• Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!

The "What's New" section on the PS4 is worthless right now

Mikey Jr.

Member
Yep, anyone else find this thing completely worthless? I don't bother to check it out because 90% of it is just completely useless info.

Here is a refresher image.

Hh87vZF.jpg


When you check it out, it provides you with the most useless information imaginable.

"Mikey Jr. played Infamous 8 times"
"Johnny earned 5 random trophies"
"Michelle is now friends with 5 people"

Whoop-de-doo! I don't give a fuck about any of this.


I think the whole thing needs to be revamped.

1. Get rid off all those things I just mentioned. They are worthless, and just clutter up everything. Only keep them when someone gets a platinum or maybe starts a brand new game up for the first time.

2. Allow me to post messages of my own. So I can go to the wall, and select "create message". There, I can type what I want in lets say 150 characters, or whatever twitter has.
I then post this to the wall and any of my friends can respond to it. There can be a running style twitter type wall. I am reluctant to say "anyone" because I'm not sure if Sony has the capability for sustaining a message wall for 1000+ posts.

3. Allow me to attach pictures/video to the wall. I press share, and there is an option of where to post it. Include facebook, twitter, youtube, but also have an optional checkbox that'll say "Post to my wall as well" or something like that. Allow my friends to respond to it.

4. I would say get rid of ads, but that would probably fall on deaf ears. I like game ads, not a fan of "Watch cold comes the night, only 99 cents!" type ads. But mehhh, I won't to make too much of a fuss. Theres not that many.

Those are just the suggestions off the top of my head.

What do you guys want to see? Like how it is right now?
 
I think pictures do show up on the wall don't they? But yeah the other stuff would be nice. I don't know about unlimited posting of messages though... I don't want my What's New to be filled with dumb twitter like posts.
 
3. Allow me to attach pictures/video to the wall. I press share, and there is an option of where to post it. Include facebook, twitter, youtube, but also have an optional checkbox that'll say "Post to my wall as well" or something like that. Allow my friends to respond to it.

it already does that if you tweet it, the screenshot appears in this area also
 
Your ideas are better than what's there now. I especially would love to post screenshots and videos I created with my Sony friends rather than my twitter friends.
 
I'm pretty sure they know somethings wrong with the What's New section. Considering how I took a survey about it not a month ago. Told them I want filters, being able to post my own messages and more specifics.
 
Well I have no friends on PS4 so this section is even more useless since it only tells me what I have done recently :(
 
I like checking out shared video clips from PSN friends, and also posting my own occasionally. It definitely is a jumbled mess of ads, trophies unlocked and shares, but I like the concept.
 
I like checking out shared video clips from PSN friends, and also posting my own occasionally. It definitely is a jumbled mess of ads, trophies unlocked and shares, but I like the concept.

I like this concept, for sure.

But for instance, I can't comment on shared clips, why not?

And to post my own, I need to post to twitter first?

Why? Just let me post directly to the wall. Thats who I want to see it, my friends.
 
Xbox added a lot of the features you just mentioned recently and I do enjoy it alot. PSN won't be far behind I believe. They even gave us SMS messaging as well as share features so say one of your friends posted something, once you click share all your friends can then see it. Basically Facebook but it works well for gaming. They're are statuses and trending features as well. This isn't a bragging post btw. I just think Sony should have it too
 
Again, that's why we need something similar like Miiverse because i don't care if "userA" just played "A game" for the first time, I want to know his thought about the game.
 
I like having an activity feed with your friends gaming and social interactions... But they definitely need to change that layout, that just don't look good XD

Maybe they should give you filter options, so you can skip info that doesn't interest you.
 
They should just allow people to customize what announcements are important to them.

I would like it much better if it looked more like a twitter feed with the most recent items at the top and if they felt they really needed to, they could put sponsored posts in between. I really don't like the pinterest model of displaying things. The what's new section would have to be much more visible for that to work.
 
I know that whole UI rumour was fake, but I hope if Sony does redo the UI, they look at the whats new section.

It has potential.
 
Well I have no friends on PS4 so this section is even more useless since it only tells me what I have done recently :(
Dude.

Add me: Fersis_4
I play BF4 and soon Diablo 3
 
I actually like the what's new section. Yeah it's disorganized but it's cool to have a quick look at what people are doing and playing, and the screenshots my friends share show up there as well. Could definitely be improved a lot but I don't think it's worthless.


Come at me.
 
