This is likely due to a specific custom firmware that converted a retail PS3 to a debug PS3, which among other things allowed it access to developer networks. Some games could be downloaded for free through the developer network.
Providing and not securing a means of pirating software is a pretty valid reason for Sony to fall silent and shut down everything. It's not something they'd want to broadcast - though I think the custom firmware in question has been public since February.
I know there are games on the 360's dev network but I don't ever recall seeing games on dev PSN.
HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
edited April 2011
Yeah, I agree with Scarab. But even then, any group operating as Anonymous would leave their calling card, so to speak. There's always a purpose to their movement / targets.
That said... wow, Opty doesn't think much of them I guess. <.<
Henroid on
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
I don't know if it'll spell doom for digital distribution, it'll just (at most) change it in some way of how it's managed. Any company worth its weight in gold would have a physical paper trail.
Yeah, that's what I mean. Not doomed, but probably changed signficantly. Without jumping the gun, this might prove to be a sharp lesson.
We had that explanation fairly fast, to contrast the situations. So, while I don't know the doom-scale on this, something bad has happened.
I would be shocked (not overwhelmingly since this is Sony we're talking about) if Sony didn't have the digital copies of those records backed up. The cost of arranging and maintaining such a system would be almost nothing compared to the cost of all the lost time and lawsuits if all that data was ever irretrievably lost. Memory is just too damned cheap now to not at least keep a log of the server transactions.
Even if the text file for each person's list of purchases was something outrageously high like a few megabytes, a single 1TB hard drive could store the data for something like 300,000 profiles. Even at retail prices, that data could get reliably triple-backed-up on hardware which wouldn't even break a hundred grand.
Yeah, I agree with Scarab. But even then, any group operating as Anonymous would leave their calling card, so to speak. There's always a purpose to their movement / targets.
That said... wow, Opty doesn't think much of them I guess. <.<
Yeah, even if it were some breakaway version of Anonymous, I'd be surprised if they could do THAT much damage.
Also, the breakaway group would loudly proclaim victory. As much as they like to be anonymous, they sure do like to make a lot of noise.
Really aggravating, whatever the cause may be. I was planning on finishing the co-op mode of Portal 2 with a friend over PSN when it went down. And speaking of that friend, can you still get trophies when not logged into PSN? She was wondering.
Transdimensional Whale on
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited April 2011
Yeah, that's gotta be kinda sucky.
Valve: We're integrating Steam with PSN!
Sony: We're integrating PSN with Steam!
PSN: Go to hell!
PS3 Portal 2: Well, shit.
Ninja Snarl P on
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
edited April 2011
LewieP is currently upset about the Portal 2 situation, but he's putting the blame on Valve rather than Sony.
Eh, Steam is still in fact working. If my computer wasn't cobbled together from bits of plywood and powered by a gerbil running on a hamster wheel, I could be playing Portal just fine right now.
Transdimensional Whale on
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Johnny ChopsockyScootaloo! We have to cook!Grillin' HaysenburgersRegistered Userregular
I'm annoyed because I just got back from vacation today, picked up my Portal 2 PS3 pre-order, and then found out I can't link my account. I didn't even want it for PS3; I only bought it to play on my Mac.
I hope this stupidity doesn't hurt this new thing Valve and Sony have going. While this whole debacle is moronic and infuriating, I still believe that the Steam-cloud support was very cool and I hope to see it more in the future.
And IF tons of credit cards were stolen, this doesn't just hurt Sony and its customers, digital distribution as a whole stands to lose a lot. How many parents will refuse to get their kid stuff on Wiiware or Steam after hearing about the PSN hacks? How many fewer people will decide it's just not worth the risk at all with smaller storefronts like green man gaming and the like? Won't this make it all the harder for indie devs whose only chance to get their game out there is digital distribution?
