It looks like the long outage will soon be over. According to Ten Ton Hammer and Game Politics, the news is that Sony will start to bring up both the PSN and SOE networks any-time-now (TM)
There’s a firmware upgrade for Playstation 3 which will allow users to change passwords and restore some services.
When everything is back at full capacity? Not sure yet, but this is certainly good news for gamers.
A couple of days ago I wrote about the situation where Sony was keeping its SOE and PSN networks down over the weekend which is prime gaming time. In that post I wondered what the average Sony gamer would do. Would they wait out the downtime, or go find something else to play?
I wrote that on the 7th of May.
Since then, Sony has said that it will likely be keeping the PSN network offline until at least the end of May. Considering the PSN woes started a week or so before the SOE problems were recognised that means the Playstation Network will be offline for five to six weeks… at least. Wilhelm portends that it’s likely the SOE network will be down until then as well, meaning a four-ish week downtime, in effect no SOE games at all for the entirety of May. He conjectures that with Sony’s recent financial woes, and some pretty major layoffs, that the SOE network could come back with far less to offer gamers than it had only a couple of weeks ago.
Whether or not that will happen is another matter, but what I want to ask you is what you will do. Are you currently involved in any of SOE’s games like Everquest, Star Wars Galaxies, Vanguard, Planetside or any others?
Are you going to wait out the downtime by doing non-MMORPG activities?
Are you going to take the opportunity to try out other MMORPGs or games?
Are you planning on returning to SOE games, or are you done with them?
Let me know in the comments.
It’s now the US weekend primetime, as pointed out by Wilhelm at the Ancient Gaming Noob, and both the SOE network and PSN are still down. That’s gotta hurt both the company and the players who love the games that rely on both these networks.
I am wondering is if this will have a permanent, negative effect on SOE. Syp has put up a short list of SOE substitutions for those who are missing out on their SOE and PSN gaming over this weekend. A couple of the suggestions include playing Wizard 101 instead of Free Realms and Anarchy Online instead of SWG. The thing is, there will be scores of players looking for exactly these kind of substitutions, and sometimes once someone takes a step away there’s no return. This is going to be a real problem for the long term sustainability of many Sony games.
They really need to fix this, and fix it fast. But I think they already know that.
Ironically, for once I don’t think it will be the game devs themselves being forced to stay up for days on end to solve the problem. This is a network and commercial systems issue, not a problem with the actual game code and systems. It will be the departments that manage the money systems that will be a hive of unrelenting, high pressure full of sleep deprived, caffeine soaked IT guys and programmers.
Spare them a sympathetic thought.