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Ps plus sucks and it’s a confusing mess

Skelterz

Member
As a PS5 owner who purchased premium when it first came out then proceeded to not be charged for nearly another year of playing online without being able to download any games from any tier??! I concur PS plus is a shambles.
 

KiteGr

Member
I'm currently migrating to Steam.

Console manufacturers are pushing for a digital-only age, yet their stores and pricing is abysmal.

On Steam the prices, discounts and interface are better, it offers all benefits of PSplus for free (such as online play and cloud saving), minus the free "hostage" games of course. It also has much better support on key sites, so the prices are even better if you go that route.
 

nkarafo

Member
UI/UX design especially in gaming is atrocious. Look at the latest Call of Duty menu layouts and the degree you need to navigate it. Look at how dogshit the Eshop is to navigate, look at the new and old versions of the Uplay/ea origins app and gamepass and so on and so forth.

Nothing in 2023 is easy or simple to navigate. Even Spotify is a clunky mess. You have random squares generated for music already in your library and to search for like a top 100 or something you have to click through 3 or 4 options.
I really don't get this. For decades i was told that a good interface must be easy to understand and snappy to control/feel. But the last few years i see more and more interfaces that make no sense and you have to figure out what is what. The latest offender for me was the Forza games, especially Horizon 4. What the hell was that? I'm playing the game for some time now and i still don't know where everything is.
 

Hudo

Member
The problem is that all subscription service front ends are kinda shit. I have yet to encounter one that's halfway decent.
 

StueyDuck

Member
I really don't get this. For decades i was told that a good interface must be easy to understand and snappy to control/feel. But the last few years i see more and more interfaces that make no sense and you have to figure out what is what. The latest offender for me was the Forza games, especially Horizon 4. What the hell was that? I'm playing the game for some time now and i still don't know where everything is.
Alot of it comes from bloat. I control/maintain legacy logistics software and to do any sort of bespoke work on it is a headache because of how bloated the software has become over the many many years and how many other different engineers/developers have had their hands on it.

But I wouldn't be surprised if another aspect of it comes from outsourcing... those who know will know.

Games really don't have any excuse though, the fact forza and call of duty and ghost recon etc. All have these bloated mess of an UI to me says they have bad project leads, if I can tell you these menus are clunky then they should have caught it the second they tried it.
 
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jm89

Member
The nesting to view different pages for a game drives me up a wall.

Why the F is ratings nested? Put that shit front and centre.
 
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Senua

Member
Meh. I think PS+ essential is the best sub cause it’s the only one that permanently ties games to your account. I don’t like renting games and playing them on someone else’s time table.
Golden Retriever Dog GIF by Milk-Bone
 
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Reactions: Isa

balls of snow

Gold Member
Yeah it’s weird you can’t sort and view games you actually bought from the ps plus, demos, betas, alphas, free weekends etc that clutter the game library.
I hide those demos and betas as soon as im done with them. Keep the clutter down.
 

King Dazzar

Member
rofif rofif when you weren't subbed, was the experience fine? Any quirks etc? Just wondering if there's anything I need to be aware of when I unsub next year? I imagine my experience will be identical, bar the multiplayer access? I take it you still log into PSN fine and have access to friend chat and achievements and played time all log as before etc...
 
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rofif

Can’t Git Gud
rofif rofif when you weren't subbed, was the experience fine? Any quirks etc? Just wondering if there's anything I need to be aware of when I unsub next year? I imagine my experience will be identical, bar the multiplayer access? I take it you still log into PSN fine and have access to friend chat and achievements and played time all log as before etc...
Unsubbed was fine. Insert disc, scroll down if I want to buy dlc and that’s it.
 

Shtof

Member
Streaming used to be super bad 2-3 years ago, but at some point in between it has become super good.
So good in fact, that the only thing reminding me that is a stream is the framerate/video artifacting, not the input lag.
I wonder if it has to do with proximity to data centers?
 

King Dazzar

Member
Unsubbed was fine. Insert disc, scroll down if I want to buy dlc and that’s it.
So aside from no cloud saves and multiplayer, there's nothing I'll miss when I unsub? Just checking that there's no hidden downsides to unsubbing next year. Cheers.

Back to your issues, strangely when I do save backups to an external drive, I always get a confusing warning message saying the cloud saves aren't fully synced. But they actually are. I've already got into the habbit of doing backups every week or two. I'm looking forward to unsubbing.

