Gamers demand payback for broken XBL service
Category: Xbox 360, Posted: 01/01/2008 at 12:54PM CST by Frank Ling, Editorial Director
The Christmas break/vacation was, for a lot of us, a time to just relax and catch up on some serious gaming time. But if you owned a 360, that experience was seriously flawed due to Xbox Live servers constantly being broken.
The worst of the XBL weirdness occurred this week as a great deal of gamers was frozen out of their accounts due to serious glitches in the system.
While some just chalked the problems up as just part of being a gamer, others have not been so understanding and are demanding that Microsoft compensate them for the downtime by offering Microsoft points or games. The typcial price of an Xbox Live Gold account is $50 per year.
Torifle, a user of the Xbox.com forums stated:
"...I understand some glitches for a few hours. Stuff happens. But to have an outage as long as this one was is completely unacceptable. I paid for this service. If my cell phone were down several times for stretches during the course of one week or my cable or internet, etc., I'd expect to get some sort of compensation. A free month, at the very least.
"I am now asking this of MS. I love my Xbox and the primary reason is Live. My Wii gathers dust and I got rid of my PS3 because their online suck. XBL is totally worth the $50/year - when it works reliably. So, MS, how about some compensation for this downtime? Either some MS points or a free month of Live. And some assurance that this won't happen again."
The post generated a flurry of comments in agreement but all the complaints evidently caused a lot of heat and the Microsoft forum administrators have now locked the thread.
Whether Microsoft plans to compensate the Xbox Live community for the online disaster of the past week is unknown at this moment. But one thing that is evident is that many new Xbox Live members and veteran users of XBL were very disappointed, to say the least, about the lost gaming hours due to the spotty service.
Should Microsoft make amends to pay back XBL users for the broken service, or should this be just seen as a one of the expected consequences of gaming?
[via xbox.com]
- Mirror's Edge 11/18/2008
- Multiwinia 11/03/2008
- Dead Space 11/03/2008
- Dead Space 11/03/2008
- Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia... 11/01/2008
- World of Goo 10/28/2008
- View More
- Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe ... 07/31/2008
- Hands-On: N+ 07/29/2008
- E3 2008: Resident Evil 5 hands... 07/25/2008
- E3 2008: Too Human hands-on 07/23/2008
- E3 2008: The Agency developer ... 07/22/2008
- E3 2008: Left 4 Dead direct fe... 07/21/2008
- View More
Kyle Stallock
Updated June 4th, 2008
Indie Games Journalism
Brendon Lindsey
Updated October 19, 2008
Blu-Ray Review: Bond...
Frank Ling
Updated: Aug. 1th, 2008 Are you a game snob?
Eddie Inzauto
Updated Wed, October 28
Silent Hill scribblings
GamerNode needs your help. Register
now and join thousands of gamers in a
crusade to spread the word of
GamerNode!
Join the Node Army!
- Christmas...Yay! 12/02/2008
- Post your Desktop. 12/02/2008
- franks advencher games 12/02/2008
- Rrod 12/02/2008
- What game did you play today? 12/02/2008
- History of Video Games, Help me ... 12/02/2008
- Pimp your.... 12/02/2008
- Fallout 3 12/02/2008
- BMS "Barney Calhoun" Background 12/01/2008
- Offical Hot Women Picture thread... 12/01/2008
- View More
An idea of who dropped the ball, and how badly, is all I need.
Make someone accountable for this. I agree to some extent, I don't think compensation is in order, but I also wouldn't complain if they did...
...and I imagine that several new adopters of the XBox are appalled by their first experiences with XBL, the first impression is always the most important, and with the problems of the past weeks, XBL looks absolutely shoddy.
Really, I'm surprised something like this hasn't happened before. But asking for a month or a free game for only a week of downtime? Ridiculous. That week amounted to a wasted $0.96, roughly.
The most compensation I'd expect is an extra week added to everyone's gold account time. Nothing more, nothing less.
I can still connect and all, but I have random hiccups and disconnects here and there. It's not the end of the world. I'm not expecting anything from MS, as from what I've heard/seen XBL runs great 99.9% of the time.
Still, free stuff is free stuff, and if they're dishing out said stuff I'm not gonna complain. :-p
Its part of gaming ffs rofl
Perhaps i could see the distrobution of 100 points to all, but thats about it
oh, and you forgot to put the "h" at the begining of the link to the thread
^ thanks for pointing that out.
Epic lulz.
They really should compensate us for the poor or even non-existent service we've been wading through recently. I've been lucky to connect recently, and it's been costing me and my friends our time trying to do something as basic and simple as start a chat.
My guess is they'll extend everyone's Gold sub for a week or so. That will cost them next to nothing. I highly doubt they'll give out MS Points, though.