Hey Ants, I'm not trying to say you're ungrateful. It's disappointing that none of the games appeal to you, or you already have them. What I was trying to point out is that you're a PS Store user; the PS+ gives you discounts across many different items on the store, some even for free. So, over the next two months, if you take into account all the discounts that you'll get, they may just add up to more than the $15 store credit you're asking for.

My comment about people being unreasonable directly relates to your comment about looking out for just yourself. If SONY were to try and please EVERYBODY, I'd imagine it'll take them a long time to filter through who already has what, and what he/she would likely want as a free game.

But I'm saddened to hear you won't be on the network anymore, because after all you've been through to identify yourself as a loyal fan, I never would've thought that SONY offering you something that you already had would be the 'straw that broke the camels back'.

Generally if service hasn't been up to par in various industries, it's customary to either give a refund or a credit of some sort. It's exceedingly rare, at least in my experience, that a company, service or whatever will offer the client something they don't want as an apology.

For example if a vegetarian waits forever to get their food at a restaurant it's unlikely that the restaurant will apologize by offering her a free steak, instead they will either cut money off her bill or give her a credit for a future visit. Likewise if DirecTV has an outage of some sort during a football event it's unlikely that they will apologize by offering people a weeks worth of the Oprah channel for free, they will probably give the user credit to use as they want on their tv service. Or if repair on someones Lexus vehicle is taking far longer than expected it's not likely that they would offer the client a Chevy Aveo as a loner car, they will set them up nicely to keep them happy.

In that respect to me what Sony is doing as "compensation" is bizarre. I don't use psn so personally I don't care either way, but I can see how people will be thrown off by being offered stuff they don't want as "compensation". The correct thing to do would have been to give a credit of sorts, that's what every other industry does.

I got an e-mail sent to me for my EU PSN account saying that I need to reset my password. It's from "donotreply@ac.playstation.net". The name they used (megan) isn't even my name.

Is this fake? I didn't get any e-mails for my NA PSN account, but then again, I updated that as soon as PSN was back up.

well, maybe you entered fake data in your secondary account? Unless there is a wrong link for reseting your PW included I dont see why anyone would care to fake this mail.

you should reset your password either way, just do it via your PS3 or the official site to be sure... dont use the url from the mail

Except joker it's more like they said that vegetarian meal is gratis and here are some deserts for your trouble. Sure you cannot like the deserts but it's not like they are offering something people don't want. Sure there is the rare person that doesn't like the desert and the rare one that had all the deserts ordered anyways. This will always happen to some extent and the game industry unlike a resteruant sony doesn't own everything so it;'s not liek they can go here's a 30 buck credit go wild.

Selection could have easily been better... wanted to see likes of Heavy Rain and Uncharted 2

Like you said, DirecTV would give you a weeks worth of Oprah channel for free. SONY are offering PS+ for free for a month - a service that will only give the users discounts and freebies at no charge.

It's not meat to a vegetarian; rather, its giving vegetarians access to discounted prices on the full menu for a month for free. People who are affected are gamers, who use PSN for either gaming or shopping. They have offered free games for the gamers, and free access to an online subcription service for the shoppers (and gamers who wouldn't have considered it - like me).

How is that not offering people what they want?

I think it's more accurate if you were to change your analogy to: a vegetarian who waits forever for their food at a restaurant, and is then offered peas and cauliflower as compensation, but they either already have this on their plate, or they want carrots and cabbage. The problem is, the restaurant seats 30+ million customers, and the only way the owner could create a quick compensation offer is to make a blanket deal rather than asking each person what they want.

I suppose they could have done a poll and then offered the top 5 from a larger (but still limited) selection. Maybe that would have worked better.

But discounts on content you have no intention of buying is no value either!

Not really. A more accurate analogy I think is that a dinner party went into a restaurant, ordered a main meal without desert, and it was ages coming. By way of apology the diners are offered a free desert from a selection of tiramasu, ice-cream, and chocolate fudge brownie. Some of the diners will think this is great, while some perhaps don't like coffee, are allergic to dairy, and are watching their weight so can't eat the brownie. Regardless of the reasonings, if the diner doesn't want the deserts on offer, those deserts fail to serve their purpose of an apology or positive PR campaign, depending on how cynically you interpret the offending restaurateur's motives.

In this case, PS+ would be akin to a month's free subscription to the restaurants Diner's Club, that offers discounts on a selection of meals. If those meals are the things the diners like, great. But if the discounts are 50% off black pudding, 30% off fried tarantulas, and 50% off unhatched chicks, no matter what fiscal savings that could equate to a lack of interest in the meals means, again, the sweetener fails to do any sweetening.

In this case we don't know what discounts PS+ will cover over the coming month. If it coincides with the release of Under Siege and Daggerdale, I may get value from the offer. If the PS+ discounts are only games I've no interest in, then it will be worthless. Sony may as well offer me £50 worth of free Home clothing and furniture! Or £20 worth of free MUBI rentals from their 1940s Spanish Cinema collection. Or a month's free access to all films on PSN in the Horror category.

