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 smurfing bulltrout 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, smurf 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.