Linked List: It Only Doesn't

Tycho, over at Penny Arcade:

The thing to say on your web is that since PSN is free you can’t really complain about it, and that’s pretty dumb. Maybe you could have said that if you couldn’t play Ratchet and Clank online with your Playstation 2, but that era is fucking over. By “that era,” I’m referring to the one where chains of appliance “islands” exist in millions of discrete universes across the globe. The store, your friends list, these aren’t perks. By 2011, they’re bedrock assertions of the medium. The deal they made with users - one which, for years, was the justification for a gruesome price disparity - was “free Xbox Live,” not “shit happens.”

My biggest issue is with Sony’s silence and their attitude that their customers shouldn’t be pissed. Here’s the latest update from Patrick Seybold, Senior Director of Corporate Communication & Social Media:

I know you are waiting for additional information on when PlayStation Network and Qriocity services will be online. Unfortunately, I don’t have an update or timeframe to share at this point in time.

As we previously noted, this is a time intensive process and we’re working to get them back online quickly. We’ll keep you updated with information as it becomes available. We once again thank you for your patience.

Umm … thanks? There was no point to that communication. If you want to garner goodwill with customers who love your failing services, be humble, be honest, and apologize. That response sounds like an AI, but not in an awesome GLaDOS way. Honestly, it sounds dismissive, sort of like “Well, I should put something up, but I don’t really care what”.

Server maintenance, especially emergency server maintenance that may or may not be related to “external intrustions”, can take time. I’m fine with that. And I’m not paying a dime for the service itself. That’s fine. People like myself are pissed not because we paid money for missing services, but because we want to use them. I wonder what PSN games & demos would have launched today. What if I wanted to grab Fancy Pants Adventure, or play Marvel vs Capcom? I know people who bought Portal 2 & Mortal Kombat on the PS3, looking to play together. These games launched a week ago today, and why aren’t they working? Sony’s response is inadequate, and the fact that the outage has lasted this long is embarrassing.

But I’m glad that Sony is focusing on the real issue here: announcing more Playstation certified tablets! (Yes, I know that different sections of the Sony corporation are involved here and I’m actually just being facetious about mocking them for announcing these tablets, although the irony of releasing tablets based on the “self-proclaimed-open” Android OS after the GeoHot incident is rather ironic).

I understand the issues that Sony is facing, and I know it takes time to fix issues. Of course, these issues may be caused because some people hate Sony, but that’s a whole other ballgame. The length of this outage is embarrassing, but Sony’s PR treatment of the issue is laughable. The failing of their network as well as the handling of this situation can only be described as incompetence. The only other time I’ve used the Incompetence tag was for the PS3 auto-formatting hard drives, but I feel that this situation also warranted the tag.