchise at the same time. After years of neglect and zero Splinter Cell games, the series came under attention after the company pulled a move that just can't be justified.
Namely, the players of Splinter Cell: Blacklist repeatedly reported that the online services for the game are not working. Out of all the responses you could imagine, threatening said players is probably not among the top 20 and yet, that's exactly what Ubisoft did.
In a forum post , they made it abundantly clear that the company is aware of the issue but instead of an attempt at a civil resolution, the company simply stated it will not "devote any further resources into rectifying this issue". While that part was oddly resolute in acknowledging the bug and eager to say they are not going to do anything about it, Ubisoft stunned the readers even more by the paragraphs that followed.
Those who dare report this particular non-functioning portion of the game in the future will be banned from Ubisoft's online services for a week. This threat was already mind-blowing but then the forum post doubled down on it.
If a player were to report the lack of online services for Blacklist again, they would get permanently banned. Whether this is actually legal remains to be seen but one thing is for certain - Ubisoft is not going to win any fans by acting this way.