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Microsoft Giving Xbox Live Users a Free Game
Earlier this week we covered the Xbox Live outages over the holidays. Several users have pointed out that Microsoft has acknowledged its lack of performance, and is now offering a free game to compensate its users. Unfortunately for Microsoft, disgruntled patrons have already filed a class action lawsuit over the recent difficulties. Quoting the PC World article:
"Xbox Live general manager Marc Whitten said that the problems with Xbox Live downtime were caused by an influx of new users who had gotten an Xbox 360 over the holidays. It's been a record-setting season for Xbox Live. 'This included our largest sign-up of new members to Xbox LIVE in our 5 year history and just yesterday you broke the record for the single biggest day of concurrent members ever on the service,' said Whitten."
I'm guessing the free game is going to Pong Advanced.
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
will it be a game of dodge the flying chair?
don't flame me please, it was just a thought!
living the dream
Last night was another terrible night of XBOX Live gaming. COD4 was unplayable online. At one point, while designated as host, my XBOX froze, unfroze, froze, unfroze and so on for 10 minutes. I couldn't even back out being host. The only way i would have been able to get control over my system was to turn it off. I didn't just to see how long XBOX Live was going to keep my XBOX 360 hostage to its poor performance while surfed for prices for SONY's PS3 gaming system. Now that nearly every major motion picture company has abandoned HD-DVD for BluRay and it appears Apple is going BluRay, the PS3 is looking to be a more desirable platform. I am really not satisfied with the response that Microsoft has put out and giving me a P.O.S. XBLA game I will never play for losing two weeks of paid service that still doesn't appear to be fixed isn't convincing me to stay with Microsoft -- not to mention the three times I have sent my XBOX 360 in because of the Red Ring of Death.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I've been having hanging and intermittent logon problems for weeks now. I keep hearing they have everything under control and yet myself and friends in different geographic locations are still having problems.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Ha... so where's the "five nines" here?
They should be running at least the authentication servers on a flavour of Linux like the rest of their network.
Okay - I realise it's annoying when a service doesn't work, but only a little bit. Considering every single user of the service likes to play games, a free game seems a perfectly good level of compensation.
Years ago I used to play Asheron's Call. In those days, Microsoft owned the game, and instead of logging directly onto the servers you had to pass through Microsoft's "Gaming Zone." This was later extended to requiring Internet Explorer to access a Microsoft Passport account to log in to the Gaming Zone so you could get to Asheron's Call. Thanks to this convoluted system, there were a LOT of connection problems that weren't addressed until Microsoft finally sold the game back to Turbine, and you could log directly onto the Turbine servers.
Good luck XBOX Live customers, and don't hold your breath...
Given the results of the class action law suit against Sony, due to the unlawful/undisclosed root-kitting of consumers' computers, I can imagine that the free game, already offered by Microsoft, is probably going to exceed any class action payout. Unless, of course, you happen to be a lawyer.
In which case it's probably a worth-while pursuit.
I aren't a member of X-Box Live though, so your level of frustration may make it worth the time, though if you were frustrated by poor service over the holidays I can't imagine that a law suit will be any less frustrating...
...then why is it still happening, now?
I don't know if it's lawsuit-worthy, but the notion that they were unprepared for an influx of new users during the holiday season is pretty much inexcusable. Besides, let's say they make the free game available tonight; we still can't sign in our profiles to get it.
Microsoft really just had to maintain its velocity in order to handily beat the PS3. Screw-ups like this are going to send their potential customer base over to their rivals in droves. Granted, the online experience on the PS3 and Wii is fairly primitive compared to XBL, but there haven't been any of these sensationalist reports to indicate that they don't work.
Blech.
It's not like this was a SURPRISE to them. They SELL the units, the have absolute control over how many units are sold. If your netgame people say the current network can support 80,000 users, you DON'T SELL 200,000 UNITS until you have upgraded your network. (numbers fabricated but you get the idea)
This was entirely their responsibility, and I cannot believe they did not see this coming. What it came down to is they wanted to do a money grab for the holidays so they made as many units as they possibly could, to hell with the network until we get past christmas then we'll divert resources from production to upgrade the net so they can USE the product.
Not saying it's unexpected, just shameful is all. Nothing new there in business.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
The basic idea of money is that one dollar is just as good as another. If the customers paid for something they didn't get, it doesn't matter what was being bought, they have the right to be compensated.
TFA says that Microsoft 'was "disappointed" with Xbox Live's performance'
... oh it's Microsoft.
Well it should blame the server software vendor for the lack of concurrency
My little Linux and tech blog
Maybe now people will see why having all your online PC games tied to a MS Live service is a terrible idea.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Right?
