Sony Home - The official thread*
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I think it's been taken down. I used to be able to access it from the world map, not anymore. That and the uncharted area are gone.
Yap, that's what I commented here: http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1242479&postcount=516
The FarCry space is not too interesting IMHO. Felt like an intern's project.
For public beta (even if they have not fixed all the usability issues), Sony should work it like Valkyria Chronicles Chapter 4. Basically, I was "pinged" with awards, custom options and new mini-games every so often. I was like "Wow !", "Woah, what's that", "Cool", "Emm... why am I in a graveyard ?", etc. while trying to learn a new environment. It gives people incentives to dig deeper. Skeptics have fewer excuses not to try things out too.
EDIT: It doesn't always have to be rewards from developers and Sony. It could be acknowledgement of good social behaviour too (e.g., chatting with curses, helping people out and received kudos as a result -- even on playstation.com etc)
The FarCry space is not too interesting IMHO. Felt like an intern's project.
For public beta (even if they have not fixed all the usability issues), Sony should work it like Valkyria Chronicles Chapter 4. Basically, I was "pinged" with awards, custom options and new mini-games every so often. I was like "Wow !", "Woah, what's that", "Cool", "Emm... why am I in a graveyard ?", etc. while trying to learn a new environment. It gives people incentives to dig deeper. Skeptics have fewer excuses not to try things out too.
EDIT: It doesn't always have to be rewards from developers and Sony. It could be acknowledgement of good social behaviour too (e.g., chatting with curses, helping people out and received kudos as a result -- even on playstation.com etc)
I cant find anything that seems to integrate PSN with the site's registration
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A 15 minute capture of someone using Home was released, Kotaku linked to it.
http://kotaku.com/5099014/watch-someone-play-use-home-v100-for-15-minutes
The comments are the most interesting -- the "general gaming public" and their response to it is not encouraging.
http://kotaku.com/5099014/watch-someone-play-use-home-v100-for-15-minutes
The comments are the most interesting -- the "general gaming public" and their response to it is not encouraging.
If you visit the Home beta forum, you can find people really getting into it, and also others who don't like Home. I don't get the feeling that it's "not encouraging". In fact, I am starting to see some users volunteering to moderate the community on behalf of Sony, because they sense that the community is growing.
Kotaku's user comments are less accurate because some of the posters have no access to Home. You can't really judge a community by watching from the outside. Some may not even have a PS3.
I visited Home this afternoon. I think the experiences have improved noticeably with more people. I saw multiple groups of 10+ people sat on the floor and chatted among themselves, even in the Mall where no stores are opened (yet). The chess tables and the arcades in the Bowling Alleys are all taken too. These people didn't know each other before they entered Home.
So far, I don't think it's hard to get people interested in Home initially. As usual, the challenge will be retention. The other glaring hole is how to keep my friends together in a party as we move from spaces to spaces.
The Kotaku video simply shows a user running through Home. It's like showing someone flipping through a book quickly. It's not a meaningful exercise in itself. To gauge the attractiveness and usefulness of Home, I think Sony should identify a few common use cases (e.g., forming a party for a specific game, getting help, making friends, etc.) and then try to perform them in Home.
The loading speed is a concern, but I have sent my suggestion to overcome it in the beta forum. Hopefully they agree and it's not too difficult to implement.
The problem is the people who post on the Home forum are not your usual user, to say the least.
The usual user will be someone who visits a site like Kotaku, and will spend a few seconds playing with it before they move on. That's why the comments are valuable, IMO -- it'll echo the kind of sentiment a "usual" player will have while watching a friend play, or their reactions themselves when they play it for the first time.
The usual user will be someone who visits a site like Kotaku, and will spend a few seconds playing with it before they move on. That's why the comments are valuable, IMO -- it'll echo the kind of sentiment a "usual" player will have while watching a friend play, or their reactions themselves when they play it for the first time.
Not really true. Home beta users are selected from the Playstation owner pool. They can be disappointed like everyone else. Some obtained the invitation even though they did not download the PS Home wallpaper.
A Home beta user is as good a gamer as a Kotaku visitor. They can be as casual or negative as regular Kotaku visitors, such as yourself. Kotaku's pool includes noise from non PS3 owners. They also don't have the means to try Home first hand to comment.
EDIT: In its current form, it is clear that Playstation Home will not appeal to all. What Sony needs to do is to establish Home with this first wave of fans. Then simplify and spread it to other users. Ideally, this initial group of people should be as large as possible. It remains to be seen how many will end up using Home regularly. In the mean time, everyone can still enjoy online gaming via the core PSN platform.
I think the social element will make a difference in the long run. Just this afternoon, someone was trolling inside Home. After reporting him, I hope PSN will eventually become a better place for online gaming.
Yeah, but the people who take time to post on the Home forum are a special subset of the people who were selected from the owner pool.
I'd never even consider posting on that forum -- hell, I didn't even know it existed.
Yes, but a Home forum user is a subset of the beta users -- you'll find almost anyone visiting the official Playstation community is not your casual gamer...
Even walking around inside of Home, a lot of people are talking but many of them are complaining or outright saying how "stupid this is". I'm wondering if the people who like it are doing so just because they're emotionally invested in Home already, because I genuinely cannot fathom how this can be so interesting to people -- especially people who profess to not like or play Second Life. Even on this site, the people who seem to really enjoy Home are the same people who've been posting news updates on Home for what seems like years.
