This weeks xbox live issues...

[skin87]

I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet here. For any that don't know here is the latest from Major Nelson:

You may have noticed that the LIVE service has been having a few issues over the past few days. This includes things like signing in, matchmaking and account recovery. Not everyone has had problems, but I know some of you have and I wanted to give you and update. While the service was never completely offline, problems like this are not acceptable. The entire LIVE team has been working day and night to ensure that you can have a great LIVE experience. While we’re not done yet, I wanted to let you know that things are getting better each hour and that no one on the team is going anywhere until the job is done. Thanks for your patience.

So pretty much Xbox Live has been up and down for some people since late on the 23rd. It got bad enough by Christmas Day that they shut down new signups for Live. I've been lucky enough to not have any issues at all (I've only been online to download songs for Rock Band, I haven't tried playing any multiplayer), but I'm still pretty bummed because my defense against Sony fanboys about having to pay $50 a year for Live is that I thought it was worth it, Live performs very well.

I still think the $50/year is worth it, but I am completely surprised that this was able to happen. They may have sold more 360s and gotten more new uses than they expected this holiday season, but you'd think they would have built up the system to have the redundancy to handle even a much bigger influx of usage.

What sort of compensation do you think Microsoft should offer to remedy this? I realize that even those who got affected the worse and couldn't use it for a week, that only comes out to less than a dollars worth of service lost, but it happened at the worst time. I'm sure for a lot of adults whose Christmas break consists of the 24th, 25th, and 26th if they're lucky plan those days as a time to get some overdue gaming in. Combined with the RROD problems, I think Microsoft needs to give every current Gold subscriber a one month credit, and give all new members that couldn't signup this week an additional month to the one you get for signup in order to stay in the public's good graces. I doubt that will happen though, they'll probably just through like 50 ms points to those that take the effort to complain to them.

I'm interested to see everyone's opinion on this situation, even the fanboys.

[fashiondr]

Boo, Micro$oft sucks, hiss hiss, ra raa...

But seriously, I'm curious to know if xbox live updated with new content this week? The PSN certainly didn't, and here I was thinking it would be the perfect time to bring out some big guns like a DMC4 demo or something like that. Sorry for the slightly off-topic response, I just want to know if the other side got a kick in the teeth for christmas as well...

[siraim]

I got home from my trip to St. Louis and decided to play a little COD4 multiplayer. Before I figured out that Live was just borked, I poked around in my firewall.. checked all my syslogs.. tried to figure out what was wrong with my network. Everything seemed fine.. but it was fine when I left, so it couldn't be XBL, right? ;) Damned XBL and all the new subscribers!

[skin87]

I think it was an average week in the XBL Marketplace. This weeks new songs for Rock Band were half price as a Christmas gift, but I'm assuming that the same thing happened on the PSN as well. Also, most of the content on XBL and PSN is handled by the people that make the game, so there's no real big guns Microsoft or Sony could bust out by themselves.

[assjacket]

I agree that M$ should have been ready for an influx of new players over the holidays, if that is in fact what is causing the problems. I don't really think that they need to compensate Live users though. When you pay for hydro or water and something goes wrong so that you are without it for hours or even days I don't think most people expect some sort of rebate(and those are much more crucial services).
After being a Live user for about 4 years this is the first time i have had any issues(couldn't play COD4 yesterday evening). I don't expect it to never go down, but I do expect them to do everything they can to fix it. It seems they are doing just that.

[joedubbs]

Yeah it's a pain in butt but I'm not pulling my hair out over it. I just started playing COD4 online. I've been a long time Xbox Live Subscriber since the original Xbox but haven't gotten into playing online as much as I have with this game. I think its' the ranking system that has me playing it for hours.

I haven't even gotten into the team objective matches.

[stubadub]

My friends and I were having problems earlier in the month. Playing COD4 was working great, then when we tried to start games of worms and Uno we couldn't get more than 2 of us logged in at the same time. We went back to COD with no problems. You'd think if anything COD would be the one giving us problems, but that wasn't the case. Weird.

[mormonrage]

The problem is compounded by their inane DRM. If you have a console that's been replaced or repaired (and who hasn't), your Arcade titles will only function if you're connected to Live. So, in cases like this, you can't play them. I already knew that--and thought it was absurd.

What I didn't realize is that I can't play the Divx movies I usually stream to the 360 without being connected to Live. That is just an entirely new level of stupidity.

Grrrrr. Paying fifty bucks for this already made me seethe.

[taozoo4u]

The problem is compounded by their inane DRM. If you have a console that's been replaced or repaired (and who hasn't), your Arcade titles will only function if you're connected to Live. So, in cases like this, you can't play them. I already knew that--and thought it was absurd.

