Playstation Plus discussion thread - Part deux

They gave a choice out of 5 x PS3 games in Europe I believe in 2011. I agree with Penn though a free game is not warranted this time. It is tough to come up with a good will gesture for such a short outage. Whatever it is should not inconvenience anyone further on top of the outage.

Give the option to accept the five extra days or not would work best for everyone in my situation and I don't think there would be anything anti-consumer in that.

Voucher code for 5 extra days to everyone with PS Plus. To use or give away. Done.

Again though, there is an insane amount of work required to achieve something like that. You're talking generating probably 50m+ individual codes and issuing them out, either via email or a push notification or something on the console itself. You then run the risk of people saying they never got their code, or having trouble entering it. Then you have to work out do you do it for all accounts, including child accounts, dormant accounts etc.

Instead what they did was just blanket extend everyone's membership by five days, because that's what the purpose of such a voucher would have been anyway.

You're not sucking it up at renewal though. You're taking advantage of timing where you can cancel and resub as a new user. And there's no problem with you doing that but you've just been lucky to date that you could utilise that.

The majority of people will just be happy with five extra days as their subs renew in the other 351 days of the year when it doesn't matter. It's "extra work" that you're expecting Sony to do for a tiny percentage of users affected who essentially will be "quitting" PS Plus in a very small window and expect Sony to accommodate them gaming their expiry dates so they can save money - versus everyone else who will just be happy to get a bonus five days.

Again, it absolutely sucks if you're affected. But it's not Sonys problem.

I think you're inferring some form of maliciousness where none is intended by Sony. PSN was down for almost a day. To make up for it, Sony are saying "Here, have 5 extra days added to your membership for free by way of apology!" Which is a very reasonable thing to do.

It's not a case that some people should have to "suck it up" because Sony don't want to do extra work, it's that you're expecting Sony to go to a lot of extra work because the free extra days might have the unforeseen consequence of knocking some people out of a method they use to get a cheaper deal on their renewal. I think that's an unreasonable expectation for what is supposed to be a gesture of goodwill.

Offering vouchers may not suit some users for other reasons. No method is going to suit everyone.

A free five days is generous.

The option was

A) Do nothing - Bad for everyone.

B) Create codes because five free days might inconvenience a small number of users who (legitimately) game the renewal date - an insane amount of work to issue tens of millions of codes in case they p*ss off people who aren't even paying full price.

C) Give everyone five free days automatically - Great for everyone bar a tiny number of people who have been getting PSN cheaper than the majority of users. Easy to implement.

Easy choice.

It would sound mental if Sony came out and said (or even inferred) "Sorry for the outage. Here's five free days but only if you want them, that is. Because we know that some of our users that don't pay full price are banking on quitting PSN in November and we wouldn't want to inconvenience them by giving them free days."

Given the number of people it would have affected (taking into account no. of PS4 & PS5 users, and how most would also have PSN membership), you're talking somewhere around 100m PSN users (I think I said 50m in an earlier post as a guess, but I just googled and it puts it around 100m).

So you would have to generate 100m individual voucher codes (codes not already in circulation too), as well as programming all those codes to be accepted on the store. Then, you have to disseminate all those individual codes to people. Then you'll likely have to deal with an influx of people saying they never got their code, they're trying to put in their code and it's not accepting it etc. You'll probably also have people who weren't aware PSN was down at all and wondering why they got this code, is it a scam etc.

Much easier for both Sony and the user (ie. Not having to manually redeem the code) to just extend everyone's membership by five days. I'm not saying it doesn't itself cause possible problems such as knocking some people out of saving money on their membership in Black Friday deals, but for the vast majority of users this is the simplest and most beneficial way for all concerned.

'Programming all these codes to be accepted on the store' - I mean this doesn't stand up to the slightest level of mental scrutiny, give over!

Nobody is saying they'll have to hire in a new team of staff working round the clock to program it all, but yes, you're talking about 100m+ individual codes to be generated, disseminated and programmed. It's not nothing.

Plus all the customer support on top of it (as you already mentioned). Significantly more work than simply programming '+5 days' on every psn account.

I'd Imagine you'd have to incorporate some kind of block to ensure it can only be done once per account, otherwise if anyone figured out it was the same code (say for example someone doing it for both their account and their child's account who realises it's the same code for both), then what's to stop them putting it in repeatedly and getting a year or more free? Maybe post it on the internet and then loads of people find out about it and do the same. Then who are the people who lose out on not redeeming the code, just the ones who are last to try redeem the code?

It's why just adding 5 days to everyone's account is the simplest and fairest solution. I'm not downplaying the effect it may have on those who time their renewal to BF deals or anything, but I just think the way Sony has done it is the simplest, fairest, least cumbersome solution which negates a wider range of unintended and unforeseen complications. It should also be considered that they also had to do something quickly to make up for the outage not just from a PR standpoint but also to account for the likely millions of people whose memberships may have been a day or two out from needing to be renewed, of which the outage robbed them of one of those last few days.

They'd never please everyone no matter what they did, because with 100m+ users you have so many different variables to try and account for.

I have nothing to do with any kind of software or programming, so I could absolutely be overstating the amount of work involved in some of the suggestions made. But likewise, I think people may also be underestimating that work or the possible issues that might arise from it.

I wasn't trying to get personal. It just seems like a very simple request if you don't know software processes.

Whether a system is simple or not isn't the issue. It's whether the system exists or not. Because if it doesn't it needs to be specced, planned, developed, tested. You need to think of every contingency, what if people's email addresses aren't up to date etc. What if someone doesn't opt out but meant to, now you need another process to go back and change it for them.

And again, it has to be perfect. This can't go wrong for anyone. And every day that it takes to get this done is a day that someone's subscription runs out and now you need another process to give 5 days back to them.

What about an opt out being offered after the 5 days are added?

Plenty of time for players who renew with Black Friday offers to have a choice.

Keep in mind its been stated here its a very small % of players to be accommodated.