A Waning Interest
by Jin Lovelace, HSM team writer & filmmaker
I try not to ever dwell on the negative about Home. To me, it’s a better use of time to simply login and partake in all the activities I enjoy. In the past, I couldn’t wait to get on Home to enjoy what the virtual social MMO has to offer. That’s starting to change, though — because of malicious user behavior.
This month I celebrated my birthday, and was interested in hanging out with a few friends, purchasing some virtual goods and generally having a good time before heading out into the real world to party. Normally, my friends and I would choose which public space to meet at. We would hang out, converse, show off fashions and have a good time. If we meet anyone new and worthy of our time, we would connect and go from there.
Hanging in public areas is a major highlight of why Home is so special to socially-minded gamers who gravitate to it. And we all have various hangouts we enjoy. Most of my activities centered around the Konami Penthouse or the SingStar VIP spaces (when it existed at the time). Heck, I even gave the Hub a chance to be a solid hangout area.
Nowadays, though…I find myself in a personal abode a lot more than usual, or just logging in for a good few minutes to work on fashion projects. Then I log off in favor of catching up with real-world endeavors or a very long library of games.
The problem is this: a growing number of Home users manipulating and breaking the experience via access to files that no consumer should have. There is even a web page that advertises itself as a “Home hacking community”. This page went the extra mile to provide premium “services,” ranging from renting a DNS server to actually owning one for life, with the intent to prevent users from being frozen for the duration of their time in the MMO. Not only this, but they gain access to a slew of features that aren’t available to the average Home user, the popular one being able to adjust your avatar’s height on the fly.
Why does Sony allow this to persist?
Home “hacker” making her female avatar appear larger than normal
This isn’t a bunch of innocuous glitching, nor is it the usual handful of people who figure out which items cause memory leaks and freeze public spaces which they consider their “turf.” This is becoming a widespread issue which is affecting nearly every heavily-trafficked public space in Home. Worse, it adds to the pervasive dread that nowhere is truly free from this infestation. Further, it doesn’t help alleviate the situation when you have said hackers perform these actions and then gloat about it on social media sites or Home community groups that support them.
And so I ask again: why does Sony allow this to persist?
Sony’s not very good at community-facing communication when it comes to Home. Cutthroats, for instance, was recently fixed after months of public outcry. Not one word of acknowledgement from anyone at Sony that the problems existed, or even a general statement as to investigating solutions. Even if we give them the benefit of the doubt that the fix took months of work, how much revenue was lost just from the silence?
The same applies to this issue. In the past, when malicious user behavior that destabilized Home got too pronounced, Sony would quietly patch the problem. It was never known if any users faced any disciplinary action. Nor is it any real secret that Home’s profitability is driven by a comparatively small percentage of the overall user base. It’s easy to assign a problem a lower priority if it doesn’t affect a sufficient percentage of monetizing consumers. But this issue cuts across all of Home.
And yeah, people are going to start asking questions. When there’s zero meaningful communication on a subject (and, to be fair, there’s probably a lot that can’t be said due to whatever various legalities are involved), it’s hard to tell if the issue’s being quietly worked on or if it’s simply being ignored. Does Sony care enough about Home to want to devote resources to fixing this issue, or does Home have no long-term future (another question Sony’s remained silent on), in which case something that drives monetizing users away allows Home to die a “natural” death rather than Sony being seen as the bad guys by pulling the plug?
Given the lack of answers from Sony to these questions, I’m forced to ask a question of myself: is PlayStation Home still fun for me any more?
Fun is still had, yes, but the more and more I see these hacks running rampant and unchecked in Home, disrupting users and potentially damaging hardware, the more my gaming library looks like a better alternative. I personally try not to let it affect me much because I believe that, overall, Sony will fix these issues soon. However, I’m very concerned over the effect this issue has had on Home.
HSM has an ironclad rule that if you bring a problem you must bring a solution, so here’s some feedback:
For users: don’t modify your DNS settings. Don’t sign up for some sort of premium protection service from a user group. Don’t give out your personal information. You’re exposing yourself to some potentially severe repercussions.
For developers: it pains me to say this, but as this issue potentially affects your bottom line, you may wish to follow the example set by Lockwood, LOOT, nDreams, Digital Leisure, Heavy Water and Juggernaut by shifting development resources away from Home. At this point in the platform’s lifecycle, it’s blatantly obvious that any developer which is still nearly or wholly Home-centric with its business model is in a bad position. Heck, the Great PSN Outage of 2011 taught that lesson.
For Sony: to my knowledge, this is the first time malicious user behavior has been so widespread — and so debilitating — that it genuinely threatens the health and viability of the platform. If fixing/patching this is not a top priority, it really needs to be. And it needs to happen soon. Moreover, if and when such a solution is deployed, it may be worth offering some sort of publicly visible acknowledgement that those behind such malicious action were in some way punished.