...a great promotion is to fail and blame it on popularity abundance.
Do we have any examples of high user load being successfully maintained?
Excuse me. Do you know a Mister Ayak? Fucking Retard.
"Our network works just fine... please somebody use it"
These problems started two weeks before the Christmas holidays. In my case on the first reboot after the winter software update was installed.
They're making excuses. It has nothing to do with Christmas gifts.
Can you give specific examples of where Windows servers fall down but Linux ones don't under specific loads? I'm requesting actual numbers, not anecdotal experiences or "gut feelings."
The disgruntled patrons didn't do a damn thing except maybe stop playing the game for a minute. The lawyers are the ones who did it, because they make money from class action law suits. We need class action lawsuits to keep companies honest, but we sure as hell don't need them to be done the way they are. Can you imagine, a lawsuit where you have to opt-out in order not to sue a company? Talk about spam...
WEAK MINDED FOOLS JOIN IN CLASS ACTION LAW SUIT Jan 6, 2008. A bunch of simpering idiots caught unaware by overloaded servers were today taken by ambulance to local hospitals in various locations around the U.S. The idiots were all suffering from mental breakdowns brought on by online game server failures and overloading at various Microsoft data centers around the country. "I was just playing my game and, um, it just suddenly locked up on me!" ranted Mike Hunt of Birdflip, Arkansas, "and those Microsoft bastards wouldn't even answer the phone when I called! I was, like, FREAKING OUT and they wouldn't answer the phone! It was horrible and I pee'd my pants because I was on the phone for so long. They deliberately WOULDN'T ANSWER!" After being sedated, a Microsoft Xbox 360 controller was pried from his left hand. Mr. Hunt is recovering slowly at Rapeme Medical Center outside of Little Rock where he was airlifted after the local medical clinic facilities in his hometown of Birdflip proved inadequate to the task. It is unclear whether Mr. Hunt's medical insurance will cover the cost of the air ambulance service. Quoting Mr. Hunt's attorney, Don I. Cheatem, "We'll sue Microsoft for the air ambulance costs too. The devils in Redmond won't get away with this. It's just a simple computer game and now my client is in the hospital. Microsoft should be ashamed of themselves. I've seen these kinds of products before. Remember the Erector Set? All those little kids who skinned their knuckles when their screwdrivers slipped during kit assembly? Right! We got those A.C. Gilbert bastards too! Imagine the nerve of those people suggesting in court that fun science, physics and chemistry education could ever take precedence over the preservation of perfect 9 year old knuckles." When pressed further, both Mr. Cheatem and fellow attorney Ramy Olbutt engaged in the class action law suit being assembled in Little Rock, stated for the record that online gamers are "very delicate beings and after long sessions at the computer when they should actually be outside getting fresh air or at least focusing their eyes on objects more than 18" away for a few minutes, things can get kind of tense. Microsoft knows this and must be forced to take steps to protect itself from all of the simpering weak-minded idiots and all of the scheming, calculating con artists. The best way to do that is to make every product perfect. We just don't understand why Microsoft refuses to do that." Microsoft lawyers were unavailable for comment. However, a long-time receptionist at Microsoft's central administration stated confidentially that, "These dizzy morons are all on crack if they think they're going to get a quick settlement and get paid off to shut up. Our lawyers will wrap these jack-offs up with briefs, warrants, affidavits, hearings, examinations for discovery and every piece of legal paperwork imaginable for the next ten years. If I was one of those morons I might just consider dropping this whole thing and stop buying or playing Microsoft products. It will take money out of Microsoft's pockets, keep money in the morons' pockets, and they can try their luck with other games and servers offered by other companies. GEEZ, what's the big deal? Those morons have just bought into a world of stress and aggravation. It's just not worth it." -33-
On Christmas day a friend of mine had invited me over to play Bubble Bobble on his Wii, he was going to buy and download it on VC. He spent forever getting thrown out again and again trying to buy some Wii points, and then again trying to access the game library. It finally worked but it was not a very fun experience. Bubble bobble was though, but nothing beats the old version we knew on C64. At any rate this seems more serious but I think everyone's servers take a hit at Christmas. It's the console version of slashdotting, all the kids who got their console for Christmas coming online all at once.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I am tracking each day(every 10 minutes) the status of xbox live, and creating statisical images, this shows the biig picture on how "live" xbox-live actually is :)
http://www.acddv.com/
Also these statistics are available for the public as-well
Cem Aykan
...last weeks news
portfolio
When you buy a XBOX and sign up for XBOX Live, is there a SLA (Service Level Agreement) that guarantees uptime/accessibility? So under what grounds would you be able to file a class action lawsuit?