It's a bit worrying, although I don't think it'll kill PC digidistro; as said earlier, consumers are a bit smarter than that, and will realize that Valve, for example, has a better security history than Sony. And, of course, in the PC space there's far more options than the monopoly on each console.
If Sony lost CC info, though, that's a disaster for them; nearly everyone would defect to PC or XBOX digi for security purposes.
Because it would demonstrate what I hate about DD - you don't buy your games. You rent them until the servers go down or the company goes under or the device dies or [insert anything else here that's pretty much 100% certain to happen eventually]. Those hundreds of dollars you spent? You already wasted them if you expected to have the content in perpetuity like you would with a disc copy. It's just a matter of whether the content craps out now or later.
I don't necessarily want DD to die; I just hope doesn't get strong enough to kill off physical media in gaming.
Just for the record: a lot of us in the PC sector make sure that the gamers do own their games. Two of Recettear's three extant distro options give you the full client with no hooks into the executable at all; if you buy Recettear on Impulse or Gamersgate, that's it, you don't need to keep any third-party software or whatever to play the game and you can create as many physical backups as you wish. Even if Steam ever Stops Existing Forever, it isn't actually going to be that hard to "fix" that for our customers to get their game copies playable thanks to how Steam works. There's seriously no reason to be irrationally afraid of digidistro, at least on the PC.
Consoles?... well, the issues with the existing console markets have become rather obvious over the past few days.
As for idle speculation on what did it... one can't help but think it's a screwup on Sony's end with the Steam/PSN integration, really, what with the Portal 2 timing and all. Steam is totally unaffected, so one has to think something done broke on the other end.
But even an integration issue wouldn't keep the platform down for four days running, one would think. It's very, very odd.
I can't be the only one who deleted my credit card information after every transaction.
Not that I could stop them from keeping a secret copy if they wanted to, but I don't know what good it would do them.
If I can't be bothered to re-enter my information, I probably shouldn't be spending my money on whatever it is. Discourages impulse purchases.
There's not a chance in hell that has anything to do with the current problem, I mean, but just saying.
As I explained earlier in the thread, it would be colossally stupid and unnecessary for Sony to store credit card information themselves, especially in the same system. It's overwhelmingly an industry standard to use a 3rd party payment gateway that is dedicated to protecting that stuff.
e: and to SpaceDrake and Darlan, I highly doubt they lost any credit card information. Reason #35336 for using a 3rd party to store this stuff.
Can't PS3 users play their PSN games offline? Any XBLA title you purchase you can play even if Live were down.
Yes you can play your psn bought games off line, you can even play them while logged in on another psn account on a different ps3 even (with a limit of up to 5 different ps3s or something like that) after you have downloaded them on there.
And don't kid yourself, you can't play XBL indie games off line.
Can't PS3 users play their PSN games offline? Any XBLA title you purchase you can play even if Live were down.
Yes you can play your psn bought games off line, you can even play them while logged in on another psn account on a different ps3 even (with a limit of up to 5 different ps3s or something like that) after you have downloaded them on there.
And don't kid yourself, you can't play XBL indie games off line.
Then why are some people talking about how console DD prevents you from really owning games?
It's simply not as flexible as a physical copy is, because you can't resell (the main sticker), back them up, lend it to a friend or transfer them from ps3 to ps3 without going on line. You are dependent on them keeping their download service alive for that. Basically they can enforce all the sillyness that is in the EULA's of all software nowadays.
A multi day outage fascinates me. Because it's either something really stupid involving data deletion/corruption that replicated to DR sites (thus requires days of "fixing" the bad data/slow assed tape restores to whenever it last worked), or really really shitty security hole that can't be isolated (X piece of PSN is unavailable, but everything else works!)
Any other failure would have been simple to recover from, even a catastrophic network equipment failure should only be a sub 12 hour downtime waiting for replacement parts assuming you didn't have DR to fail over to.
