Home 1.75 — A Growing Concern
by Burbie52, HSM team writer
Patch 1.75 is about to be installed into Home soon. It is being met with a bit of trepidation from many sources. While I am not sure I understand all that is involved with this upgrade, we have been assured that it includes things that will enhance our Home experience, things that we have been wanting or asking for. But we don’t know that those things are — the announcement was a bit vague on the actual details.
I am not one to follow the forums. I rarely go there at all except to report an issue with Home in their support area. I do know there is a loud voice of concern about this week’s path in the forums, but I have also been hearing concerns from my Home friends as well. Here is the statement from GlassWalls and community management:
Hi Home Community:
We’re excited to let you know that we will introduce a new patch in PlayStation Home next week (Home v1.75) and we will be transferring your save data from the PS3 hard drive and onto the Home Servers.
This will generally improve performance and means that your save data will be available should you ever need to reinstall Home or login from a different PS3. Your save data will be transferred from your PS3 to our servers when you first install the patch. This process will only occur once per account and you will be informed that the save data transfer take place via an install message.
Once the transfer is complete, Home will only read your save data from the Home Servers. As such any backup data or saved data you may have on another PS3 will no longer be accessible.
The save data being transferred includes your Preferences, Character Saves and Apartment Furniture Layouts.
The transfer process will not affect your Purchases and Rewards which are already stored on the Home Servers.
Since this is unusual to pre-announce a feature of a platform update, it is to give ample time to our core users who may use several versions of their save files, manually updating them from from a backed up source—this is to let you know to put your main saves on the hard drive prior to launching Home the first time after it updates to version 1.75.
The rest of the official patch notes will be released in the blog the week it comes out. Get ready! There’s never a dull day in Home.
This announcement has been met with a wide range of emotions from people, both those I have both talked to in Home and those on the forums. Many think it will be a good thing, whilst others are very skeptical that Sony will be able to pull this off without a hitch. I have been reading their responses and would like to sum up what their feelings are about this.
1. Many people’s biggest concern seems to be the loss of freedom. We will no longer be able to save more than one version of our personal spaces, or collection of avatars to an outside source. This seems to have ruffled quite a few feathers, and the one space I can think of that will be most affected is Blueprint, as the only way to have more than one furniture placement saved right now is to add them to a USB or external hard drive. That ability will be gone totally. So be sure that your favorite one is in place before downloading this new patch to the system and logging in.
2. More lag or longer load times for spaces. They seem to think that the servers are slower than our personal PS3’s are. Or, the servers may be quite speedy, but some people have miserable bandwidth, which will limit their transfer speed.
3. Since we will no longer have access to the saves, many are worried that if they get a glitch while decorating or any other malfunction, they won’t be able to access and delete the space like they used to to fix it. They will have to contact Sony and have them do it, and the customer service has been less than helpful where Home is concerned in the past. If the glitch that needs to be fixed is repairing a glitched apartment — well, good luck with that. Next time your carefully floated furniture falls, it may just have to stay on the floor.
4. Another issue is the script files being migrated as well. People seem to be afraid that if they get corrupted from a bad source code then saved to the server they may not be able to fix it.
Are we in for a wild ride?
All of these seem to be reasonable concerns, though none of it may come to pass. The problem with speculating like this is that until the actual patch happens is that it only stirs the pot to no avail. No matter what we think or dread about this, it is going to happen; that is a definite. Like Jersquall said in the forums, it is a given that this is going to occur; we may as well just bite the bullet and wait before we judge the results.
The patch is intended to stop some of the ISE hacking that has been going on. It will probably also prevent certain kinds of cheating, such as the well-known exploit that lets you get a nearly infinite supply of Pickories in LocoRoco Island. And, as a side benefit, it will free up a little space on your HDD.
It is also a great thing in that if you ever lose your PS3 for any reason; all you will need to reinstate your account just as you left it is your password. This is a good idea for us — there are many who have never backed up their accounts, and this will help them. They are also hinting at added benefits, but we will all have to wait til the day it happens to find out what those are.
So: just hang on to your seats. The ride next week could be a bumpy one, or it could be a thrilling one; only time will tell.
