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Xbox Live - The Christmas Zombie
SEWilco writes "Xbox Live is not working, as mentioned 36 hours ago in an Xbox team blog. Even if you can get logged in, multiplayer matchmaking doesn't find enough players for games. For a while Zune Marketplace was also affected. At present Zune status claims 'Up and running' while Xbox Live status continues to say 'Users may experience intermittent issues logging onto Xbox Live. Our engineers are continuing to investigate and are working to resolve this issue. We apologize for any inconvenience.' This has been been going on for days." My assumption is that this is the result of lots of new XBLA users logging in with Christmas 360s.
Quoted from a spokesperson, Heis Afake:
"We were worried, but while the three new users of our online service did add some strain, we managed to keep it up and running."
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I'm sort of at a crossroads between getting at 360 or a PS3. The main thing driving me to get the 360 is Xbox Live, and it's kind of surprising that they can't handle a surge of new purchases. (Are they not expecting people to buy?) Without Xbox Live, the PS3 looks superior, with a free Blu-Ray drive and Wi-fi attached.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
They've not had _that_ massive an increase in subscriptions, surely? Not when you look percentage-wise, anyway. And yet this is the first time I've seen it so flaky, ever, after years as a subscriber. Outright down we've had, yes, but this is like it's straining under some DDOS or something; everything is there, but slow as molasses and times out a lot.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
The outages in service hasn't stopped the usual flood of people (I mean, morons) I don't know trying to friend me on Live.
Anyways, anyone that expects 100% uptime out of a network is kidding themselves.
I sent my friend in Indy a 360, so we could meet up online for some friendly frags, and I haven't been able to get on live at all! This is really starting to get old for a paid service...
Who cares what the problem is? Just fix the damn service already. I pay Microsoft for XBL. It had better damn work. Me not being able to host a private match with some of my buddies for days on end is fucking ridiculous.
Let's be fair, here. I've run into this problem a lot lately too and it was annoying. But, for the most part, XBL has been stable and amazing. I'm sure they'll work it out. It's too early to spit too much hate about Microsoft and how stupid they are. The XBOX 360 is a marvel of design and XBL revolutionized on-line play. That's just plain fact, no IMHOs here.
So your theory is that because of a lot of new players, Microsoft can't find enough players for games? Would you care to rethink that theory?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
So your theory is that because of a lot of new players, Microsoft can't find enough players for games? Would you care to rethink that theory?
Or it could be that countless new XBLA users are repeatedly trying to long onto Xbox Live, creating something like a distributed denial of service effect, which not only makes long-ins next to impossible, but also makes it difficult to stay logged in and finally negatively affects other services, like servers and match-maker too. Care to rethink your reply?+++ MELON MELON MELON +++ Out of Cheese Error +++ redo from start +++
This is one of the reasons I haven't embraced gaming platforms, and prefer to do my gaming on a computer. At least with a computer, there are LAN gaming options (although some game platforms may have LAN gaming capabilities, they don't seem to be as flexible or easy to set up, or even as well thought-out).
This is coupled with the fact that there are many more computer games that have an offline campaign/career/single-player mode, and the newer games for PS3/XBox/etc that even bother to have a single-player offline mode usually do a very poor and limited job of it. Yes, there are exceptions on both sides, but on balance, computer-based gaming does a better job of offline/single-player play, which helps when game servers experience outages.
Multi-player gaming is fun, but I want to be able to play a game I really like after the support for online play from the makers goes away, and also if some snafu with game servers as in this case happens. I know I'd be very very angry that the expensive gaming platform and multi-player service I either bought for myself for Christmas or for some poor kid was basically un-playable for days after the holidays are over.
Cheers!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Its been 61 days since my family has been able to play most of the downloaded content. I sent my xbox in for the red rings of death and when I got it back my content didn't work. I've been escalated repeatedly I've been told I would have to re-purchase all of my content I've been told I was violating federal law by recording the conversation....from someone in a foreign country. Told it would be fixed within 30 days When that failed and it wasn't and I stated they had said it would be within 30 days they basically called me a liar and said it would take a minimum of 30 days. To be fair when I pointed out the email they apologized, but said it would take 30 more days. That was 31 days ago. I can't even check now to see if it works-but as of 47 days ago it didn't. I was developing for them with the xbox xna service, but currently stopped. This christmas when it came time to choose where to spend my gaming dollars...I went with a wii again. $400 worth of gaming cash spent elsewhere. Since they won't help/listen to customers the only way to send a message is to take the money elsewhere. My idea of fun isn't spending 8 hrs trying to get my content to work-its spending 10 minutes setting up a system, and 7hrs 50 minutes playing.