I'm actually going to bet heavily on "we fucked up our data in a large way", since most DR solutions don't actually handle corrupt data well. And if you miss it for a few days, all your fast restore options go out the window and you wind up with the 72 hour tape restore/log replay of doom. Way back we had a san fail in an interesting way that caused controller 2 to overwrite the partition information on all the disks when it thought it was taking over, and it wiped out the whole thing. Given that it was ages ago, the restore took four weeks Thankfully operations continued, but everyone's personal excel files were unavailable for a hilarious amount of time.
I'm going to subscribe to this thread because I want to read more stories like the one above, and more conspiracy theories about the current situation.
It'll probably blow over with no real consequences (at least I hope so, because I forgot to check if my credit card info was still saved or not), but for now I can get a kick reading this thread and thinking this guy was involved:
My guess for why they are taking so long is that it's not because they are having trouble getting everything running again, but because the security hole that was exploited was in a fundamental part of the system that they don't hastily want to patch over.
Having to rethink how their digital downloads are validated like that twitter rumor suggests would be such a thing. They are probably testing and reviewing the new system by now.
I guess they could have gone for a stop gap solution but for some scenarios that just would not work, like if they would only be able to tell for sure whether a digital download came from the dev network or the regular one until after the patch would go live, or the repackaging of the games to the new format requires some input on the original developer's side or something like that.
Yeah, I don't think there will be any TERRIBLE CONSEQUENCES of this except that maybe PSN users will get a free game to placate our collective rage. Personally, I think a free month of PSN+ would placate me quite well.
Yeah, I don't think there will be any TERRIBLE CONSEQUENCES of this except that maybe PSN users will get a free game to placate our collective rage. Personally, I think a free month of PSN+ would placate me quite well.
Didn't 360 owners get a free game when XBL went down a while ago?
I wouldn't be surprised if we got a free month of PSN+ if the outage lasts for a while. It would help placate the masses while providing a lead in for more subscriptions.
I can't shake this idea that beyond some level of abstraction, PSN is this horrible massive spaghetti code basement of incompatible server processes bridged by hacks and quick-fixes piled on top of each other over several years that no one ever bothered to document, and they had a cascading failure this week that they're still trying to understand.
SCE knows hardware well, but it's the little things that make me worry about their online infrastructure: Why does it take 30 seconds to sync trophies? What is the point of limiting a status message to exactly 21 characters? In an age where Internet companies give away gigabytes of storage for free, what has them so concerned about their server resources that they limit premium accounts to an anachronistic 250MB?
PSN has improved vastly since its inception, but I hope it's built on a more solid foundation than it seems to be.
Yeah, I don't think there will be any TERRIBLE CONSEQUENCES of this except that maybe PSN users will get a free game to placate our collective rage. Personally, I think a free month of PSN+ would placate me quite well.
Didn't 360 owners get a free game when XBL went down a while ago?
I wouldn't be surprised if we got a free month of PSN+ if the outage lasts for a while. It would help placate the masses while providing a lead in for more subscriptions.
Hmm...that brings up an excellent point: what will the compensation be? Will there be one? Maybe some Sony Points?
As to the free game on XBL, I can't remember XBL having gone down for any substantial time in the past year. Entirely possible I missed it though.
Synthesis on
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SteevLWhat can I do for you?Registered Userregular
Really aggravating, whatever the cause may be. I was planning on finishing the co-op mode of Portal 2 with a friend over PSN when it went down. And speaking of that friend, can you still get trophies when not logged into PSN? She was wondering.
You still earn trophies when not logged in. They'll just sync with PSN once it's back up.
However, what I'd like to know is if the corresponding achievements I would have earned in Steam would sync up once PSN comes back.
Hmm...that brings up an excellent point: what will the compensation be? Will there be one? Maybe some Sony Points?
As to the free game on XBL, I can't remember XBL having gone down for any substantial time in the past year. Entirely possible I missed it though.
Christmas '07, Live was down or partially down for about two weeks.