January 23rd, 2013 by Burbie52 | 15 comments
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.
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This article had to be written, so well done bringing more attention to this Burbie. I’m not going to go on any kinda forum rant here ( I think I did that already anyway) but I’d say the most worrying thing about this latest update (and the massive impact it’ll have on Home) is how quiet Sony are being yet again.
When it comes to stuff like the PS4 their silence is akin to a knowing parent smiling knowingly at their child when they ask about birthday presents. But not here. Not with Home. With Home their silence is more like a policeman at a reception desk who’s blatantly ignoring you because you’re nothing more than a waste of time who doesn’t deserve even an acknowledgment. Least, that’s how it feels.
There are so many unanswered questions about the technicalities of what this patch even means for the end user and ALL of them remain unanswered regardless of the forums being full of questions. Worried isn’t quite the right word, it’s more like I’m in a state of petrified silence.
Of course, having been banned from the network, I’ll just have to sit back and watch the rest of the Homelings deal with any problems that might arise from the changes in the next week or so…
So your ban has a silver lining, at least.
Actually no because the update doesn’t come til January 30 and he should be back by then.
Good read Burbie, here’s my take: we are on Sony’s playground. They make the rules. I give them money and I get virtual product. This isn’t life saving medication, this is an option, though a valued one for many, and for those that like to sit and ride the rage train,Sony, Home and the community that likes/loves Home will still be here. People will always complain about something. ALWAYS. I find that if Sony handed out free $100 cards to everybody, people would still complain that it’s not enough. My point, we’re in Sony’s land and have to take what’s dealt, like it or not, it’s part of being here. I am a huge fan of Home and choose to simply say, let’s do it and if there’s something bad…report it and it may get fixed, may not.But Home is so much more than any one element. In a month no one will remember the patch, the rage will calm and things will be back to normal. Let’s just log in, say ‘hey’ and have some fun, we all met here, and really, none of us are leaving anytime soon.
Are you speculatin Burbie? Because there still no word from Sony about the cloud save being there to prevent ISE hack.
The official statement is still that it will “improve performance” Exactly the same way they once “improved furniture targeting”…
The difference is no one taking the bait this time. You don’t need a master in computer science to understand moving data from a local HDD to an obscure network will never “improve performance”
And thats my problem. Not only are we kept in the dark without any customer services. But when they do release some info it’s sugar coated with lies.
What happened last week-end is what we call in french. “The drop that overflow the vase (bowl?)”
First the annoucement (Sony’s lie) by Glass_Wall.
Second, he add this will only be a problem for a minority of users. Should I need to explain the market value of whales in this business? I think we had it explained in detail before here.
Third: His innapropriate reply to Julie_Love. A long time Home lover who created the Welcome commitee.
But wait, there’s more…
Saturday morning we found out our club furnitures layout didn’t showed up. Sorrow created a thread on the subjet and we were discussing the issue. We we’re worried yes, but agreed this will probably be fixed up monday. Then moderation strikes, moved the thread to support. We see that a lot now.
That reminded me of the F13 problem. Thread at first were quickly locked and deleted. Why they never said at the time they were switching Home to new server still baffle me.
But wait, there’s more…
I don’t expect the management team to log on on w-e. But G_W did. Did he post something like “Oh crap, sorry about that people, I will get you some answers as soon as I can Monday”? No. He kudoed a post about himself…
Sure we had our usual whiner with apocalyptic scheme. But Jersquall too couldn’t hise his concer about home missing a dedicated management. HearitWoW complained about the “no customer services” business model. We saw new faces with articulated arguments. Old veterans coming out the shadows.
Misinformation. Control of information. Absence of accountabilty. Silence when communication is needed. I spent a good part of my life and so much energy to fight that against school boards, company and governement. Moraly, I simply can’t go on like everything is good. I know Home is not a democracy, it’s a business. I’ll take my business elswere.
Jersquall too couldn’t HIDE his CONCERN… sorry…
If history is our guide, Home does not have a good track record with these major changes.
It started at launch, when the servers were so overwhelmed that no one could even log in. I expect similar problems during the massive data migration next week.
It continued during the hacking incident, when Sony released no meaningful information to its customers for a month.
