DIY Disaster

I spent the better part of last night knee deep in piles of compressed air, thermal paste, an accursed T10 Torx security screw, and a piece-of-shit memory card reader. My PlayStation 3 decided to drop a yellow light of death on me, and I really didn't feel like paying Sony $250 to repair it for another six months. So I took it upon myself to repair it.

I'm not going to go into details about the repair process - for that, check out iFixIt if you want to try it - but rather the results. My work transformed my PS3 from a fragile brick into a shade of a working console. It plays discs and games fine, but has sadly lost all Internet connectivity. No Wi-Fi, no Ethernet. Also, my controllers are wired-only. It's essentially become a HD PS2, which is not entirely a bad thing. As a console in was primarily a Battlefield machine, but now it's mostly useful for bawling my eyes out as I repeatedly watch the opening to Up.

Jokes aside, this has revealed a strange change in my psychology and how I play games. My initial reaction to finding out that there was no Internet wasn't sadness at the lack of Battlefield - rather, I thought "may as well not play single player games, since my trophies will be lost when I replace this". I was ashamed when I felt this, but it does reflect a big change in how I play games and how I feel them. I've become so accustomed to earning trophies, and then sharing them via Facebook and bragging about them that I had a moment of "I should burn $300 NOW so I won't lose any trophy progress".

So I'm intentionally not replacing my PS3. After I complete Mass Effect 3, I'm going to finish Castlevania Lords of Shadow and Saints Row 3, knowing that the trophies are likely trapped to this husk of a console, which can die at any time.

Addendum: so you may have noticed that this really isn't a "DIY disaster", but it's a delightfully cheesy and cliche title, so I kept it. Also, the front green, red, and blue lights are so dim as to appear off unless the room is in total darkness, which isn't entirely a bad thing.

Trophy Tracking Service?

So I’m preparing my second annual ‘Earnings’ post where I track my Achievement progress, and it’s going to be really depressing unless I can somehow track Trophies in there. Has anyone seen a trophy tracking website or service that will let me see a list of trophies earned by date? I don’t need like a spreadsheet or anything, just a list of trophies earned (with their parent game listed) sorted by date.

Sony provides me with a list of trophies sorted by game, but not date. I can examine each game in detail to see when I earned the trophies, but that’ll take ages, and I might also miss games (“Ehh, no way I played that this year”) unless I check every single game. And unfortunately, I don’t have the time to do that.

I’m attempting to see if Raptr does this well, but the interface is atrocious, and seems to lack any sort of sorting/reordering or to view my achievements on an individual level, rather than sorted by game. But that’s somewhat promising.

PS3Trophies.org doesn’t seem to want to take my trophy list from Sony and work with it, they seem to want me to add every single trophy manually. No thanks.

Any other ideas?

Linked List: Sony Hacked Again

Jason Schreier, over at Game|Life:

Sony said that the compromised personal information includes customers’ names, addresses, e-mail addresses, birth dates, gender, phone numbers, logins and hashed passwords.

[…]

Hackers may have had this information for more than two weeks now. The intrusion occurred April 16 and 17, Sony said.

 … 

 

I can finally lay down my burdens

And stop whining about this:

EDIT: Apologies, this was supposed to go up just before noon today.

Phat Lootz

Just a quick Sunday note here. One of the games I’ve been enjoying on my PS3 whilst the PlayStation Network is dead is Dungeon Hunter: Alliance.

I’ll be honest, it’s a pretty average four-player top-down hack & slash RPG. Honestly, any four-player local co-op games get by my wrathful critic gaze pretty easy. I gather some friends and a bag of chips, we kill monsters or the Covenant or goombas or each other, a good time is had by all, and I spend less time nitpicking menu loading times.

The biggest issue is often the loot system; when a piece of slick armour drops, who gets it? Sure, there are usually class distinctions (does a warrior really want some smelly robes?) but problems can sometimes happen. Play enough of these games and you’ll see that melee classes always get the brunt of the loot, simply because they’re right up where the loot gets dropped.

Now, 99% of items will just get picked up and sold, but the guys in front typically get more loot than the mages in back, creating a wealth inequality. This could cause resentment in the guy playing a ranged character, or cause him to be less effective as he runs around trying to snag a fair share for himself, and all sorts of unhappy things like that.

In most friendly groups, people do leave stuff for the ranged players to pick up, but I still bet that rogues and warriors end up with the lion’s share.

In Dungeon Hunter, each piece of loot is randomly determined to be for a certain player. So an item might drop, and only I can pick it up. Now, it seems to be totally random, so my warrior might be assigned robes and staves. But in a four-player game, each player gets exactly 25% of items.

Not only is this great for ensuring all players will have enough loot to sell, but it also encourages players to trade and help each other with their inventories. Every now and then I’ll hear a call “Ooooh Rob, just picked up a sweet two-handed axe you might enjoy” and I’ll start to get excited. Every now and then we stop and scroll through our inventories, looking for what we’ve picked up that could benefit other players, and then we trade them around. But at the end of the day, you’re still guaranteed an equal share of magic items to sell.

