Ubisoft's NFT dumpster fire flares up as a matchmaking bug leaves every player connecting and losing to the same confused, unkillable guy

Last week, Ubisoft baffled us all by launching Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles, an NFT tactics game, in the year of our lord 2024. Its characters cost as much as $63,000 in cryptocurrency, despite the fact that I'm not entirely sure what you can do with them once you own them. Mostly, it seems like they're good for, well, playing Champions Tactics—unless you wanted to play over the weekend, when every player found themselves connecting and immediately losing to the same guy, at the same time.

On Friday afternoon, players began appearing in the bugs-and-feedback channel of the official Champions Tactics Discord to report that ranked matches had become unplayable. They would connect to a game, only to immediately get a server error message. Despite the message saying that their "stats and ratings have not been impacted," players were watching their competitive rankings plummet as they repeatedly joined matches they'd immediately lose.

Gradually, those players all realized that in their busted game, they'd been matched to the same player: "Paulstar111." By Friday night, the Discord's users were demanding that the Champions Tactics devs ban Paulstar111, who'd somehow managed to hack the game's matchmaking and feed himself wins.

Unfortunately, one of the Discord's mods appeared with bad news: The devs weren't able to access their office over the weekend. "Hey fam. We all share the same frustrations and it's a known issue which so many of us have reported already," said moderator Unchartedblock. "Unfortunately, we have to wait until Monday for team to fix the issues."

"If this guy stay whole weekend connected doing this he doomed this game," said Discord user Ketaros in response. "GL for you guys."

Saturday morning, however, brought a welcome surprise. Game director Biloukat announced that the devs had been able to administer justice to the rogue Paulstar111. "We observed a weird behavior for this player 'paulstar111," Biloukat said. "We decided to ban him and we'll deeply investigate on his behavior on Monday!"

Sadly, as soon as Paulstar111 was struck down, his villainy reemerged by another name. Within minutes of Biloukat's announcement, players were experiencing the same instant losses as they all found themselves matching with the latest unkillable demigod: a user named "Schilleri11." Spirits had plummeted through the floor, as though pouring a bunch of fake money into a bunch of fake tactics figurines might not have been the canny investment it'd seemed.

Monday brought the strangest wrinkle yet. Biloukat returned this morning with another announcement: Matchmaking, for now at least, should be functional. Players are once again free to battle their crypto-forged tchotchkes. The sordid tale, however, had a baffling conclusion: Paulstar111 and Schilleri11 might have become unconquerable archvillains, but they hadn't known what the hell was happening either. Through no fault of their own, a networking error earned them the hatred of—well, however many people are playing Champions Tactics. Couple dozen, at least.

"We sincerely apologize to Schilleri11 and Paulstar111, as the problem was due to a matchmaking bug, and they were banned for security reasons," Biloukat said. "We have, of course, lifted their bans and kindly ask everyone to be understanding towards them."

Just in case you took this as a sign to sprint headlong into Champions Tactics yourself, it sounds like things haven't been entirely buttoned up over at Ubisoft Web3 HQ. In this morning's announcement about restored matchmaking, Biloukat asked players to "please keep in mind that the bug might reoccur" while the dev team works on a long-term solution.

The Champions Tactics marketplace seems unphased, at least. As I write this, its most expensive champion is listed at $256,570,000. After the game's first week, I can only imagine how many eager buyers are eyeing it now.