This has been a long time coming anyway, as the company has made no secret of their plans to introduce new ways to make their premium subscription to the PlayStation Network as appealing as possible to first time buyers.

One logical new approach to doing this is by extending the PS+ benefits over to the PS Vita, which Eurogamer has heard will happen starting at E3. Vita owners will apparently be able to subscribe to PS+ as well and they’ll get free ‘exclusive’ games to download, as well as free pieces of DLC as well.

Another benefit that PS+ subscribers with a Vita will have over non subscribers is the ability to back up saves and other content directly to a cloud, without the need to connect to a PS3 system or PC first. As for the future of PS+ regarding current subscribers on PS3, we’re hearing that Sony will be offering ‘top tier’ games for free as part of the package, games which presumably will be latest releases and not the mid-card games that PS3 users already have that Sony have a tendency to do with their current format.

With all this talk about improving the PSN though so ultimately Sony take home more money, we hope that there are some plans in place to improve the PS3 XMB. It is also no secret that some of the features can well do with a revamp, the internet browser being the most notorious.

As a Vita owner, are you happy to pay for a PS+ subscription if the benefits are good enough? The worse case scenario would be for Sony to announce remote play support with PS3 titles at last, but make Vita owners pay for them with a PS+ subscription. These cloud features between PS3 and Vita has massive potential obviously, but we just hope that Sony don’t get too greedy and lock away the best features of the new PSN for paid customers only.

Similar to the way in which Game of the Year Editions work at retail stores, this limited sale now gives you the opportunity to try out games that you haven’t played along with all the content that came with the game post-release.

For example, there’s now an Ultimate Edition of Call of Duty Black Ops on the US PSN store, giving you the game as well as the First Strike, Escalation, Annihilation and Rezurrection Packs for a discount price of $66.49. That’s obviously still fairly expensive for an old game, but if you happen to have a PSN+ subscription as well, you’ll find the same package available for the cheaper price of $46.54 which is a lot more reasonable.

This looks to be yet another move by Sony to make their PSN+ subscriptions more appealing to first time buyers and aside from Black Ops, PSN+ users will be able to enjoy 50% Ultimate Edition prices on many other decent titles as well.

Mortal Kombat is another great choice if you are yet to play it. For $34.99 or $24.49 with PSN+, you’ll get the game along with the Rain, Kenshi, Scarlet and Freddy Krueger DLC characters. You’ll also get all of the classic skins and extra fatalities on top as well. Even at $35, that is a pretty good price for the content you are getting, especially compared to the price that Activision are commanding for Black Ops, which in all honesty is too expensive and perhaps a little greedy.

You can have a look at the US Blog here to see what other games are getting Ultimate Editions. Unfortunately though, we’re sad to see that this is yet other occasion where EU PS3 owners are getting completely shafted. Sony has confirmed to Eurogamer that this is a US-only deal, so this is only good for those EU gamers who have a US PSN account and access to a credit card or USD PSN vouchers.

Do you think it’s acceptable that EU owners have to settle for second best all the time when it comes to sales and promotions like this? Give us your thoughts on the matter – the deal will be valid on the US store until June 4.

Unfortunately, just like the other maintenance periods before it there doesn’t appear to be a reasonable explanation either. Maintenance is unavoidable sometimes everybody understands that, but when it occurs at such a frequent rate as PS3 users have experienced, eyebrows are naturally going to be raised.

According to the official Sony US Blog, the downtime will take place on Monday April 16th at around 6am Pacific time, 9am Eastern Time and 2pm over in the UK. Those of you who are playing in Asia will suffer the worse as the outage will happen just as you are finishing work no doubt – 9pm for Japan and 8pm for Hong Kong users, nasty.

This is as heavy as outages goes for Sony too, as they have stated that users will not be able to access ”Account Management, the PSN store, PlayStation Home or play online”. We love how they kept the online gaming part until last, even though it’s obviously the most important factor of any maintenance. Usually gamers would be able to game online as long as they stayed logged in during a maintenance window, but that isn’t the case here sadly.