The only other thought I have. Its a shitty workaround. But it may help to use the folders option to separate your games out for you. You could have one folder for digital another for physical. At least then you may know which games require a disc from you or not...
 

Mr Hyde

Member
Stopped subbing PS Plus about two years ago. I only buy a month here and there if I wanna check out some interesting games that drops (like Callisto Protocol when it was on offer) or play some Souls online. I will never sub for entire years ever again. Waste of money if you ask me.
 

mdkirby

Member
It can be a little confusing, but I don’t find it that bad tbh. The xbox dashboard makes me want to scream every time I use it 🤣, so maybe the bar just isn’t very high. In the same way i sometimes bitch about Netflix, until I open nowTV which is a barely usable traversty, and realised Netflix is the best of the bunch.

Really tho, once you have a large library of content it can get very hard to surface it all intuitively. Our own service we now have over 1500 episodes/releases, and it becomes a nightmare working out how to best serve them to users…not to mention when u try to get smart, the more things you do the more costs go up on things like recommendation engines, so it’s always a balancing act.
 

Clear

CliffyB's Cock Holster
Being cleaner and easier than Gamepass doesn't mean it's ideal though.

Both need a little bit work imo.

I agree. With PS5 I generally find the storefront parts are overall fine to search and navigate, aside from the sometimes bizarre way that PS4->PS5 upgrades are often hidden or made incredibly obtuse to figure out. It gets a pass from me mainly because I'm so used to it by now, but some of it is I agree really clunky.

Xbox on the other hand I'm coming back to after a long break, so maybe I'm being overly harsh, but it feels like a smartphone type interface that is trying so hard to be simple and helpful that its constantly getting in my way.
 

GHG

Gold Member
Aside from the obvious multiplayer access, do you have any issues at all being unsubbed? Say if you go into GT7 for single player or login as normal to PSN etc, is it all tickety boo? Any dashboard quirks or nagging for not being subbed? My PS+ and GPU both expire Mar 24 and my plan is to just get a month here and there to maybe demo stuff, if at all but remove my sub from both services. Cheers.

It's just sport mode that doesn't work, everything else functions as normal.
 

King Dazzar

Member
Stopped subbing PS Plus about two years ago. I only buy a month here and there if I wanna check out some interesting games that drops (like Callisto Protocol when it was on offer) or play some Souls online. I will never sub for entire years ever again. Waste of money if you ask me.
Yep that's how I'm going to be rolling after March next year for both PS+ and Game Pass. Going by recent sales too. You're more likely to get offered a special deal and get the odd month for cheap being unsubbed. Where by you could maybe demo some games and drop it again.

I've just been reading into the detail of not being subbed and there appears to be a lot more available than I would of expected. For example a lot of online games still give you a lot of functionality even without PS+ Especially micro transaction fuelled games. You still have access to PSN and friends chat, achievements etc etc. I think I've been wasting my money for years tbh. Its only the recent price hikes have given me the slap in the face I needed to look at it more in depth. Just need to do sensible house keeping like backing up saves to USB for playstation.
 

TrebleShot

Member
They also need to sort out filters etc in the library section it’s lacking some
Basic filters that would be awesome “60fps” ore “performance” filters, just plus filters, publisher , Dualsense support, HDR support etc pretty basic stuff that would be pretty powerful.
 

VinnyMac

Member
it is pretty shit and confusing, the user experience is really fucking bad, but hey! they not only have the same issues they've had for years, they added new ones when the PS5 released... and raised the price!
If you can't afford 13 dollars a month you either spend your money poorly or should be spending it on more important things. Almost every streaming service is more than that a month.
 

diffusionx

Gold Member
I've been a subscriber to PS+ since it launched on PS3, and PS5 is my primary gaming device, and I think it is somewhat telling that I have never, not for one second, thought about spending more money on the higher tiers since they launched. The service is just not any good and Sony isn't putting in the work they need to. A lot of what Sony has done outside of the actual game development (which to be fair is the most important part) has been really half-assed
 

SScorpio

Member
They also need to sort out filters etc in the library section it’s lacking some
Basic filters that would be awesome “60fps” ore “performance” filters, just plus filters, publisher , Dualsense support, HDR support etc pretty basic stuff that would be pretty powerful.
Come on man... This is Sony who couldn't be bothered to only show content in the library that you could access on your Vita or PS3. With zero type of sorting, only ordering by purchase date. Databases and view modifications are so challenging.
 