I come to slashdot after a long time ignoring the crap flinging here and lo and behold I see Microsoft attempting to act responsibly and try to give something back to the users they acknowledge they did not serve properly, and people still waste their time writing trash.
1. microsoft is apparently doing something about it on their own EVEN THOUGH SOME DOUCHE is trying to get free money from them because their game didn't work for a couple days. Waah waah waah.
2. you accept an agreement that says if the service doesn't work all the time, you give up responsibility.
3. Xbox live is one of the few services that actually has a customer service line. IN THE US. Your dell, dude, doesn't even have that.
4. go outside and play.
5. They don't have to do a DAMN thing about it and most people would still accept it.
6. Lemme guess, if Google had a game console, it would always work perfectly.
7. Did you notice that nintendo shipped thousands of wiis with faulty video cards? I have one, it sucks, i'm sending it back, but thems the breaks. Are you telling me that you have never bought a new complex electronic item and had it not work properly and had to replace it? is that unique to microsoft?
8. I think that it's obvious that they realize that they need to serve their customers to keep them, and that xbox and live are a big part of that. if it wasn't they wouldn't even bother.
Turbine's Ascheron's Call 2 used MS chat (text) server technology and it didn't scale beyond several hundred users (a friggin chat server!). Chat and in-game action text was delayed, non-functional, or unreliable for several months. Turbine lost lots of subscribers and eventually left their MS "relationship." Sure turbine had huge issues with lack of content, but I wonder if the early release and MS technology requirements weren't MS mandates. I liked the AC2 franchise and now it's dead :/
But considering the quality of Lord of the Rings Online, either Turbine became a different company or moving away from MS improved their operations.
Games like Frogger have extraordinary longevity and appeal. Talk to anyone who has sponsored a computer museum or video game expo. Its the "cheap and nasty" classics that draw the crowds.
I'm still seeing new faces appearing in Halo3 (zero experience points and green colours), which is surprising since I figured anyone getting an Xbox would have been on by now, then again maybe they couldn't.
I'm no Microsoft fan (Linux is my OS for my home PC) but I can relate to what they are going through. I work at a casino and it seems people are attracted to broken or malfunctioning games. It seems like they go out of their way to sit next to you when there are 100 other seats available or play a game that has burnt out lights or a sticky button. When you try to repair the local network the bank of games connect to, I feel like saying "If you'd just go away for two minutes I'd be done and you wouldn't have so many problems! Go away!" I bet MS Xbox Live engineers are thinking the same thing right now.
Just go away for a little while and let them work!
It's the new 'Software As A Service' model.
They provide the software, and a bunch of services for a 'small monthly fee'.
Everything is sold 'WITHOUT WARRANTY' or 'FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE'.
You pay your money, and hope the code monkeys and cable pullers at microsoft had a good day when 'Latest Steaming Pile of Code v2.0' was rolled out.
Don't like it? Don't buy it.
You are a consumer, you have no rights.
CONSUME! CONSUME! CONSUME!
"I think in the end they're both quite on par at the moment."
Do they have the same number of users on their servers at the same time? If not, then they are not "on par at the moment".
There are some issues that do not arise until certain conditions exist. MS should have been better prepared to handle the additional new users over the holidays, but their issues appear to be due to poor planning. To say that you can play a game well on PSN right now and Xbox live sucks is a hollow example. MS has paved the way for online gaming in the console market. Sony is reaping the benefits of following in their footsteps, but MS is still the forerunner and will meet the technical issues with regard to scaling first.
Hopefully, they (MS, Sony and Nintendo) will learn from MS's mistake and do better in the future.
they cant really give out games for free because of contracts with game developers. for example, im sure everyone wants halo 3 (heck, even halo or halo 2), cod and other cool games..but microsoft cant compensate their losses with other companies' games because they would incur losses (by losing sales)...microsoft makes the XBLA games so thats pretty much all they can give away..
i mean i dont really know, i had a ps2 before this and i just got my xbox 360 last week and its perfectly fine so far. i love it.
To date, not many people have made it to the second level.
Have gnu, will travel.
Xbox Live has been having serious issues since around December 24, so right around two weeks now. Some people are worse off than others, typically by geography, which is why you hear some people say they have been able to play just fine while others can't stay connected for more than a few minutes around peak hours or can't connect at all. It seems that the bulk of the users have been effected by it.
The most common problems are things like:
you try to connect and the machine locks
you try to connect, it says you need to get an update or disconnect, you tell it to get the update, it can't get the update and disconnects
you connect but your profile is missing or incomplete
you connect but then get dropped once you try to get into a game
The pathetic part is that Microsoft doesn't even host these games on their own servers, Xbox Live is primarily a multiplayer matchmaking service, the actual games are being hosted on the consoles. So the customers have to pay on a regular basis to access Live in the first place, and are subjected to tons of advertisements while on Live, and all this just for the privledge of hosting their own game on their own machine using their own bandwidth.
