fnook played PlayStation Home

yeah i was an alpha tester also. Honestly, HOME is not at all what i thought it would be. I thought it would actually integrate the PSN and everything. It's cool that they are trying to build an online community, but without any real reason to go there, im not sure i really see the value in HOME.

I know that eventually SONY wants HOME to be the staging ground for gamers to group together and form parties so that when they launch a game, they all stay together. Now while this is technically feasible, they just haven't implemented it. You may have noticed that even simple GAME LAUNCHING is a feature that comes and goes as the product continues through it's several development phases. Warhawk was the first game to have launching featured through HOME. I'm not completely sure if that's even still functional anymore, simply because voice chat in HOME appears to be fairly broken again. With the 3 of us gathered in my personal Summer Home space (which I got to keep for free because of the ALPHA), 2 of us could speak and be heard just fine, but the 3rd person could neither speak, or be heard even though they had a mic.. So.. Verdict.. Voice chat = still kinda broken.

Again, I still think there's some cool potential for HOME. I wanna see where this eventually leads to. But for now.. It's a clunky, mostly boring environment, with a lot of very rude people lurking around. In it's current form HOME kinda brings out the UGLY side of gamers..

I agree with you, fnook. I tried HOME and just didn't like it. Mostly, I was bored out of my skull...until I wandered out of my house and noticed a lot of very rude people. Then, I decided that I had no desire to be there, left and haven't gone back.

yeah i think that home is still just kind of a useless thing at this point. Hopefully they can get it worked out where it is an organic extension of the gamin/psn process.

This brings me to my point about how HOME in particular seems to bring out the severely UGLY side of gamers. It's like 1 giant, drunken, costume party, where a lot of people figure they can get away with wholly unacceptable social behavior. I honestly can't see why any female gamers would choose to have a female avatar in a public place. I've heard and seen some of the most VILE behavior in HOME by users than I have in any other video game environment.

If Obi Wan Kenobi had anything to say about HOME, he would say;
"HOME is a wretched hive of scum and villainy"..

you know you bring up a good point. My girlfriend made a female avatar for HOME and she went out into the common areas and it was like harassment hour at the smut clinic. She was on for about 5 minutes and bagged it cause all of these guys were just hassling her. It was crazy! To all you boys out there who have nothing better to do than accost virtual woman in public domains.... put down the controller, go outside and get a girlfriend.

sheesh.

Exactly. That's what happened to me. Unfortunately, I've gotten comfortable with female avatars in MMOs because everyone nowadays assumes I'm a guy playing a female. So, very rarely do I get harassed, anymore. (Back in the old days, though....whoo boy!)

It's weird that it's not like that in HOME. I guess since it's not really a game but more of a social gathering place, they assume that everyone plays their own gender? Maybe?

Arislyn-
I actually had a female character in WoW. Anyone who new me in the WoW community new i was a guy, but I was genuinely surprised at how (initially) much flack i took (harassment, etc.) Course it was always funny when the perp discovered I was a dude. LOL! it was worth it for that, but still. It made me appreciate some of the shit that woman have to deal with in all aspects of life. Fortunately as the game evolved, that became less and less of an issue, as it did for you.

Heh! Yeah, WoW harassment was nothing compared to what I got back when I played EQ. I still remember some guy wandering up to me my first day playing, getting as close as he could (to focus on my oh-so-hot polygonal mammaries, I assume) and then proceeded to try and cyber with me until I got so fed up that I logged off.

Well... MMO's have been around in the PC space for years now. And I think the general population in PC MMO's are people who too, have been playing MMO's for years. So there, you wind up with a population of users who will actually behave in a generally acceptable manor. Now this is just simply NOT SO, for consoles. Consoles have NOT HAD the luxury of a long history with MMO's, and since HOME is FREE to use, it ends up getting every Tom, Dick, and butt-ferret that comes along who has absolutely no idea what is and is NOT acceptable.

I'm not trying to make excuses for others' behavior in HOME. But i do see a logical link to why there appears to be so many *^%$^-tards running around in there. Just simply because the console user population is NEW to the whole online social network/MMO style game environment.

oooo... thats funny and creepy at the same time. Fortunately, most MMOs have reporting systems built into them now so you can do something about that kind of activity...
...which, coming back to HOME, probably wouldnt be a bad idea for SONY to install.

You have a good point, fnook. I hadn't considered that.

