Now, I don't normally do this in my blog but I'm going to call someone out directly. Marc Whitten, the instability of Xbox Live is not only unacceptable to have continued for this long, but your answer and your teams lack of communication is even more disheartening. Even now as I write this post at 5:30pm Sunday afternoon (1/06/08) Xbox Live is still essentially useless. Last night I played Halo 3 for about 5 hours while getting about 2 hours worth of gameplay. Today, when attempting to play Call of Duty 4, I spent about 2 hours to play about 3 rounds. Getting constantly dropped from the lobby, constantly dropped from games, and sometimes a complete inability to find a game was the norm, and not just for me. I spoke with people in every game lobby (when I was lucky enough to get into one) and they all reported the exact same issues, since Christmas.
Marc, your original letter would have been acceptable if the outage (and yes, it is an outage no matter how you might want to interpret it) had lasted only the initial weekend. I understand that you underestimated the load your servers would experience and we expected that your team would be hard at work for the next 2 days to get more hardware in place to handle the new load. Except that didn't happen, did it? Xbox Live is still experiencing an outage. (When the power company is experiencing constant rolling blackouts, back up, then out, do you think they can get away with saying it's not an outage?) When visiting the Xbox Live support page, the service status messages I have seen are either 'everything is up and working fine' (which is what Xbox Live reports as I write this entry) or the earlier posting stating there might be an issue signing in, or creating new accounts. Marc, we all know the issue is far more severe than that. We pay for Xbox Live so we can have a stable, fast way of doing online gaming. Online gaming can be done for free via the PC, or even the PS3 but nothing has been created to provide a universal, consistent and stable environment like Xbox Live before. In the 5 years I have been on Xbox Live, I have never experienced an outage as this. I have absolutely loved Xbox Live until this last week or so. We pay for the stability of the network, and if that isn't there, there isn't much worth paying for.
So what do we want Marc? I don't want a free Xbox Live arcade game, although that is a nice gesture. I just want Live working again, normally, and I want to be told the truth. Open and honest communication. I find it insulting to visit the Xbox Live support site when Live hasn't worked for days to see a 'everything is working fine' message. And if you really want to make a meaningful gesture, I'd suggest extending everyone's subscription the length of time of the outage. In your letter you refer to how many new accounts were created around the holidays. If you want to keep those accounts, Live needs to actually work, and you need to find a way to make this up to people.
I'd like to ask everyone who reads this blog and has an Xbox Live account to please post their comments to this post. Let Marc Whitten and everyone at Xbox Live know that their loyal customers are sick of paying for a service that doesn't work, and we don't like being lied to about it.
Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but my sincere worry is that the Xbox Live team may be assuming that much of this new load on the servers is going to disappear when all the free 'month' subscriptions run out, and if that's the case we can all look forward to another 3 weeks of problems. I really hope that isn't your plan Marc.
So everyone, are you as frustrated as I am?
Posted
Jan 06 2008, 05:41 PM
by
Matt Freestone
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