ebay.au would be a good place to start. You should be able to pick up a 12 month live subscription for $50AU or thereabouts, and most sellers will email it to you within a few hours. The codes aren't region dependent, so buying from US/UK sellers is generally the best option for aussies.
Xbox live price going up !
- Thread starter eastmen
- Start date
ebay.au would be a good place to start. You should be able to pick up a 12 month live subscription for $50AU or thereabouts, and most sellers will email it to you within a few hours. The codes aren't region dependent, so buying from US/UK sellers is generally the best option for aussies.
Try eBay, sometimes they have good deals. I got a 12 month Live voucher for $30 a month ago.
specwarGP2
Regular
Why do people always try to rationalize it like that? Look, you would have an argument if MS actually let you pay $5/mo or $1.25/wk. But they dont, you have to pay $60 in one payment.
XBLG is better than PSN, but it wasn't $50 better and it sure as hell isn't $60 better.
Yeah, but I'm just saying don't let that cloud your judgment too much.
I would personally change that to 'much better on Live' rather than lousy on PS3, but that's just words. I think there are very few people who consistently play both enough to make a good comparison (me included, I play much more on my PS3, my 360 is almost exclusively Forza 3 and Trials HD, and too little online). If you lived closer to me I'd let you borrow my 360 so you could try it out for yourself.
By the way I decided to renew my 360's Live subscription, paid 38 euros for it, which is the least I've paid for Live in my now 7 years (this being my 7th year purchase). I briefly got rid of Live over the summer then re-upped for a montly subscription for Forza 3, which of course is automatically renewed. Thankfully these codes aren't, so I'd recommend everyone to use those - over here you have to call Microsoft to end your subcription and its a drag.
This is OT, but hey, you are a mod!
What is soo "poop" with PSN compared to Live regarding online gaming?
Alkohallick
Newcomer
This is my question as well. Are people comparing the "features" and saying XBL is better or are they comparing actual game play conditions? I agree that PSN lacks a party system and other "features" but from my experience actual game play online is the same, well very similar.
I really hate to derail this thread, but just for the sake of it:
The absolute only place that XBL outpaces PSN is in it's features, not it's performance. Cross game voice chat, gross game invites, party system, and voice messages are the only things that separate the services. In general, voice chat quality is higher on PSN (because the bit rate is higher) and performance is almost always the same. You may get faster downloads on XBL because Microsoft has considerably more servers available, but that's not tied to gold, as Silver members can enjoy it too. But the bottom line is, it's a stinky old wives tale that PSN isn't as good as XBL for online gaming, when the actual performance of these titles is the same.
I won't be renewing any Live services unless I get it for free. Done paying for things that should be free.
At the moment I'd say it's reasonably on topic. There's only so much you can say about a price hike, and the comparative value of the now-more-expensive Live! versus PSN is an obvious progression of the thread.
And it's these things that make my experiences of online with PS3 so tortourous due to their absence. Teamwork is non-existent in many titles due to poor chat support. Teaming up is torturous because you have to wrestle with whatever party mechanics the title has and these are often buggy. For much of Uncharted 2's early period, the point when I was playing online, we'd spend time trying to form parties that would crash when the third player joined. Typically it's about an hour from all switching on our PS3's to getting to play our online games, an hour of poking around in the order we join games, who hosts, quitting games, restarting them, powering off and on again. Recently we used Skype to talk in Borderlands, and we tried that idea with Warhawk only its player system is so utterly pants it can put players from the same clan wanting to play together on opposite teams. Has this been addressed? Has anyone ever even mentioned solving it?
Some of that is going to be via title, but the lack of a common interface and common infrastructure on Sony's part aggravates that. Also Sony specify the TRCs, and they can just as readily specify a minimum online quality as any other requirement, even if they leave specific implementation up to the developers. And most importantly, Sony don't address it! They haven't given any indication when or even if they'll roll out cross-game chat, common in-game chat, cross-game invites, cross-game party creation, etc. They've turned a blind eye to it, and stalled the gaming populace for a couple of years now with their hints at cross-game chat. Thus one cannot look to the current state of PSN and say, "it'll improve," as I used to, because after all these years, these priority services haven't even made it into the paid-for content.
