A Small PlayStation Rant

Even though I fucking love gaming as a hobby and I am glad that I managed to get into it many years ago there are many things about gaming culture and games in general that gets on my fucking nerves, and well I want to fucking rant so let me blow off some steam here in the blogs section once in a while...okay?

Anyway what has urged me to write this blog? The playstation 3, well The Playstation Network more specifically. Now I will start by saying I am not 100% sure if I am a lone case in this or if its that the old Phat playstations have shittier hardware or all Playstation 3’s are just terrible but what is wrong with the download speeds?

Okay let me set up my problem. I recently bought Playstation Plus (because, well have you seen the amount of games they give away if you have the service). My first problem came about upon trying to actually give Sony my 40 quid for a years subscription. I entered my card details and nothing (card invalid apparently), now I know I have money on my card and I know for damn sure I entered it correctly. So what the fuck. In the end I got a little pissed off but decided fuck it.

An hour later I got a phone call from the fraud department of my credit card company, someone had tried to use my card for a non secure transaction. After worrying for a minute or two I realised that it was actually me trying to purchase Playstation plus. It turns out that because of the little (well fucking massive) hacking debacle Sony had a little while back they are on many credit card companies blacklist. After a short conversation with the person at my Credit Card Company's fraud department (stupid questions to check if I am actually me) I was allowed finally to use my card on the Playstation Network. Now thats fucked up one of the World's biggest companies is not considered secure by many credit card companies. Fuck me sideways.

Anyway after all that shit I finally managed to buy myself the year of plus. Simple. That however

wasn’t my main problem the thing that is annoying me the most is the speed of my downloads. Like I said I don’t know if its all Playstation 3 consoles or mine but wireless speeds are ludicrous.

I have been downloading a 6 gig game for 3 days now and I am 50% of the way there. I leave my console on while I am out of the house at work (7-6) and still only halfway there. What the fuck. I think its the wireless card the playstation 3 uses but I am not entirely sure and before someone starts I am unable to connect wired. I am too far away so don’t be a dick. I have decided to try something out. My girlfriend used to use a wireless extender for her iPad because she has a big ass house and her wifi doesn’t reach her bedroom, anyway. I am thinking about connecting that up to my playstation 3 via an ethernet cable and connecting that to my hub wirelessly. In a hope that, that will speed up my fucking downloads. Anyway that's my rant about playstation network over. Fuck that service. I see why I pay for Xbox live year upon year now. No i’m not a fucking fanboy don’t start, Xbox is just better ;)

Even though I fucking love gaming as a hobby and I am glad that I managed to get into it many years ago there are many things about gaming culture and games in general that gets on my fucking nerves, and well I want to fucking rant so let me blow off some steam here in the blogs section once in a while...okay?

Anyway what has urged me to write this blog? The playstation 3, well The Playstation Network more specifically. Now I will start by saying I am not 100% sure if I am a lone case in this or if its that the old Phat playstations have shittier hardware or all Playstation 3’s are just terrible but what is wrong with the download speeds?

Okay let me set up my problem. I recently bought Playstation Plus (because, well have you seen the amount of games they give away if you have the service). My first problem came about upon trying to actually give Sony my 40 quid for a years subscription. I entered my card details and nothing (card invalid apparently), now I know I have money on my card and I know for damn sure I entered it correctly. So what the fuck. In the end I got a little pissed off but decided fuck it.

An hour later I got a phone call from the fraud department of my credit card company, someone had tried to use my card for a non secure transaction. After worrying for a minute or two I realised that it was actually me trying to purchase Playstation plus. It turns out that because of the little (well fucking massive) hacking debacle Sony had a little while back they are on many credit card companies blacklist. After a short conversation with the person at my Credit Card Company's fraud department (stupid questions to check if I am actually me) I was allowed finally to use my card on the Playstation Network. Now thats fucked up one of the World's biggest companies is not considered secure by many credit card companies. Fuck me sideways.

Anyway after all that shit I finally managed to buy myself the year of plus. Simple. That however

wasn’t my main problem the thing that is annoying me the most is the speed of my downloads. Like I said I don’t know if its all Playstation 3 consoles or mine but wireless speeds are ludicrous.

I have been downloading a 6 gig game for 3 days now and I am 50% of the way there. I leave my console on while I am out of the house at work (7-6) and still only halfway there. What the fuck. I think its the wireless card the playstation 3 uses but I am not entirely sure and before someone starts I am unable to connect wired. I am too far away so don’t be a dick. I have decided to try something out. My girlfriend used to use a wireless extender for her iPad because she has a big ass house and her wifi doesn’t reach her bedroom, anyway. I am thinking about connecting that up to my playstation 3 via an ethernet cable and connecting that to my hub wirelessly. In a hope that, that will speed up my fucking downloads. Anyway that's my rant about playstation network over. Fuck that service. I see why I pay for Xbox live year upon year now. No i’m not a fucking fanboy don’t start, Xbox is just better ;)

Unfortunately it's not just your PS3, download speeds on PSN are pretty terrible, it took over 6 hours to download all the updates for Resistance 3 when I first got it, which put the speed at around 0.8kb/s. That was with a wired connection so unless your wireless router is bad then I doubt that's an issue for you.

Up until reading your post I always thought crappy download speeds were for non PS+ members, which I guess isn't the case.

