Allow me to rant here about the criminals who work at Ubisoft. I recently purchased Settlers 7. It got a good general rating of 8 out of 10 and people said it was good. The review did say to watch out for the server problems associated with the game.

So off I went, looked at the box, liked what I saw and got the game. Installed it with no issues. I knew the game required a permanent net connection, but I have that so it's fine. First thing the game does is download a mandatory 450 meg patch, which already irritates me and delays me playing for an hour.

So I go into the game ... 'the server is temporarily unavailable, please try again later.' The game then kicks me out. I've been trying for three days now with the same message. It's not my connection - people I know who have the game have experienced the same, and online blogs are filled with acid directed in Ubisoft's direction.

How can these people link a game to mandatory server availability, and then link it to a rubbish server? People want to play a game, not get involved in some sort of online conglomerate to do so. I seriously think these people should be sued for what they've done in this game. It's like selling a car to someone and the only way to drive it is to have it turned on from a remote server, which is always unavailable.