Good news, the five saddest people on Earth: one player was reportedly insta-winning every match in Ubisoft’s NFT RPG, until a ban, a fix, and then a kinda awkward unban

If you were one of the three people who’d hoped to spend your weekend playing Ubisoft’s new weird NFT game Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles, first of all, I’m very sorry that you probably ended up playing a bunch of matches against the same person. The good news is that the problem has now reportedly been fixed in semi-awkward fashion.

Yep, it looks like the “web3 competitive turn-based RPG” that the publisher quietly launched last week had a rather rough first weekend, with players reporting that they were constantly being match with – and instantly losing to – the same person every thing.

The issue was pointed out on Twitter by YouTuber Jauwn, who wrote that they found it basically impossible to play the game properly, due to always ending up matched up with a user going by the handle of either schilleri11 or Paulstar111, with that person then alledgedly instantly being handed the win in each encounter.

Naturally, they and a number of other players on the game’s Discord server automatically feared that this could be a user delibrately having found an exploit to ensure they constantly win, and based on their response now they’ve looked into the problem, it seems the game’s developers might have initially made the same assumption.

Having noted the issue over the weekend, a fix has now arrived, but the statement accompanying it’s rather interesting. “The issue you experienced with matchmaking has been resolved, and you can now play normally again,” Biloukat, Champions Tactics’ game director, wrote in an announcement on its Discord server.

“We sincerely apologize to schilleri11 and Paulstar111, as the problem was due to a matchmaking bug, and they were banned for security reasons,” they continued, “We have, of course, lifted their bans and kindly ask everyone to be understanding towards them. Please keep in mind that the bug might reoccur, and we are currently working on a long-term fix for it! I will get back to you soon with more updates!”

So, yeah, based on that, it seems like after initially banning the offending account – or accounts, it’s not quite clear from the wording here – as a precaution over the weekend, the team has now had to kinda awkwardly rescind those bans as it’s transpired that this was just a case of a bug doing a thing.

It’s a bit funny, especially the whole asking the online community of a competitive video game to not be dicks to folks you’ve just unbanned part, but fair play to the game’s devs – who’re probably just doing their best with what they’ve been given – for holding their hands up and doing the right thing once they’d been able to investigate what was going on.