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near (Vita App) | Scanning local Vita chums for all dat Game Goods

patsu

Member
Can someone explain the Near gifts for me? Like for Super Stardust, i have gotten some gifts that unlocks soundtracks. But is it impossible to unlock these soundtracks without getting the Near gifts?

I also have gotten notice in Super Stardust that says something like "new gifts are now available for upload to Near", but how do i upload these?

The behavior may be different for different games.

So far, most people say their gifting was automated. The gift collection part is manual.
 

Blitzzz

Member
for you UK people, does motorstorm rc have near functionality (lap times etc?)

i hope someone releases a good racing game in the future with giftable mods
 

patsu

Member
What if it was 2 people an hour before?

It's difficult to say unless you run through a series of Near experiments with a friend "side by side".

if you are together within the hour, then you should/may count as "players encountered". There is a set of stats for this subset of people on the radar.
 

LiquidMetal14

hide your water-based mammals
It's difficult to say unless you run through a series of Near experiments with a friend "side by side".

if you are together within the hour, then you should/may count as "players encountered". There is a set if stats for this subset of people on the radar.

That would be a good idea. And move around. Go about 3-4 blocks down the road and rescan.
 

sakipon

Member
Yes, if you have passed/met a Vita user at a close enough distance *and* time, they will be flagged as an "encountered player". When you look at their gamer cards, click on the Near tab, it will show the street where you encountered him/her, together with other specs like Gamer Match rating.

I suppose the time limit is rather broad? I encountered someone who had checked into near several days before me (or so the gamer card said). I suppose he might've been using other online functions after that or checked into near at some other location if that counts.

I've got 6 encounters already and haven't taken Vita to a big city yet. Public wifis rock.
 

thetrin

Hail, peons, for I have come as ambassador from the great and bountiful Blueberry Butt Explosion
It's difficult to say unless you run through a series of Near experiments with a friend "side by side".

if you are together within the hour, then you should/may count as "players encountered". There is a set of stats for this subset of people on the radar.

I'll let you know when I meet someone that owns a Vita :p

My roommate, despite being rather enamored with the machine, is holding off until P4 Golden. I WAS going to hold off until Gravity Rush, but I guess that didn't happen.
 

GringoJB

Member
Just getting a chance to start messing with this today! It seems pretty cool so far... I'm still wrapping my brain around what exactly it's doing and when. Could someone tell me if have it right (with a non-AT&T-activated 3G vita and all sharing and automatic polling enabled)? I just need to have it phrased it in my own words...

- If I fire up the Vita and leave it in sleep mode (and not even having visited the LiveArea for Near), it will grab location data (latitude and longitude) from the GPS every 30 minutes.

- Once I wake up the Vita, connect to Wi-Fi, launch Near, and hit the big button to check in, it will transmit where I am right now, along with all of the GPS cached locations that it was gathering while it was asleep.

- If anything notable is on record for any of those locations (game goods left there, nobody has reported that location yet, etc), it will get reported back to me.

... is that all pretty much right? Did I say anything that is totally wrong?
 

Salaadin

Member
So, according to Near, there are 5 people within a 5 mile radius of me that own Vitas. I regularly see them on the radar and the Vita is always updating the "times met" stat under their profiles.

Is this other "People playing nearby" stat completely different from people met? Whats the radius on this? One day, it claimed that I had 108 people playing nearby which seems ungodly high to me.
 

Raonak

Banned
So, according to Near, there are 5 people within a 5 mile radius of me that own Vitas. I regularly see them on the radar and the Vita is always updating the "times met" stat under their profiles.

Is this other "People playing nearby" stat completely different from people met? Whats the radius on this? One day, it claimed that I had 108 people playing nearby which seems ungodly high to me.

The near radar picks up the 10 closest people. I think it also takes into account private accounts. So the range keeps expanding until it's reached 10 people. (I always get 9, im guessing because theres a private account nearby.)

People playing nearby are people up a certain distance away. Not sure what the radius is, but i suspect it's quite large, or keeps expanding.

When it says "players met" it means you've updated near within .5kms of where they updated.
 

Toki767

Member
Near makes me want to keep my 3G plan. Do we know if it'll still update your location using the GPS if your 3G is off?
 

Salaadin

Member
The near radar picks up the 10 closest people. I think it also takes into account private accounts. So the range keeps expanding until it's reached 10 people. (I always get 9, im guessing because theres a private account nearby.)

