Calendar Bug Disables Older PlayStation 3 Models 342
JohnWilliams writes "The Sony PlayStation Network appears to be inaccessible to older ('phat') PS3 units. Players cannot play games that require a connection, even in single-player, offline mode, e.g. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Also, the system date resets to January 1, 2000. Sony is 'looking into it.' Speculation abounds that it is a bug related to 2010 being incorrectly flagged as a leap year. The newer PS3 Slim models seem to be working properly."
Re:HA! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a bug. And it's not because of any kind of DRM system with the bluray games. It's because of the trophy system:
It's the same story for other games that feature dynamic trophy support.
Re:HA! (Score:3, Insightful)
I hope Sony gets sued to absolute oblivion over this. Not being able to play games you have paid for is abso-fucking-lutely un-acceptable for any reason other than your console being physically broken.
Jesus fuck. Suing over temporarily not being able to play a game? The "sue everybody" mentality really has gotten ridiculous.
All these goddamn DRM schemes that backfire and companies never learn.. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my DRM-free games and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone!!!
What does it have to do with DRM? Calendar bugs have been a very common part of the computing landscape for many years.
Re:HA! (Score:3, Insightful)
I hope Sony gets sued to absolute oblivion over this.
Jesus fuck. Suing over temporarily not being able to play a game? The "sue everybody" mentality really has gotten ridiculous.
Thats why I dont want to live in the US. Instead of solving problems like civilized people everyone sues right and left and demands millions in damages if you even looked angrily at someone. I demand, I want, me me me money money money for me.
Re:HA! (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, but what do "computer landscapes" have anything to do with being unable to play my games due to a calendar screw up?
I've been playing video games since Commander Keen was being sold as shareware on a 3.5 floppy at your local VHS rental store, and I have *never* had a single problem with my computer or video games because of a "leap year".
The only reason I can see a video game not working because of mis-matched dates is because of DRM, there is no - and neither should there be, any reason why a game should be dependent on any date.
Re:HA! (Score:1, Insightful)
I found the ps3 drm quite unintrusive. I just pop in a disc and it works. It doesn't even ask for a serial number. What's your problem?
Re:HA! (Score:5, Insightful)
So you're saying it's ok for me to be locked out of my games because Sony's servers don't feel like giving out achievements at this time.
Re:HA! (Score:5, Insightful)
While people are far too quick to yell "sue" needlessly, it is a legitimate complaint that otherwise offline, single-player games should be unusable due to this glitch. Whatever happened to gracefully handling failure? A network connection has no business being a requirement (to the point of failing to play without it) for a single player game.
They'd better fix this (Score:5, Insightful)
If this a hardware/firmware issue, then I hope to god for Sony's sake that there's a quick and easy fix that users can apply at home. The problem is that even if they offer everybody a free trade-in to a PS3 slim (which would be cripplingly expensive), then a lot of users, self included, won't accept this. Trading from an original 60 gig PS3 to a PS3 slim is not an upgrade. It's a downgrade.
Why? Because the original first-gen PS3s had full PS2 back-compatibility, while the more recent versions don't. People like me, who got rid of their PS2 when they picked up a PS3, are not going to be happy in the slightest if it turns out we need to start hitting Ebay for PS2s.
Re:HA! (Score:4, Insightful)
What does it have to do with DRM?
The DRM for games purchased on PlayStation Network seems to require that it be able to phone home and validate everything before it lets you play the game. This is impacting all of the games I've tested so far which were purchased from the PlayStation Network. Many of them just fail with an inscrutable error message ("Error HEXADECIMALSOUP") and refuse to start up. Others give you "demo version" mode and behave like you need to purchase the full product still.
Calendar bugs are one thing, but DRM which fails and locks you out of a bunch of stuff you paid for in the presence of such a bug is another thing entirely. If Sony gives me a nice discount voucher or PSN credit by way of apology for this inconvenience, I'll be less peeved, but I get the feeling that Sony (and their ilk) consider their self-rights-protection technology to be so damned important that no amount of inconvenience on the part of their paying customers is too much to ask. They'd be more concerned if a calendar bug allowed you to bypass all that license-key crap.
Re:HA! (Score:4, Insightful)
And sometimes they shouldn't.
This was an accident that is ultimately harmless, particularly in the long term, and will more than likely be resolved within a day or so.
A lawsuit is ridiculous at this point. Maybe if they let it go on for weeks, or if it actually destroys their peripherals.
Re:HA! (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe I'm wrong but this is the only reason I can think of. I just can't find it easy to accept their explanation for this, that's all.
Re:HA! (Score:5, Insightful)
However, if your fridge doors locked and prevented you from using it each time you set the date wrong on the fridge, yes I would suggest suing.
I am not mad at the PS3 breaking, I am mad at the fact that rather trivial issues prevent people from playing fully functioning games on a fully functioning console system.
Re:HA! (Score:3, Insightful)
Instead of solving problems like civilized people everyone sues right and left
How do two parties in disagreement over financial liability solve things in your country?
Re:HA! (Score:3, Insightful)
Do not worry, if someone does sue, Sony will come to the UK and put a super injunction in place so nobody will hear about it.
Re:HA! (Score:1, Insightful)
Article? What article? All I see is some blog post where some guy rambles on about how his console is broken, and a forum thread where a bunch of people whine about their consoles not working. The closest to actual information we get is a Twitter post from Sony, who indicate they're researching the supposed issues.
But what we don't have is an article with researched facts. Hell, Sony hasn't even been given a chance to respond to the allegations yet! All we've got here are a bunch of random anecdotes from untrustworthy sources.
Re:HA! (Score:4, Insightful)
The DRM for games purchased on PlayStation Network seems to require that it be able to phone home and validate everything before it lets you play the game.
