It is hard for me to determine as I dont play online that often anymore.

Hey, guess who's trying to grift comsumers with a bullshit ad again. Again. AGAIN..........Sigh. Because of course they are.

I'm looking at aussieoutages.com and DotA2 is the #2 most reported product this week - 67% server connection issues and 32% log-in issues. EA is at #3 and Battlenet is at #8. The rest are non-gaming products.

It is the best gaming network on console, but that's never really been up for discussion.

Yeah. 2 gens ago, the gap was hilariously tilted in Microsoft's favor. I didn't really bother with the PS2 online, which basically means I didn't play SOCOM. :) I had extensive experience with both XB360 and PS3 last gen. PS3 closed that gap big time. Resistance 2 pulled off some crazy feats of strength. 8 player co-op and 60 player multiplayer? Not bad to say the least.

Steams Network is decentralised. It's impossible to take the entire network down completely.

There have been instances where DDOS attacks has taken down the Authentication servers for Steam which prevented people from logging in temporarily, but you can work around that easily enough.
Those that were logged in didn't notice any difference really.

How do you explain one of the greatest hacks in recorded history that resulted in the PSN network being offline for months during the PS3 era? ;)
Xbox live was just as reliable back then as it is today, even when it had the larger marketshare.

Exactly.
But, we can confidently say, it has never had the kind of extended downtime that we saw last generation.

That is highly dependent on your location in the world and what internet provider you have.

Microsoft and Sony for instance both use Akami to distribute data here in Australia, however... Microsoft had the edge over Sony thanks to the fact that Internet Providers would capture Xbox Live data and cache it on their own Content Delivery Networks, which provided a massive speed advantage in Microsoft's favour. - Sony wouldn't allow this practice, which was a downright shame, ironically neither would Blizzard.

Data on a providers own personal network is far cheaper and has more bandwidth that a 3rd party network.

Most providers take Steam one step farther and host Steam content on their own servers, next to their own content delivery networks, which gives Steam the best possible reliability thanks to redundancy (As ISP's supplement Valves own servers), and thus also has the best throughput.

Please. Trophies full stop was a response to Microsoft's Achievement system. Microsoft was first with the concept on a platform-wide basis.
It even took awhile for the PS3 to gain Trophy support and thus some games never had Trophy's.

Player bios was on the Xbox 360. Communities I think was a recent thing on the Xbox One.

Activity Feed has been on the Xbox One for years as I don't remember not having it. - And real player names? Meh. Didn't care when Blizzard tried to push it years ago, don't care for it today.

Pretty much. I'm just glad there is finally a party system. Nothing was worse on PS2 and PS3 than either playing a different game than buddies or dealing with games that varied in what online features they supported. Now they just need to work on voice quality and download speeds, those are both still horrendous imho.

As someone that uses PlayStation Network at least 12 hours a day, I can honestly not remember the last time it was down in my area. On that same note my boyfriend is on Xbox Live around 6 hours a day, and I can't recall him ever complaining avout it being down in the last year. So, all in all, I would say both PSN and XBL won't be letting you down beyond reasonable expectation.

It's a great gaming network alright!

I just hope it won't let me down on Christmas :P

Funny lol psn network issues are exaggerated, i haven't had an issue since the time they were hacked.