This reminds me -- a lot -- of a hyped MMORPG called Vanguard that came out a while ago. It was in beta forever, there were vocal people in the beta talking about how fantastic and awesome the game was with so much potential...I got into the beta in the late stages and was amazed by how bad the game was. But the Vanguard fan community insisted it had potential, was fantastic, etc...then when it came out, it bombed spectacularly. It's got about 30,000 subscribers now, total.
As luck would have it, Vanguard is a SOE IP as well...
I have to say that I have been a fan of the idea of Home, but the loading looks awful...I don't get how it cannot be streamed like GTAIV and drop the detail level.
Anyway, a mate has promised me his beta code so hopefully I'll get to tinker soon and get some hands on impressions.
Anyway, a mate has promised me his beta code so hopefully I'll get to tinker soon and get some hands on impressions.
Well, for an equally anecdotal counterpoint, I saw a bunch of people doing nothing at all. And I'm somewhat baffled as I find Home to be pretty pointless, I rarely last more than 15 minutes on. But there were people hanging around in the theater watching the same SOCOM commercial for the 500th time and just chatting, or hanging around the chessboards in the mall. Maybe they were all die-hards, of course.
If that were true, maybe they'd be spending time in the real world rather than a virtual one.
Honestly, I'm not sure if that was a thinly veiled insult aimed at me (that I'm anti-social because I don't like what I see in Home so far), but either way I'm sure it's not appropriate.
Only interest I have in Home is if it has a better game-launching interface than many 3rd-party games.
For instance, I play a bunch of NHL 09 games with up to 12 players. EA creates game sessions where people wait while a 2 minute counter counts down. But nobody has control over who's on whose team, who gets to play which positions. There's voice chat, no keyboard chat supported.
What would be nice is if you could launch an NHL game from Home with exactly the players you want. Maybe Home would hand off the parameters to the EA servers or something like that.
Home game launching would fill in the gaps which are lacking in some 3rd-party games and guarantee a minimum feature-set for all PS3 games.
But it doesn't look like this kind of thing will happen. It sounds like chatting is the main thing in Home, not playing games.
For instance, I play a bunch of NHL 09 games with up to 12 players. EA creates game sessions where people wait while a 2 minute counter counts down. But nobody has control over who's on whose team, who gets to play which positions. There's voice chat, no keyboard chat supported.
What would be nice is if you could launch an NHL game from Home with exactly the players you want. Maybe Home would hand off the parameters to the EA servers or something like that.
Home game launching would fill in the gaps which are lacking in some 3rd-party games and guarantee a minimum feature-set for all PS3 games.
But it doesn't look like this kind of thing will happen. It sounds like chatting is the main thing in Home, not playing games.
No it was a response to the post above me saying that they must be die-hards.If that were true, maybe they'd be spending time in the real world rather than a virtual one.
Honestly, I'm not sure if that was a thinly veiled insult aimed at me (that I'm anti-social because I don't like what I see in Home so far), but either way I'm sure it's not appropriate.
Although your response to it suggests you might be
Not? I thought that was pretty much exactly what was going to happen, and was supported partly already in the beta with Warhawk, where you can create a session and people around you can join you. If you can do this in your apartment or clubhouse where only your friends / club members can go, then that right there is the basis for a pretty decent party system I think, and once you've finished a game you could easily take the same group to another game entirely if you'd want to go from say Warhawk to Motorstorm PR to Resistance 2 together.
It's taking some time, but ever since I saw the first signs of game launching and the rooms for Warhawk, Uncharted and so on, I have a lot of faith in Home. Lots of changes and additions and new examples are only adding to that faith, not taking away from it. I can totally understand how easy it is to be sceptical, and it's probably a healthy attitude if patience isn't your forte anyway. But if Home Open Beta does launch as planned before the New Year (or on New Year's Eve, whatever
) then I think it will start to really take off, as only then does it start to become truly interesting for developers/publishers to invest into it, and I expect we'll see a lot of areas materialize. In passing, we've seen concept and test areas for a whole lot of games (not to mention events) already, and Sony has a dedicated team to help smaller developers get areas into Home by building spaces for them (recently announced).As stated earlier those who posted in Kotaku do not necessarily have experience with Home. Their comments are based on the Kotaku Video. A 15 minute video showing an avatar running through home. Thats far from passing the experience to people.
If you go to home and see what kind of people are in there you will see tons of casuals, who dont post in the Home forums either. And they are there for hours. Which is encouraging
Are we connected to different Home servers or something? The only chatting I see going on is people trying to figure out how to use the keyboard, or trying to say something that is unclear to other people who are just running by. I've logged on on two different occasions and I've not see any serious conversations, but I did see a lot of idling and a lot of aimless walking around and that was about it. There is seriously nothing to do but awkwardly chat with other barely-customized avatars. What kind of person spends hours talking to strangers on Home? There's a million better ways to randomly chat with people online, most of which do not involve 10 second load times for small zones. Most people do not have keyboards or headsets on their Playstation (I certainly don't either) as well.
Additionally, the impression of Home from people who have not played it themselves IS important. Home is NOT being forced down people's throats, they need to WANT to get it BEFORE they have it. So the impression of people on Kotaku who don't have it is very relevant.
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