GymWolf

Gold Member
Yeah it's shit.

And don't let me start on the dogshit old game streaming system you get with the higher tier of plus...a literal waste of money even with blazing fast internet connection, at least in italy.
 
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rofif

Can’t Git Gud
Yeah it's shit.

And don't let me start on the dogshit old game streaming system you get with the higher tier of plus...a literal waste of money even with blazing fast internet connection, at least in italy.
yeah classics suck ass to play and ps3 games are streaming only... which is a nightmare. It is unplayable
 

GymWolf

Gold Member
yeah classics suck ass to play and ps3 games are streaming only... which is a nightmare. It is unplayable
Someone said to me that it is better in us, but i pay the same amount of money so i expect the same quality, it's not an excuse at all.
 
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When Rocket League went free to play is when I stopped needing PS+. Still dragged along with it for a few years out of habit I guess, finally let it expire for good this year.
 

rofif

Can’t Git Gud
Someone said to me that it is better in us, but i pay the same amount of money so i expect the same quality, it's not an excuse at all.
Exactly. I am in Poland. 600mbit low ping connection, wired to router.
I asked sony for a refund. I don't believe they will refund me but maaaybe.
I want my library to be tidy and clean. I don't want this crap which you can't filter or only partially so.

I just want online only tier (should be free of course).
 

Hohenheim

Member
I did a check to see what i've got out of my ps+ extra sub since those updated ps+ variants launched..

It was one game (Odin's Sphere)
..which would have been a lot cheaper if I had brought it instead.

So i've definitly been one of those who forgets about stuff like this and keep subscriptions running without using it at all. A dream customer! 😆

My last ps5 game was FF16 and the next game i'm gonna play on there is FF7 remake part 2, so it's hilarious that i've been paying for this unnescecary stuff for ages.
 

rofif

Can’t Git Gud
Lol I posted my compains on reddit ps5 sub and within 5 minutes:
"
This submission has been removed because it has received an extraordinary number of user reports.

"
Lol CONSUME CONSUME CONSUME PRODUCT DO NOT QUESTION CONSUME. Fucking idiots. How is anything ever going to improve.
 

Chronicle

Member
That’s naive. I would wager that disc is more environment friendly. You print disc once and keep it in home forever.
1 disc gives many installations while digital you have to download whole thing from a server farm each time and they have to expand farms constantly. At this rate of digital data increases we will not have space and power for server farms in the future
You can't be serious that plastic is better than bytes. Especially calling me naive. I cant see how wanting to have a better planet is naive. There is a garbage patch of the pacific larger than Texas! There's plastic all over our streets. It has now been found in human blood. We don't need it. Get off plastic.
 

rofif

Can’t Git Gud
You can't be serious that plastic is better than bytes. Especially calling me naive. I cant see how wanting to have a better planet is naive. There is a garbage patch of the pacific larger than Texas! There's plastic all over our streets. It has now been found in human blood. We don't need it. Get off plastic.
You got played into personal carbon footprint buulshit.
Server farms eat a ton of energy, requires hard drives and tons of other parts/metals.
Punching stupid piece of plastic in a press is infinitely less damaging for the planet. Nobody throws this shit away too.

What is found is human blood is teflon and microplastics. but the plastics are not from cds lol
 
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Shake Your Rump

Gold Member
-the fact there is no cheaper tier with just online functionality and maybe cloud saves is a disgrace.
I completely agree. It is ridiculous that I now would have to pay over $100 CAD just for basic online functions. The “free” games each month are an embarrassment.

The PS3/PS4 era was fine. I paid $30 a year and got five games a month, and they were actually good games.
 
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Chronicle

Member
You got played into personal carbon footprint buulshit.
Server farms eat a ton of energy, requires hard drives and tons of other parts/metals.
Punching stupid piece of plastic in a press is infinitely less damaging for the planet. Nobody throws this shit away too.

What is found is human blood is teflon and microplastics. but the plastics are not from cds lol
Yeah. No one throws away video games. That never happens. You probably live in a city yes? Well I don't. I enjoy nature and don't need to see anymore plastic. Microplastics are plastic. Leave wildl8fe alone. Where does your trash go? If no one picked it up and made it disappear within a week you'd be neck deep in trash and it's all plastic (and that only takes a few days). It will never go away.