Xbox Live is completely fine for 360 (no pun intended) or so days of the year, and some of these new users are going to get bad first impressions of the Xbox Live system. It would be nice if I could play games though, my disc tray will not stay shut and I cannot play any of my new games, woohoo!
I would like to mention that I read somewhere that Microsoft was moving all of their web servers over to 2008 - Longhorn. I wonder if this issue is related. From my experience, and a friend of mine's. . . I've been able to long in all the time. Yet my friend's account could not log in. the difference is this. . . . My account was already on the xbox, and my friend was trying to recover his gamer tag, so he could play online with me. It would get connected, but would time out on download of his gamer tag. after 1 week of trying he finally got through today.
Self proclaimed wannabe geek. You know how it is. Most of us who read this stuff probably fit in that category.
Do other game servers degrade more gracefully? As the original journal entry asked, such as by allowing anonymous unrated games if the online identities are not available?
They probably wish they has Linux Servers now, but I think you are right and they used Windows 2003 or something like that.
I have only had one issue recently with XBL. I wasn't able to log in for about an hour 2 days ago, but since then I haven't had any issues.
Xbox LIVE Service Status: Status: Up and running.
The irony is because the 360 has the best games (yes, that's my opinion) it keeps selling despite the problems. The biggest problem (RROD) is covered by a 3 year no cost warranty and Live is stable the vast majority of the time. In fact even during this "outage" I have still been able to play.
From people I know that work on Live they actually can draw on other MS servers (MSN and such) if needed for things like popular demo downloads and have in the past. I don't know if the same applies to log on and matchmaking servers. So their network is scalable to a certain extent.
If you don't mind losing your console for a couple months at a time.
"Most 360 users have an original Xbox so the traffic should drop then rise as they retire the old Xbox."
Huh? You mean they are gaming on them both at the same time? I guess I don't understand your point.
Did anyone see the Xbox Live status at xbox.com/support? It says "Status: Users may experience intermittent issues with login, account recovery, matchmaking, and statistics. We are aware of the issue and are actively working towards a resolution. We apologize for any inconvenience.". Reminds me of a classic Microsoft joke: A helicopter was flying around above Seattle yesterday when an electrical malfunction disabled all of the aircraft's electronic navigation and communication equipment. Due to the clouds and haze the pilot could not determine his position or course to steer to the airport. The pilot saw a tall building, flew toward it, circled, drew a handwritten sign and held it in the helicopter's window. The sign said "WHERE AM I ?" in large letters. People in the tall building quickly responded to the aircraft, drew a large sign and held it in a building window. Their sign said, "YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER." The pilot smiled, waved, looked at his map and determine the course to steer to SEATAC (Seattle/Tacoma) airport and landed safely. After they were on the ground, the co-pilot asked the pilot how the "YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER" sign helped determine their position. The pilot responded, "I knew that had to be the MICROSOFT building because they gave me a technically correct but completely useless answer."
I really, really love my PS3. (Yes, I'm thinking of marrying it.) The PSP/PS3 interaction is pretty damned cool. I play the hell out of Warhawk, and Ratchet and Clank is one of the best games out there. Unreal Tournament looks like it's going to kick some serious ass.
That said, I wish I had Bioshock for the PS3. I played Halo 3, and it was OK, but really nothing that great. Then again, I was never impressed with the Halo series, as a whole. They are good, solid games; I just never got into the story line. Bioshock, though, seems to be interesting.
Anyway, what I'm getting at is this: the PS3 is a damned solid piece of engineering, with some great *technical* advantages over the XBox. But the XBox has some great games. Now, you can't get R&C for the XBox, nor Haze (which also looks cool). But Haze is still a month off, it seems.
If you want a PSP, though, it's damned cool the way it works with the PS3. And it has internet radio now, too. I've been using it to remote my media from the PS3, and I can access my music and videos anywhere there's an internet connection. Now, *that's* cool.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
It's a business relationship, and if you go deeper than that, you're a sucker.
Service sucks? Quit the losers and move on to something better.
Sure, you'll lose some of your investment...but I'd rather lose some of my money than my self respect. Not that much remains of the later.
Blar.
I think it might have as much to do with people downloading demos as it does with people playing games online. When I got my 360 this September, the first thing I did (after playing some Halo 3 and Dead Rising, of course) was fill the better part of my 20-gig hard-drive with ten or so demos. Once I downloaded most of the demos I was interested in, I mostly stopped, and now I usually download one every week or two. I doubt I'm the only one who did this, especially since the 360 lets demos download in the background while you play. A hundred thousand or so people downloading demos as high as their high-speed internet will let them, plus another hundred thousand playing online, and hundreds of thousands more creating accounts and downloading the October update--it's not hard to imagine that kind of activity could take down Xbox Live.
