Comments on: No place like Home

By: Pete

Pete — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 04:13:45 +0000

“But does that 50 bucks a year pay for a better online session? I do know my 360 connection is a lot faster and smoother than the PSN one.”

Define what you mean by “your connection.” When downloading, or when playing a game? When playing a game, the speed of the connection depends on you and the other players: it’s a peer-to-peer connection once the ‘matchmaking’ servers hand you off into the game. Your $50 isn’t impacting that at all. And anyway, for actually playing games with others, PSN has been just as good as XBL for me (though I’ll admit I very rarely play console games online. LBP sometimes, Motorstorm every once in a while, Tiger Woods on XBLA once in a blue moon).

If you’re talking about download speeds (downloading games or videos or whatever) then I’d point out that I can download stuff like this from the internet plenty fast without paying an extra $50/month to anyone.

I’m not debating that XBL is a lot faster that PSN to download from. But I think if a company is SELLING you content via direct download, it is their responsibility to offer sufficient bandwidth to make that a quality experience.

The fact that Sony falls on their face in this regard doesn’t suddenly make it great that MS charges $50 for what we should get for free. If the Steam service throttled its bandwidth unless you paid a $50/year membership service, would that be ok?

The last time I paid for gold membership, for my $50 I spent about 20 minutes playing XBLA online over the course of the year. That’s $2.50/minute to play. Then I got access to some demos I guess (my XBox 360 was broken for most of the year so I didn’t do much downloading, plus my hard drive is so tiny I don’t have much room on it). Now I need a gold membership if I want to watch Netflix, and I have to pay Netflix as well. This bandwidth never touches MS’s servers. It goes from Netflix’s servers to my XBox. Why require a gold membership for that?

If you spend 100 hours/year playing online, then $50/year is trivial. But I was talking about my personal feelings, and to me, $50/year is a terrible value. I could pay monthly (and just sign up when I want to play online, or get a “Gold Only” demo), but the cost goes way up doing it that way. Or I could stick to PSN and just d/l stuff overnight while I’m sleeping. It’s inconvenient, but its free, and I’ve never died from having to wait until the next morning to play a demo.

Really its more the principal of the thing than the actual money. *shrug*

By: DM Osbon

DM Osbon — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 02:22:12 +0000

@ Grid – I agree, am happy to pay Â£2.90 a month for a much better online service in the XBL.

By: Grid

Grid — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 19:19:30 +0000

But does that 50 bucks a year pay for a better online session? I do know my 360 connection is a lot faster and smoother than the PSN one. If a dollar a week is what gives better service than I am all for it.
I tried to play around with HOME today and just gave up in frustration. It seems everytime I went to a door I had to wait for a download that took way way too long for the small amount of data that was coming down and I do agree about the avatars. I could not get one close to my appearence.

By: DM Osbon

DM Osbon — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 17:27:20 +0000

I thought that I had aleady picked my favorite in the PS3 & surprised myself by how much I’ve fallen into the 360 world. I can understand that owning a console that ‘fails’ on a regular basis would put you off – I just hope I never have to experience that one!

If I had a blu-ray player before my PS3, I doubt I would have gone for it at all but that’s based on hindsight.

By: Pete

Pete — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 15:06:15 +0000

@DM, my feelings about the 360 might be different if I hadn’t been a launch customer. My first one was really, really loud, ended up breaking (and not a red ring, so that repair cost me $100) and I was without it for a month. My second one was still pretty loud and started freezing up randomly, so I had to send it back, too (though that second repair was much faster, about 2 weeks). Happily it was still under repair warranty so that didn’t cost me anything. My third one is quieter, but not as quiet as my PS3, but by then I’d already picked my “favorite” of the two, if you know what I mean. (I also prefer the XMB to the 360 interface when I’m streaming videos or watching movies – the PS3 is my main DVD/Blu-Ray player.) Add to that years of paying $50 for online functionality, and my general dislike of all things Microsoft, and I choose the PS3.

But not to the extent that I’ll turn my nose up at a great game like Fable 2 just because its on the 360.

By: DM Osbon

DM Osbon — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 11:45:51 +0000

i’m the opposite of you then, Pete. I prefer the 360 experience over the PS3 & I find everything that is PS3, ‘sterile’. The 360 has more warmth to it for me…

By: Werit

Werit — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 18:06:02 +0000

I never understood this either. Walking an avatar around is a pretty crappy interface to ‘get things done.’ I’m just not sure what the use of it all is.

By: Thallian

Thallian — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 17:53:30 +0000

yaiks… I was kinda hoping this would be a neat thing. Even though I have no ps3 I like to hear that advancements are made… but that doesnt sound like advancement.