By Alec Meer on May 16th, 2011 at 4:01 pm.
Sony had some sort of little problem recently, I hear. Why, someone even claimed that, following a serious security compromise, all of their PlayStation online services had been offline for about six weeks, but they’ve got to have been jerking my chain. There’s no way a major technology firm could allow that to happen, surely. I mean, that would simply be absurd. Absurd.
Things are on the mend now, anyway. Sony Online Entertainment’s MMOs – including Everquest II, Free Realms, DC Universe Online and Star Wars: Galaxies (I wonder if SWTOR will be the final nail in that ever-troubled coffin?) – have ‘only’ been offline since May 3, but have today sputtered back to life alongside PSN.
If you play any of ‘em, you’ll probably be wanting to change passwords and that kind of thing – plus changing any other online service passwords which match whatever you did use for said MMOs (or PSN). Once you’re back in, you’ll find some ‘Sorry, We Screwed Up’ gifts waiting for you, including complimentary game-time and a whole bunch of virtual items. Like a Batman-inspired mask for DCUO. So there you go: Sony gets hacked, and you get to be Batman.
Full details on the Welcome Back freebies are here. You’ll probably wanna log back in fairly sharpish to claim them.
16/05/2011 at 16:06 Antsy says:
I’m shallow and so because EQ2 is hideous I won’t go out with it.
16/05/2011 at 16:11 Rei Onryou says:
Planetside gets no Welcome Back love. I shouldn’t be surprised, but still, with Planetside: Next planned, you’d think they’d want to keep the audience happy…
16/05/2011 at 16:14 Rii says:
I think folks should be looking at Sony’s online debacle less as an absurd saga of corporate negligence to laugh at and/or be enraged by, and more as a warning re: our growing dependence on online services and a sign of things to come.
16/05/2011 at 16:21 frenz0rz says:
You think that its only a matter of time before the machines take over?
16/05/2011 at 16:43 Harlander says:
We’ll be fine until the machine stops
16/05/2011 at 16:44 Rii says:
@frenz0rz
Yes, that is exactly what I said.
16/05/2011 at 16:52 TillEulenspiegel says:
This is why I love services like Dropbox. They give you all the advantages and convenience that an online file storage service can bring, but if they blow up, no worries – you still have all your files stored locally.
Not so much with, say, DarkSpore:
“PERSISTENT INTERNET CONNECTION…REQUIRED TO PLAY. [...] EA MAY RETIRE ONLINE FEATURES AFTER 30 DAYS NOTICE POSTED ON http://WWW.EA.COM/2/SERVICE-UPDATES.”
16/05/2011 at 16:57 Rii says:
@TillEulenspiegel re:Darkspore
And then when EA decides to pull the plug on those servers a year or three down the track they wring their hands about how much money it’s costing them to maintain the game servers. Gee, well whose fault was that? /rolleyes
17/05/2011 at 22:22 anduin1 says:
lost an internet connection for 2 days and everything went to shit in the house, its ridiculous how much I depend on it for almost everything. I mean, I wanted to play some Steam games to pass the time while I couldnt access email or get work done but guess what, errors left and right because steam thought it was out of date and kept trying to update despite clicking “Start offline” and then it so happened that about 80% of the games I have, need steam to be running to work so it was an endless loop of fail. It was a major wakeup call, telling me I need to stop buying games on steam and go back to physical discs again.
16/05/2011 at 16:33 adonf says:
DC Online is Sony ? Oh shit !
16/05/2011 at 16:35 Anthile says:
The real horror is, that I doubt other companies have much better security means than Sony and it’s just that no hacker bothered with them or worse – it already happened and they didn’t feel like telling you about it. Just because you’re not paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you, etc.
16/05/2011 at 16:37 pakoito says:
What free games do PS3/PSP users get? They’re not stated in that webpage.
16/05/2011 at 16:37 adonf says:
Is there a place with useful, synthetic information on all that was compromised, game by game ? For example if I had an Everquest account like 20 years ago, where can I find if my password and bank information have been stolen ?
16/05/2011 at 16:48 Herzog says:
I am not playing any of those mmos. But Sony could do something good and finally supply official windows drivers for their PS3 controllers!
16/05/2011 at 16:59 Rii says:
Why bother when the X360 controller is so superior?
16/05/2011 at 17:04 Dao Jones says:
Except the horrible d-pad, of course. :)
16/05/2011 at 19:39 Herzog says:
@Rii: What Dao Jones said. I currently use a X360 pad (really a good pad when you compare it to the controller from the first xbox :> ), but the PS3 d-pad is far better.
17/05/2011 at 10:11 Kdansky says:
But the PS3 D-pads are quite bad too. They are too hard to push and they have these incredibly annoying ridges that make it look like it’s four disconnected buttons. I recently bought myself an arcade stick. Even a cheap one is way superior to a shitty dpad.
16/05/2011 at 16:49 TillEulenspiegel says:
This is some kind of record, right? No other major MMO has ever been down for anything like two weeks.
I’m a little surprised that hasn’t caused a bigger splash. Maybe it says something about Sony’s games; if it were WoW…
16/05/2011 at 16:53 skurmedel says:
…as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
16/05/2011 at 20:43 Hallgrim says:
Nah, that was years ago, with the NGE.
16/05/2011 at 23:46 Dances to Podcasts says:
WoW in China was down for quite a long time when they switched between local partners and got in trouble with the Chinese government.
16/05/2011 at 16:52 AbyssUK says:
Dear all,
we should all learn from all this, don’t trust any of them with anything personal.
16/05/2011 at 16:54 gorgol says:
Just imagine if the hackers decide to do it again and again till SOE collapses definitively :o I would lawl tbh.
16/05/2011 at 17:28 Heliocentric says:
News flash:
This downtime was in fact an ARG for Introversion’s Subversion. A Sony executive smoking crack in a $100 bill was quoted as saying “Its just like lawn mower man but for real, we even have Pierce Brosnan”. Sony is Introversion’s distribution partner on the game.
16/05/2011 at 17:35 ulix says:
PSN has been offline for ~25 days, NOT six weeks. Just to clarify.
17/05/2011 at 08:25 Fuxalodapus says:
She has nice abs.
17/05/2011 at 22:18 anduin1 says:
45 days free and I still can’t bring myself to reinstall SWG or to even play DC Universe, god I don’t think Im going to ever get another SOE mmo.