Update 1.70 – Troll Control!
by Burbie52, HSM team writer
Update 1.70 has come to Home this week, and brought with it many new changes that will add to the social aspects we have been craving. There are added camera upgrades that put the camera under the emotes area of the R1 menu, which will allow us to have both a camera and a companion at the same time. This will give us much more variety in our photo taking; other than that, the controls remain the same.
Developers will also now have the ability to create animating objects for our avatars to wear or use. This also includes the ability for them to make things for our avatars to wear that can enhance the speed of movement in the avatars themselves up to fifty percent. Just think of the possibilities there! Could this open up the possibilities for new dance moves or animations for our avatars at long last? If so, this is one of the more exciting new upgrades and one we have wanted for a long time.
The store interface has been streamlined as well, with the details of the item added to the same screen as the thumbnail picture. A “buy now” function with the square button was added to make it easier to purchase something immediately. Another easy method to continue shopping is with the option to highlight the picture and then, using the triangle button, to add it to your shopping cart. The R1 button will take you to your shopping cart for a quick look at what you have. This is a nice feature, and once we all get used to it I am sure we will be grateful for it.
No more of this!
But the best new thing to come along in the 1.70 update – as far as I am concerned – is going to be a better “block/ignore” function. For as as long as anyone has been in Home, there has been a call for more ways to deal with people who seem to want to make everyone else angry or miserable by being a nuisance. We have labeled them trolls, and there have been countless articles written about them and ways to deal with them.
“Ghosting” was one suggestion, essentially making them turn into an invisible version, like the pre-load avatar. This might not be a viable solution though, so Sony had to come up with one which was. Enter update 1.70, with some amazing new abilities given to us, and it might just work.
First of all, if you ignore or block anyone, the emotes they use will no longer be seen by you at all. It will be like they are just standing there, no more squatting or suggestive obscene behavior. Not only that, but any avatar that has been blocked or ignored will not be able to get up close to you at all! That is amazing to me; it will be like having an invisible wall around you that they can’t penetrate.
Added to that will be the fact that they will be faced away from you every time they try to get too close to you. They will always have their backs turned to you, no matter how much they try to get near you. Another cool feature is that the ignored or blocked avatar will have a label under their name that says they have been ignored or blocked.
The only question I have about this is will that label only be seen by the person blocking or ignoring, or will it be seen by everyone around? If it is the former, it is for your personal information, if it is the latter, it is a great “shaming” device to let all of us know this person is not to be bothered with. I am going to assume it will only be seen by the one who ignored the other person, because otherwise it might be abused by the very trolls who it is meant to discourage.
Will glitching be affected?
There is another new feature that has a sound effect attached to it. When you receive a private message in chat, there will be a sound to let you know. This is nice because at times when you are in a crowd of typing avatars, private messages can get lost in the text box. What kind of noise this will be has not been specified, but it will be interesting to see what they have come up with.
Sony also announced a “number of general stability” improvements to the Home platform. What those are were not specified, but it makes me wonder if even more of the glitching community’s favorite glitches will be taken from them. This has been a byproduct of many of the upgrades in recent times. I hope that one of the stability improvements is going to stop the constant “club chat log” disconnects and boots people have been experiencing lately. This has happened to me more in the past few weeks than in the past two years I have been in Home. What this “general stability” entails, we will have to see.
All in all, I have to say I am glad for many of these improvements to Home. I believe they are a great step forward for us and a very welcome addition to the social aspects here in this virtual society we live in.
September 12th, 2012 by Burbie52 | 1 comment
Burbie52 is a 62 year-old published author and founder of the Grey Gamers group within Home. Born and raised in Michigan, she has lived there her entire life, with the exception of a twelve-year residency on the Big Island of Hawaii. She enjoys reading and writing, as well as video games, especially RPG's. She has one son in his twenties.
Good read as always Burbie. I for one am glad to see this new blocking feature. I think it is going to help greatly in the war against trolling on PsHome. Many of us go thru it and im intrested to see how well it works. Hopefully we will see a decrease in trollish behavior on pshome. All in all 1.70 looks like a winner, its always so nice to get new features on Home dont you all agree.