When Home Content Breaks
by Phoenix, HSM team writer
PlayStation Home, at this point, should be a fairly well-oiled machine when it comes to submissions and testing: it’s a platform that’s several years old, and most of the major content developers have been around for a while.
So this begs the question: why is it that content breaks in the live environment, if it was properly tested and passed ahead of time?
Keep in mind, I’m no programmer. I’m just a consumer. But it stands to reason that content developed for Home has to go through an internal Quality Assurance process before being submitted to Sony, and then Sony puts it through its own QA gauntlet. In theory, by the time something passes all the checks and gets released into Home, it shouldn’t break. So why is it that it seems every single major content release for Home — for the last few years — has seen errors crop up shortly after release?
Sometimes the errors are relatively minor. Sometimes they’re catastrophic crash bugs. Certainly, major games such as Mercia and Cutthroats are no strangers to the latter group. But how did they get through the QA process? Is there that big of a difference between the development environment and the live environment?
The only guess I can personally venture — and again, I don’t know how Home content is tested — is that there must be something to do with the sheer amount of stress that lines of code get put under when submitted into the live environment, and this sort of stress testing cannot be duplicated in a QA environment. Because no developer would submit something to QA that has catastrophic flaws in the code, nor would such a crash bug pass QA if it was caught.
One aspect to the testing process which, to this untrained layman’s eyes, appears to be of great benefit is the soft-publishing process: when content is released into the live environment, but it’s not on the main navigator nor can anything be purchased. If something’s going to crop up in the live environment, then the only way to test it is to push it live, but in a controlled and semi-limited manner.
As consumers, it is perhaps important for us to remember that we are still using beta software, crazy as that is to believe. This may be one of the largest and longest-running betas in the history of software development, but we nonetheless have to accept that a certain level of broken functionality is to be expected as part of the user experience. That doesn’t make it right, nor is it an excuse for sloppy coding and lax testing, but Home has always been a work in progress. It’s somewhat amazing to look back at how little Home had, functionally, when it was released to open beta; some of the features you would’ve expected it to have right from the beginning didn’t show up for months or even years after the fact.
The reason why Sony’s been able to get away with this is because they have a captive audience: there’s simply no other console-based social MMO alternative to turn to. And no, Free Realms and Final Fantasy XIV don’t count, as wonderful as they are. Had Microsoft deployed its own alternative to Home, the competition might have spurred greater and faster development of new core features, along with a more robust environment that didn’t break as often.
To be fair, however, perhaps there’s good reason why neither Microsoft nor Nintendo ever developed their own versions of Home. If you were an outside observer, studying the mass market reaction to Home as well as all the logistical challenges it continues to face, would you commit the resources and ongoing support necessary to have something like it?
HSM strongly believes in the “bring a problem, bring a solution” edict, so here’s my idea: not only should all content be soft-published in Home for stress testing before it goes on sale, but some sort of in-world feedback system should be set up to allow us as users to report encountered problems. If we are to be beta testers, then let us be beta testers. It’s actually a good community-building move, since it emotionally engages the user in making Home a better place.
And, who knows, maybe we’ll end up with a Home that has fewer disconnections, indecipherable error codes and broken games. That’d be something, wouldn’t it?
August 1st, 2013 by Phoenix | 7 comments
Phoenix writes poetry and is a photography enthusiast, along with writing for HomeStation Magazine. She is currently studying for a BFA in Creative Writing and BA with concentration in Photography. psn ID phoenixstorm21
youtube.com/user/phoenixstorm21
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Looking in from the outside of Home seems to generate a lot of hatred and venom from other gamers, but think about the “consensus” of gamers on Home for a second. Most if them have never even tried the service, and some who did, did so for all of 20mins.
When the developers of Blops slowed down the rate-of-fire for some of the guns the reaction from a lot of “gamers” was an embarrassing one; childish screams of “how dare you”, threads of mindless complaining, some even felt it was necessary to send death threats to the devs via Twitter. And THAT’S the mentality of the majority we’re dealing with here -- immature and spoiled.
So sure, look at the response of the majority to Home as a dev and you’d be forgiven for thinking it wouldn’t be worth it. But really, that “response of the majority” is only a few (very loud) spoiled voices; voices that have no experience of what they’re shouting about.
I absolutely agree there should be better feedback available in Home, if anything I’d like someone to shrink the active slots on a load of stuff I already have! But to be able to give comprehensive feedback on more recent items and spaces would (maybe) benefit all users.
If you think about it x7 is a sort of soft sell area for many of the new products in Home. You can’t access the store there without having bought certain things and that eliminates a lot of people right off the bat. Not all things make it there of course, but I guess it serves a purpose.
We do need an easier way to communicate problems than going to the forum support though. Most beta have just a forum as we do though. Home users just need to start using ours more judiciously than we do. The problem here is that some users don’t own a computer or know how to use the browsers in their PS3 properly. They don’t see it as a computer itself, though it is.
Nice read Phoenix.
Most of the items in X7 are released fully in other regions at the same time and only means NA region waits a week longer for them. Part of the issue is the culture of home, too many users booty kiss or attack developers so no one really knows if they have done right or wrong. A space or item can also be dreadful but can sell because it offers rewards or exclusivity. If you put in to real life situations it’s like eating a cereal that tastes like vomit to get the free toy out of the box. I don’t walk into my local shop and booty kiss or attack them, if they are rubbish I don’t use them again if they do the job I expect I do. Problem is if we vote with our wallets then home ceases to be profitable so if we dont buy vomit flakes for breakfast, there is no breakfast. You can tweet most developers with issues and they will try and sort, peakvox were the only ones I know of that had trouble replying. But if the quality is poor until we get away from the over positive or over negative bias it will never be resolved
As a developer I do not want you to buy my items to support the cause. If we are not creating items that you will use, I would rather you save your money. I also recommend people not spend money on things that crash. It only sends the message that broken is okay.
I know all developers do not agree, but they are likely not fixing broken items or trying as hard as we are not to ever sell anything broken.
Reward quality and developers will make more quality items.
The problem is the buying public is not currently intelligent as a whole. There is a crowd mentality. The crowd does not do what is in its own best interest.
But if individuals behave smartly, slowly the crowd will turn.
I wouldn’t blame a developer for doing what sells. Id blame the people that bought it
The biggest issue here is that in Home you have an opportunity of a week, two at the most to actually sell products. After that the next new thing comes along and your awesome, amazing new items don’t get a look in.
Home is about being the first to have something primarily and if an item is old then there’s no point in purchasing it.
I like to think we at nDreams make quality products. Don’t get me wrong at times there are things that get missed or react differently in the live environment but we try as hard as possible internally to QA our products before they are submitted through to Sony for their QA tests.
When it comes to fixing items that are broken, the biggest issue comes with the cost of the fix vs the amount of money the project has made or not. We aren’t all about making as much money as we can from every product but we need to make sure we aren’t losing money on products. We know that if we spend a few days fixing a product then the cost of just fixing the product will rarely be made back.
I would love everything to be perfect and it’s what we will always aim to work towards.
Thank You Joe,
for that explanation and your time in commenting, it is appreciated.