It happens every Thursday, when promised items are missing from the store and performance issues dog new spaces and games.
With that history, and I’m just highlighting bits of it, it should be completely understandable that the community would react with suspicion and concern to a change that affects basic functionality.
To be fair, there should be a performance improvement with the new patch, but it only impacts personal spaces. Since the old model involved uploads directly from a player’s hard drive, and since upload speeds are typically slower than download speeds, loading a personal space will be faster, because we’ll only be downloading from a Sony server.
Other elements of this update raise some real questions. Users have lost the ability to have multiple avatar saves on USB, but they can now buy an extra 24 slots with PlayStation+. That’s not going to sit well with people. Multiple furniture layouts are gone completely. There is no indication of how and when our save data will be backed up, which really ought to be the first thing any cloud storage service communicates to its customers.
I fully understand Sony’s need to end ISE and xPloder exploits. People have been stealing content and sharing merges that are damaging to the service, and they’re well within their rights to store data in any way that they want. But at a certain point, their data storage practices may directly impact the ability of customers to access the content that they have purchased, or to use their content in a manner that they find acceptable. Sony loses a bit of their out in blaming Internet connections or corrupted hard drives when Home stops working, as the burden of data preservation has shifted from the end user to them.
Personally, I want to know that I’ll be able to access what I’ve paid for in the ways that I’m accustomed to using it. That means content doesn’t disappear, game progress isn’t suddenly lost, personal spaces aren’t locked out and furniture layouts don’t vanish without warning. Cloud storage gives me a few more things to worry about with Home that I didn’t need to worry about before. Good customer service would address those concerns now and let people like me know what to expect and what our remedies will be should something go wrong.
I wanted to point out the good news we heard today about the new patch. Guess my post was too long already and I wanted to cut it short. Thanks for mentioning it, and the personal space loading time. Not too sure about it thou.
If only Sony had been honest about the “exploit” prevention. I’m sure there would had much less rants. I know it would had made a big difference for me.
Q? Could this cloud save may be a tryout for the PS4? Another thing that would had please user to know instead of upsetting them.
The exploiters still would have made noise, but then we’d know who’s who. Yes, Sony should have been clearer about that…something along the lines of, “We’re getting ripped off, so it turns out we need to lock things down a bit more.”
As for the cloud, once everything’s there the only thing that’s keeping Home from running on a PC or the PS4 is network access and a controller. I’ve speculated in the past that Home could move to the PS4 in its current form like this.
How about releasing long-requested features such as expanded wardrobe save slots and hair colours to PS Plus subscribers only?
Are long-time, high-spending Home users typically subscribers of the Plus service? How many of these Home whales will add a Plus subscription to their already substantial Home budgets? And should they be expected to do so in order to obtain access to new “core” features?
Count me out.
I still don’t think this is as bad of think as everyone is making it out to be. If people are so dang worried about the ise stuff (correct me if I’m wrong here) but that stuff is displayed in either “My purchases” or “My rewards” so, sorry to break it to you but that stuff is on the sever already and I but they aren’t so dumb that they see audi gear in a NA account & know it’s ise and if people get banned I’m sorry but I think the community is full of enough “big boys and girls” to know that they have to face their actions. (or the actions you paid some other guy to do)
Great article Burbie, I think Sony’s lack of communication skills make people crazy, and when something like this happens we get all bent out of shape. It seems to me 1.75 is a natural progression in Home, and not a bad thing.
I don’t care for the plus thing, I feel that kind of cheapens the whole thing by introducing a class system, but that’s just my feeling.
This core update just brings home in line with other social applications, which nearly every other one is cloud saved, and every other one has all access passes or VIP membership functions far in excess of what sony have introduced. Can the servers handle it, if the right equipment is there it can, the ps3 can handle it, your bandwidth might not though. Can it be successful, it is outside of home. just have to sit and wait.
Spoken very well Burbie,
I hope none of the negative thing come to pass, but what can you? I am curious about the extras are.
Why worry about something we can not control. We will just have to wait and see. If it turns out that patch is worse then the problem then complain. I personally have never backed up my PS3. I am a bit slow on those things.
Thanks Burbie for the insight!