What I didn't realize is that I can't play the Divx movies I usually stream to the 360 without being connected to Live. That is just an entirely new level of stupidity.

Grrrrr. Paying fifty bucks for this already made me seethe.

the problems were so bad on the Xbox.com forums people were actually selling their xbox to buy a PS3(which i was considering) the least they could do is give everyone a free week of live, i just had to renew my subscription come to find out i wasted the $50 on not being to play for about 4 days now. C'mon Microsoft get this shit together, it is just not professional

[andyaldrich]

Considering that Microsoft charge for Live, this is unacceptable. I can see Microsoft potential 360 owners because of this. It's enough that the hardware which people buy is duff and has to be returned or fixed with a towel, it's totally unacceptable that Microsoft, who should be the finest software house in the World (based on the amount of money they make, rather than the amounts of 'hotfixes' we have to download) have failures on their own systems and aren't able to supply the online content. I can understand not being able to make enough systems to supply the demand (ie the Wii situation) but online delivery is not physical per se...shame on Microsoft. I might just buy a PS3 next year instead of a 360 because of this.

[deegraww]

Had issues with it last night trying to get an update so I could play rock band. Why doesn't it tell me what it's updating?

[yssman]

I've been able to connect and play most times that I've been on in the past few days, however, that is usually later at night (or early morning), so maybe the low in users makes it that much easier to use.

I'm not happy about it, but I'm not throwing my controller out the window over it. I've seen some Sony kids go off the deep end about it, which at least in my opinion is a shade unfair, given that there are far fewer people using PSN versus that of XBL. Furthermore, who is to say that HOME won't cripple PSN once that launches?

No, Microsoft won't get off easy on this one. I pay $50 a year, I demand that my service go on with little or no problem. I would seriously hope that they are considering giving everyone some free XBL stuff, otherwise, I think they're going to have a lot of really pissed-off customers...

[assjacket]

I wasn't able to log on for the past two days but today seems okay, at least at my house. I looked at Major Nelsons blog, they seem to be doing what they can.

[bobafettjm]

It was wonky for me for about a day and a half. I think people selling their Xbox's over a few days of Live problems is a little ridiculous. I think people should bug Microsoft about some compensation, but I think selling the hardware is a little overboard.

[kilroyperrywinkle]

Considering how massive their network is something at some time was bound to break it down. Anyone who's worked in IT before can tell you that just because the company has the money doesn't mean all hell doesn't break loose. Also considering how many millions of user they have worldwide the fact that only 2 out 3 people have had problems is a miracle in onto itself.

The phone/power/cable/whatever company, would never openly apologize for outages as quickly as MS has so I'd give them a break. Someone is getting their arse chewed for this and I would not be surprised to see them offer a free week/month out of this.

Its like giving away air to them.

Stuff breaks, servers crash. Let them fix the problem first, then let them worry about making you happy.

[az0madman]

Did the same thing happen during the Halo 3 release? I'd figure more people would be on Live then compared to Christmas week so they'd be ready for anything. Just kind of makes it surprising that it'd crash now.

I didn't have problems when I played last week, but right now it's being a bit stubborn. Trying to recover my account on my own 360 but apparently account creation is unavailable or something so I'm outta luck right now which sucks since I can't play any of my games with my save files.

[hepcat]

I was pretty annoyed at this too and I still think they should be offering to extend everyone's Live acct's for two weeks beyond their current expiration date as compensation. However, I listened to the most recent Major Nelson podcast and I was pleasantly surprised. They had a ops guy from XBL on and they did good job of explaining the situation despite the fact that they didn't actually explain what happened. Interesting discussion with the head security guy too.

[thy751]

This has annoyed me so much. Ive spent so long trying to play Call of Duty 4 its just compleatly killed me.

[magunwarrior]

So THIS is why I had such a fucking hard time getting into COD4 matches last weekend!

I was seething with anger because I thought it was my connection all along.

[ender-]

[bump]

i had problems too,

and ive heard rumors about us geting some compensation from M$... anyone know if its true? some fucking free DLC would be nice.

[taozoo4u]

[bump]

i had problems too,

and ive heard rumors about us geting some compensation from M$... anyone know if its true? some fucking free DLC would be nice.

its a free arcade game and judging by the ones that are already free it will SUCK

[blacksymbiote]

I don't know. Aegis Wing is pretty fun if you play it with friends and can combine into the super ship. All your weapons do way more damage the more ships you have docked together. Another fun thing to do is if you're the pilot for a combined ship, disengage their ship when they don't expect it. Since you can just shoot in any direction with the control stick while docked, when they are let go they often will fly forward like a torpedo into the enemies killing themselves, haha!