Weirdly, Gameloft didn’t apply any sharing system to gold, so the melee characters are often carrying ~4x the cash of our mage, but without the item sharing system, he’d have even less. That said, with three distinct classes and gold being nearly useless beyond buying potions, there isn’t much incentive to cheat your friends, or even online random players, so Dungeon Hunter doesn’t actually need some sort of crazy Need Before Greed system like you may see in MMOs.

I can imagine how the implemented loot system would help regulate online play by ensuring that you get some sort of reward, without going through all the time and hassle that a more fair system would put you through.

Hopefully we’ll see similar systems return in future hack & slash games, as I really like how this system works. Maybe Diablo 3 can have something more fair than “first come, first served”?

Sony Announces "Welcome Back" Program, Still Fails To Apologize

So Pat Seybold is up on the PlayStation Blog again (that guy seems to have all the posts from the last week or so, what a spotlight hog) with a new press release hot off Sony’s digital presses. Next week, Sony will roll out online gameplay, Qriocity music, account management, PlayStation Home, your friends list, & chat.

And no, I don’t know why PlayStation Home is deemed more important than the rest of the PlayStation Store, I sort of hoped Sony would just quietly mercy-kill the program while it was down. Oh well.

I took a little while to read over the press release, and I can’t recommend that you do the same: it’s pretty dull, but it is a press release, so I’m not faulting them. I did find some comedy in it, so keep on reading.

How will they prevent this from happening in the future? Sony is creating a new job to protect your data and provide “accountability” (i.e. somebody they can publicly fire next time this happens), they’re adding more firewalls more firewalls more firewalls, and providing enhanced levels of data protection (i.e. some data protection, enhanced from the previous amount of zero protection). Furthermore, a mandatory firmware update for the PS3 (no mention of PSP owners, but I think most of them died out waiting for PSP loading times) will force a PSN password change. I’ll first try my old password, and see if they were foolish enough to let me re-use it.

They’re also moving the data center to a “different location”; do they not understand how the internet works? Unless the hackers had physical access to their machines, in which case their new firewalls will do squat, I don’t see the point of that except sounding important. And yes, random interned guy, I know they said they just expedited this process so they were probably planning on doing it anyways, but they’re fun to tease right now.

The big news that’s flooding through my RSS feeds is details on Sony’s Welcome Back program, giving everyone a free region-specific download ($10 says that either nobody wants it, or everyone already has it), and 30 days of PSN+ membership.

That’s actually pretty nice, since I have a PSN+ membership and actually really dig it. They’ve provided enough free stuff to straight-up pay for the service, the discounts are nice, and automatic updates are just icing. And I promise I’m not being sarcastic: I genuinely think it’s a solid service for more dedicated Playstation gamers like myself, and it helps Sony make some sort of Xbox Live style revenue without compromising free online play. Of course, some beancounter at Sony is also hoping that many people get addicted to Cloud Backup for save files and automatic updates, and when they realize that the free PSN+ games don’t persist when your subscription ends you’ll resubscribe … but maybe I’m just being cynical.

Quick digression: Sony says they’ll restore the PlayStation Store “within a month”. PS+ is crippled without the store, and the subscription only lasts a month. They’re either really not looking to give away those discounts (since unlike the free stuff, discounted purchases remain yours after the subscription ends), or they’re shooting their own promotion in the foot, making PS+ look bad.

The press release also mentions that “Sony Computer Entertainment is recognized as the global leader and company responsible for the progression of consumer-based computer entertainment” [citation needed]. It goes on to describe that PS3 has “super-computer like power”. You know, the important stuff. It has micro processors. I should also mention that the PlayStation legacy is apparently “the core of home networked entertainment”; shame their legacy is now the core of non-functioning home networked entertainment. I considered mocking their phrase that the PSP allows users to enjoy 3D games, which is of course literally untrue, but that’d just be mean of me.

What the press release doesn’t mention is any sort of admittance of fault, any sort of remorse, or even an apology. I know I’m harping on this point over and over, and if you’re sick of hearing me talk about it I’m sure I’ll be discussing other stuff soon (I at least turned up the snark to make this post a bit of a sillier read), but I just can’t get over how absurd this situation is. It’s almost unbelievable. They thank their devoted customers for getting through the tough time of being unable to play Killzone 3 for a week, they’re providing us with free stuff for the outage, they’re even moving their data center, but they can’t be bothered to apologize.

Is there a legal reason? Like an admittance of fault or something? I doubt it. I can’t help but feel that they’re refusing to apologize, even though this is a spectacular failure of customer service and PR. Apparently the executives bowed and apologized at the live press conference, but would it have killed them to apologize to their customers who weren’t watching a 1AM EST conference?

Kevin's gonna let you finish . .

Original image from Ripten, manipulation by me. (“VP of Humility” was there in the original ad, rather than being sarcastically added by me)

Linked List: Opinion - PlayStation Brand Faces Uncertain Future

An opinion piece by Colin Campbell, writing for Gamasutra:

I’m not here to drag Sony through the mud for its incompetent custodianship of your data. Rather for its inability to respond to the crisis. For me, the Sony PlayStation brand is being eroded by Sony’s own charmless posturing. The most human thing to come out of the company this week was the statement that the hackers would be hunted down “no matter where in the world they might be located.” Surely this is the least attractive response imaginable; the cry-baby tough guy.