No, I'm sure they don't. Because it's most likely a load issue, or a hardware issue. It's not an OS issue that Linux would fix.
Imagine if WoW didn't work for a week? Why would that be unacceptable and LIVE not working for a week be considered OK?
That has actually indeed happened, well I don't think constantly for one week, but anyone who has played on Kel'Thuzad from the beginning can tell you, how they actually had to get up and go do something else besides playing WoW for a few days.
Live has been a little flaky for a few days, disconnecting once or twice and one COD4 matches not starting and some little lag other than that it's been fine.
"Imagine if WoW didn't work for a week"
WoW is down all the time. XBL has much better uptime then WoW.
nooooo the traffic drops when they stop using the old Xbox and immediately rises when they start using the 360. In other words people bying 360's didn't do anything to traffic except when you account for the number of people who sold their original Xbox to people who didn't have one before and those people are now using Live.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
I don't see why xbox live has to be as bad as it is, your paying £40 a year for this so called service that doesn't work all the time. Why can't Microsoft follow a working system where they don't milk the cash cow for all they've got and write a system that actually works. This just reassures me that sticking to PC games and steam was the right choice. That's not to say steam doesn't have its crashes, it happens occasionally such as steam friends rebooting randomly, But I haven't had a problem getting a game going or playing online since the release of Half life 2. And on the up side of steam, I am not wasting £40 a year to pay for a dodgy service.
When they released halo 3 and other games were affected by it XBL and ubi service just ignored tickets, and many people on /. barked at me, that my connection sucked. Turned out, that it wasn't the problem, and they applied a silent fix.
:)
This time interestingly I played every night through the Christmas (except 24th night), 25-28 every night, and COD4/RS Vegas, games that were affected according to many.
I saw no problems at all. 31st has a huge amount of "host ended the game" errors. Not sure if people were just drunk and ignorant, or if there were really service problems.
I play from Costa Rica though, and did not take the time to figure where I really connect to (last time it was MIAMI, as the local provider's cable pops up there from the sea.
And before the hungover flame starts: I have a life, and hate the holidays (as sitting at a table with family bores me to hell), so I play as much as I can after escaping as early as I can. And my wife approves it, so I guess it is OK.
Happy new year
It seems to be working much better (only a few oddities) on January 1, 2008.
Wow. This is my problem with the 360. I was willing to give in and let Microsoft rule my gaming life like they rule my computer use but I refuse to pay money for a device that is so likely to break down that the conversation has moved from if to yes but how long. I've never had a console break down on me. Not my NES, Genesis, SNES, SegaCD, N64, Dreamcast, PS2 (even with all the laser malfunctioning talk), or even my original XBox which is still in use 5-10 hrs a day with XBMC. Most of these other system would probably still operate today if I hadn't sold them (I wonder how much value your 360s will retain at the end of your use of it). Sure modern systems are way more complex than the systems of yore, but broken architecture is broken architecture. Microsoft has an incredible ability to lower people's expectations. It's really their strong suit. If Sony doesn't pull itself together I'll just stick with my Wii and PC for this round thank you. Nintendo doesn't make shit hardware.
£40 a year?!?! Wow, you Brit's are getting shafted!
Ebay commonly has 1 year XBOX Live membership cards (North American) on for ~$40USD + shipping.
I bought one recently...total came to $47 USD. Or approx £24.
I was hesitant about Xbox Live at first having been an avid PC gamer, but now having tried it, I find it a reasonable value at $4/month
The matchmaking, integrated voice chat, achievements & friends management all work very very well.
Even this past week where there were apparently "issues", the worst problem I had was finding people playing specific maps in Orange Box. Oh, and a couple of my achievements weren't recorded.
It wasn't anything like when "issues" have occurred on PC MMORPG's though (Yes, EQ2, WoW, I'm looking at you).
I became an Xbox Live subscriber in 2004, since then I have seen a small hand full of scheduled outages for upgrades which were planed on non-peak hours and announced well in advance... I have also seen a few unplanned outages none of which lasted more than a few hours and the total number of which I can count on 1 hand.
Whatever happened on the 22nd was substantial and unlike anything the XBL service has seen before... and it came at a very bad time considering that week saw probably a 10-20% boost in membership all at once combined with most of the support staff on vacation.
it was a "perfect storm" so to speak and hardly typical of the XBL service.
Don't get me wrong, I've been quite aggravated with the inability to reliably login for more than a few minutes at a time, especially considering it happened during a week were my plans were basically to kick back and relax with my favorite game. But at the same time I'm not going to troll around claiming that XBL is a piece of junk that never works... because that's not even close to the case.
Collector's Edition
I guess I'm not a complete online junkie because when I say "met" I mean someone I've actually met, not exchanged some bits with over a network.