As a result, everyone got Undertow for free.
edit: Also, PSN doesn't use points, it uses actual dollars (which is nice), so odds are if there was a throwout to people it would likely be a game or service.
Hmm...that brings up an excellent point: what will the compensation be? Will there be one? Maybe some Sony Points?
As to the free game on XBL, I can't remember XBL having gone down for any substantial time in the past year. Entirely possible I missed it though.
Christmas '07, Live was down or partially down for about two weeks.
As a result, everyone got Undertow for free.
edit: Also, PSN doesn't use points, it uses actual dollars (which is nice), so odds are if there was a throwout to people it would likely be a game or service.
No, I know PSN uses monetary amounts--which is nice on one hand, but sucks on the other because, to my knowledge there's never been a sale on them. You're right though, it would kind of suck to have to say, "Well, we're sorry for the ___ days of the service being down. Here's $5. We cool?" Seems a little too much like, "There's a hundred dollars on the counter. Don't look at me and I won't look at you."
I think I vaguely remember interruptions of service in '07, but I think I blamed that on my own ISP--did not know about Undertow either.
Yeah, I don't think there will be any TERRIBLE CONSEQUENCES of this except that maybe PSN users will get a free game to placate our collective rage. Personally, I think a free month of PSN+ would placate me quite well.
I would be much happier that they took the time to add in a massive update that finally has the equivalent of party chat plus universal custom soundtracks for every game, among other long-needed tweaks.
I can't be the only one who deleted my credit card information after every transaction.
Not that I could stop them from keeping a secret copy if they wanted to, but I don't know what good it would do them.
If I can't be bothered to re-enter my information, I probably shouldn't be spending my money on whatever it is. Discourages impulse purchases.
There's not a chance in hell that has anything to do with the current problem, I mean, but just saying.
As I explained earlier in the thread, it would be colossally stupid and unnecessary for Sony to store credit card information themselves, especially in the same system. It's overwhelmingly an industry standard to use a 3rd party payment gateway that is dedicated to protecting that stuff.
e: and to SpaceDrake and Darlan, I highly doubt they lost any credit card information. Reason #35336 for using a 3rd party to store this stuff.
I just wanted to chime in an say that Dusda is 110% on the money here. (Woo, pun!) I used to work for an online store. Trust me, if someone takes your credit card info through the Internet it is extremely unlikely (and not entirely legal, in some cases, I think) that they held on to your credit card info. I know we even had to have a special isolated server specifically for handling credit cards, and that we annihilated the data after use.
So I wouldn't start worrying about that sort of thing until someone like Merchant Services gets hacked.
Yeah, I don't think there will be any TERRIBLE CONSEQUENCES of this except that maybe PSN users will get a free game to placate our collective rage. Personally, I think a free month of PSN+ would placate me quite well.
I would be much happier that they took the time to add in a massive update that finally has the equivalent of party chat plus universal custom soundtracks for every game, among other long-needed tweaks.
Universal custom soundtracks wouldn't work very well on the PS3. On the 360 it was designed as a mandatory feature on par with widescreen support and 720p, so when a game is started with custom sountracks running the game's music is muted. The custom soundtrack pauses during game cutscenes.
If the feature was brought to the PS3 than it would work great for future games that supported it, but for any games released previously it would be as much of a pain in the ass to work with as it is on the 360 while you're playing an Xbox game - you have to find the audio menu and turn the in-game music off, and then deal with a horrible cacophony of clashing music that is the soundtrack of my nightmares whenever a cutscene starts.
I'd rather Sony just make a major push to get developers to add the feature in games that it works well with (racing, fighting, action, puzzle, etc) instead of a blanket solution that doesn't work well with some genres. There's actually a pretty decent list floating around somewhere of the games on the PS3 that support custom sountracks independently.
Party chat is cool and all, but I never understood the point of talking to people you weren't playing with. Although, years ago, my friends and I used to fire up our original Xboxes and use them as a way to voicechat while we played PS2 games online.
