The Ubisoft blog announced on March 5th that console players can expect dedicated servers in For Honor starting on March 6th. The change has already taken place on PC for a while now, and Ubisoft has reported that since the change, resyncs and host migrations have gone down, while completion of matches has gone up. This results in a more fulfilling gameplay experience for the people who still play the game.

These positive changes reflect the troubles For Honor experienced on release, when it launched with peer-to-peer networking. In addition to complaints about microtransactions, players initially also noted issues with lag and connectivity with the game. Often, in 4v4 matches, one or more players would drop out of the match before it finished. The experience was more cumbersome than enjoyable.

Players who have stuck around have wanted these changes for a long time, and now they should be able to have a more enjoyable experience in the game. Since the console launch of the servers, there has been a positive response from the For Honor community on reddit and elsewhere.

For Honor is fighting an uphill battle and still very much struggling to remain relevant to its own player base. Whether it's from severe connection issues that have plagued the game since before its launch, thanks in part to Ubisoft's bizarre and terrible P2P netcode which has lead to connectivity and NAT region issues -- to Ubisoft then responding to these issues with nothing but silence -- until only recently.

Which in turn caused their own community to schedule a blackout event in which they would stop playing, simply just to get the attention of the developer.

Since For Honor's launch back in February, positive user reviews on Steam have dropped down to 37% and the negativity and anger of the community isn't calming down any time soon. In that time the developer had attempted to appease the playerbase by attempting to fix drop rates within the game itself in the latest patch... but in my opinion:

It's Ubisoft Putting a Band-Aid on a Fatal Wound

In a Warrior's Den Weekly Livestream on March 21st -- Developer Damien Kieken responded to concerns from the community; including the topic of the drop rate. Notably he had this to say:

“We never had an intention for you to unlock everything in the game.”

Later also mentioned:

“It's like in an RPG -- let's say World of Warcraft, you would never try to unlock everything for all the characters of the whole game. It's the same thing in any MOBA, you're not trying to unlock all the content for all the heroes in your game."

In my opinion I think the developers never imagining someone trying to unlock everything for their characters in For Honor is extremely naive -- but I also believe it's bullshit. I don't believe for a second Ubisoft didn't purposely structure the drop rate for gear and loot in For Honor to be intentionally difficult, it's beyond obvious it was implemented this way from the start to drive players to purchase steel and in turn -- make the developer and publisher lots of money. Which is interesting considering this a full priced $60 game, and yet Ubisoft are utilising a pay structure for cosmetics found within most free-to-play games...

The Ubisoft 2017 Financial Strategy

In fact, the likelihood of a casual player (who maybe only plays a few hours day) unlocking everything for their character is almost impossible, as pointed out by Reddit user bystander007 -- The average hero would require around 91500 steel to unlock every base game unlockable -- excluding upcoming updates and DLC, if you then multiply by that 12 for every character in For Honor, you get a little over a million steel. This is valued at over $700 (on top of the charge of $60-100 for the game itself) to unlock everything.

If you were to attempt to grind this instead -- Reddit user bystander007 estimates this would take anywhere from 326 to 915 days depending on how much you played... but by that point I'm sure we'll already have For Honor 2.

The irony being even if you decided to try and grind for two and a half years, you'll still have to deal with Ubisoft's horrible netcode and the plenty of issues that have already crippled -- or in my opinion fatally wounded this game. Fixes like this aren't going to solve the big issues at hand long term. The Ubisoft medical staff are so incompetent they've placed a band-aid in the form of this “fix” on For Honor which is already bleeding out. While it continues to do so -- stay tuned to GameSkinny for everything For Honor...

While it lasts.

According to the Xbox Live website, they have acknowledged that many users on the Xbox One and Xbox 360 are having connectivity issues. These issues are affecting Netflix, Twitch, PBS, and purchased content as well.

Have you ran into issues trying to watch television seasons that you’ve already purchased from Xbox Video? Our team is currently working hard to resolve this issue as quickly as possible. Thanks for being patient in the meantime! We will provide an update as soon as we have more information.

Many are relating the latest update as to a possible culprit for the recent problems Xbox Live users are encountering when trying to access the apps and/or purchased content. This is affecting both the U.S. and European regions according to their website.

They have stated that they are currently working on the problem with the engineers and their partners, and appreciate everyone's patience while they investigate. They also promise to post another update when they have more information.

At this point, these are the only known applications being affected at this time. So rest assured you are not alone if you're having issues.

Stay tuned to GameSkinny for all your Xbox news.

Oh, DICE, you have released various patches and updates for Battlefield 4. But now, a new problem arises from the ashes on the battle field. Players scream about the new connectivity issues. The sound of their screams of frustration on the battlefield--can you hear it? Over the sounds of explosions and kill streaks? You do? What do you have to say for yourself?

"We are continuing to monitor some intermittent connectivity issues affecting some players across various platforms. Thank you for your patience. We will update this with further information as available," - DICE's Update on the issue. 

Oh, I suppose you did. This is one of the various issues plaguing the game, it is on their rather long list of "Top Issues Tacker." With such an anticipated release, people are starting to wonder if they pushed the release of Battlefield 4 before it was ready. Right now, the connectivity issues is a an unknown. They do not know how widespread it is or exactly what is causing the problem. 

While the above picture is an exact portrait of how many gamers reacted to the release of the game, that hasn't stopped gamers from filing a class-action lawsuit against EA.

But the issue tracker is so long because it's with smaller issues, right? Sadly, that is not the case; taken right off the top tracker post is this: 

Before we dive into the tracker, please keep in mind this is not a comprehensive list – we’re working on some smaller fixes as well. Each of the issues in this tracker will have one of three statuses. We’re commited to fixing all issues in this tracker (and more.) 

So how many major issues are we talking? At the time of writing this, there are 22 major issues, while many have been "Fixed Live," meaning that they're fixed. We are looking at 11 major issues a month, or almost 3 new large issues a week. This, coupled with new issues being created by fixing things, is like the old saying "It's not a bug, it's a feature."