However I think we also need to reduce server farms and get that info out there too. I'm in the camp of reduce all waste.

We will agree to disagree. Thanks for your response.
 

rofif

Can’t Git Gud
Yeah. No one throws away video games. That never happens. You probably live in a city yes? Well I don't. I enjoy nature and don't need to see anymore plastic. Microplastics are plastic. Leave wildl8fe alone. Where does your trash go? If no one picked it up and made it disappear within a week you'd be neck deep in trash and it's all plastic (and that only takes a few days). It will never go away.

However I think we also need to reduce server farms and get that info out there too. I'm in the camp of reduce all waste.

We will agree to disagree. Thanks for your response.
I guarantee you that punching some discs is more green than server rooms.
It doesn't matter where I live. The fact is that you will not find red dead redemption 2 on a trash. It will rot in someones attic for 100 years....
Besides - I don't care abou a fucking planet. I am not responsible for it's demise. It's the corporations and super rich. Jeff bezos pollutes as much as whole countries. fuck that. Meanwhile I can't use discs and plastic straws ?! no way I am getting beaten over the head with this green crap. Enough is enough.

good watch

 

DryvBy

Member
I mainly get physical games but since this year’s Black Friday is terrible, the only deal I’ve got is -30% on ps premium.
I’ve figured, why not. I’ve had ps+ few times before. Claimed some games, finished stray when it released on + and teardown just got out so why not check it out.

And I am instantly reminded why I couldn’t wait until my last time being subbed year ago ended. This thing is a mess:
-cloud saves are not seamless. Somehow it can get confused which one you want and insist on bringing cloud copy back when you delete local etc.
-it’s impossible to tell which games you own and how. Is it on disc, bought from store, claimed or in some of the packs available now. Some game shows download with ps+ icon and other says purchased without any icon even though I never bought it or played. There is sorting in library but it’s not logical.
-then if any of games you have installed from disc, is on plus, it still asks for a disc unless you click view product and download… but it will not download anything and now will let you play without inserting the disc all of sudden.
-I’ve tried streaming hogwarts legacy which I have on disc and installed from it. I was curious about streaming quality (terrible and I am wired)… and I launched the trial. It used my saves correctly but now every time I launch hogwarts it starts that trial. Play game no longer asks for disc lol.
-if I want to purchase a game that is in plus catalog that shows as purchased and not “download with plus icon”, then you have to select product and the price is there in pull out context menu. wtf.
-the fact there is no cheaper tier with just online functionality and maybe cloud saves is a disgrace. I have to live with this mess if I want online in Elden ring.

Nesting nesting and nesting. You can enter game, have play button, view product, see price, select version and be 3-4 layers deep.

It is actually a nightmare to know what you own and it’s just slow.
Honestly, can I refund it?! It’s really hampering my user experience. Especially compared to just reaching for a disc.

Oh btw teardown ps5 port is surprisingly fantastic. I didn’t expect performance this good.

The disc thing has been resolved for a really long time if it's the same one. I buy physical and you used to have to uninstall the disc game to get the digital to work. Not the case now.

The worst thing about their store is buying things. If you try a game out on Plus and then want to buy it, good luck. It says you own it.
 

rofif

Can’t Git Gud
The disc thing has been resolved for a really long time if it's the same one. I buy physical and you used to have to uninstall the disc game to get the digital to work. Not the case now.

The worst thing about their store is buying things. If you try a game out on Plus and then want to buy it, good luck. It says you own it.
exactly. And there are tons of examples like this. hot mess
 
Just a heads up, Alone in the Dark: Inferno is a PS3 game so it's streaming only. I know many of you are chomping at the bit to dive in. Also, please make sure to close out properly when streaming games from the cloud. There's limited bandwidth and we want to make sure that no one misses out on Alone in the Dark: Inferno.
 
I really don't get this. For decades i was told that a good interface must be easy to understand and snappy to control/feel. But the last few years i see more and more interfaces that make no sense and you have to figure out what is what. The latest offender for me was the Forza games, especially Horizon 4. What the hell was that? I'm playing the game for some time now and i still don't know where everything is.
Horizon: Call of the Mountain is the dumbest UI of recent memory for me. Turn speed is set to a truly awful setting and the speed names are not intuitive. So many VR players get the game and think it's unplayable because they don't realize the speed can be further increased from what they already increased it to. Just happened the other day in the PSVR2 OT.
 
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