Ubisoft sneaks into the Event space and makes itself at Home
by Jem Alexander 
{ May 28th 2008 at 11:00AM }
Between the hours of 7pm and 8pm BST, Home beta users will be able to check out the Event area and see exactly what Ubisoft has to offer over the coming months. Meanwhile, the rest of the world can check out the keynote which will happen at 6pm BST tonight. Considering the software is still in a very closed beta stage, we're intrigued to see a publisher take such interest in it so soon.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
adolson @ May 28th 2008 11:13AM
Must be nice for the people who are in the beta. Hopefully these things get used a lot after Home actually opens up for everyone.
HektikLyfe @ May 28th 2008 12:08PM
A Beta within a Beta at that!
Nate @ May 28th 2008 11:30AM
For those who were as confused as I, BST = British Summer Time, aka British Standard Time, aka Irish Standard Time, officially known as Western European Summer Time..... which is UTC +1 hour.
At least, I presume they meant British and not Bangladesh Standard Time.
Man, do time zones suck. Especially time zones that change in the freakin' summer and have like a dozen different names.
Lars @ May 28th 2008 12:42PM
Yeah, I'm not a fan of the time zone system. Nor the retarded units (why can't we switch to some sort of metric time?). To make matters worse, we've got all these DST zones where some switch times in summer and some don't. Half the year, Arizona's time is the same as California's, and the other half it's an hour off. I wish we would follow suit and stop changing our clocks constantly.
Popfrogs @ May 28th 2008 12:47PM
The time zone system is good, it's daylight savings that's retarded.
chris.westermann @ May 28th 2008 12:00PM
Awesome, a place where people can show off their wares, but then nobody has access to it. Great Sony, way to keep our faith in you by adding all these neat features in Home but then not releasing Home to us.
Just release Home already, stop striving to make it perfect 'cause it won't be perfect. We know it, you know it, get over yourselves.
Sony has to accept that no matter what they release people will love aspects of it hate other aspects and the only way a software company can work in today's world is to listen to their customers and dynamically update the product.
If Sony thinks they are going to release Home and it will be uniformily loved and accepted by all exactly the way it is and Sony has no intention of ever changing it again then they are severely dissilusioned.
I am more inclined to believe that Home will suck, that the constant delays are due to the fact that the architecture of Home is problematic, that the features Sony wanted to add to Home cannot be done, and that the expectations of what this product should have been cannot match what the product can really do. Its not unlike Sony to invest a lot of time and money on a bomb, and Home might be Sony's biggest white elephant. Sony, prove me wrong, but not releasing Home sooner rather then later is will become its biggest detrement.
adolson @ May 28th 2008 12:36PM
I think they should just open the beta up again.. make us register on some obscure website, fill out a survey to get a download code, etc. whatever it takes.. Just let people in who want to be in and who don't care if it's half-broken.
What's it going to hurt? They're already in beta, and they're releasing an open beta later on, so there's really no difference... only so few are currently privileged, that's all.
They've already said that Home will never be complete, so the delay doesn't really make much sense, especially if they had some hoops to go through to weed out the people who would only download it if it's easy and then complain about it's incomplete state.
I'd really like to see these virtual events, myself.. Even if that were the only thing to do.
All that said, I still would rather have in-game XMB (specifically text and cross-game voice chat) more than Home.
HektikLyfe @ May 28th 2008 2:04PM
I agree with adolson. The more people we have talking about it the better. It amazes me that Sony makes it a point to exclude media members from signing up too.
We KNOW what we're getting into, I don't think anyone is looking to be blown away. It just looks like something fun to mess with and we, the early adopters, should be the first to mess with it.
What they should do is base it on the age of the console as a sort of payback to those who paid a little more and had faith in the console.
scratch @ May 28th 2008 3:17PM
I would imagine the reason they have the beta restricted to such low numbers has something to do with servers, bandwidth, and/or network code.
If they lets tons of people on then they have to have a huge number of servers and a huge amount of bandwidth dedicated to it. That is going to cost a lot, especially for something that is late and probably already over-budget. They may also be having some kind of issues with network code such that having huge numbers of people might crash the system.
That said, I think they should make an effort to start to open it up, not necessarily all at once, but in chunks. They can just send out emails to groups, and slowly build the user base. Fresh users would also help because they would be more likely to actually log on to it, and check out stuff like this Ubisoft promotion. I wonder who is paying whom for this event...
Brodie-san @ May 28th 2008 12:13PM
I'm personally a big fan of SHFT
(Super Happy Fun Time)
deusmecha @ May 28th 2008 2:21PM
Sweet. Ubisoft will be able to cater to the 20-ish people that still bother to beta test Home.
Jason B. @ May 28th 2008 5:00PM
There are more than that. The problem is that when they segregated the regions, most people were in the European Beta.
Joe @ May 28th 2008 7:04PM
Well I can say for a fact that there was more then 20 people that went on Hoem to see what was going on and I can say Ubidays looked great on Home and believe the Hype Home is great. Also on the Euro servers there was even more people then on the US and Jap together.