Sony snoozes over substandard PS Plus service

Sony's latest pledge to fix Europe's faulty PS Plus subscription service "as quickly as possible" will do little to appease users, who were told the exact same thing two months ago. The PlayStation Plus subscription is supposed to give PSN users access to heaps of additional content. However, many of these freebies, discounts …

[wowfood]

SMH

Did they learn nothing about customer services after the hacking fiasco?

I mean, I'm a sony enthusiast I'll admit. (I own a sony TV, walkman, ps3, camcorder and i've been looking at the phones) and even I'm finding it hard to think of any way to defend them. They're basically driving fans into the arms of competitors.

[leon stok]

any more info ?

I've not been having any problems at all, and I wonder if this is a UK issue, European, or just incidental on certain systems ?

[Greg J Preece]

Re: any more info ?

Same here. Been merrily playing all my freebie games, no worries. Add them all to my download list the day they come out, for future reference.

Wish they'd stop adding things I already own. ;-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Fix the save game fiasco while you are at it!

Its annoying to see an increasing number of games that will only allow the game saves to be backed up into the pay extra cloud and wont back up to an external hard disk. EA seem to be the worst, in league with sony to try and force you to pay for their cloud service for backup.. Piss take!

[Greg J Preece]

Re: Fix the save game fiasco while you are at it!

Seriously? I didn't know that was happening! That's a bloody liberty. Not encountered any myself - are there any notices on the box to say it requires a PS Plus subscription?

[Iain Hamilton]

Re: Fix the save game fiasco while you are at it!

To be quite fair, this is nothing to do with PS+. It's been with that with some titles since Day 1. Protected saves won't back up to USB. All PS+ did was provide a compromise for those who needed the facility. Also would like to point out that if it wasn't for PS+ automated cloud backup, I would have had to go jump of a peer when my PS3 died last xmas and I hadn't backed up anything for months.

[g e]

Fine in the UK

And even broken it'd still be better value than XBOX Live Gold which I discontinued.

Maybe they have a dicky server in a particular region or something.

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh

Even I learned after Sony were happy to take my money for things and clamber aboard the failboat a good few times. I am avoiding any SOE/SCEE wares now, and it seems to have lessened leisure time frustrations. Ok, so I am a bit slow, and certainly fall into the "fool me twice, shame on me" category, but I can at least avoid thrice.

[Dr_Cynic]

The main problem I see is the lousy download speed which at best is less than 1/4 what I typically achieve from elsewhere, which is increasingly a problem with the ever larger offerings.

[Perspyro]

I still don't know where the issue is with the speed. It's not PSN, it's got to be the PS3 itself.

I did a test and downloaded the same PSOne file on the PS3 and PSVita from the same network at the same time and the Vita achieved expected speeds.

[jodyfanning]

And I just coughed up for the PS+ as well. First thing I noticed was that in the Store many of the freebies icons were missing. For example the dynamic themes were just empty boxes in the UI instead of showing a thumbnail.

In any case the biggest thing to me is that it will auto-update. I get little enough time to play these days without waiting through 30 minutes of forced updates...

[djstardust]

I've had a PS3 for ages but don't use it that often .... it's so frustrating. Keeps nagging to update system firmware at hundreds of megabytes a time, and the same happens with updates before playing a game. The downloads are really slow from their servers and by the time it's all in place I can't be arsed playing any more.

What happened to just switching on a console and playing a few seconds later?

Sony just haven't learned how all their propietary crap coupled with very poor support is driving people away, but they're oblivious to it as profits fall.

[SpaMster]

Suspected FAIL

You do realise if you just switch your network connection off it wont prompt for updates dont you?

[Test Man]

Yeah, cos you so have to update your PS3 and games every day, yeah?

[1Rafayal]

I am intrigued. I am a PS+ customer and havent seen any of these problems at all.

I get my free games every month, the console updates itself when needed and a whole bunch of my save games are up on the PS+ cloud.

Would be interesting to see if this only affects certain models etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

And the walls.....

they com' tumbling down...........................................

[Shaun 2]

I've been very happy with my PS+, especially when they break something somewhere else, as this usually results in some more decent free games.

Sony have been releasing some really decent titles on + recently. Am playing through Darksiders at the moment, and have Just Cause 2 and LBP2 to play after that.

And auto updates are a godsend. All my games and the console are up to date and ready to play.

My only minor gripe with the service is savegame storage. 150MB gets eaten quickly. Especially with 10MB+ Skyrim saves.

[djack]

Storage

I'm sure I spotted somewhere recently that they have upped the storage availability to a gig or so.

Maybe I was imagining it.

Yet another PSN+ subscriber wondering what all these problems supposedly are.

I know that there was a problem when they first put games on there that were previously released as a timed demo, but that got sorted many moons ago (for me at least).

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Storage

The only people unhappy with PS+ are those that pay the same amount to Microsoft every month for just online play (and of course access to the 2nd tier payment for pay-tv or pay-music streaming, something Playstation owners get for free of course).

[Andee]

Re: Storage

Nope you didn't imagine it; PS+'ers now get 1024MB of storage. And not a moment too soon; I just went PS+ mainly for the cloud save feature, and I only just realised that all my Dragon Age saves are massive.

[Greg J Preece]

My only minor gripe with the service is savegame storage. 150MB gets eaten quickly. Especially with 10MB+ Skyrim saves.

Check again. The 4.25 firmware release they handed out this month upgrades that to 1GB. :-)

[measmyself]

Been using PS3 almost daily and downloading all my freebies on PS plus, not had any issues, never even knew this was an issue until now.

[Ilsa Loving]

LOL

Sony has a long an cherished history of screwing with their customers. From music CDs with rootkits, taking away marketed functionality after the fact via bios updates, etc etc.

I question the sanity of anyone who buys any Sony product with the expectation that they are going to actually get what they paid for.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: LOL

I'm getting more that what I paid for. PS+ is good value. It's unfortunate that some people are having issues.

See what I wrote there? That's a sane post. It's unfortunate that Sony music implemented a rootkit. It was a serious issue but saying Sony has a long cherished issue is overkill. And before you say "oh but Linux on PS3", I had not met anyone that used it (and as a computer, the PS3 wasn't the most responsive). It's unfortunate that it was removed, yes. But you had a choice to keep it if it was that critical.

[Lord of Cheese]

Story smells iffy to me

No probs for me, everything PS+ was supposed to deliver it has and enjoying the shedload of freebie games, Red Dead Redemption this month..... Just running out of hard drive space!

Very much appreciating the 1Gb cloud game save feature, filled the original 150Mb a couple of months back.

[Caleb Cox]

Re: Story smells iffy to me

It doesn't appear to have affected everyone, but some of our own staff members have had the same problem for months as well, so it's certainly affecting some gamers.

I think some may not realise they have a problem, though, as the items you're supposed to have access to only appear for a split second before they're removed. So while the service appears to be running fine, many of us in the EU have a limited service in comparison to those in other regions.

[Obitim]

What's the deal with downloading in the background but then it doesn't appear to download????

I do get all the games tho

[Anonymous Coward]

Background downloading stops if you play a game with online content, so as not to affect the game. If automatically resumes when it's safe to do so...

[pewpie]

Anyone who doubts the existence of a problem is either one of the lucky ones who are unaffected, or just plain unobservant. this is an issue affecting many customers in the EU region.