Happy Pride Month, sackfolk! I want to give a few quick, informal updates about progress on Beacon’s return to service, recognize people’s hard work, and mention a few notes about some other stuff that’s going on. The most important takeaway here? Beacon will return sooner than we thought.
Please be advised I wrote this rather quickly, and my thoughts (and potential mistakes) are my own.
LBP Union Pride Month 2025
This past month I have been just as depressed as you all have been at Beacon’s temporary suspension of service. None of us knew how long it would take until a solution could be found. I was fully prepared to accept that we might have to wait years before we could restore service.
I was especially disappointed because we had an exciting contest and event season planned, that has been a bit disrupted. For Pride Month, my roommate potato farm suggested a great idea for an event that Minister of Inspiration Ryankz11 and I have been preparing for: the LBP Union Pride Parade. Our plan was to have creators sign up in May, and then we would assign them a ‘linking partner’. They would take some time to create a short level, and then add a level link at the end that would go to the next creator’s level. You would then be able to start from the beginning of the ‘parade’ by playing a level, and then be linked all the way to the end in one long chain.
Sadly, with no server, and with everyone’s hearts and minds overwhelmed and exhausted by what’s happened, those plans haven’t really come to fruition. It’s something I’d love to see us put together again sometime in the future. I’ve also been thinking about independently creating Blahaj Survival 2. I’ve been planning for a while to make a sequel to that which would be a versus challenge similar to ShadowLeviathan’s ‘Sonemy’ bomb survival; if you are snuggled to death by one of the Blahaj sharks, you become a Blahaj and get to turn on the other players in your lobby!
Anyway, I wanted to write how I felt about that because I am a bit disappointed that it looks like this June will be yet another ‘change the server logo’ month. Perhaps when Beacon returns, we can run the event anyway, regardless of what month it is!
On Bringing Beacon Back
I am pleased to report that there is an effort to return Beacon back to service, thanks to the hard work of Zaprit, Jvyden and other contributors of Patchwork, a PlayStation 3 plugin which will prevent the force join exploit we discussed in our latest security advisory from functioning. In very simple terms, you will be able to set unique lobby passwords, and only people with that same lobby password will be able to join you. This, however, will not prevent the larger issue of remote code execution via scripts placed by others in your session. You still will need to be cautious about who you play with in lobbies.
With Patchwork functioning, the next step is for us to ensure that it is enforced across Beacon users connecting to the server. To implement Patchwork, we will be recommending the latest version of Refresher instead of UnionPatcher, as the latest version of Refresher will have the Patchwork implementation. I am also encouraging discussion to take place on incorporating the best possible implementation into LittleBigPatcher, a native PS3 patching application that I have been very excited to see developed by myegghead.
I am unsure of what support will be like for RPCS3 at this time, so please stay tuned for a more formal announcement about what we plan to do about Beacon’s return to service.
Thank you for your patience; we have been just as eager as you are to get Beacon back up and running for everyone!
