Playstation Plus

[Hollycat]

There are several of us who have this, so might as well make the thread.
Disscuss the best deals, the best free games, and ask for help with specific trophies, m'kay.

On topic: that moment when you buy something and the full bundle for that game goes on sale 50% off the next day.

[Roogle]

What does Playstation Plus do, exactly? What are the advantages of having Playstation Plus over a regular account. I understand that you get access to premium things and some other small things at a discount, but what is the practicality of it?

[Hollycat]

Free games, Huge discounts, special downloading privileges, full game trials, you can backup your data, Access to special betas, free themes and avatars. That kind of stuffs.

[Mirage]

PSN being required to easily back up saved games is some of the worst fucking bullshit i've ever encountered. Just saying.

[krissy]

at night it will update your games so you don't have to wait for updates to download while playing.

which should have been free

the problem with p+ is that if your account gets cancelled, you suddenly lose the ability to play the games you got for free from p+... so... i couldn't ever justify it on my income.

[Hollycat]

At 4 dollars a month, I just cancelled my Netflix since my parents also have netflix and bought P+

yes, there are better ways to backup saves, such as using a flash drive, but it's not just saves, you can cloud data that wont fit on your playstation, up to 500 megabytes. Useless on the 320, great on the 80

[Mirage]

No, actually, you're wrong. You cannot back up your saves to a flash drive. Saves are locked to user accounts, and if your PS3s HDD dies and you need to replace it, you'll be using a different user account even if you give the account the same name as before. All the games you copied out to an USB drive will therefore not work at all on your new user account. Sure, you can copy it back and forth and whatever you want, but when you start the game, the game will tell you "this save file is for a different user account, fuck you and good bye".

So the only way to take a backup of a 2 MB save file is to take a complete backup of your PS3. My PS3 currently has 200 GB on it. Backing up 200 GB is not nearly as convenient as backing up 2 MB. I don't even have an external drive witht hat much space, and if I did, I wouldn't want to spend it on backing up 199,9 GB that I don't need a backup of.

[Roto13]

You can copy some saves to a flash drive. But not enough of them.

PS+ is great if you buy a lot of PSN games. Lots of games go on sale for PS+ users right at launch.

Rumour has it they're going to make PS+ bigger and better and start releasing Vita stuff through it, too, so that would be cool.

[GhandiOwnsYou]

There are certain things that you can argue (easily I might add) that should be standard features on PSN. Autoupdate was one of them to me. It seems like a blatant dick move to go "we can easily schedule this, but we'll only do it if you pay us." The cloud storage is awesome for certain people in certain situations, for most people I guess it wouldn't really serve much purpose other than a thought-free backup or convenient way to move a roster of unlocked street fighter characters to your buddies PS3 for a party. There ARE options to do both of these easily without PS+, you just have to do it manually. The plus account just makes it more convenient. On the otherhand, I look at Xbox Live and think it's total tit to charge you for something as integral as MULTIPLAYER or access to services like netflix, which require their own fee in addition.

The games are where I give it the big bump up though. I can understand a lot of people not getting why you have to maintain your membership to play the games you download, but it's a pretty simple trade off. You get a veritable tit ton of games for a monthly fee, and your collection grows the longer you stay with the service. It's a plus for both playstation and the consumer. The consumer gets a netflix style rental system for games, digitally. Having the games ON your system and pulled from the store gives the consumer a false sense of ownership, it's a rental. But that false sense of ownership will make it difficult for users to justify canceling their playstation + account, because in their mind they would be LOSING games they never really owned. It's a pretty obvious psychological trick, but even knowing it I'm cool with it. If PSN were to instead offer a Streaming app for games instead of allowing you to download the titles then I don't think people would be irritated about it. Problem is they would be paying for the bandwidth for each stream, players would be forced to deal with outages in PSN or their network connection. It works out better for both parties if the games are downloaded one time and held on the users system.

Frankly, if you boil it down you're paying less than $5 a month to collect all these games, and I pay more than that for netflix and get less entertainment value from it. Then you get the extra perks on top of it with sale items (discounted PSN items DO carry over if you cancel your account, it's only the FREE items that don't.) the auto updates, cloud storage, and early access to new games. All in all, I feel like I a lot more for my dollar than I'd expect, and it runs about the cost of a small meal at a fast food joint or a pack of smokes. I've been super happy about it.

[krissy]

whoa did prices go down? wasn't it like 17 bux a month just a little bit ago?

[Mirage]

You can copy some saves to a flash drive. But not enough of them.

PS+ is great if you buy a lot of PSN games. Lots of games go on sale for PS+ users right at launch.