If it makes you feel any better, wired connection is just as slow with DL speeds

I've heard of having slow DL speeds but you really take the cake. 6 gig game taking 3 days? I've got Virgin's cheapest internet package and manage a 1gb game in just over an hour. Weird. 

I thought mine was slow, but that's crazy! I recently downloaded and installed infamous 2 (15gb) and that only took about an hour and a half

I never seem to have a problem.

it has done 2 gig today since 11 am this morning, thats 5 hours

Never had any problems with the downloadspeed on PSN, but I'm sure it has never been faster than a few MB/s.

5 hours for 6 gig file is just rediculous. Seems like the problem is on your side and not PSN's.

I've never had a problem with download speeds here when I update games or download games on the PS3, yet a friend who lives like 10 minutes away from here gets terrible download speed on his PS3. 
It makes no sense to me

I downloaded inFamous 2 (15GB) in 6 hours. I have heard that the slim PS3s have better wireless cards. It could also be that your internet is slow or it could be that the SCEE servers aren't as fast as the SCEA servers. Actually, which game were you trying to download? I ask because on PSN each individual publisher hosts their own download server so if it's a 3rd party game then they would be the ones responsible for the server and not Sony.

On the PC, I reinstalled TF2 recently. That mofo has gotten up to like 10GB and it only took an hour or so. For a company as big as Sony, why are they forcing their users to use dial-up speeds to download required updates? Stop supporting their bullshit, duders.

Yeah PS3 is pretty bad. Probably the worst of all the services I use.

@Ravenlight If download speed was the only thing that mattered, we'd all be using either Amazon or Origin.

It differs for me. Sometimes I get acceptable download speed but most of the time it is pretty slow compared to other services. But after a few years I got used to it, so it doesn't bother me that much anymore... Although it was never as slow as in your description.

@JTB123 said:

Unfortunately it's not just your PS3, download speeds on PSN are pretty terrible, it took over 6 hours to download all the updates for Resistance 3 when I first got it, which put the speed at around 0.8kb/s.

That's an issue with the game. When I first tried to play I went for the update > install > play only to find the game kept locking up half-way through the install. After deleting all data for the game from the HDD I opted to go for install > update and found not only did it install without problems but the updates were downloaded within 30 minutes at most instead of the 2 hours it took the first time. Seems like an ongoing issue with the game as a quick google search showed others suffering the same issue I had when I tried to play it the first time.

As for PSN download speeds they've always been noticeably slower than other services but never to the point they've been utterly useless taking days to download a file that any modern fibre-optic broadband service should be able to download in a few minutes to a few hours at most.

In all honesty I'd say the issue may be with the OP's ISP/connection than with Sony's servers. Or worst case scenario the PS3 hardware is on the blink.

I understand your frustration with the blacklisting of Sony by your cc company, but it's them protecting their asses and justifiably slow. You can't really get mad about their poor reception from cc companies, but you can be outraged by the events that caused them to be considered a security risk, because they were. It will probably be a while before new psn transactions (meaning that the card has never previously been used for that purpose) won't be flagged

Yeah, it's definitely slower than Xbox Live's downloads. I hope this gets fixed for the next generation.

My PS3 usually downloads stuff fast so I've always been curious as to why other people have problems with download speed with the PS3.

I managed to download all the PSN Plus games in a day, so I don't really have an issue with download speeds myself. However, Space Marine has a 1gb patch, that I'm never going to download because I don't want to wait half an hour to try out the multiplayer. It's ridiculous.

Your speeds are ludicrous. The speed isn't amazing at my house (nor was it fantastic in my dorm last year, which clocked Steam at around 3MB/s) but it's not even close to that slow, nor have I ever seen it get that slow. You may want to contact your ISP about that.

My download speeds on the PS3 can be pretty slow when I'm downloading other things at home with other devices, and this is with an ethernet cable plugged into the back. The annoying bit is that the PS3 will get stuck at that slower download speed, even after all other traffic on my home network has pretty much disappeared. I've found that pausing and then restarting downloads can sometimes kick the download speeds up a bit, since they force the PS3 to communicate with PSN to resume the download.

As for your credit card, I've run into another annoyance in the past that you should be aware of. I don't know if they still do it, but PSN may test your credit card by charging it and then immediately cancelling it for some really small amount of money, like $1. Supposedly, this was all done to see if your credit card information was valid. Of course, this caught my credit card company's attention, and I had to do some digging around to see why that transaction actually happened before I could call that company and tell them that everything was OK. This was all before the PSN debacle last year, so I'm not sure if this practice is still, err, practiced.

I've never had your problem.

@Galiant said:

I've never had your problem.

I know some people have issues with slow download speeds, but I've never experienced it either.

Only had issues with speed back around 2007... Since then it's been maxing out my dl speed... But I've heard it really differs from person to person. Maybe it's a region issue? Maybe a router issue? Maybe a ISP issue? or maybe it's just a bit of everything

@ryanrulez said:

I managed to download all the PSN Plus games in a day, so I don't really have an issue with download speeds myself. However, Space Marine has a 1gb patch, that I'm never going to download because I don't want to wait half an hour to try out the multiplayer. It's ridiculous.

Automatic updates.. Turn it on! Downloads the patch while you're sleeping!

Mine takes no time at all, especially if I plug in.

Fios, duder