Agreed.

I wish your screen shots (that you make Public) from games should show up here or say small clips that you made. (to all your PSN friends)

Edit: without using Facebook or Twitter. Why cant we use PSN directly?
 
If you think it sucks now, it was even worse at launch ;)

At least they've consolidated things a bit and grouped similar items into one "played Netflix X times" instead of showing "played Netflix" 8 different times, etc. They also added timestamps and stuff like that. There need to be more sorting options. I could care less that my friend unlocked a trophy nor do I need to be reminded what games i've played

The annoying thing is that I don't think any of my friends list people can see my screenshots or videos here because they aren't linked to twitter or facebook? Being able to comment on stuff would be a nice feature. Liking is pretty much useless.

I'm kind of thinking that once they properly build in Friend notifications...the current iteration of What's New (especially if it has the beacon feature from the 360 where you can tell it to notify you if they start playing a specific game) actually becomes useless.
 
Instead of the useless 'Whoever played Infamous 5 times', i'd prefer a most popular games being played by my friends in the last day / week / whatever.

Like a Top 10 list of what's happening.
 
3. Allow me to attach pictures/video to the wall. I press share, and there is an option of where to post it. Include facebook, twitter, youtube, but also have an optional checkbox that'll say "Post to my wall as well" or something like that. Allow my friends to respond to it.

4. I would say get rid of ads, but that would probably fall on deaf ears. I like game ads, not a fan of "Watch cold comes the night, only 99 cents!" type ads. But mehhh, I won't to make too much of a fuss. Theres not that many.

3. The feature is already there, if you share something in the social networks. Haven't you tried it?

4. There's only game ads here in Europe, as there are no movies/series in the store

As for trophies in the feed, I'm interested to see what my friends have gotten from the games I've also played.
 
allowing users to post things like reviews, polls, comments, and what I might use a lot, game session sign-ups would get more people looking at the feed.
 
It should even rather be a glorified message board for announcements / discussions / news amongst your PSN friends more than what is is.

Cus right now, it's like, your friend "RaptorXxX just took a shit" and "AlanDeni just breathed in oxygen"

so utterly pointless.
 
3. The feature is already there, if you share something in the social networks. Haven't you tried it?

4. There's only game ads here in Europe, as there are no movies/series in the store

As for trophies in the feed, I'm interested to see what my friends have gotten from the games I've also played.

i think the issue is that you can't see them unless your friend is apart of that particular social network which is dumb. you should be able to only post things to your PSN wall and have your friends see it without also having to post it on facebook or twitter and be friends with them on those. those other social networks should be in addition to, not a requirement.

the ability to filter out certain type of items in the news feed would be nice compromise for those of us who don't want to see all of this info.
 
allowing users to post things like reviews, polls, comments, and what I might use a lot, game session sign-ups would get more people looking at the feed.

On a side note, it's odd that you can only rate games you've bought digitally from the PSN store. I'd like to be able to rate my retail games as well.
 
It should even rather be a glorified message board for announcements / discussions / news amongst your PSN friends more than what is is.

Cus right now, it's like, your friend "RaptorXxX just took a shit" and "AlanDeni just breathed in oxygen"

so utterly pointless.

Yep, a message board for your friends would be great.

I am interested in their videos, and what they have to say, or talking to a bunch of my friends at once. That would be great.

Right now it shows on my feed that "User has watched Brokeback Mountain"

Uhhh.......thanks?

And for videos, you can give a thumbs up or a thumbs down. What is the point of this?

Just so much of that section needs to be overhauled.
 
It feels like there's a group of people at Sony who know how they would like things to work, and there's a group who actually implements how things work, and they are only allowed to communicate through flailing hand gestures. It's as if the entire PS4 UI was developed by space aliens who were given a set of basic instructions, but had none of the actual instincts that a console using human being would have in implementing those ideas. Sony's left hand never quite seems to know what its right hand is doing with so much of this stuff. I really don't get it.
 
i think the issue is that you can't see them unless your friend is apart of that particular social network which is dumb. you should be able to only post things to your PSN wall and have your friends see it without also having to post it on facebook or twitter and be friends with them on those. those other social networks should be in addition to, not a requirement.

the ability to filter out certain type of items in the news feed would be nice compromise for those of us who don't want to see all of this info.

That's news to me. Are you sure that's the way it is?

More options are always better, as currently my feed is cluttered by the actions of few power players.
 
Top Bottom