I have to get out my frothing at the mouth frustration first so that should I decide to send Sony a letter asking what exactly they were thinking it is maybe a useful piece of customer insight and not just OMFG WTF U GUYS SUK!!!!!
Anyway, the Playstation Store Update. Liked it at first. Added a download list. Good freak'n idea. Because one thing I didn't like about Sony's internet service was having no way to tell in any convenient way what I had downloaded. You could see what you had purchased in the store on the individual items, but there was no concise list that I could find anywhere else on the system. Now they have that, so I at least know what I've bought and downloaded. Cool, that much is an upgrade. The rest of it is not. (As I double check this I start to get memories of there maybe being a list before after all. So maybe this wasn't even an improvement.)
I should've known something was up when I saw a progress bar just to load the store up. Okay, they added some stuff, no biggy there. This is kind of cool... Okay, here's a thing I want to buy. Add to cart. Add to cart? That's new on here. Sure, add to cart. Oh, another progress bar. Well... that's taking a rediculously long time. (Seriously 20 to 30 seconds for me). For each freaking item. The old one had a bit of a delay, but not this freaking (I really want to say something other than "freaking") long. If I want to continue shopping I can go back, and for all that delay there is no indication on the item I sent to the cart that its in the cart. If I'm jumping around I wouldn't know what I had put in my cart without the nice and freakishly slow process of accessing my cart. Anyway, the first thing I was doing was buying The Unfinished Swan. On PSN I usually just let it auto add funds when I buy something instead of keeping money on there. Anyway, checkout triggers another progress bar, and confirming all your purchases and such triggers yet another progress bar. Of course, an error occured. Why not? I mean I never had errors before, so now that its all nice and upgraded why not now? So did I buy it or no? Reclicking on it still gives me an error message. At this point it looks like the purchased didn't go through, and so to make sure the problem wasn't caused buy the wallet being empty, I went and manually added funds. There was even an option to add specifically 14.99, the price of the game, so I figured that must be it. But an error was still occurring, so I shut the whole thing down and came back on. Well, turns out I did buy it after all and just had to hit download, so there's an extra 15 bucks I didn't want to spend.
So I decided to collect more Hyperdimension Neptunia Mark 2 DLC (there are 86 items. The first game had around 50. Most of them are 99 cents, and the ones that add dungeons and such are usually free, with maybe a few 1.99s in there. All in all they can make more off the DLC than the game discs, from suckers like my who will buy it all up no matter what). I have about half of the Mk2 DLC, maybe a little more. For one, they changed the list. Instead of being able to filter how you want to look at the list between a bunch of small icons through various sizes that reduce it to about four items on a screen, now you just have a straight down list with no apparant way to change it (Improved!!). These icons are really big... but of course the titles are also huge, and still don't completely fit, and naturally it takes them a while to start scrolling really slowly. I prefered the small icons because it was much easier to check what I had and hadn't bought and to see what types of DLC I had prioritized. For a game with only a few items this wouldn't be a problem. For a game with 86 items its a nightmare. I nightmare that gets 30 seconds longer every time I want to add something to my cart. With the old system the process of purchasing and starting a download and then backing out continue browsing might have taken 30 seconds total. And lets not forget that I still have to go through all the very slow steps to finish my purchase (and the only way I can see the subtotal is to go to my cart. Normal for cart based online shopping, but annoying for game downloads). I got three items in there before another error occurred and I decided to check out instead of dealing with any more nonsense. So all this wonderful new upgrade did was make me cut my shopping short.
Now, some of the slowness might be my connection, but of course I was using the same connection before the update, so I'm gonna say its the update. Perhaps there are extra layers of security that make it take longer. I don't know. What I do know is that buying multiple things from the Playstation Store has just become infinitely slower and more tedious. I commend the effort to bring it more in line with Microsoft's fairly smooth system, and yes the update is still fairly young and might have unforseen glitches, but in this moment I'm still just absolutely pissed.
This of course brings me around to the internet as a whole lately. It seems like when one site changes something, everyone else has to jump on that wagon even if it adds nothing to the experience. Google image search still works fairly well, but I had no problem with pages. And of course if you get down to the show more button then every time you click on something after that and hit back you'll be back up to the bottom of the first set of pages. Wonderful. Now I've seen other websights going with the show more button rather than just letting me load pages. STOP IT!! Pages are fine. Pages do the job nicely. This change is pointless and seems like it would just put more strain on a connection. And now suddenly everything has to be a social networking site. Frick'n everything! Alexx, who posts a lot of pictures, uses photobucket pretty extensively, and even that has gotten hit by the social network-ification of every damn websight on the whole freaking (definately not "freaking") internet. They also pointlessly updated their website which has caused him problems. They let him use the old version by hitting a button and of course a little box asks him why he's not using the new version, to which the best response seems to be "because the old version actually works."
Changes and updates are great, so long as they accomplish something. By all means improve. Certain new trends might benifit your site. It they do then get on board. In my opinion, all the Playstation Store really needed was the download list (did it have that before I really can't remember now). That was my only complaint. But now we have changing and updating merely for changes own sake, and not to make needed improvements. If your system doesn't work at all, then do a complete overhaul. If you have a good system that everyone is used to, then tweak it, and add new things as applicable, don't just throw it out the window and completely revamp everything just for the hell of it, especially if all it does is make your service worse. What is the freaking point!?
...whew. Sorry, I know I have a habit of being long winded, but it feels good to get out all that bottled up whining. I'm sure some of the seemingly pointless changes have some reason, but at least make that reason transparent. I'm sure some of it might be to make more sites smart phone accessible, which is probably pretty important to a lot of sites. But still, at least do stuff right. Bluh.
