Firmware 2.70 - How it helps tournaments

As you may or may not know, Sony has pushed v2.70 of the PS3 firmware update to users tonight which includes a few new features. I’d just like to focus on one new feature and how I feel it can help SRK’s PS3 players, but also how it can help for tournaments.

The newest added feature to the firmware is the addition of text chat. My initial reaction to this was… “uh… aren’t we taking a step back from voice chat and the year 2009 here, Sony?” But it actually comes in FAR more handy than I realized.

The general premise of the feature is that you can create a persistant chatroom on PSN and have up to 15 friends join you there and you can be in 3 different rooms at the same time. You do NOT need to quit whatever game you are playing to use it either. When a new message is posted on one of the rooms you are in, you’ll receive a small notification at the top right part of the screen listing what room the activity was in, who spoke and what was said.

It’s a very simple chat interface and doesn’t let you type in quite as much text as I would like, but… for organizing tournaments, it’s going to be nice not to need to be by a PC to find out who you are facing. The organizer can start up a room (or two or three if need be) invite the tournament players in and let them know who is playing who and so on. Players can easily report results… and I think this can help speed things up quite a lot.

Another idea is maybe to create one room just for chatting about the tournament and have a separate channel simply for the tournament organizer to report results to players… That way players that aren’t interested in the chatter can just get what they want to know. Real time results!

Anyways, that was just my first thought about how we can use this to our advantage. Anyone have any thoughts or maybe further ideas on how we can use this new text chat feature?

i hear this update fucked up a few ppls ps3s. ima wait and not update just yet,

It also lists people in your friends lists online first when you try to send invites for games as well.

This stupid rumor comes with every firmware update, and it’s never true, unless people are updating their launch PS3s for the very first time right now, from 0.96. But how likely is that, really?

http://forums.shoryuken.com/showthread.php?t=183933

Make sure not to have an adapter plugged in while updating if you are going to do it anytime soon :X

ouch… i use a adoptor for my ss pad. yea i wont be updating any time soon. goodbye online till they fix this. wish they didt have to force u to update to go online.

any update for Pelican or Cathulu users?

Another thing that I noticed is when you get a friend request, the person requesting is in your friends list as if they are online

:xeye: Was thinking the exact same thing. Seems like every time there’s an update you hear this but I’ve yet to actually hear anyone say it’s effected them… dood.

Does this update allow madcatz stick users to use their sticks on PS 2 / 1 games?

Was wondering this also since my wireless is down I can’t update yet.

Haven’t tried it yet, but it seems like it could be a great teaching tool. Set up a 1 on 1 match with someone and critique their game (or get help with yours) in realtime!

That is great news.

It has the option of text AND voice chat. Has anyone tried the voice chat?

Voice chat hasn’t changed. It’s still just one person to one person and does not work while playing games.

loving the new text chat.

I usually want to make comments to the other player , I mean if the opponent did good in the round I want to make a quick comment inbetween the rounds saying “niice” or " good 1" or " even a text taunt “HIT ME”

I love it .

thanks for the heads up about a new firmware update… hopefully everything goes smoothly >.<

Firmware crippled one of my adapters. As soon as it plugs into my PS3 it LOCKS THE SYSTEM! It has to be hard booted in order to work again and won’t boot assuming that adapter is in the console. I had removed all adapters/chords before the update. My C2 Tech adapter still works but they’ll definitely have to release another update if the USB ports are going to lock the console for any random 3rd party issue.

Yeah, they probably will. I posted elsewhere that I think they fucked something up and that a stray line of code or something is fucking up unlicensed peripherals. It happens. I just get real tired of the “Sony hates us and did this on purpose!” attitude that presents itself every single time something like this happens.

Any word on the borked shared PSN content rumour?