SmokeStacks on
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
edited April 2011
Most of the games that support custom OSTs are the only ones I think need it, like SSFIV.
I'd never use it for BlazBlue, since it has amazing music.
I can't shake this idea that beyond some level of abstraction, PSN is this horrible massive spaghetti code basement of incompatible server processes bridged by hacks and quick-fixes piled on top of each other over several years that no one ever bothered to document, and they had a cascading failure this week that they're still trying to understand.
SCE knows hardware well, but it's the little things that make me worry about their online infrastructure: Why does it take 30 seconds to sync trophies? What is the point of limiting a status message to exactly 21 characters? In an age where Internet companies give away gigabytes of storage for free, what has them so concerned about their server resources that they limit premium accounts to an anachronistic 250MB?
PSN has improved vastly since its inception, but I hope it's built on a more solid foundation than it seems to be.
I've had this feeling ever since they unveiled the whole "clear-text credit card and account information passed through HTTPS query strings" thing a while back. Not that it's a real security threat (unlike launch where they apparently did it with plain HTTP), just that it's stupid to send anything like that clear-text.
That said, its a lot more likely to just be lost data; might be caused by poor coding, might not. Enterprise level backups can take a very long time to get up and running again, and with 70 million records of account data it's not too far-fetched to assume a week-long restore process if something gets royally screwed. Plus, if we're assuming their network code isn't optimized, we can probably say the same about their database optimization, too. In fact, that would probably help to explain the 30 second trophy sync process, too.
Most of the games that support custom OSTs are the only ones I think need it, like SSFIV.
I'd never use it for BlazBlue, since it has amazing music.
Mortal Kombat doesn't, a fact which I am pretty upset about since it was being reported online that it does and the demo did.
There's really no excuse for any game to not support it. It makes no sense. And MK would be so much more fun, especially at parties, with custom music (MK theme).
I'd be upset if I was a an RPG developer or something and I took the time and effort to hire someone who crafted a beautiful, epic soundtrack that took months of hard work and absolutely captures the essence of the moment in gameplay where it was being heard, only to have some dumbshit kid disable it and play Lil Wayne instead.
For Mortal Kombat, though? Yeah, a game like that should have custom soundtracks.
Really aggravating, whatever the cause may be. I was planning on finishing the co-op mode of Portal 2 with a friend over PSN when it went down. And speaking of that friend, can you still get trophies when not logged into PSN? She was wondering.
You still earn trophies when not logged in. They'll just sync with PSN once it's back up.
However, what I'd like to know is if the corresponding achievements I would have earned in Steam would sync up once PSN comes back.
Ah, thank you. And you bring up an interesting point, but I imagine they would. Since Steam doesn't automatically start up when you play on PSN I would think they planned for that, at least.
And IF tons of credit cards were stolen, this doesn't just hurt Sony and its customers, digital distribution as a whole stands to lose a lot. How many parents will refuse to get their kid stuff on Wiiware or Steam after hearing about the PSN hacks? How many fewer people will decide it's just not worth the risk at all with smaller storefronts like green man gaming and the like? Won't this make it all the harder for indie devs whose only chance to get their game out there is digital distribution?
It's a bit worrying, although I don't think it'll kill PC digidistro; as said earlier, consumers are a bit smarter than that, and will realize that Valve, for example, has a better security history than Sony. And, of course, in the PC space there's far more options than the monopoly on each console.
Uh, are you forgetting when someone stole HL2 because the security password was "password"?
I can't shake this idea that beyond some level of abstraction, PSN is this horrible massive spaghetti code basement of incompatible server processes bridged by hacks and quick-fixes piled on top of each other over several years that no one ever bothered to document, and they had a cascading failure this week that they're still trying to understand.