Shifty the point is anything short of throwing money at people will always have that result for someone though. Sony just should do the best they can to minimize that group and maximize the group getting value for it within reason. It really depends on if they lock the downloads to the IP of the country they are from I guess. If so they have no reason not to give a wide selection of games. If not it's more understandable to keep the list small to avoid abuse. Though I think 10 choices choose 2 might of been a better option.

If you want a refund, just imagine Sony payed you back the 0$ you'd pay them for the service. Refund given.

For compensation of perhaps loosing your credit-card or personalia information - take advantage of the offer Sony give you - with the fraud protection programs they offer you, because they currently reached agreements with fraud protection agencies in North america, and 5 biggest euro countries, and currently try to reach agreements with others based in other locations, if any customers want to sign up for it, it won't cost a dime, Sony pays the bill.
Or you could sign up on any of the class action lawsuit, filed against Sony.
If someone steals your identity, it would not help you with free credits on the store.

The games in the welcome back-program you get, are a compensation for not beeing able to get games on PSN, or play on PSN, during the downtime, after Sony took down the Nnetwork. Not for the security breach.

PSN+, subscribers get's 60 days subscription renewal, for the 26 days they lost access to the service.
SoE-games subscribers on both PC and PS3 get the downtime lost added to their subscription + 30 days extra subscription.

You're beeing compensated for your losses, the only thing they can't' give back, is the time lost.

To be frank, the only service wich have experienced similar stuff like this before is Microsoft, with it's XBox live, during a two week outage for their consumer-base, and the only compensation they offered their customers were a 20$ XBLA game.
So in the industry, I think Sony is setting new high standards at compensating their userbase, wich I hope all publishers, and online vendors will notice how much is given/expected now when more and more is getting digital. :)

Well, regardless of how we interpret what's happened, it's a shame that you guys feel hard done by, and I hope there's something on PS+ in the next month that may make you change your mind.

As a lifelong supporter of SONY and their products, I feel they handled this situation as good as they possibly could.

Now let's get those hacking $^%#$!!!

But the console did not stop working, some features was unavailable for a periode of 3 weeks.
And 99% of games still worked, only a few games that requires online validation even for SP did not work (Capcom stuff) and online bits.

Did you miss leaderboards and CoD online so much, that you could not play anything else?

In fact my PS3 worked just great watching BD movies even avi files stored on my NAS.

The value of PSN is subjective to a persons usage habits. A gamer heavily into online gaming will certainly "suffer" more than users such me who primarily use it as BR player or gamers more focused on SP campagins based games.

Well that was 3 weeks neither my wife or I could play BF:BC2 multi-player, the online components of TDU2, Blur multiplayer, Hoard multiplayer or check highlights via the NHL app. BF:BC2 is something I play every day or two normally, likewise TDU2 / Blur for the wife. The NHL app I would check a few times a week.

If I had actually subscribed to Center Ice or if Netflix hadn't made their app fail gracefully I would have been furious since the only reason that PSN access is required for those kind of apps is that Sony likes spying on their customers.

Just because you are not as interested in multiplayer does not mean that others feel the same way.

I already own Infamous and LBP and Dead Nation so the freebies are OK but meh. I would have much preferred if they had thrown some of the HD remakes into that list or better yet, made the cloud save option free for everyone.

What I really want thought is for Sony to deal with the core usability OS issues of their system which they should have done while things were offline - sluggish menus (no caching of icons), poor media support (broken MP3 playback due to lack of volume control, poor codec support for video, poor organization, etc.), slow handling of trophies and crap download speeds from PSN. This last issue I absolutely expected to be rectified once PSN came back but it appears that their server allocation is as lame as it always has been.

I am starting to really wish that Valve would release a console so there was some option besides the existing 3 manufacturers (all of whom I find less than optimal).

Cheers

It was out for 2 weeks and Undertow was $20? Are you sure about that? Could have sworn it was less than that for both. And didn't both Silver and Gold get the free game? I don't know, it was so long ago and LIVE was turned on, what, 8 years ago? Maybe I'm remembering it wrong.

Well I've had a PS3 since launch and I couldn't be happier with the selection since I don't own most of what's being offered. I will bite, as long as I don't have to enter any credit card info to get the freebies. ;)

Live wasn't out for even one week. Service was near unusable for ~5 days, but not even completely down over that duration. Service wasn't 100% for a bit longer than that, but was usable. And yes (I believe) silver and gold users both got undertow for free, if you already had undertow, you got credited what you paid for it. I believe it was an 800 point title, or roughly $10.

hmmm...I have a US account, an EU account and an Indian Account. Can I download free games from all of those accounts? :wink:
Is the PSN Store up yet ? Has anyone claimed these goodies?

Even though Live was out, there was no fear of your CC or personal info being stolen. To me, that is a much bigger concern than not having PSN for a few weeks.

