Hello everyone.
An annoying thing happened a few days ago. For the first
time since moving to the UK, I decided to turn on my PS3 and buy a personal
space for the PlayStation 3’s social game, PlayStation Home. I realized that my
credit card information wouldn’t work, so I needed to update. I went into the
master account settings, found the payment info section, entered the password,
and began updating the address. Once I got to the country/region field,
however, I found that it couldn’t be changed. So I went on my laptop to the
website, where hopefully, I could change my region. Nope. Not there either.
After a fruitless search through customer support, I decided to call the UK
helpline. I was connected to someone rather quickly, but I was told that in
order to change my region, I would have to either disconnect my PS3 from my
account or buy a completely new system and then create a whole new Sony account
for the UK. This wouldn’t be so bad, but all of my data would be wiped off of
the hard drive in the process. I’d even have to make all of my purchases all
over again! This is out of the question, and I suppose I’ll just have to be
fine with an Xbox 360 for three years.
If Sony had been smarter about this, then perhaps this sort
of situation wouldn’t have happened. I know that their network had been
attacked last year, and their security had gone up as a result, but this
restriction on changing regions is overreacting—if it was even because of the
attacks in the first place.
This policy that to change your region, you need a whole new
Sony account is unnecessary and inconvenient, and practically makes my PS3
unusable.
Sony, stop. You rocked E3 with your PS4 announcement, but
this is far from rocking. Actually no it isn’t-- it’s rocking my world in a bad
way.
Andrew Ferguson