SCE knows hardware well, but it's the little things that make me worry about their online infrastructure: Why does it take 30 seconds to sync trophies? What is the point of limiting a status message to exactly 21 characters? In an age where Internet companies give away gigabytes of storage for free, what has them so concerned about their server resources that they limit premium accounts to an anachronistic 250MB?
PSN has improved vastly since its inception, but I hope it's built on a more solid foundation than it seems to be.
I've had this feeling ever since they unveiled the whole "clear-text credit card and account information passed through HTTPS query strings" thing a while back. Not that it's a real security threat (unlike launch where they apparently did it with plain HTTP), just that it's stupid to send anything like that clear-text.
That said, its a lot more likely to just be lost data; might be caused by poor coding, might not. Enterprise level backups can take a very long time to get up and running again, and with 70 million records of account data it's not too far-fetched to assume a week-long restore process if something gets royally screwed. Plus, if we're assuming their network code isn't optimized, we can probably say the same about their database optimization, too. In fact, that would probably help to explain the 30 second trophy sync process, too.
Real men have synced redundant copies of everything so that if one goes down, they simply switch the tracks over and we can choo choo on with the second copies. It's entirely transparent and I believe it's been done a few times with gmail and there's no problems at all.
For an entire network to be down for more than a few hours, it can't be DDoS. And it can't be something so simple as lost data. Maybe it's literally a hardware fault and some big data centre had a fire or something. That shit happens.
Posts
I know there are games on the 360's dev network but I don't ever recall seeing games on dev PSN.
Battle.net: Fireflash#1425
Steam Friend code: 45386507
That said... wow, Opty doesn't think much of them I guess. <.<
I would be shocked (not overwhelmingly since this is Sony we're talking about) if Sony didn't have the digital copies of those records backed up. The cost of arranging and maintaining such a system would be almost nothing compared to the cost of all the lost time and lawsuits if all that data was ever irretrievably lost. Memory is just too damned cheap now to not at least keep a log of the server transactions.
Even if the text file for each person's list of purchases was something outrageously high like a few megabytes, a single 1TB hard drive could store the data for something like 300,000 profiles. Even at retail prices, that data could get reliably triple-backed-up on hardware which wouldn't even break a hundred grand.
Yeah, even if it were some breakaway version of Anonymous, I'd be surprised if they could do THAT much damage.
Also, the breakaway group would loudly proclaim victory. As much as they like to be anonymous, they sure do like to make a lot of noise.
Valve: We're integrating Steam with PSN!
Sony: We're integrating PSN with Steam!
PSN: Go to hell!
PS3 Portal 2: Well, shit.
Yeah, thanks to this I haven't been able to play a single second of Portal 2 co-op.
I will echo the "thank god Netflix still streams" sentiment.
Steam ID XBL: JohnnyChopsocky PSN:Stud_Beefpile WiiU:JohnnyChopsocky
I hope this stupidity doesn't hurt this new thing Valve and Sony have going. While this whole debacle is moronic and infuriating, I still believe that the Steam-cloud support was very cool and I hope to see it more in the future.
Not that I could stop them from keeping a secret copy if they wanted to, but I don't know what good it would do them.
If I can't be bothered to re-enter my information, I probably shouldn't be spending my money on whatever it is. Discourages impulse purchases.
There's not a chance in hell that has anything to do with the current problem, I mean, but just saying.
It's a bit worrying, although I don't think it'll kill PC digidistro; as said earlier, consumers are a bit smarter than that, and will realize that Valve, for example, has a better security history than Sony. And, of course, in the PC space there's far more options than the monopoly on each console.
If Sony lost CC info, though, that's a disaster for them; nearly everyone would defect to PC or XBOX digi for security purposes.
