Post by Blade Runner 07 on Dec 29, 2014 15:50:28 GMT -5
So as many of you know, Xbox Live and PSN was hacked on Christmas day. Lucky for Xbox players, it only lasted a few hours, as for the PlayStation owners, I know a few who still can't get online. Thats not the point of this article though. Instead I'm focusing on what Sony, Microsoft, and gamers need to take away from this experience.
As my wife of all people pointed out this Christmas night, alot of things were unexpectedly brought to light in this hack. The obvious is that despite being warned a few weeks prior by the hackers themselves, the necessary precautions were not taken (or did not work) and the hack happened anyway. There is lesson number one: Microsoft and Sony either don't take hackers warnings seriously or worse, can't defend against these attacks.
The second lesson makes this whole situation a bit of a double-edged sword. Yeah, on one hand these hackers are criminals and should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. On the other hand, they are geniuses that might just deserve our praise. Not from us as gamers, but as users of a technology that has become exponentially more dependent on server connections.
While I was offline I could not play any of my games without switching my Xbox One to the "go offline" option which is buried in the settings app and and frankly sounds like something you wouldn't want to do while trying to work around networking issues. However, if you don't do this, the console is a useless brick. You can't get past the dashboard without signing in and when you go to do that, the console automatically tries to sign you into your online account instead of just signing you in as offline. Anyway, going offline had me playing my games again, but to my surprise, achievements don't work, and many games like Halo and Assassin's Creed go out of their way to remind you that you are offline with pop-ups that tell you what you can and can't access. Yes, the games are playable offline, but whole features we are used to having available offline in previous generations are locked behind a mandatory server connection.
This NEEDS to be fixed. While I had no personal experience with the Playstation side of this, it's never been more apparent that both consoles need help.
These hackers showed the world just how useless your new console can be without an internet connection. Worse yet, all the kids that got these consoles on Christmas morning had to wait 24 hours just to get that mandatory day-one update to play it, then the (sometimes) online dependent installs of certain games means many first impressions of the system were of them ignoring an over-hyped new paperweight during christmas dinner and checking various gaming websites every 15 minutes for updates on whether the servers were back online or not.
If you take but one thing away from this thread let it be this...
Coming off of the Xbox One always online debacle of E3 2013, my worst fears came true this Christmas. It's extremely important that we look past this attack and any hostile feelings we might have toward the hackers themselves and focus this energy on Microsoft and Sony. This inevitably WILL happen again. I want to know that when it does, the ONLY things effected by it are 100% online dependent features such as video streaming and online multiplayer. Nothing else.