Last week, I noted how the community of For Honor seemed to be, for the first time, turning against Ubisoft in regards to their whole model of Steel, microtransactions, revenge mode and the like. Yesterday, that tension boiled over on r/ForHonor where one Redditor gathered more than 10,000 upvotes to rally behind a day-long boycott of For Honor.
Calling it a "blackout," those who have pledged participation believe this would have a serious impact on For Honor, and it very well might. If even half of the 10,000+ people who upvoted the post participated in the boycott, scheduled for April 3, that would be more than For Honor's daily concurrent players, for the last few weeks, according to githyp. Hoping to get Ubisoft to notice and respond, the protestors may have already gotten the response they were looking for, and it's rather impressive.
While not mentioning the boycott directly, Ubisoft announced surprise "maintenance" this morning that dramatically increases the amount of Steel players earn from playing games and completing orders, such that the idea of a boycott is in flux mere hours after the idea took off.
The changes?
- 25% increase in Steel income from Matches
- 33% increase in Steel income from Daily Orders
- 50% increase in Steel income from Side Orders
- Community Orders now give a flat 2000 Steel instead of 500-1000.
I have been perhaps one of the loudest critics of For Honor, specifically their microtransaction model, and even I have to admit that this is an admirable step. Ubisoft estimates that these changes will buff your Steel income by as much as 45% in the first two hours of play each day. And they're not even done.
They're also giving everyone a brand new elite outfit per hero, and, as compensation for an earlier outage, they are granting every player a 3-day champion status, in addition to correcting the situation with Faction War rewards.
They've really gone up a peg in my book after this. But they also may have averted disaster in terms of the April 3 boycott. After seeing the changes, the organizer of the boycott updated his Reddit post going over the Steel income buff and asking the sub if the blackout should be called off.
"[Today's update] raises the question if we should continue the blackout or not," Reddit user jbaayoun wrote. "Remember this is a community event, not my event, we move in the direction of the majority of the community and if the community feels as if we are happy then we can call off the event."
The response thus far has been something of a mixed bag, with others surprised and grateful for Ubisoft's response, and others saying they're still going to black out, one user writing "I refuse to accept a lollipop when I should have been given a cake."
A Ubisoft Community developer did respond on Reddit after the maintenance was announced, saying that will be addressing more issues brought up and that this week's Warrior's Den stream will have more details.
So, for now, the saga continues, but Ubisoft has acted admirably in responding to the community in a way that only benefits the consumers. I have to give credit where credit is due.