Rumour has it they're going to make PS+ bigger and better and start releasing Vita stuff through it, too, so that would be cool.

Yeah i know. Some games work. None of the games I care about work though, which includes tekken 6, resonance of fate, soul calibur 4 and 5, final fantasy 13 and 13-2, way of the samurai, assassin's creed 1/2/brohood, and a few more that I can't remember right now.

[Roto13]

whoa did prices go down? wasn't it like 17 bux a month just a little bit ago?

That was for three months.

[Hollycat]

All my game saves were backups about a month ago when I switched ps3's so I know you can backup all your saves on a flash drive.

Yeah, P+ has been going crazy lately, HUGE FRICKIN discounts every other week. Check out the 50% off ultimates this week, two weeks ago they had a HUGE AC discount, 60%, and a little while ago they did fallout new vegas addons.
Wait, that last one was steam.

Yeah, it's 18$ for 3 months or 48$ for a year.

[GhandiOwnsYou]

The copyrighted stuff you can't save INDIVIDUALLY. You can still do a full system backup and it will save them. It does prevent you from copying them onto a thumbstick and taking them to a buddies house though, you have to restore the entire system. and I should have noted when i said it was less than five bucks a month, I bought a 12 month subscription for $50. buying month to month or 3 month chunks will be a little more expensive.

[Hollycat]

You can backup individual saves, go into saves, click copy to storage device.

[Roto13]

You can backup individual saves, go into saves, click copy to storage device.

*sigh* Everyone knows how to copy saves. It just doesn't work for most of them.

[Bolivar]

I like how PS+ went from a glorified coupon book, to a "Game of the Month Club," to a ridiculous way to build up your library, to now this (http://www.warpzoned.com/?p=23329). It's been getting progressively more attractive. Shame I'm only gaming on my new PC, but I could see getting it once I come back to my PS3 for the holiday releases.

Question: If you download free games, then delete them to clear up hard drive space, can you re-download those games? Or can you only download what's free for the current month?

[Mirage]

You can backup individual saves, go into saves, click copy to storage device.

I know this. So which games did you move over with this method? Did you actually try to load these games after starting the games? Did they all work? I want a comprehensive list.

[Hollycat]

I like how PS+ went from a glorified coupon book, to a "Game of the Month Club," to a ridiculous way to build up your library, to now this (http://www.warpzoned.com/?p=23329). It's been getting progressively more attractive. Shame I'm only gaming on my new PC, but I could see getting it once I come back to my PS3 for the holiday releases.

Question: If you download free games, then delete them to clear up hard drive space, can you re-download those games? Or can you only download what's free for the current month?

yes you can.

[GhandiOwnsYou]

SON OF A.

....I have personally bought almost half of that list. I bought Infamous 2 LITERALLY three days ago, retail $40.

[Hollycat]

Ouch, I almost bought the ultimate edition online last week. Glad I didn't. the only game I have on the list is just cause2, and now I'm going to go sell it.

[Roto13]

It was a really titty move to lure people into buying InFamous 2 and Just Cause 2 for $20-$30 each last week when they were planning to release them for free this week.

But my PS3 is only now half way through installing those 60GB of free games so I'm not complaining.

[Bolivar]

You can backup individual saves, go into saves, click copy to storage device.

I know this. So which games did you move over with this method? Did you actually try to load these games after starting the games? Did they all work? I want a comprehensive list.

I was under the impression that very few games restricted saves. In fact I remember transferring FFXIII saves between systems last year fine so I was about to call bs... but a weird message popped up when I loaded the save. Maybe the game's been patched and most games do it nowadays... or maybe it allowed me to transfer and use saves because i transferred it between profiles with the same PSN account... you may want to check that out in the future, if moving your saves is a big deal for you.

[Mirage]

Moving saves isn't the biggest deal. The fact that I can't easily back up my several hundreds hours of gameplay in case something happens to my PS3. Hard drives are very far from indestructible. On every system since the dawn of gaming and up until the current generation, game saves have either been distributed in a way that means that no single hardware failure will destroy every single saved game you have(1). On PS3 this not possible on a significant amount of games, and Sony has the nerve to charge extra for something that should be a basic smurfing functionality.


1) Cartridge based games have saves for each game on the cartridge, meaning the failure of a console will not affect saved games. Consoles with memory cards let you save your games on several memory cards for redundancy in case of save medium failure, and the memory card is also independent of the console. The vast majority of PC games let you simply copy and paste saved games to anywhere you like. PC games that require accounts to log in to and have achievements through those accounts are secured by being stored on the game's servers and these servers always have backups, even the ones that don't force you to pay a monthly fee.