Most of my PS3 friends don't venture into it because there is nothing to do and only limited game launching support. I have a clan club house and I think people use it like 2 times a month for warhawk events. Great idea, but sadly not implemented correctly. Seems to come down to Sony not putting enough people and money on the project.

I poke into HOME every rare now and then. I did at the end of Xi to experience that whole thing before they took it down. It was a neat idea. But I agree wholeheartedly that Sony needs to really find a better implementation for the system. Right now there's just really so very little reason to even go through the time to load it up. It's just a bloated 3D IRC right now. If you want to interact there are so many easier ways to go about it. It just doesn't feel like an organic go-between from real life to games as Sony had hinted it would be. I still have hopes for the potential it holds but if Sony just leaves it as is with only adding new game spaces here and there it will never be anything more.

In a lot of ways, I feel like LittleBIGPlanet has been FAR more successful at being a networking gamer social tool than HOME has been able to achieve, even without trying to be. Here's what I mean, point form:
- grouping people together in a ready room so that they're all together in, and out of a play area
-Easy way to meet new people randomly
-1-click-join your friends when they're in a game.
-Well implemented voice communication *STANDARD*
-Well planned environment that always gives users SOMETHING TO DO even when they're waiting for their friends to join.

Now I know HOME is FREE, but considering how much interest Sony is investing into the product, it's rather odd to see a single retail game achieve everything they're trying to do, in such a smooth and efficient manner. Heh.. Maybe MediaMolecule should have been the devs dedicated to the HOME project.. O_o

I concur, LBP has some excellent community features that the PS HOME team should look at to get some ideas as how they could better the program. Also LBP seems to have a much smaller community of total tools, so there's that too :P

So HOME went live after all? I heard nothing but people raving about it ages ago, then silence... I though it had just run its course as a fad.

As has been pointed out thought, communities on the PC have been around for ages, we have a set way of doing things and weeding out the idiots. Consoles, thier communities haven't had the experience the PC has (even though som eof its users are PC/Mac users who have).

One of the reasons I never renued my Xbox Gold sub was because the chat room sin games where amature hour for all A-holes, which didn't encourage me to talk back to them (just wipe the floor with them in game). Once you get past the profanity, they didn't have anything worth listening too anyway.

This seems to be the case with HOME too. In fact, from what I've read here, it seems like a poor mans 4Chan (And when I say poor, I mean weak).

As a FREE service, HOME looks FANTASTIC on paper. But without a solid structure or purpose, HOME seems like it's being victimized by it's own unruly user-base. Don't get me wrong, I think HOME brings a lot of BRILLIANT a new ideas to the table, and is taking BOLD new steps in user communities where consoles have never gone before. But.. And this is an elephant-sized BUT... If your users feel harassed or unwelcome, or uncomfortable, and like they want to leave within the first 20 mins of being there, then you very seriously have to have a good, long, look at how things are progressing, and what needs to be fixed about it. >_<

I think you nailed it with your first point there -- HOME lacks purpose. There's so many things that it can do that it's heading towards being a jack of all trades and a master of none. Unless the development team can give it some structure it has nothing to build from.

Beyond that it really needs some sort of real way in place to report and take action against troublesome accounts. I think that comparing it to 4chan is pretty accurate in that regard.

I think PlayStation Home is a useless virtual doll house. Having some virtual apartment, watching commercials in a virtual world, and playing some sill arcade games is not why I bought a PS3. If I wanted to play the Sims I would. Also talking about the Sims does anybody remember the Sims online? That's what home is, except with less personality and in 3D. If my memory is correct that game crash and burned big time.

I almost wonder if one of Home's biggest shortcomings besides being a personal space for the most deplorable people to get their jollies, is that it is trying for the lifelike avatars instead of a more stylized appearance, a la Miis or the XBL Avatars. Yay, you can make your character look very close to your actual appearance, but at the same time it increases things like load times and rendering and for an online thing, that makes the system more of a hassle to get into than anything else. Wait a minute or so to load your personal space, pull up the PSP, tell it to go to the Warhawk space, wait another minute or so, and all this after loading the program, connecting to the net, blah blah blah.

The characters also really seem like soulless robots wandering around. Live Avatars are about as fruity as you can get and all have the exact same personality, but at least they have some idle actions like shifting weight, looking about, etc. And when a Home character sits down? Yikes. I think if you merge the look of Live Avatars with the Home spaces you could have yourself something that's more interesting to more people and, as has been stated, integrate more game launching and mock maps so that strategies can be drawn instead of just having a Home space for game promotion, Home could be a relative hit.