To MS's credit, they have given the gamers what they wanted, though the price seems fairly steep. I think overall if you just like casual online with whoever you happen to meet, PSN works. But if you, like me, bought a PS3 expecting to be able to play one's preferred titles with one's friends without having to meet up round someone's house, it's been a disappointment, and one even questions if Sony will have anything worked out by next gen when their capacity to fumble around is unequalled.
Alkohallick
Newcomer
But again as you agree these are features of the service not actual performance. Now while I agree that some titles on PS3 launch with some of the problems you describe, by no means is the game rendered unplayable online. Just like anything in life its only because you have something to compare it to that gives the impression PSN is rubbish, but is it even a fair comparison to begin with? PSN is and always was free to play online. In my opinion it should be free to play whats labeled as a bullet-point on a game i already paid for. Now the extra "features" of the service is a whole diff issue.
I look at it like this, when i bought my xbox none of my friends played games so i didn't know anybody personally to play with so these extra "features" didn't matter to me. When my xbox rr'd on me, I bought a PS3 and the online features "seemed" the same only for free. XBL wasn't free of lag, didn't have superior voice quality, at that time to me it just cost money.
This is my experience with PSN
I tried to play FIFA 10 online with my brother. We were both online and sending text messages to each other. He didn't know how to get to the correct menu option for us to play together, and didn't know how the lobby system worked. Solution? Call my brother on the phone and explain how to do it, and then stay on the phone until we managed to get into a game together. Game ends, call him back up and do it again.
Playing Little Big Planet with RobertR1 while chatting on Xbox Live. It was the easiest way for us to get organized, and then once we were in, why switch to chatting on PS3?
I also had huge problems with voice chat playing Killzone 2. I have the official PS3 headset, but there were a few things I couldn't figure out. One, it seemed I'd get beeping on the mic all the time, and it pissed me off. I'm not sure if it beeped every time people finished talking, or every time I finished talking, but it seemed to beep a lot. The other problem was with having non-standard headsets, the voice chat quality and volume varied far too much for each player. Some people sounded like they were yelling while others were quiet as a mouse. I'm sure they weren't configuring their headsets properly. Mine was in that HQ mode, which didn't allow me to change any settings, so I'm assuming Sony would make some reasonable defaults. On Live, the general quality is not amazing, but it's clear and sufficient. Because most people are using the standard headsets, the volume level is far more consistent across players.
Sure, the actual peer to peer netcode is probably the same, and I doubt the actual lag etc is any different. After using Live its really really hard to play on a system without cross-game chat, cross-game invites, parties, voice messages, the ability to jump to see what a friend is playing and drop into their game.
For me, Xbox Live is easily worth the money. $50 is nothing to pay for a service that's far and away better than the competition. Would I prefer it to be cheaper or free? Damn right. Until Sony can actual match those features, I'll pay what I have to pay. Obviously there's a limit to what I'll pay. I'm not sure what it is yet.
Patsu is probably right in that I'm invested in 360 now, having a big friends list from NHL and Beyond3D, people I play games with almost every time I'm playing a game. If Sony had realized the importance of the online service earlier, the 360 wouldn't have had such a big advantage for me. Unfortunately they are still lagging.
I'm sure there are people on this forum that think I'm a 360 fanboy, and maybe I am a little, but it had nothing to do with branding. I like the online service and I like some of the exclusives. I'd never owned a Sony or Microsoft console before this gen. Coming from PC gaming, what Microsoft was able to do was provide all of the features I was used to from various programs in the PC space. I'd use ventrilo, Roger Wilco etc all the time when I played with friends, or MSN, ICQ to chat with people while playing games. Essentially Microsoft surpassed the online ecosystem on the PC. The PS3 could have just as easily ended up being my primary console, if they'd had the same features and competitive pricing for online. All in all, this probably just comes down to gaming habits. I have a few friends that hate that they have to pay for Xbox Live, because they really don't do much online gaming. On the other hand, I would say 90% of my gaming is done online in some capacity. I love cooperative gaming.
