by Jin Lovelace, HSM team writer & filmmaker

The exact words that came right out of my mouth when I read the announcement of this week’s Home update was something along the lines of, “Really? Home is implementing trophies!?”

If this doesn’t make any sense to you at all, don’t worry; it didn’t for me. In a year of Home’s uncertain and shrouded direction, Sony’s bulletin regarding the 1.86 core client update surprisingly came with mixed feelings, mostly due to trophies finally making their way into Home. I’ve always argued that Home wasn’t a game, and gave the lack of the trophy system as an example to the debate.

It came off as a bit of a surprise for me because I just don’t know — at all — what there is to do to achieve the prestigious status in a social construct. I mean, does Home need such a system implemented into Home at this time? Is it actually too late for this sort of feature? And if so, what advantage does Sony see in this feature implementation — particularly since, according to SCEA’s Paul Sullivan, none of the trophies technically require financial investment in order to acquire. Since Home itself is free, that’s quite remarkable.

After several thoughts on this, it boils down to one of the few things that’s been missing for quite some time: engagement.

As always, rolling out a new feature is walking the tightrope of dramatically enhancing the service or bearing the wrath of unintended consequences. Example: Home is a social application, so we desire more to do inside it, but an enormous risk was taken when Home shifted directions from being a social gaming platform into a full-blown games platform, with (at best) mixed results for the third-party developers who incurred the brunt of the financial risk.

But lets look at this from a different perspective: for the users who do enjoy in-Home games and play them consistently, would you desire some award system rather than receiving generic T-Shirts that you would instantly throw away into your storage, never to wear again? This integration may very well be worth it for those who have, for instance, logged in over fifty hours of gameplay time in the Konami Penthouse’s Dance Dance Revolution game.

Let’s also address the possibilities of reviving some of the dead spaces in Home. Can you imagine just how much traffic the dreaded David Guetta World public space would have if you were to perform some of the tasks there and receive a trophy? How about traversing to the Playground to play a game of HORSE and acquire a few bronze trophies? Something like this can regenerate public interest again, while reviving some of the older and less active public spaces.

While I see trophies potentially reviving the engaging experience that has lacked for quite a while now in Home, we don’t even know — at the time of this writing — the trophy list for Home, and which ones that will be unlocked upon update. But the mixed emotions come in the purpose of the system integration. I just don’t know whether or not if I can muster myself to say this was needed at this time, though it isn’t to say this was a bad idea. There is a lot of potential for the Home trophies, and again, it boils down to what the actual offering entails. Frankly, anything that attempts to reinvigorate the existing user base and — more critically — attract new users is much needed.

Among everything else that will come with the 1.86 update, here’s what else is to come. Patch notes:

Trophies
· Trophies have been added to Playstation Home. Some users may find they earn trophies when first logging in after the patch. The list of available trophies can be found within the Trophy Collection option on the XMB. 

Mute
· An option has been added to mute sounds made by other players’ portables. This option can be found in the Portable Item Settings menu on the Safe Screen. The safe screen can be accessed at any time by pressing Select.

Bug Fixes
· A number of bug fixes and general stability improvements have been made.

Aside from the new mute option, I’m definitely looking forward to what bugs will have been fixed. Sony is notoriously tight-lipped for being specific on bug fixes, but given the rise of more egregious and flagrant malicious user behavior in Home, hopefully some of this is being addressed.

At the end of the day I’m still a bit skeptical about this one. Not to be a Negative Nancy about this — as I’m sure a lot of players will find this to be a cool feature, which it is — but I guess we’ll just see what happens when the client goes live. Here’s hoping for the best.

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