AC4 savegame erasure/deletion rant

[Mr_Spanky]

So AC4 seems to have a bit of a problem in its save game system. Twice now I have had the problem of playing the game, and then turning off only to discover when I turn back on again that I have lost my progress. First time I lost probably 2-3 hours. Second time I think about 15-17 hours . . . . which is a little exasperating to say the least.

So I decide to go onto the ubisoft forums to check out if this is a me problem or something else and how to fix it. Because you would have thought if lots of people were having this kind of problem they should be all over it right? Oh how naive I feel now . . .

http://forums.ubi.com/showthread.php/810094-Save-game-lost

Seems that I am definitely NOT the only one having this problem - some people have had their saves irrecoverably deleted others have lost dozens of hours and not even a single peep from Ubisoft or even the forum mods. The above is just the longest thread on their forums about this - there are several others.

So . . . I'm about as mad as I could be right now chewing rocks spitting and fire but there seems at the time being to be NOTHING that I can do about it expect wait and see if Ubisoft can get their collective fingers out of their collective buttholes and do something about what is an utterly game-breaking issue. I've decided at least to not play anymore until they solve it. And sworn off Ubisoft and uplay for a veeeeerrrrrry long time.

Partly tbh I just want to publicize this issue a little and partly I want to know if you guys have any thoughts/ideas or have had a similar experience with AC4.

This problem is btw NOT solved by turning the cloud saving in Uplay off. I've also heard reports that people running the main .exe as admin works - but not for me at least.

 

[DiscoRhombus]

I had the same issue. I lost around 6 hours of gameplay early on. Thankfully the issue has never cropped up again for me since and I never looked into it (assuming I may have shut the game down incorrectly and lost the data myself).

It's a little worrying that they haven't bothered to fix it in all this time though.

 

[Tanis]

I've never had an issue.

Then again, I am playing on the PS3, and everyday my saves are upload off site.

 

[teh_gunslinger]

I've lost, all told, I reckon about 30 hours of game time.

What I do is to back up the saves on every exit. And even so, I still lose some every now and again. Even after qutting to menu and reloading to see if the save stuck and the exit and back up. Still the next time something may be gone, both on the back up and the master.

It's a really shitty situation and Ubisoft should be ashamed.

 

[MrDumpkins]

That sucks man, could be that the game autosaves alot and if you turn it off during an autosave it corrupts the data or something?

I never picked the game up after hearing they weren't supporting 3D on PC. Ubisoft is getting lazy with it's games now.

 

[Mr_Spanky]

Update:

I decided that the only way to continue playing the game would be to take regular backups of the savefiles so I set up a program to take a backup every 15 minutes (overkill or so I thought) and keep 999 consecutive versions of the backups (around 10 days worth or so).

Then the fire nation attacked . . .

It deleted my savegame files (no crash and cloud saves turned off) and I wasn't able to do anything with them. I tried putting in several of my backups as well as some third party ones I downloaded none of which made any difference - the program simply doesn't recognize that they are there. And yes I'm 100% sure that they went into the right place. Also now my AC4 will crash now about 60-70% of the time upon startup.

I have btw also verified and re-installed the game multiple times and there are no changes that I can discern.

Furthermore (not that I am recommending piracy to anyone) I have found definitive proof that pirated versions of the game do NOT have this problem and also exhibit greater FPS and fix audio and video sync issues.

And on the Ubisoft forums still no official response to the problem (the main thread is now over 300 messages long) and I've pretty much given up hope of ever being able to play the game again.

So yeah . . .
Thanks Obama.