I tried to play FIFA 10 online with my brother. We were both online and sending text messages to each other. He didn't know how to get to the correct menu option for us to play together, and didn't know how the lobby system worked. Solution? Call my brother on the phone and explain how to do it, and then stay on the phone until we managed to get into a game together. Game ends, call him back up and do it again.
Playing Little Big Planet with RobertR1 while chatting on Xbox Live. It was the easiest way for us to get organized, and then once we were in, why switch to chatting on PS3?
I also had huge problems with voice chat playing Killzone 2. I have the official PS3 headset, but there were a few things I couldn't figure out. One, it seemed I'd get beeping on the mic all the time, and it pissed me off. I'm not sure if it beeped every time people finished talking, or every time I finished talking, but it seemed to beep a lot. The other problem was with having non-standard headsets, the voice chat quality and volume varied far too much for each player. Some people sounded like they were yelling while others were quiet as a mouse. I'm sure they weren't configuring their headsets properly. Mine was in that HQ mode, which didn't allow me to change any settings, so I'm assuming Sony would make some reasonable defaults. On Live, the general quality is not amazing, but it's clear and sufficient. Because most people are using the standard headsets, the volume level is far more consistent across players.
Sure, the actual peer to peer netcode is probably the same, and I doubt the actual lag etc is any different. After using Live its really really hard to play on a system without cross-game chat, cross-game invites, parties, voice messages, the ability to jump to see what a friend is playing and drop into their game.
For me, Xbox Live is easily worth the money. $50 is nothing to pay for a service that's far and away better than the competition. Would I prefer it to be cheaper or free? Damn right. Until Sony can actual match those features, I'll pay what I have to pay. Obviously there's a limit to what I'll pay. I'm not sure what it is yet.
Patsu is probably right in that I'm invested in 360 now, having a big friends list from NHL and Beyond3D, people I play games with almost every time I'm playing a game. If Sony had realized the importance of the online service earlier, the 360 wouldn't have had such a big advantage for me. Unfortunately they are still lagging.
I'm sure there are people on this forum that think I'm a 360 fanboy, and maybe I am a little, but it had nothing to do with branding. I like the online service and I like some of the exclusives. I'd never owned a Sony or Microsoft console before this gen. Coming from PC gaming, what Microsoft was able to do was provide all of the features I was used to from various programs in the PC space. I'd use ventrilo, Roger Wilco etc all the time when I played with friends, or MSN, ICQ to chat with people while playing games. Essentially Microsoft surpassed the online ecosystem on the PC. The PS3 could have just as easily ended up being my primary console, if they'd had the same features and competitive pricing for online. All in all, this probably just comes down to gaming habits. I have a few friends that hate that they have to pay for Xbox Live, because they really don't do much online gaming. On the other hand, I would say 90% of my gaming is done online in some capacity. I love cooperative gaming.
I don't think so.
Even if PSN offers feature parity (in some area, it already is more interesting than 360), the core 360 gamers will only use it as a reason to get Microsoft to lower its price. They are unlikely to switch for a difference of $10 a year.
As a (ex-)vendor, I know customers always want to shop for a better deal sometimes by using one vendor against the other.
Alkohallick
Newcomer
I'd say more like if the PS3 came out before the 360 and at a lower price point. It really does come down to your personal online contacts. If the PS3 came out first and you built your friends list up on PSN, you probably wouldn't care to pay for the added features provided by XBL because you hadn't become used to them.
*Reading that you came from PC don't read into my "you's" as referring to you personally but the general console population. As you stated PC gamers have been accustomed to these features for years.
That's probably true as well. I was a blank slate on both systems this generation. But I didn't buy a 360 or a PS3 until both had already come out, so the early release wasn't an advantage. I really just waited to see which one was going to have the features I wanted, and I really liked what I read about Xbox Live. You're right in that I was used to having cross-game voice chat and messaging at my disposal on my PC through Roger Wilco, Ventrillo etc.
