Broken Chess – The Ubisoft Chess Expansion for Xbox

When Ubisoft unveiled their chess expansion on Xbox Live it was expected to be a quantum leap forward for consoles and offer a new generation of chess players fun variants to get them interested the sport. Soon the chess community was amazed as the leader boards started being populated by chess immortals descending from the heavens to play amongst the denizens of Xbox Live. Then something strange happened as we got the chance to play with these highly ranked players, they just wouldn’t play back.

Unfortunately due to a major software bug with multiplayer ranked matches, Chessmaster Live has become prone to a host of people cheating to win games. The bug enables players who start a match, to automatically win if their opponent leaves before the game begins. That encourages these cheaters to never start the game in the hopes that the person they're playing against will eventually give up and quit.

Last night I joined a 1 hour Dark Chess match and my opponent wouldn't start playing. I sent him a message to please not cheat and I got the following response:

"wont start srry... not my kind game sorry only 4 achievement dont want to wasted r time"
With a few subsequent messages, he said he “was watching Lost” and would leave the game “running for the next 8 hours” in order to win. Yeah, thanks for being a cheater pal!

As the chess community started coming together to discuss the problems it became clear that what could have been one of the most feature rich XBox Live games ever, was released with several major software defects. (Summarized below)

A) Cheaters are able to win games by never moving after a ranked match has started, because they receive a victory if their opponent leaves the game.

B) Message Chess Hell - the feature to play chess via mail, is effectively non-functional. You can't invite friends to a message chess game (no one can believe that feature was omitted) and lots of people can't even open their Message Chess Inbox at all now.

After more research I confirmed online that people were actively posting on how to use these defects to win at chess. They call their exploits "Boosting." Nothing like a good sounding name to help them sleep at night!

Unfortunately the first issue is creating the perfect storm for achievement whores who not only want XBOX Achievements but also want to get a high Chess ELO and be known as a chess god. That issue has effectively ruined the leader boards by littering it with fake Grandmasters.

As the Xbox Chess community loudly clamored for a fix, an employee of Ubisoft (in a different group) unofficially reported on the forums that Ubisoft Europe had ported the game, but that there were not any immediate plans for a patch coming. He said he would try to ask for a fix internally but didn’t believe he would be very successful and recommended that everyone call support for help.

I contacted Ubisoft Support directly and their representative stated that they didn’t have a lot of information about Xbox Live Marketplace games, but that I should also encourage my friends to report the issue. Wow, two Ubisoft employees publicly instructing people to pound on their company! More people called and I was even able to get the moderator on Chessmasterlive.com to enquire if any fixes were coming.

The following weekend we thought our pleas were answered and were excited to see that a patch had finally been released for Chessmaster Live! However our hopes were crushed when we discovered that the patch was merely to sell 5 additional downloadable chess sets. The Chessmaster.com moderator confirmed this was the case, and gave us the appropriate condolences.

This weekend there is a promotion to reward players who are online. The contest is sponsored by the Hip-Hop Chess Federation. That’s somewhat encouraging news for the Xbox community, but ultimately these issues need to be addressed and the leaderboards wiped clean.

Overall I find it incredibly insulting that Ubisoft can be bothered to patch the game to make more money, but yet there's no time to do the tiniest of fixes to stop the blatant cheaters ruining this game. I've been a good Xbox citizen by trying to rally the troops to ask for help, but so far all of our efforts have been ignored. If these fundamental issues aren't fixed soon with Chessmaster Live, I think the only option left for the community will be to boycott the game and ask Microsoft for a refund due to a defective product.

-KSR