I still think you're not looking at this objectively nor realistically. You want a more robust game list - well, from what it sounds like, you must pretty much own everything 'good' they have to offer anyway. Anything they'd offer that you don't own is either not released yet, very new or probably wasn't on your 'interest' list to begin with, so why would you care now getting it for free? The games on PSN aren't overly expensive either - it's not as if one way or the other it's a huge deal, especially for someone with the 'buying power' you have.

If the welcome gesture isn't enough to bring you back (nor the games you already purchased that you can play again now that it's online) from the Xbox, then maybe nothing is. I really don't see the point in whinging about 'being the only one that was damaged in the relationship' and that 'It's on Sony to keep me coming back' etc.

You either are happy with what they were offering as a service (as you were before, given how much you spent and how loyal you saw yourself) or are not, but a (free) game that may or may not interest you surely will not have that huge impact you are making it out to have nor does it change the offering of their service. Surely, if the service on Xbox is so much better to you, a single game (or two) won't really make the PSN service any better. And if it would, why are you on Xbox in the first place? :wink:

lol, this is madness - people are complaining because a free service that costs nothing was offline a few weeks and Sony want to say sorry by giving you MORE free stuff!?

No, Sony should PAY you to play on their PSN - they should set up payment into my account for the privilage of my draining their resources each time I go online!!

Seriously, I'm a day one owner and I only benefit by selling on my disk of InFamous (+£5) a free copy of dead nation (which I was tempted by) and 30 bonus days of PS+ (seeing as I lost ~30 days through the outage I'm not really getting 60). Then as I have a PSP I will also get Modnation & Pursuit Force...oh, and I get identity theft cover free for a year.

Go figure.

logged in to PSN today..read about the welcome pack...it is a joke!
Giving old (very old) games for free to people...great for those that already bought lots of games for PS3!
I already have most of the games...except Dead Nation...but guess what...the german psn idiots changed it to barbie house 5 or something like this (I really don't care anymore)...great!...or as I say: booooooooooo (no, not Buuuuurns this time!!)!

They're not just saying sorry for 3 weeks without online gaming. They are saying sorry for not communicating effectively what was going on; telling everyone their passwords had been got and worrying everyone about getting hacked; the effort people had to go through to go to all the internet accounts they have and make sure they aren't using that same password; concerns over cards getting stolen and in some cases people canceling their cards because they didn't know what the situation was; and in some cases delays and costs to people who were waiting to get a game that was taken off air because PSN was dropped.

Sony screwed up. It wasn't just an online gaming outage, but a serious breach. Sony accept they are wrong and are wanting to say sorry. Normally, any decent person (and corporation trying to present that front, whether sincerely meant or not) will attempt to balance out negative feelings caused with some suitable positive feelings. Sony's gift is there to generate positive feeling to counter the negative feelings this fiasco caused.

If you live in a city apartment and have an argument with your significant other, upset them, and want to make it up, would you offer them a gift like a sack of manure for the garden you don't have, or some Bonsai pruning sheers when she doesn't have Bonsai trees? If you accidentally upset your little Hello Kitty loving daughter and want to apologize, do you walk past the Hello Kitty aisle to the hated Action Man isle and buy her an Action Man? Would you give her that an expect her to be grateful because she's getting it for free?

"Free" in itself does not give something value. Would you be as supportive of this offering if the titles were all low-rated, low-interest games like Barbie's Horse Adventures and MINI's Game Compendium Featuring Chess, Draughts and Backgammon? I don't imagine so. The reason you're pleased is you are gaining from Sony's offering. Other people aren't which is unfair on them. Okay, Life isn't fair, and sometimes you just have to take it. But in this case, with a little extra tweak to Sony's offering a lot more people will benefit, meaning Sony's compensatory gesture for their screwup would more effectively be generating good feelings.

Now you're being ridiculous.

Im quite suprised to the reaction the offering is getting. I honestly thought it would be recieved quite well, shows how much i know! (though i do suspect it is a small but vocal minority of the userbase).

Regardless of peoples individual feelings about what they have been offered i do think its quite obvious Sony hav atleast tried pretty hard to please people, i mean the games that they have are a selection of the best games available on PSN, i think they should atleast be given some credit for saying 'We'll give them a selection of the best games we have got' even if it hasnt ended up pleasing some people as planned. They could have done better sure but i dont think anyone can say they didnt try hard to please people.

In the end i dont think its a bad offering compared to what is offered from comparable outages, i mean with RROD or YLOD where you may loose use of the system entirely for weeks (or months for some over ther entire ownership span, or even forever if out of warranty!) yet you get compensated nothing like what is being offered here.

An intersting question is that has this outage suprised anyone about how valuable PSN is to people? Is the reaction encouraging for Sony should they want to charge for PSN? What do people think a month of PSN is actually worth in dollar terms?

You make it sound like Sony are offering everyone a X360 game or something and you're calling me rediculous!?

Sony are giving everyone PS+ & identity theft protection for free. Everyone will benefit something from this...some more than others, but that's the way it goes.

I think Sony maybe could have extended the list to ~10 games but even then people wouldn't be happy - like if they just gave everyone £10 - whatever they did it wouldn't be enough!