PSN members get 5 day PS+ extension for the holiday outage

Happy New Year! Since access to PlayStation Network was impacted during the holidays, we wanted to show our appreciation for your patience by offering all PlayStation Plus members that had an active membership or free trial on December 25th a membership extension of five days. The extension will be automatically applied, so no action is necessary to receive the extension. We will post additional information here on PlayStation.Blog when the extension becomes available. If your membership or trial ends before the extension is available, you will receive five days of Plus to enjoy once the extension becomes available (we will notify you when).

In addition, sometime this month we will announce that for a limited time, we will be offering a 10 percent discount code good for a one-time discount off a total cart purchase in the PlayStation Store as a thank you to all PSN members.

This discount can be used toward content available on PS Store including blockbuster new releases, award winning indie games, game add-ons and season passes, and an enormous selection of TV and Movies.

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2015/01/01/a-holiday-thank-you/#sf6690761

What are your opinions on this?

I personally feel that this is the absolute bare minimum they could've done, without getting themselves tangled up in another PSN lawsuit. Giving people a 5 days for a service that very recently used to be free, and a discount the encourage people to just hand them more money without any promise to improve their infrastructure?

Preventing DDOS-attacks is possible, but costs money. Sony is clearly not interested in doing anything else than just shutting everything down, wait for the storm to calm down and blame somebody else.

I couldn't care less for 5 days of PS+, I want them to actually prove to me that they're doing a real effort in keeping their service up. And while you're at it, fix your bandwidth problems for PSN downloads.

Yeah, sure. That's about the right reaction there. A discount for people already in, a few days back for sporadic subscribers. Cool. Gotcha.

There's a conversation to be had about how and what you need to prevent this sort of attack and, perhaps more importantly, about how to retaliate and get attackers punished, but yeah, this is a good thing to do from Sony.

Please let's not be the usual Internet douche that goes "it's not enough, I totally couldn't play high level Guilty Gear online the day my granny bought it for me". It sucked that PSN was down, I bet Sony really didn't like it, either, they should work to bounce back faster, but that's an observation, not some sort of tragedy brought about by negligence.

In terms of 3 days lost of service and you getting 5 days back in return thats more than fair. Gaining the trust back in your ability to provide a paid for service is another thing. PSN is weak enough when it does work.

It's fair, you get a 10% discount code and they'r extending everyones sub by 5 days for 3 days outtage. I'm cool with that.

RE: Preventing DDOs outtage, well that simply means buying more servers.

I think that's fair, I don't know if I'll use that 10% code though as I bought a few games on PSN yesterday.

Huh? PS+ has never been free.

Honestly, I couldn't care less if they did anything or not, so 5 days + a small discount is fine by me.

I'll probably use the code for Citizens of Earth later this month and maybe a couple other things(Tales from the Borderlands, maybe...I need to check the store out).

Online matchmaking used to be absolutely free on PSN before PS+.

I'd say its pretty fair, although I do agree. Both Microsoft and Sony need to look into finding better ways to mitigate this kind of thing. Three days is not all that bad in the grand scheme of things, but if enough yahoo's decide to try to keep it down for longer it could really start to be a huge pain in the ass. For consumers and for the public images of these companies.

I wasn't even on PSN for the time it was out, so the bonus days will suit me fine and I'll use that 10% code to finally buy Transistor. A game I've been meaning to get around to finally playing.

PS4 is the only one that requires it. PS+ was a thing way before PS4.

So? That's not all PS+ is. Online didn't used to be a part of PS+, sure(still isn't on PS3 and Vita), but PS+ has never been free. Technically, everything is the same as it's always been as far as online play goes. It's still free on PS3 and Vita, and has never been free on PS4.

Yay, free stuff for something I didn't know happened!

Can you really prevent a ddos attack ? Also the PSN network was down ? my ps 4 was collecting dust, thanks for the 5 free days i gues.

No, PS+ has never been free.

Online matchmaking has, now it isn't. Because of PS+

@soulcake said:

You don't prevent the DDOS attack, but you can absolutely dodge it if your system is redundant/dynamic enough. That requires a hell of a lot of design work from the ground up, both in terms of software and operations processes though.

Companies that actually have measures against this, usually like to brag about it aswell. Sony's style of keeping their mouths shut and do bare minimum damage control when these kinds of issues pop up, doesn't really show a sign of confidence.

Yup. That's what I've said since my first post.

It is for the consoles that have always had it free (PS3 and Vita). They've been upfront about PS4's access to matchmaking. And if you have any of those consoles it's a boon to get PS+ anyway just for the discounts and free games.

My point is, the minute you decide to charge money for a service the expectation about the availability of that service are tremendously higher.

If matchmaking and game functionality overall is affected on a paid service, people shouldn't just expect there to be free days given away. I want to see my money spent on making these outages a thing of the past.

If matchmaking/online functionality was free? I'd give a damn about hiccups like these once in a while.

Sure, PS+ is more than just matchmaking, but it's not like you're given anything else on these 5 extra days.

But the fact of the matter is the end user didn't pay for the days the service was down, which is the most anyone can realistically ask for when it comes to any service, a lot of services don't even offer that. And the fact of the matter is the problem isn't even the fault of Sony but the fault of the assend of the gaming community. They would've benefited from getting the service online quicker and despite being critical of PS+'s reliability myself I'm not pegging this one on Sony at all.

Yeah, I get all of that. I also don't really think it's possible for them to ever stop something like this. Mitigate the damage so they can get back up and running faster, maybe, but as long as there are people willing to do these kinds of attacks, there will always be downtime. And that goes for anyone, not just Sony.

Also ultimately 5 free days is meaningless because the people who use PS+ for online play will continue to renew their subscription regardless. The coupon is just enticing you to spend more money you normally wouldn't think of spending so all in all Sony does kind of come out on top by offering basically nothing as an apology and in the best case scenario making a profit on it.

I could have enjoyed 5 more days of Woah Dave?! My sub ended on the 23rd lmao

Giving a week of Plus to everyone would've been a better make-good, but better this than nothing at all.

No, they don't have to worry about another PSN lawsuit at all. The Terms of Service were updated years ago to sign away your right to form a class action law suit.

As for getting 5 free days, that likely pushes me from one month into the next due to my habit of buying at the end of the month.

Who cares about five free days? That's absolutely meaningless for a subscription service. You are never going to notice since you will be resubscribing until you no longer want it. The only people this would affect would be single month subscribers that were not going to buy PS+ next month who probably don't care about some extra days tagged on.

Personally I didn't notice since I was away from home for the holidays but if I wanted to play on my days off and the system was down for three days I'd be pissed and being told my annual bill will just be five days later certainly wouldn't make me feel better.

I'm pretty sure that doesn't hold water and it's usually a scare tactic. I may be wrong.

@sethphotopoulos: It doesn't. Like most terms of service its a way to try to scare off frivolous lawsuits.