Have they fixed the problem with cloud saves overwriting your local ones, synchro failures, lost progress, etc...? As annoying as everything else is, that was what made me avoid Ubi titles for the las 2 years.

You can turn cloud saves off. Always could.

The worst thing about Uplay is the fact they don't update the games' main downloads. So you end up downloading like 6 patches after you down the game itself. It makes GOG's patching process look good, which is quite the achievement. Other than that it seems about equal to Steam in my experience, but then I'm not playing online, maybe that is where the trouble comes in (like with GFWL).

The option to turn off a system that doesn't work is not what I meant by fixing. And wasn't Uplay originally meant to work primarily with cloud saves from the get go, with the whole always online and whatnot? You'd think they would get something like that right, when it was part of the core product, but no.

Of course they should work, didn't mean to imply otherwise. However you seemed to indicate you were staying away for 2 whole years out of fear your saves would be lost, so I was saying turning off cloud saves is an option so you can play without risk. I didn't know you meant cloud saves are a must for you to want to play the games at all.

Ok, I guess we misunderstood each other.

I had a lot of frustration with this issue while I was playing through the AC series a couple years ago, I lost hours of progress several times due to this issue. I tried different approaches but nothing seemed to work just right. At some point I just became a hater and wrote the whole thing off. I may be able to turn them off, but I don't trust Uplay not to switch them back on (say, after an uninstall/reinstall) and overwrite my local saves. Because stuff like that has already happened to me. This is why I will stay away of Uplay, at the very least until the cloud save issue is fixed. Or they release on GOG.

Another option is what I did with AC3: I bought the game, then immediately went to piratebay and got a pirate version where I could play without worrying about Uplay. But I don't think I will go that route again unless I really, really want to play a particular game.

I doubt that this will get "fixed" in the way you'd want it anytime soon, as the problem lies in the concept of cloud saves. The problem you described is pretty much one-to-one the same I had with Skyrim on Steam and the reason why I turned off cloud saving on both services.

Nope. On steam, for instance, they will ask me if the system finds an inconsistency between local and cloud saves: which want do I want to keep, which one do I want to override? Asking the user instead of outright deleting the local files, crazy I know.

I never had these issues anywhere else. It may be that years ago steam was doing it, if so they have now fixed it. But I never had a situation where I would play offline because I don't have internet access, then the next day go online and lose everything I did while offline without so much as a warning.

Which doesn't help me at all as I have no further information about the state of the 2 saves. Especially after a gamecrash, you can't be sure if your local savefile is alright or if the cloud version would be the better option.

Cloud saving not working as expected and not willing to turn it off, makes you stay away from UPlay and it's titles for 2 years. But you would buy it on GOG which doesn't offer that functionality. That's quite.... rational? Staying away because of DRM is one thing, but cloud saving possible problems vs not available - I don't have to understand that. ;)

P1na, some people(I am NOT thinking of anyone in particular or anyone in this thread) will incist that you are hypocritical if you don't either like all DD/DRM services or hate them all EVEN if you point out issues you have had with one but NOT with others. This is especially the case if you say anything positive about Steam. They will insist that all services are equal or even that some service is superior to Steam and they will ignore your experience pointing in a different direction.

It gives you a warning of something going wrong, at the very least. you can always load the local files first, see the situation and then get the ones in the cloud if the local ones are corrupt. You get a chance of fixing it, while Uplay outright deleted my stuff. I think that difference matters.

Yep, you don't have to understand, it's my business after all. But rational or not - as I said, it's a matter of trust. After what I went through, I wouldn't have trusted the safety of my saved files to a checkbox on Uplay settings. If I have to choose between a flaky system which has proven me to delete my data on a regular basis, but can be disabled; or for that system to not even exist in the first place, I choose not having it. Because if it doesn't exist, there's absolutely no chance my data will get deleted, and I can rest easy.

Now, it is perfectly possible that they worked to fix this during these last couple of years and now cloud saves are handled better, therefore my question on this thread. It doesn't seem to be that way, so I'll keep avoiding Uplay.

Yeah, I don't care about some people. We each have different experiences and develop different reactions to each service. I'm simply saying that I find the handling of saves by Uplay very unpredictable and not trustworthy, and it is possible to handle it better because other services do handle it better. If somebody calls me a hypocrite for that, I'll laugh at their face and move on with my life.

Watch Dogs review: http://steamcommunity.com//id/Fiskie/recommended/243470/

lol

As far as I know, you can't. You select the local or cloud file and once you did, the other one get's overwritten - at least, that was my experience with Steam and Skyrim back then. Which is why, I came up with the problem being the concept of cloud saving / cloud sync. But, since I disabled both on default, I can't really say if that's still so.

You could cancel the menu, switch to offline mode and launch the game with the local files only. Or simply make a backup manual copy of the savegame folder.

But I'm not saying this is a perfect solution, far from it. They could set some kind of save browser or manager, where you could compare them and delete what you're no longer interested in. Hell, aren't there people paid to come up with these kinds of ideas? If there aren't, there should be. Setting up system that do not work as intended and then have everybody disable them is just retarded.

With canceling (which more than not means shutting down tasks), offline mode (which UPlay has too, though haven't tested this approach with it - and won't), relaunch.... still doesn't say anything about the save in the cloud. Then having to fall back to manual copying renders every cloud saving useless, at least for me.

Nope sry, don't see this as the better way to handle it. Might just as well don't bother and use a game save manager.

err... the cancel button was there I think? If there's a conflict (which doesn't happen often), you get a warning and can just not fire the game and look into what happened. At that point, you can either launch the game offline [EDIT: or deactive the cloud and launch without it] (therefore ignoring cloud saves and seeing if the local ones are correct) or make a manual backup before letting the client override your local files (therefore checking the cloud saves without losing the local ones).

Uplay doesn't (didn't?) bother checking what you have locally, it just synchros to the cloud, overrides whatever you have, and there we go.

Look, I'm not trying to convince you that steam's way is the best thing ever, because it's not. However, it is better than just deleting whatever I have on local without warning. At the very very least, you get a warning, instead of the game launching normally only to find that your progress is gone forever.