But that doesn't seem to be the case. I've played downloaded PSN games plenty of times without having any internet connection. This glitch seems like an entirely different beast.
Re:HA! (Score:3, Insightful)
My PSX games, actual PSX discs, work just fine.
Dunno about Blu-ray movies, but I know my Netflix disc won't work. None of the $2,000 in games I bought work (every single one has trophies/achievements.)
Also, try to play that game, it wipes your trophies. Hopefully those will come back once the servers fix themselves.
This is what they get for making varying hardware in the first place. They should have introduced ONE MODEL, with backwards compatibility all the way through. Leave in EVERY ADVERTISED FEATURE EVER, and ship a solid unit. Don't make different hardware revisions just to save money - they cut corners somewhere along the way and it is starting to come back to bite them in the ass.
There really needs to just be a massive uprising against Sony in court - they've rootkitted our PCs, they've given us crap invasive DRM, they've advertised one feature (BC) and stripped it from 100% hardware to part hardware part software in the next revision, then to full software in the next, and then pulled it totally the next hardware refresh, and now with the PS3 slim advertising campaign they're saying right on the kiosk wall in Best Buy "It does everything" when in fact it does NOTHING close to what the original did. IT IS PURE AND SIMPLE FALSE AND MISLEADING ADVERTISING, and they need the shit sued out of them so they'll NOT DO IT AGAIN. Screw the money - we can sue for a full injunction, and force specifically SCEA to stop operating in the USA until they get the consumers what they originally were advertised on TV, in magazines, - a PS3 with BC and the ability to install another OS. Damn hard drive size, since we can upgrade that ourselves. Give us the hardware and quit trying to dictate everything in our damned lives.
Re:HA! (Score:5, Insightful)
We talk to each other. We try to come to an agreement. If that fails a third party might get involved, especially if it's a disagreement between a company and an individual customer.
And once all those options have been exhausted...then we might bring in an actual lawyer.
Re:HA! (Score:3, Insightful)
We talk to each other. We try to come to an agreement. If that fails a third party might get involved, especially if it's a disagreement between a company and an individual customer.
And once all those options have been exhausted...then we might bring in an actual lawyer.
Sometimes even "talk[ing] to each other" and "try[ing] to come to an agreement" result in complaints from the Slashdot peanut gallery. A cease-and-desist notice over a fan-made derivative work, for instance, is just "talk[ing] to each other". And a lot of disagreements don't make the news until "all those options have been exhausted", which biases news coverage in favor of lawsuits.
Re:Microsoft has to love this (Score:2, Insightful)
We didn't ignore it. Everyone just forgot about it because nobody has a zune. ;)
Oh please (Score:1, Insightful)
They aren't going to fix dick. Mark my words. Anyone who tries to roll their own fix will get sniped with a DMCA, and Sony will just tell everyone to buy a new console. Gamers will begrudgingly buy one, but if as long as they buy new stuff then Sony is happy.
Re:HA! (Score:3, Insightful)
"Why should I wait for Sony to fix it?
Because the other alternative is . . . . not waiting for Sony to fix it? Forcing Sony to hire a team of time-traveling coders to travel back in time and fix the bug before it happened? I fail to see what alternative there is besides waiting for a few days. Deciding to sue Sony won't make your PS3 work any sooner than just doing something else for a few days and then coming back and installing the update that they put out to fix this.
Look, I know you're upset that a bug in the PS3 calendar has managed to trigger some sort of DRM switch. Sony is rightly at fault, and is guaranteed to fix this in a matter of days. But your over-reaction is well outside the realm of what is reasonable.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:HA! (Score:5, Insightful)
To me, as an individual, a cease-and-desist doen't feel like you're trying to talk to me, it feels like you're trying to bully me. If you're trying to talk to me, give me a call or send me an informal email, from one human being to another.
Re:HA! (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually, if everyone goes to buy a new PS3, SONY will lose money hand over fist. They sell their units at a major loss.
Re:HA! (Score:3, Insightful)
This bug is something different. I've been able to play downloaded games and games with trophy support even when the net connection has been down before, but not with this bug.
Re:HA! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:HA! (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, if that's the only reason you can think of, you're not thinking very hard, are you?
Neither are you apparently, otherwise surely you'd have provided some examples of additional reasons instead of simply insulting GP.
While personally I side with GP, I will point out that games do use dates for a variety of reasons. Pokemon games starting with Gold and Silver for the GBC, and the Animal Crossing series, all have date-specific events. Of course, none of those refused to play if their internal clocks did not match the clocks of some central server. Heck, you could even set your clock to before the time of the last time you played, and it would still play just fine (though some Animal Crossing residents might be like "it's been hundreds of years since you've visited me!").
Except maybe the Wii version of Animal Crossing, have yet to touch that.
Re:HA! (Score:4, Insightful)
Can it be a date bug in the PS3's hypervisor (or other internal 'security' functions)? The units that that maintains among other things the DRM and copyrights.
If that insists that the date is 29/2-2010, I can hardly imagine the number of things that will get decoded wrong.
We may be lucky, that tomorrow the clock will claim it's March 1, at least that is a valid date. or the hardware will continue being 1 day behind, screwing up the DRM again tomorrow.
Re:HA! (Score:3, Insightful)
If you see hundreds of fan works and instead of thinking "damn, the customers love us" you think "how dare they make fanart without paying us for it", you probably don't deserve the customers.
Re:HA! (Score:3, Insightful)
You despise Sony, yet you spent $2,000 on PS3 downloadable games? Nerd rage troll detected!
Re:HA! (Score:3, Insightful)
Still afaict this is a defect in original workmanship (not a wear-out and not a random failure) that renders the product largely unusable.
If sony doesn't sort this out quickly i'd expect lawsuits in the EU at least.
What? This is exactly that.