With that said and done, lets hope that this is the only maintenance period we see in April. We’re guessing that the inevitable comments are going to come that it’s no big deal, but with no explanation time and time again some users may have a right to question Sony on their motives.

Will the maintenance period affect you on Monday? What are your opinions on Sony’s lack of explanation regarding the frequent outages?

Sony used Twitter to reveal this news and we’ve embedded the tweet from the official PlayStation Twitter below. This was tweeted less than an hour ago (at the time of publishing this brief article) and as you can see no reason has been given for the cancellation, but it does clearly suggest that they will be rescheduling the maintenance.

Update: Tomorrow’s scheduled PSN maintenance has been postponed. We’ll update everyone once it’s rescheduled. Until then, game on.

— PlayStation (@PlayStation) March 1, 2012

Ever since Sony’s nightmare of a situation in mid-2011, where the PlayStation Network went down for a considerable amount of days, we’ve seen Sony voluntarily take down the network multiple times to take carry out maintenance. Don’t get us wrong it’s great to see Sony’s team taking a proactive approach to PSN stability and security, however we have to say that the downtime this causes is an annoyance to say the least.

We raised our concerns over the frequent PSN downtime in a recent article which can be seen here. Basically we think that Sony’s next-generation console would benefit greatly from less frequent outages, something which Microsoft seem to have gotten right with the Xbox 360.

As we hear of a new date for the maintenance we will keep you posted, for now make the most of the PlayStation Network while it’s live and share what plans you had made to keep yourself entertained while the PSN was supposed to be down.

Infinity Ward’s community manager tweeted roughly 22 hours ago that a new title update would be rolled out over the PlayStation Network at 2.00am, no time zone was stated, but no-matter where you are in the world this time has been and gone, which means you should have it by now. You can see @Fourzerotwo’s tweet below:

The latest #MW3 title update for @Playstation goes live at 2AM. Includes improved voice chat quality, theater fixes, weapon rebalances.

We searched the Modern Warfare 3 forums for more details, but nothing else has been said about the changes, sadly this means that we can’t tell you more about the weapon rebalancing or theater fixes, all we can confirm is that voice chat quality should be noticeably improved.

Another tweet from Robert Bowling have confirmed that there are still spawn issues with the game for all platforms, it’s nice to see that Infinity Ward’s developers are aware of issues and looking into solutions, but surely such issues should be resolved by now? Spawning next to enemies seems to be one of, if not the biggest issue which needs resolving.

Before we leave you we must just tell you that PlayStation 3 gamers with Elite Premium subscriptions will finally get their hands on the Liberation and Piazza maps on February 28th (this tweet confirms this), you can see videos of these maps here. Xbox 360 gamers have had their hands on this content for a while now and the date just announced reveals that Microsoft’s console gets over 1 month of exclusivity, as you would expect PS3 Elite subscribers aren’t going to be happy with this! This tweet from @hofftwit sums up what many are thinking:

@fourzerotwo WOW- that MONTHLY DLC I paid extra for is coming already?! After nearly 4 months of no benefit whatsoever? You’re too kind.

Are you a PS3 Elite subscriber? If so, do you think that Elite subscribers on Xbox 360 are getting more for their money?

It was only a couple of weeks ago when the service went down for fourteen hours starting on January 19th, which was only about a month after some other downtime for the same reason. This latest scheduled maintenance begins at 14:00 PM on Thursday 2nd of February, and runs until 08:00 AM on Friday February 3rd.

This latest downtime is even longer than before with a massive eighteen hours of maintenance. The information has come via the PlayStation Forum, and will mean that you will not be able to sign into the service during this time.

It will affect both the Console and PC versions of the PS Store, account management, customer registration, and HOME will be unavailable as well. Obviously if you are already signed into the PlayStation Network before the maintenance begins you can continue to play online. After this and you are out of luck and will be met with the site notification page.

Currently the routine maintenance has only been confirmed in Europe, but as before it could quite easily affect US gamers as well. It will cause frustration for some gamers who will not be home for whatever reason, and then will not be able to sign in.

Are you annoyed by more routine maintenance to the PlayStation Network?