Good point raised in the article: where the hell is Kevin Butler? He’s the best PR thing Sony has ever had going for them. He’d add a point of humanity to this PR failure.

Failure To Launch

While getting the small things right is admirable, an equal amount of attention needs to be paid to that opening experience. Every time some new tech tool or collectors edition game launches, an unboxing video hits the web. First impressions are important.

Which is why it’s critical that a game launches properly. and painful when it doesn’t. A successful launch lets players start playing the game when they get home, and immediately begin to enjoy every aspect of the game. A successful launch also happens on-time. Now, a successful launch shouldn’t be terribly difficult; games often go gold weeks before they launch, giving the developer & publisher time with a gold master to test their online system for bugs, stress test their servers, or even issue a day 1 patch, although that’s not ideal. And developers have been releasing games for years now; I’m sure they have fairly accurate estimates of rough launch-day sales, how much stress that will put on their servers, etc.

I can think of two games that all launched within the last year that all put massive amounts of stress on their respective servers; Starcraft 2 & Halo: Reach. Both games had nearly flawless launches for me, and based on the websites & forums I track, 99% of users feel the same way. Battle.net was functional & operational, allowing me to be crushed into the ground several times on the midnight launch with no notable lag, despite three people playing Starcraft 2 through my one residential connection (!!!). Halo’s launch was near flawless; everything in-game worked fine, but Bungie.net experienced a bit of lag with loading your matches online. Furthermore, your character’s model did not update properly on Bungie.net. Otherwise, all critical game elements on both titles worked great, and loading your match stats was running 100% after a few hours.

These two games are both huge, enormous launches; that’s why it’s such a shame when a game like Rock Band 3 is released in such a sloppy manner. EA is a monolithic company with huge resources; this launch should have been even smoother, considering it’s not as online intensive as Starcraft or Halo. The worst part about Rock Band 3’s launch was actually getting the game into people’s hands. First there was the stupidity about the PS3 keyboard & game bundle not being sold in North America. Really, EA?

Then Harmonix ran into major issues with exporting from Rock Band 2. Rather than just patching that game to allow a direct export of track files to your hard drive, they made it a download from Microsoft & Sony’s digital stores. Not only does this take up a fair chunk of your bandwidth (just under 2gb for me), but this required both Microsoft and Sony to upload the content to their servers. Xbox 360 exporting hit around midnightish, and the PS3 export hitting around 2:00 PM the next day. Really shoddy show; why weren’t the songs uploaded to Microsoft or Sony the day before? They also seem to be sort of figuring this out as they go; not only did many PS3 Rock Band 2 export downloads accidentally make you download a Lego Rock Band track pack, now on the Xbox they actually ran out of Lego Rock Band keys. Why wasn’t this figured out two or three weeks ago? And why not just let you copy the songs directly from the disc; that would have solved every single issue here.

Of course, the rest of their web services were totally borked. The new Rockband.com didn’t even launch until 11 PM, unfortunately, and there wasn’t very much there. Linking your Rock Band 3 to the website still isn’t up, despite there being a large and visible link on the page.

Couldn’t they at least pop open Dreamweaver and add a disclaimer “Not currently available”?

Later in the week came the bad news for Rock Band Stage Kit owners. While it had been previously confirmed that it works with Rock Band 3, only several days after purchase did Harmonix confirm it doesn’t work. Of course, the Rock Band disc is non-returnable, and the export fee is non-refundable. For the vast majority of Rock Band 3 owners this is a total non-issue, but for a few very dedicated fans, this is brutal; at the very least, Harmonix could have at least been honest up front.

The final nail in the coffin has been the difficulty many people have been getting with physically getting copies of the game. Gamestop/EB Games in Canada didn’t even receive the keyboard bundles at their warehouse for the PS3 until the day Rock Band released, leaving many people in the dust. The bundles they did ship were low in number, meaning only people who preordered a fair amount early even received keyboards. The pro Mustang guitar hasn’t been even seen in Ottawa; Amazon.com now has it launching on November 16th for Xbox 360 and November 24th for PS3. And finally, until yesterday, my local EB Games has still not received a single disc copy of Rock Band 3 for PS3 (does Harmonix have something against Sony, or is it just me?)

In short, actually buying the game, short of people who preordered just the disc, has been far too difficult.

What makes this launch so disappointing isn’t just that it was bungled. It’s that they shouldn’t have been bungled this badly. Harmonix and EA have both done big launches before. Both teams have lots of experience managing web services, and all the hardware and software was announced early enough that it should have been available in fair numbers, with appropriate pricing. Export information should have been figured out much earlier, uploaded to the servers earlier; it should have been available when people brought their copy of Rock Band home. Obviously none of these are game-breaking issues; I absolutely adore Rock Band 3. It’s fantastic, and it comes highly recommended from the LvlofDetail Review Team™.

But its launch was a failure.