Just for the record: a lot of us in the PC sector make sure that the gamers do own their games. Two of Recettear's three extant distro options give you the full client with no hooks into the executable at all; if you buy Recettear on Impulse or Gamersgate, that's it, you don't need to keep any third-party software or whatever to play the game and you can create as many physical backups as you wish. Even if Steam ever Stops Existing Forever, it isn't actually going to be that hard to "fix" that for our customers to get their game copies playable thanks to how Steam works. There's seriously no reason to be irrationally afraid of digidistro, at least on the PC.
Consoles?... well, the issues with the existing console markets have become rather obvious over the past few days.
As for idle speculation on what did it... one can't help but think it's a screwup on Sony's end with the Steam/PSN integration, really, what with the Portal 2 timing and all. Steam is totally unaffected, so one has to think something done broke on the other end.
But even an integration issue wouldn't keep the platform down for four days running, one would think. It's very, very odd.
Twitter
e: and to SpaceDrake and Darlan, I highly doubt they lost any credit card information. Reason #35336 for using a 3rd party to store this stuff.
Yes you can play your psn bought games off line, you can even play them while logged in on another psn account on a different ps3 even (with a limit of up to 5 different ps3s or something like that) after you have downloaded them on there.
And don't kid yourself, you can't play XBL indie games off line.
Then why are some people talking about how console DD prevents you from really owning games?
Also I said XBLA for a reason ;-)
Twitter
You can play every PSN game except for BC:Rearmed 2 and the Final Fight/Magic Sword Combo, due to Capcom's DRM. Which requires a connection to PSN.
NNID: Glenn565
Any other failure would have been simple to recover from, even a catastrophic network equipment failure should only be a sub 12 hour downtime waiting for replacement parts assuming you didn't have DR to fail over to.
I'm actually going to bet heavily on "we fucked up our data in a large way", since most DR solutions don't actually handle corrupt data well. And if you miss it for a few days, all your fast restore options go out the window and you wind up with the 72 hour tape restore/log replay of doom. Way back we had a san fail in an interesting way that caused controller 2 to overwrite the partition information on all the disks when it thought it was taking over, and it wiped out the whole thing. Given that it was ages ago, the restore took four weeks
I'm going to subscribe to this thread because I want to read more stories like the one above, and more conspiracy theories about the current situation.
It'll probably blow over with no real consequences (at least I hope so, because I forgot to check if my credit card info was still saved or not), but for now I can get a kick reading this thread and thinking this guy was involved:
Blog||Tumblr|Steam|Twitter|FFXIV|Twitch|YouTube|Podcast|PSN|XBL|DarkZero
Having to rethink how their digital downloads are validated like that twitter rumor suggests would be such a thing. They are probably testing and reviewing the new system by now.
I guess they could have gone for a stop gap solution but for some scenarios that just would not work, like if they would only be able to tell for sure whether a digital download came from the dev network or the regular one until after the patch would go live, or the repackaging of the games to the new format requires some input on the original developer's side or something like that.
Didn't 360 owners get a free game when XBL went down a while ago?
I wouldn't be surprised if we got a free month of PSN+ if the outage lasts for a while. It would help placate the masses while providing a lead in for more subscriptions.
SCE knows hardware well, but it's the little things that make me worry about their online infrastructure: Why does it take 30 seconds to sync trophies? What is the point of limiting a status message to exactly 21 characters? In an age where Internet companies give away gigabytes of storage for free, what has them so concerned about their server resources that they limit premium accounts to an anachronistic 250MB?
PSN has improved vastly since its inception, but I hope it's built on a more solid foundation than it seems to be.
PSN:RevDrGalactus/NN:RevDrGalactus/Steam
Hmm...that brings up an excellent point: what will the compensation be? Will there be one? Maybe some Sony Points?
As to the free game on XBL, I can't remember XBL having gone down for any substantial time in the past year. Entirely possible I missed it though.
You still earn trophies when not logged in. They'll just sync with PSN once it's back up.
However, what I'd like to know is if the corresponding achievements I would have earned in Steam would sync up once PSN comes back.
My Backloggery
Christmas '07, Live was down or partially down for about two weeks.