The EU PlayStation Blog has taken to Twitter to reveal the latest downtime which will begin at 16:00 GMT tomorrow Thursday January 19th or 17:00 CET. It will run through the night and end at 06:00 GMT or 07:00 CET on Friday January 20th.

This means the service will be unavailable for fourteen hours in total, but luckily if you are already logged in once the maintenance starts you will be able to continue playing online, just don’t log out. The PlayStation Store will also be unavailable during the work, and users will not be able to access Account Management either.

Only last month Sony took the service down for routine maintenance that lasted for ten hours, but this month’s outage is for even longer. Currently it is not known if the outage is for anything specific and currently it only seems to be for the European region.

Update: The routine maintenance is also going to affect US users and will take place today between 8 AM until 9 PM PST.

It was just a few weeks ago that we told you that Sony shut the PSN down for their most recent maintenance period on November 17th, but according to the company and a recent statement on the official PS forums, the network will also go offline for maintenance on Thursday December 15.

As usual, during the period of downtime you will no longer be able to sign in, but the one positive factor that many gamers are starting to realize, is that if you stay signed in to the PlayStation Network before Sony shuts it off, you’ll still be able to play online.

This will be crucial on Thursday as well, since we can tell you that Sony are planning to take the network down for a whopping 10 hours. The maintenance will start at 4PM UK time and will stay offline until 2AM on Friday morning. During the downtime, PS3 users will not be able to use account management, account registration, the PlayStation Store, or use HOME either.

Also slightly disappointing is the fact that there is no word from Sony at the moment what this 10 hour maintenance period is for exactly. We’re guessing that we’ll receive the standard ‘security measures’ statement somewhere along the line, but you just know that there is always more to it than Sony are willing to disclose publicly.

On the plus side it does allow gamers to get a dose of reality outside of the worlds of Uncharted 3 and Battlefield 3 online, two games which we bet a lot of you are playing non-stop at the moment. If you were planning to have a full on gaming session on Thursday, let us know your thoughts on the latest outage and most importantly – don’t forget to stay signed in.

The blog post clearly states that on Thursday, November 17th from roughly 8am PST there will be no access to the PlayStation Store (PS3 & PSP), PlayStation Network Account Registration or PlayStation Network Account Management. Also you will not be able to sign into the PlayStation Network from us.playstation.com, that said, some gamers may find that they are still able to play games online during the maintenance, but don’t count on it.

Sony seem to think that the maintenance will last up to 14 hours, which means it should finish at roughly 10pm PST, as we have readers from all around the world we thought we would do the hard work and convert this to different time zones for you. Check out the image below, if it is too small head over to this link.

Frustratingly for our UK gamers (and people in similar time zones) it means that it looks like Thursday night will not be full of gaming as the downtime will start at approximately 6pm and finish at roughly 8am – however Sony has stated that some gamers may still have access to online games – that could be great news for MW3, FIFA and BF3 gamers.

We really hope that when everything is back up and running a new firmware update will be live for the PS3, however we doubt it, but if we do hear anything you will be the first to know!

Do you mind frequent PSN downtime when it’s for maintenance?

According to this recent EuroGamer article it looks like the downtime will occur between 4.00pm and 6.00pm GMT, however Sony has warned us that it could potentially last longer whilst testing is carried out – sadly Sony did not go into detail regarding just why this maintenance has been scheduled.

During the outage you will not be able to sign in to PSN, access account management, browse the PlayStation Store or sign in via the SonyEntertainmentNetwork – let’s just hope the maintenance and testing goes smoothly as we doubt PS3 gamers will be impressed with an entire evening without PSN access.

Obviously any downtime is frustrating for gamers, but let’s not forget that it at least shows that the guys over at Sony are keeping on top of things. We just wonder why they felt 4.00pm was a good time to start it, surely it would be far less disruptive if the maintenance was carried out whilst people were sleeping.

As and when we hear more about today’s PlayStation Network maintenance we will keep you posted, hopefully things will go smoothly and people will have full access to the network at 6.00pm, if not we are sure we will be bombarded with complaints directed towards Sony.

How will you keep yourself entertained whilst the PSN is down?