[GhandiOwnsYou]

Moving saves isn't the biggest deal. The fact that I can't easily back up my several hundreds hours of gameplay in case something happens to my PS3. Hard drives are very far from indestructible. On every system since the dawn of gaming and up until the current generation, game saves have either been distributed in a way that means that no single hardware failure will destroy every single saved game you have(1). On PS3 this not possible on a significant amount of games, and Sony has the nerve to charge extra for something that should be a basic smurfing functionality.


1) Cartridge based games have saves for each game on the cartridge, meaning the failure of a console will not affect saved games. Consoles with memory cards let you save your games on several memory cards for redundancy in case of save medium failure, and the memory card is also independent of the console. The vast majority of PC games let you simply copy and paste saved games to anywhere you like. PC games that require accounts to log in to and have achievements through those accounts are secured by being stored on the game's servers and these servers always have backups, even the ones that don't force you to pay a monthly fee.

I don't really see the difference between memory cards and Hard Drives, other than memory cards are more likely to get lost and/or destroyed. At least the PS3 (usually) just sits in one spot on an entertainment center. I'd say it was plenty reasonable enough for them to just give a good hard drive backup option.

[Mirage]

Memory cards are lower cost, easier to remove, and flash media is a lot more sturdy and resistant to shock and vibrations than hard drives, as well as not having any sort of mechanical wear like hard drives do. I've never had problems with losing memory cards, and if I did, I would solve that by having my saves spread over two memory cards in case of loss.

Now, on to the backup feature, are you seriously saying that making a 200 GB backup *every time* i want to back up a 1 MB save is fair? Played FF13 for 20 hours, made good progress, back up 200 GB. Next up, Assassin's Creed 2, got halfway, want to back up that save in case of loss, whoa, another 200 GB backup process! Do you have any idea how long it takes to back up 200 GB on a PS3 via USB? We're not exactly talking minutes.

With the ability to freely back up my saves whereever I wanted, this process would take exactly 30 seconds per save I wanted to back up. You're saying a 1-hour long backup process is a "fair solution"? That's 120 times as much time, plus the requirement of having an external hard drive, which is a much higher initial cost than an extra memory card is, or a USB flash drive. I have tons of USB flash drives that each would be able to back up all my saved games 10 times each, but I'm not allowed to because the games software-block me.

If there was a "back up saved game data" option on my PS3 in addition to "back up entire hard drive", I would be satisfied.

[GhandiOwnsYou]

Your only valid complaint is that certain game saves have been locked to your particular PS3. 90% of save games can be freely copied in seconds to any flash drive you want, without necessity to back up the entire system. This means that your righteous indignation lies not with Sony or PS3, but rather with the developers that have created games that for some reason are locked to a singular system. Sony did not create Street Fighter IV's save system, or FF XIII's. While I can understand your frustration at moving these save files around, this is not the fault of Sony or PS3, but rather the developers of those given games who decided to place restrictions on those save files. Can you honestly tell me that we should blame the PS3 and PSN itself for bad decision making from game designers? It's akin to saying the Xbox 360 is a terrible console because Too Human had a horrible control scheme and Xbox didn't respond with a patch to let you manually remap the controls for all games. It's the developers job to make games that work within the framework provided by a console. The people behind the PS3 provided a not one, but two easy ways to provide both full and partial backups. The developers decided to give them the middle finger and lock those games to the systems, supposedly so they could protect the validity of their trophies. Apparently it's far more important to these developers to make sure people are legitimately earning trophies than to allow the players reasonable backup saves.

But again, this is not SONY'S issue, it's the developers.

Edit: But, if someone is genuinely peeved about this whole thing, there IS a third party workaround. http://www.ps3crunch.net/ps3saveunlocker.html will overwrite your save files lock data and allow it to be moved to a new system. It's kludgy and inconvenient, but it saves you the $5 a month and allows you to retain your righteous indignation.

[Roto13]

If I wasn't so lazy, I'd stick a USB drive in my PS3 and see how many of my saves can be backed up. I've tried to copy saves tons of times and it has only ever worked with one game. (MGS4. I guess because there are no trophies.)

[Bolivar]

I had the complete opposite experience, I've backed up and moved and played on different PS3s tons of game saves, the only one I ever had a problem with was MotorStorm Pacific Rift. But when you guys brought up FFXIII it turned it is true, at least on the limited basis I'm presuming, and according to you guys it's a much bigger deal now. I wouldn't be surprised if the move coincided with PS+ inclusion of cloud saving.