“SACK IT TO ME”…Weekly Answers to the LBP Community’s Questions (12/9)

Another crazy week in the world of LBP filled with tons of new questions for us to answer. But before we get to the questions, we wanted to introduce “efong”, one of our US producers for LittleBigPlanet. You may have noticed him jumping in to answer a few of your questions in the comments section last week, and we’re glad he’s able to help you guys out. Now, onto the latest!

Moderation
We haven’t forgotten about those of you who have been affected by level moderation either. Changes are coming very soon, and we believe the way we check levels for inappropriate content will soon start to be received more favorably. We know it’s a big deal, and we’re very much working on it.

Rankings
We hope you noticed but within the data for each user created level, there appears the “Star rankings” associated with fellow players ranking levels.

Failed to load level
Several of you have gotten this message when playing online. This is one of the things on our list, wanted to provide some insight on the message.

The “Failed to Load Level” message happens in two basic situations – firstly, if latency or server conditions result in a time out before the level completes loading, and secondly, if you’re trying to access a level that has been moderated. Assuming that you haven’t received a moderation notice, it might well be worth trying again as it could have been a temporary issue causing the inability to load.

Lag
Wanted to explain a bit about our servers to address the issue of Lag. Online multiplayer gameplay on LBP works on a P2P principle, so the connection is as stable as the weakest link in your party. And if someone is trying to play through WLAN or has a lower connection, lag occurs. This is not to be confused with lag you may experience when accessing the servers. The servers for LittleBigPlanet act only as a gateway or matchmaking service for multiplayer games; once you’re in a level, the server is no longer part of it — it’s purely down to your connection speed and that of the people you’re playing with. We’re aware that quite a few players experience excessive amounts of laggy play and Media Molecule is working on optimizing the multiplayer netcode further in order to minimize this, however when talking about the servers, they are now for the most part stable, which should considerably reduce those occasions where the online side of the game is not available at all. We’re still working to improve things further, but we’ve already come a long way since the game launched.

Full Profiles
Some have started seeing a Full Profiles message. Essentially, there are too many items stored in your Popit menu — especially in “Community Objects” category. To make your profile “less full”, go into your Popit and delete some of the unwanted objects (pictures, objects, etc). On our end, we’re aware that there is interest in seeing profile space increasing and we’re looking into it further.

Sackbook.com
An impressive community fansite popped up last week and we were all impressed, but we’ve been in discussions with the site owner and requested the site be suspended. Chris, the site owner, was happy to work with us on this. Our intent is to be able to offer everyone the choice of whether their shared data is visible or not in order to protect everyone’s privacy, and while Sackbook was doing nothing wrong in the way it presented information and had no access to any personal data, we believe this additional option is important.

Merchandise
Lots of inquiries on this one. And yes, there are major plans for Sackboy merchandise. Expect to see a handful of announcements in the New Year. Why is it taking so long you ask? Few reasons. It’s a new IP (intellectual property) and many companies are unwilling to take a risk manufacturing a whole new line on something new and untested, which is why you always see tons of merchandise around major ‘sequel’ releases. Also, once we get companies on board, the production lead times are insanely long. Another reason is quality — we absolutely love Sackboy and want to make sure that our merchandise is the highest quality. You should see some of the samples we’ve received (not so good). Don’t worry, you’ll start seeing things soon enough.

…That’s it for this week. Don’t forget to jump in the comments below and ask some more questions. We’ll try to get to all of them, and if we don’t , no need to get frustrated. We need questions to answer for next week’s installment.