Yes well, this is exactly the kind of thing that has me all over the gaming industry, and Ubisoft has been one of the worst, most unrepentant culprits within the gaming industry, and to be honest what they have gotten away with has just made things worse as it's encouraged more and more companies to follow suit.
In Ubisoft's case I look at the horrible "always online DRM" that was started with "Assasin's Creed 2". Given that Ubisoft continued to make money, and has seen two sequels to that game series since then, has ultimatly shown that gamers will complain, but won't actually take their money elsewhere, and unless we do, nothing is accomplished. People are willing to complain about the DRM, activation limits, and other assorted things but won't actually go so far as to go without the newest "Assasin's Creed" game. The industry as a whole has doubtlessly noticed that.
As far as oblivious and incompetant goes, that's not really an issue with just Ubisoft. Right now I've got a serious gripe with EA (which hardly makes me unique) over their handling of "The Old Republic" and "Origin". What they did was send the wrong codes out to Gamestop so when I bought a Collector's Edition they gave me a code for a standard edition. I eventually got an appropriate code, but the EA/Origin system won't let you redeem more than one code for the same product. Tech support told me the only way to deal with this was to start a new account and put my code in there, and then later they would set up some way I could combine my accounts. I basically wound up with two accounts, one for ToR, and one having my other EA games. I more or less forgot about this until recently when I picked up "Kingdoms Of Amalur" and installed it, and found out it was installed under my ToR account, which is seperate from my other EA games, Bioware Social, etc... which of course raises some interesting questions if I decide to play ME3 despite my misgivings and want all the promotions I'm entitled to since my games are now scattered between two accounts... and yes, after months there is STILL no way to condense all my EA registrations into one account.
The point here is that the industry doesn't do the fixes to the infrastructure they promise, or own up to their mistakes, unless somehow forced into it... by say a popular website with a lot of community influance like just happened with Ubisoft, even if they never actually said they screwed up.
The bottom line here is that we need to see laws granting more protection and rights to customers by limiting what hoops a company can make someone jump through, and also clearly stating that if someone pays for something they own it, and have control of it, not the people who manufactured it... which includes the right to re-sell it. That would deep six a lot of this garbage right then and there.