Personally, I hope to see this issue resolved soon. I can always find other activities if nothing is done to resolve this problem and it becomes too severe for me to risk my console hardware in further attempts to enjoy Home, but that means giving up a platform which is a wonderful tool for creativity and enjoyment. Hopefully it won’t come to that.
February 1st, 2014 by Jin Lovelace | 8 comments
Jin Lovelace is a machinimist and team writer for HomeStation Magazine, as well as the founder of Twilight Touch Inc. -- http://twilighttouchinc.com and http://youtube.com/twilighttouchinc. When not found in PlayStation Home, Jin studies graphic design and illustration (character design and fashion), gaming, and the culinary arts.
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Good point Jin. Sometimes, “pushing boundaries” is human nature. But I have seen more things like this on Home myself. I have a few ideas/suggestions for Sony myself; maybe I’ll consider submitting an article.
Who knows, possibly Sony is reading things such as these. Great article, and a nice friend.
When I spoke to a Sony rep on the phone last week, she assured me Sony is working on the issues but that the first priority is protecting Sony servers. I got the impression the problem is like trying to bail water out of a boat, but there’s still a hole in the boat. Perhaps another massive shut-down would help in the long term, with every single user having to verify their PSN account with a valid name/address/phone number in order to be allowed back on PSN. I can think of a dozen users, mostly hackers, some with as many as 16 accounts EACH (that I know of), who would be weeded out. Whatever happens, I miss the way Home used to be and I don’t think it will ever be the same way again. The world is virtual but the hurt in my heart is real.
Having 16 accounts isn’t the issue in my opinion. It is the ISE hacks that go on without retribution. The people who are constantly ruining our time on Home. I wrote about all of this just last week. Glad to see others share my concerns.~*Sue
Happy belated birthday. What your saying is so true, so many users I know are using home less, the malicious users, the broken spaces and the lack of new stuff to do is slowly destroying home. But a lot of side effects of some of these malicious users actually make some of homes figures better. higher psn figures, more users and visits to home and it’s spaces, duplicate purchase. So if they sorted all these issues would it cause viability problems for home in regards to user base.
I’ve only been dipping into Home for the Challenges now really. Thing is, the people using ISE don’t really bother me, if you wanna cheat your way around things in life then have at it, I’m not here to judge -- I wouldn’t be part of it myself but I don’t force my views on anyone either. The “hacking” (heh, also known as reading a website and following instructions) don’t really bother me either, except those times it freezes my machine. That’s unacceptable I’m afraid and I will not use software/applications that could damage my hardware -- it’s very simple.
Sony never speak. So I just do the British thing and rather than complain to try and get the standard I want, I simply don’t go to or use the service involved. Again, very simple. If Sony can’t give us feedback on what’s going on then I don’t have any motivation to do so either; so when Home finally dies we can all sit around on our hands and not have a clue as to where it all went wrong. FANTASTIC!
Good read Jin, thanks.
Recent updates, they just seem to be taking the easy route and pandering to those that want a new suit every week. Challenges are devalued by the prizes, queues and repetitive nature. There’s nothing groundbreaking. I’m starting to think that these users that use those methods are having more fun they I am on home. Home has a certain amount of attention seeking involved in it and those users are certainly getting talked about more than any genuine user.
i know you dont like this to happen but exploiding home dosnt harm anyone
there are people missusing the grow ability to freeze
but not everyone is like that
and most people dont over use it or dont use it at all
and to calm you down everything got patched even
the ability to grow
even the hackers them selfs or in other words the exploiders didnt liek the fact eithr that they had found the grow thing
one of the ownsers of these hacking sites even
made a topic with a message to sony to patch some things up since people were abusing it
and well everything got patched and encrypted
so there will be no exploiding anymore for a while
btw you will never know when they afre around some people just show there selfs in public whats dumb and some do it un noticed
and hide in the crowed and chat
What you’re telling me is to understand that not everyone who has these features that aren’t meant for them to have publicly online, in an open forum and to utilize said features aren’t as malicious as what I make them out to be.
No, I’m sorry but I 100% disagree with you. If you have these features enabled and you perform these acts on Home, regardless of your intention at all, you are breaking the ToS. That is fact.
If they wish to gain access to said features, they can always fill out an Application for SCEA and hope they are hired by them. Then if they wish to abuse the features, then that’s the Company’s problem. The Home users, including myself, shouldn’t have to suffer at te hands of these bozos that’re running rampantly around discovering these said feats and use them to tehir discretion openly just because they can.
No, I don’t and won’t buy that statement.