As a result, everyone got Undertow for free.
edit: Also, PSN doesn't use points, it uses actual dollars (which is nice), so odds are if there was a throwout to people it would likely be a game or service.
No, I know PSN uses monetary amounts--which is nice on one hand, but sucks on the other because, to my knowledge there's never been a sale on them. You're right though, it would kind of suck to have to say, "Well, we're sorry for the ___ days of the service being down. Here's $5. We cool?" Seems a little too much like, "There's a hundred dollars on the counter. Don't look at me and I won't look at you."
I think I vaguely remember interruptions of service in '07, but I think I blamed that on my own ISP--did not know about Undertow either.
I would be much happier that they took the time to add in a massive update that finally has the equivalent of party chat plus universal custom soundtracks for every game, among other long-needed tweaks.
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I just wanted to chime in an say that Dusda is 110% on the money here. (Woo, pun!) I used to work for an online store. Trust me, if someone takes your credit card info through the Internet it is extremely unlikely (and not entirely legal, in some cases, I think) that they held on to your credit card info. I know we even had to have a special isolated server specifically for handling credit cards, and that we annihilated the data after use.
So I wouldn't start worrying about that sort of thing until someone like Merchant Services gets hacked.
Universal custom soundtracks wouldn't work very well on the PS3. On the 360 it was designed as a mandatory feature on par with widescreen support and 720p, so when a game is started with custom sountracks running the game's music is muted. The custom soundtrack pauses during game cutscenes.
If the feature was brought to the PS3 than it would work great for future games that supported it, but for any games released previously it would be as much of a pain in the ass to work with as it is on the 360 while you're playing an Xbox game - you have to find the audio menu and turn the in-game music off, and then deal with a horrible cacophony of clashing music that is the soundtrack of my nightmares whenever a cutscene starts.
I'd rather Sony just make a major push to get developers to add the feature in games that it works well with (racing, fighting, action, puzzle, etc) instead of a blanket solution that doesn't work well with some genres. There's actually a pretty decent list floating around somewhere of the games on the PS3 that support custom sountracks independently.
Party chat is cool and all, but I never understood the point of talking to people you weren't playing with. Although, years ago, my friends and I used to fire up our original Xboxes and use them as a way to voicechat while we played PS2 games online.
I'd never use it for BlazBlue, since it has amazing music.
I've had this feeling ever since they unveiled the whole "clear-text credit card and account information passed through HTTPS query strings" thing a while back. Not that it's a real security threat (unlike launch where they apparently did it with plain HTTP), just that it's stupid to send anything like that clear-text.
That said, its a lot more likely to just be lost data; might be caused by poor coding, might not. Enterprise level backups can take a very long time to get up and running again, and with 70 million records of account data it's not too far-fetched to assume a week-long restore process if something gets royally screwed. Plus, if we're assuming their network code isn't optimized, we can probably say the same about their database optimization, too. In fact, that would probably help to explain the 30 second trophy sync process, too.
Mortal Kombat doesn't, a fact which I am pretty upset about since it was being reported online that it does and the demo did.
There's really no excuse for any game to not support it. It makes no sense. And MK would be so much more fun, especially at parties, with custom music (MK theme).
For Mortal Kombat, though? Yeah, a game like that should have custom soundtracks.
Ah, thank you. And you bring up an interesting point, but I imagine they would. Since Steam doesn't automatically start up when you play on PSN I would think they planned for that, at least.
Uh, are you forgetting when someone stole HL2 because the security password was "password"?
Real men have synced redundant copies of everything so that if one goes down, they simply switch the tracks over and we can choo choo on with the second copies. It's entirely transparent and I believe it's been done a few times with gmail and there's no problems at all.
For an entire network to be down for more than a few hours, it can't be DDoS. And it can't be something so simple as lost data. Maybe it's literally a hardware fault and some big data centre had a fire or something. That shit happens.