Bought Might and Magic Heroes 6 off of Steam, Bullshit DRM says my Steam key has already been used. I say 'thank you sir, may have another'? Fuck you Ubisoft. Another thing that's annoying is, you have to login at least once to be able to play offline. What a fucking joke.

http://ubisoft.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/16828

I know this is coming late, but I wouldn't recommend buying UPlay games from Steam until Ubisoft realises what they're doing there is fucking ridiculous. Still, this is a semi-common issue and should be fixable.

Thanks for the link. Hopefully, i can get this awful situation fixed.

EA handled that a lot smoother when they switched to Origin....

The crux of the matter is, you can actually have two separate accounts tied to the same UPlay installation – one for the "PC" platform and one for the "Steam" platform; even though their credentials are the same, they are in fact two different accounts. So UPlay launched through Steam and UPlay launched outside Steam are essentially two different things (even though it's in fact the exact same UPlay.exe), CD keys activated in one of them do not work in the other and you cannot see your "PC" library from Uplay launched in "Steam mode". As a bonus, this leads to the perfectly schizophrenic situation where a single game (PoP:FS) uses always-on DRM in Steam mode UPlay and a one-time on-install check in standalone UPlay.

Why do they do that? I have no idea.

Had a similar experience recently. I wanted to play From Dust (which I had pre-ordered last year) but the key was "already in use". Turns out that I had used another account for this than for Assassin's Creed 2. Have no idea how that happened (I must have somehow gotten confused because of the Steam + Uplay combo) but I'm pissed that there's nothing I can do about it and I'm permanently stuck with two different accounts for two games now (unless of course I'd buy another copy of From Dust and bind it to my "main" Uplay account). Damn, these games simply have to come to GOG so I don't have to care about this non-sense anymore.

In what sort of Bizzaro world do you have to live for that sort of implementation to seem like a good idea?

The strangest thing about it is that this idiocy aside, the UPlay client is actually very good. It boggles the mind how did they manage to get everything just right except for this one thing where they dropped the ball so hard it must have ended up in Australia.

Welcome to the world of "everyone desperately wants a piece of the pie". You can expect THQ, Square Enix, Take 2 and Codemasters to pull similar shit in the near future as they spontaneously decide that they wish to be more independent of Steam and other third-party platforms.

Legal reasons?

They probably can't tie the Steam licenses into their uPlay. I could thing of some possible scenarios. Maybe EA simply has a better legal staff?

Got it running. It seems that when these pickleheads ask for a corresponding email address (for Uplay), they actually mean my old User name for my game. Thanks again for the assistance. I kept getting hung up over an email issue, but after i entered my old user name for my game. i was able to play. Also, a big thanks for all the reply's.

Edit: It seems that i have to connect to my account, then use my old information. What a clusterfuck of dumb. But I am able to play, it's now just a total pain in the ass.

I'm glad the OP found a solution. Despite the crappy DRM, HoMM VI is quite a fun game.

When I played HOMM VI in early spring, you could run it directly offline (no UPLAY interference) by launching from the command line with the '/offline' switch. I don't think you even need to register with this method. This won't spare you the Steam DRM but maybe it would make the game more palatable to those with a DVD version.

Interesting. I wonder if that works with any other UPlay games. Quite possibly a developer's debugging feature.

I had a steam acount too. one day, my interet goes out. sucks, but it happens. so i figure i'll load up one of my favorite games that i bought on steam, torchlight. not gunna happen, i have to be logged in to play. but whats this! offline mode! sure i'll try that! NOPE! Doesn't work. for as long as i have to go without internet, i shall be going without my games.

to make matters even more ironic, later i notice GOG has torchlight too! I could have just bought it form GOG and been fine the whole time!

clearly the moral of the story is, if you can, buy it from GOG.

I read about an indie game here on the forums and check it out. The game has the best blurb in the history of blurbs, I buy a copy, I buy the soundtrack, I buy more music from the dude who wrote the soundtrack and generally go into "holy shit this game is awesome I should spend moar money on it" mode.

I download and install it, input the serial, start playing, time passes, save, save, reload... then I notice my game data has been lost. I've lost character skills, character *name*, and every single state change. Everything is as if I have just started a new game, except I'm ten screens away from the starting location.

I report the glitch, report some other glitches, then the crazy tenant destroys my internetz with extreme prejudice and I fail to submit the most recent report. No real problem, I complete the playtest report on paper and email it to the dev first time in the morning. He says my installation is corrupt and I need to reinstall.

So I do. Aaaaaaand... I cannot activate the game. Turns out it needs a one-time connection to activate. The requirement was not mentioned on the site; in fact, there is now only one thread about it, started three months after I bought the game.

I drag my PC off to work, and the networks admins there waste a lot of company time trying to make the game see the activation server through the magical security layers. Fail. It's quite some time before I get a linux distro and an antenna to steal wifi. By that time I am no longer interested in the game. And I feel cheated, too. Because when a page says, "REQUIRES A FREE STEAM ACCOUNT", I know what to expect. But when an indie dev puts a game on direct sale and doesn't mention the f@#king DRM at all, I assume there's none, because they are indies, cute and fluffy and consumer-friendly, right?

TL;DR: I can totally understand why people don't see that online activation is horrible. Because when it works, it works so smoothly you don't even notice. But when it doesn't work, it is the shittiest shit that has ever been excreted.