Not at all. If Live! didn't exist, PSN would still be rubbish. Any system that has us repeatedly messing around for an hour to get it working is a poor system! I can also point to similar PC experiences prior to PS3, where trying play online was a disaster, such that we gave up trying. The comparison in this case is my expectations. I expect a friend-based online gaming platform to be design around how players play games and meet up. We need to be able to pass the time while waiting for people to come online, which means playing some games. We need to coordinate when online, which means talking, and preferably as we are playing our games so we can gradually group up. We then need to able to join a game, either lauinching directly into it as a party, or within the game being able to join up in a party and play together, with voice communication to make it an actual group experience. Without voice chat, it's no different to playing solo.
As it is, PS3 struggles by with text messages, where the message is squeezed into a few characters of title because we don't want to break out of our game (sometimes without pause so we die, especially when online), to discuss the plan. home looked like being the pre-game platform, but it turned out to be a bit of a turkey. Sure, maybe it's all lovely now, but they messed us about too many times for me to care now, and haven't effectively communicated if Home provides the services or not. AFAIK Home is now basically a social centre with next to nothing for the gamer. And since then. Sony haven't talked about gamer features for gamers to enable a better gamer experience. Thus the choice is either a paid for service where at least you know what you're going to get, or the freebie which is like a lot of free, open source projects, full of features you don't want, buggy features you use, missing features you want, and with no support!
Alkohallick
Newcomer
So how would you go about sending a text on XBL that doesn't entail a similar process? I sold my 360 early in '09 but if i recall correctly you still need to press the "X" in the middle of the controller to get to the menu for chat, invites, IM's, etc...
I would respond to your entire post but I think we have had different experiences w PSN so no common ground will be reached.
Scott Arms said:
You'll continue to pay for XBL. The price hike is carefully calculated to keep people in. What you'd do if Sony can match or exceed those features may be a different question altogether. You're already way too vested in the platform to jump out.
In your follow up post, you mentioned convenience as a key feature. In my experience, it's always been the case in the US of A that if you do a bit more work, you can get a better deal (in this case, free). Since you prefer convenience over saving, you have already chosen to stay on XBL from day one. Even if Sony releases a cross game chat tomorrow, you will always be able to find other reasons to stay on XBL (e.g., We're already used to how 360 is set up; my friends can't figure out how to use PSN cross game chat).
Yes, we all want Sony and developers to improve the online gaming experiences, and they all should; or they will lose out to
social web gaming, which is a step up from core network gaming; and it's much larger
OTOH, the openness of the platform comes with problems and also more possibilities. some already have rather special and exclusive online experiences. Demon's Souls is the top dog on my list. It uses the User Data PSN infrastructure to "teleport" players' ghosts into my game world in real-time. MAG has 256 player battles. The Resistance series have full featured party platform. FatPrincess started out great, and continues to improve without me paying a single dime. It's easy to take them for granted because they are free.
If you want to stay on PSN, you can also find reasons to be there. e.g., In your original post, you highlighted exclusive XBL games, but there are exclusives on PSN too. PSN and XBL are very different creatures with opposite philosophies. I am not sure if PSN can be a parity of XBL, or XBL can match PSN.
At the end of the day, it's all personal preferences. I don't think a $10 hike will get you to switch if you can't/don't recognize and appreciate their differences from the beginning. Those who may switch are the ones who see the pros and cons of both systems (or don't care). In this case, it takes nothing to join PSN since you already have a PS3. It's more a question of whether you want to stop subscribing to XBL. Then again, you can find XBL discounts right ?
Btw, your voice chat experience may not be headset related. It may be chat server related. This is one area that I think XBL has real value in. The beeping in your headset may be a signal that your voice channel has been switched. It's a headset feature, useful for situations where a bluetooth device is connected to multiple systems (e.g., in iOS4, you can switch between different bluetooth devices for voice output/input). The audio feedback tells you this mic is active/inactive so you won't speak into a "dead" mic.