People playing nearby are people up a certain distance away. Not sure what the radius is, but i suspect it's quite large, or keeps expanding.

When it says "players met" it means you've updated near within .5kms of where they updated.

That makes more sense.

The "people playing nearby" might be large for me because I live within 10 miles of the interstate. I guess its possible that theres that many people driving through with Vitas in their cars?
 

thetrin

Hail, peons, for I have come as ambassador from the great and bountiful Blueberry Butt Explosion
So, a little clarification:

The people that actually appear on my map were all picked up since...how long ago? My last ping to near?

Also, is the number of people at the location count repeats of the same players, or is it 26 uniques?
 

codhand

Member
Found this near encounter amusing/strange. The only parts of the convo I skipped were when he sent me pics with varying degrees of offensiveness.

EFWSi.png


:-0 ?
 

Zoibie

Member
To make it a little easier to collect all the Bounties, we created The Black Market. This is a near application that allows you select a Bounty type from your collection and send a request out to the Black Market.

How do I do this? I don't see any option for this in either Uncharted or near.
 

levious

That throwing stick stunt of yours has boomeranged on us.
Near makes me want to keep my 3G plan. Do we know if it'll still update your location using the GPS if your 3G is off?

it has for me, there's a couple of locations on my commute that it registers, have not activated 3g.

Not sure if it picks up the location while in sleep mode, I am playing during my commute.

Zoibie,

I think the black market is on the live area screen.
 

Toki767

Member
it has for me, there's a couple of locations on my commute that it registers, have not activated 3g.

Not sure if it picks up the location while in sleep mode, I am playing during my commute.

Zoibie,

I think the black market is on the live area screen.

So it'll pick up locations with no 3G or wifi? That definitely justifies the 3G model purchase if so.
 

thetrin

Hail, peons, for I have come as ambassador from the great and bountiful Blueberry Butt Explosion
So how do you start conversations with people in near?
 

Zoibie

Member
it has for me, there's a couple of locations on my commute that it registers, have not activated 3g.

Not sure if it picks up the location while in sleep mode, I am playing during my commute.

Zoibie,

I think the black market is on the live area screen.

I can get to the Black Market, I just don't know how "request bounty types".
 

Jinfash

needs 2 extra inches
Perhaps when you discovered the new location, no one was around ?

The radar shows you the number of players in the new location over a period.
Yeah, that's what I recently discovered.

When Near was first revealed, Sony stated that it'll display profiles of players who checked in at that location 1 hour before and after your auto-scan (not sure how manual scans would work), which sounded pretty reasonable reasonable.

However, when I checked the profiles of players who were in my most recent scan, most if not all were last seen 2-5 days ago, some even just at the 22nd. So I don't know. Maybe that 2 hour range only pertains to the "Players Encountered" counter in Discoveries. Who knows.
 

thetrin

Hail, peons, for I have come as ambassador from the great and bountiful Blueberry Butt Explosion
Touch their avatar, go to their profile and hit the message bubble. I hope they streamline it a bit soon.

I haven't been able to go to profiles when I touch people's avs in Near. I'll have to check again.

EDIT: Oh, I've been touching their names. No wonder. Silly me.
 

thetrin

Hail, peons, for I have come as ambassador from the great and bountiful Blueberry Butt Explosion
My first thought is to touch their name instead of their avatar. That makes more sense to me for some reason.
 

Zoibie

Member
It's on the launch page for Uncharted I think, to the right of the start button?

I know how to get into the Black Market, but when I'm in there, I don't know how to choose which bounties to put up for trade. Does it just do all that stuff automatically?
 

mochuuu

PSN Community Mgr.
Been scoping this thread to gather what some of people's questions and suggestions are for Near. We're meeting up with the Near dev team soon; so if anyone has any suggestions, questions, etc; would love to know!

thanks!

- morgan
 
Been scoping this thread to gather what some of people's questions and suggestions are for Near. We're meeting up with the Near dev team soon; so if anyone has any suggestions, questions, etc; would love to know!

thanks!

- morgan

- When you add someone in near, it should message "Someone near you just added you as a friend.", so I can tell if it's a friend or a neighbor (lol);

- There should be an ability to delete/decline gift without waiting for it to expire (or a clear all button for those with a massive list), and an ability to remove people from list cause the OCD in me has to click every name to remove the counter.
 

patsu

Member
Cool !