Gradthrawn
Veteran
The funny thing is you could have done that with the free Silver account!
Those features you just mentioned make all the difference. I don't play online enough to justify a Gold account at MSRP (so I now keep a Gold account via bundles and deals), but this $10 a year increase hardly seems substantial. One could argue percentages, but that's pretty inane given the numbers we're talking about here.
Conversely, unlike many here, I'm actually content with PSN as it is now. Would I like Gold feature parody? Absolutely, but not at the expense of it turning into a paid service (for online play). But maybe that's because I have both? I'm not sure...
Just FYI, it beeps when the mic is on mute, so, no one could hear you.
EDIT
Therein lies the problem. You can pop straight to the message from the 360, making things much easier. No such option on the PS3 (yet, at least). It does remember XMB position, but that's hardly comparable.
I'd like to join in with one of your sessions sometime to see what's going on, though I certainly see where problems could be. Games that support invites from the game that are sent to a user through a message which, when accepted, bring you straight into the game and have an option to join the person who invited you directly (something like Uncharted). Alternatively some of the games have the option to 'join a friend', which is what I typically used in Killzone 2.
I agree that Home is still a missed opportunity. It's pretty cool insofar as that you can launch straight into a game (any game) from there, and you can see what other people are playing. If you're together in a club house or personal space you can voice chat with as many people as you would ever need.
However, if you're not interested in whatever game you can setup in your personal space to pass the time (these days you're starting to get a handful of things like your own pool table, but not nearly enough), things become less useful. And still far too few games take you to the same lobby/party launching from Home, which is a shame. Simplified game launching does not put you in the same session typically. This strongly limits its usefulness.
And in the end that means you're left at the mercy of what the game you're playing supports - if it has the join a friend option that usually makes life much easier. I guess I've been lucky with the games I've played so far. But there's no question that this part of online gaming works better on Live Gold.
EDIT: yes, I noticed the 'go straight to new message when pressing XMB option' as a suggestion on the PS Blog. Would definitely be helpful.
Lesser known but also there is the option to six-way chat on the PS3, with the option to add video. At least for getting organised, that's a fun alternative to the chatbox that hopefully will become more popular once people get the PS Eye for Move.
I agree that Home is still a missed opportunity. It's pretty cool insofar as that you can launch straight into a game (any game) from there, and you can see what other people are playing. If you're together in a club house or personal space you can voice chat with as many people as you would ever need.
However, if you're not interested in whatever game you can setup in your personal space to pass the time (these days you're starting to get a handful of things like your own pool table, but not nearly enough), things become less useful. And still far too few games take you to the same lobby/party launching from Home, which is a shame. Simplified game launching does not put you in the same session typically. This strongly limits its usefulness.
And in the end that means you're left at the mercy of what the game you're playing supports - if it has the join a friend option that usually makes life much easier. I guess I've been lucky with the games I've played so far. But there's no question that this part of online gaming works better on Live Gold.
EDIT: yes, I noticed the 'go straight to new message when pressing XMB option' as a suggestion on the PS Blog. Would definitely be helpful.
Lesser known but also there is the option to six-way chat on the PS3, with the option to add video. At least for getting organised, that's a fun alternative to the chatbox that hopefully will become more popular once people get the PS Eye for Move.
Oh ffs, don't get me started on that !
The beeping wasn't consistent. It seemed to happen randomly, but frequently. Does it beep after you talk if it's on mute? Maybe the mic was picking up noise from the ear piece and causing it to beep, because I really wasn't talking while playing Killzone2, since I didn't know anyone that was playing. Patsu's description seems more likely.
I can pay the extra for Live. I just think it would suck if it kept creeping up. If it was $100 a year, that's a good chunk of money. How high will it go before it stops?
I can pay the extra for Live. I just think it would suck if it kept creeping up. If it was $100 a year, that's a good chunk of money. How high will it go before it stops?
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