My questions are (in decreasing order of importance):

* The Near app is nifty but has convoluted UI and confusing concepts. Many things such as Gamer Match rating are undefined. Errors are poorly documented and ill conceived (e.g., Duplicated location requests within 60 minutes is not an error, but a cache request, why show an error message at all ?). What does the Near product team plan to do to improve Near in the near term ? What does the Near hope to achieve in the long term ? Is there a dedicated team handling Near, or is this a hobby for the developers ? ^_^

* The integration with games seems to have room for improvement. e.g., It is unclear how to post gifts from games. If it is automated, why alert the users that a gift is ready (since the user can't do anything about it). The flow seems to be inconsistent from game to game. Any plan to standardize the interaction ? Any plans to simplify the gifting flow and other general Near UI further ? If so, what can we look forward to ?

* Under what circumstances would Near fail ? We have seen "An error has occurred" but has no way to find out what's going on. Is it a network issue ? GPS issue ? Skyhook problem ? Near server update problem ? Users who can't use Near can be very frustrated especially when Near seems like a cool idea. Does Near work better in some countries and not others ? If so, what is Sony's systematic plan to address them ? And what can the users do to avoid them ?

* What are the exact definitions of all the Near stats ? We need one pronto ! 8^)
When can we expect a multi-page, detailed online guide on Near to teach users how to maximize their Near experience ? The current online Vita manual explains Near briefly but it contains too little meat from user's perspective. If it's a complex service, take the time to elaborate instead of skimping over the details.
 

Tiamant

Member
I know how to get into the Black Market, but when I'm in there, I don't know how to choose which bounties to put up for trade. Does it just do all that stuff automatically?

I'm on the same boat here, can't figure out how to make it work yet I've recieved 1 near offering (which expired :/)
 

Perkel

Banned
Been scoping this thread to gather what some of people's questions and suggestions are for Near. We're meeting up with the Near dev team soon; so if anyone has any suggestions, questions, etc; would love to know!

thanks!

- morgan

Probably it have more to do with OS of Vita than Near:

-Option to stay logged to PSN all time. I know people in america have poor internet over phones but here in europe, (in poland) we have 10GB for 10$ a month. Also There are people who like to use Vita in home as their main console :)

As of Near. it's a little confusing with those 3 diffrent tabs for emonticons. That should be consolidated in one tab without those emonticons.
 

mochuuu

PSN Community Mgr.
oh and to be clear; this isn't a Q and A type thing =) just questions that I can relay to the team to influence the development roadmap with some input from the folks who are using it. I'll just be gathering the feedback so can't promise a two way discussion i'm afraid.
 

patsu

Member
oh and to be clear; this isn't a Q and A type thing =) just questions that I can relay to the team to influence the development roadmap with some input from the folks who are using it. I'll just be gathering the feedback so can't promise a two way discussion i'm afraid.

That's fine ! Relay my entire message and their product manager will know what to do. ^_^

EDIT: Or better yet, give them the URL starting from your post. They can always track backwards to see the entire thread.
 

Andrefpvs

Member
How exactly do you receive gifts? I've met over 30 different people in near and only got 3 gifts from someone in my friends list (who I suspect lives in a different continent).

Also, what do you guys mean by going to a person's profile to see if they have gifts to share? I see no such option when I click on people's avatars when on the Out and About screen.

This app is unnecessarily confusing. The online manual really needs to be more in-depth.
 

Wario64

works for Gamestop (lol)
Needs a digital manual to explain everything, the explanations in it right now doesn't really explain much

Like, I know you can have it auto-update your location, but does it check for game goods too? I have no idea. I would like to have it automatically grab game goods for me so I don't have to check every hour.

I've gotten the "an error has occured" message and I was only able to fix it by resetting the Vita. That's unacceptable.
 

mochuuu

PSN Community Mgr.
That's fine ! Relay my entire message and their product manager will know what to do. ^_^

EDIT: Or better yet, give them the URL starting from your post. They can always track backwards to see the entire thread.

will do, thanks!
 

patsu

Member
will do, thanks!

mochuuu, I have worked in a large company before and I know the issues. The difficulty will be in the follow-ups.

Does the PSN community management team intend to follow up with the Near team later to see what resolutions they come up with ? If it's a one way, fire-and-forget thing, it will end up like a suggestion box -> trash can interaction eventually. ^_^


Would be great if we can have a community blog to see what they say !
 
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