It's especially bad when compared to something like World of Warcraft, which has 9 million users compared to Live's 8 million users. Yes Blizzard does maintenance briefly each week but their service has never been dysfunctional for weeks at a time and they actually host everything on their own servers.
Back in the olden days of Quake1 if you wanted to join a game all you had to do was hit ~ to bring down the console, and type "connect IP-ADDRESS" and you were connected, TCP IPX whatever. Or you could download a program like Gamespy, Kali, or All-Seeing-Eye and connect to any of the servers people were running and it just worked, and still works to this day. With many modern games from large publishers connecting directly to an ip is usually disabled now, and LAN play is sometimes disabled, forcing you to go through the publisher's own game network. So what you gain is the ability to have a friend's list (which could be done now with a program that posts alerts to your im client instead), and in exchange for that we have a single point of failure that causes problems like this, we can play multiplayer on the games we bought only so long as the publisher sees fit or can stay in business. It's not all bad but it's unfortunate we are losing features that have been available to us for over a decade.
With regard to the lawsuit, I don't think they have much chance and they probably know it but they are going to go for it anyway and hope to get lucky. If you look at the Xbox Live contract at http://www.xbox.com/en-US/live/legal/ it says 16. WE MAKE NO WARRANTY We provide the Service "as-is," "with all faults" and "as available." The Microsoft Parties give no express warranties, guarantees or conditions.
If you had a cable tv or phone outage/partial-outage lasting for weeks you could probably call the FCC and get them fined or at least threatened, but since this is a private service I don't know that their is any recourse.
As for why it is happening, I would bet either Microsoft had a pretty major engineering screwup causing the service to run into scaling issues that they don't know how to deal with. Or they are getting DDOS attacked and weren't prepared but don't want to admit it.
I am far from amused with a service that I pay for. It's been over a week now and I am not able to recover my gamer tag. What does that mean? Well not being able to recover my gamer tag means I cannot play any of my saved games or any have any achievements count (yeah big deal). Basically my XBox is rendered useless (I only play games on it). The worst part is that Microsoft has made no attempt to fully explain to its customers why and when Live is going to be working properly again. The support page says that it's "up and running", yet when recovering my gamer tag I get "signup to not available". I guess my biggest question is how can something be so damn broken that it takes over 3 weeks to fix??? Someone really screwed something up really badly over there. I don't give a rats ass about a free arcade game, I just want my gamer tag back! If Sony can make their online experience more compelling I'd actually start playing my PS3 (got it for free as a gift). XBox gaming is nothing without XBox Live.
I've been playing on XBL everyday of the supposed "outages". Sure there have been many annoyances of being unable to accept some game invitations, unable to listen to messages, or people getting disconnected from games. But, I have been using XBL for about 2.5 years and it has been nothing but stellar service. It also seems that some games are more affected than others. In my case Halo3, performs much better than COD4 in terms of finding stable matches during the "outages". The XBL service is certainly experiencing problems, but I would definitely not be thinking of canceling my account. Much less try to bring a lawsuit against MS -- (retarded). The simple fact is there is nothing as good as XBL for anyone to use, so it will get fixed and it will still be the most popular online community for console gamers.
I was one of the thousands who received a brand new XBOX 360 this holiday, and tried to connect to XBOX Live and use the free 48 hour trial. I was shocked to see a prompt saying that the servers were "Unavailable". I quickly thought, "oh darn, it must be my router's NAT or ACLs preventing me from connecting", but I should have known better not to blame my own configurations first than to blame good ol' Microsoft.
What are they going to give Vista users as compensation? A free Mac?
There are some fantastic games on Arcade. This is why Slashdot has NO credibility. Anti-XBox phanboi comments get modded "Insightful". SLASHDOT HAS BECOME A LAUGHING STOCK!
3 Weeks of not being able to use a service I pay for, and MS is going to make it up to me by allowing me to stress test their servers with a free game download? It shocks and amazes me that MS can't figure out why people hate them.
This has nothing to do with lag at all. It's the matchmaking servers and such. The ONLY advantage PSN has over Live is that it's free. Otherwise it's inferior in pretty well every way I can think of from the store, to the messaging and matchmaking.
Yeah! Enrich some more lawyers who, in a more sane society with fewer whiny bitches, would be sweeping streets. Instead, they find enough rubes to sign up for a class action suit. The company gets a tiny slap. The rubes get a $1 coupon. The lawyers get to snort coke off hooker's breasts in the back seat of their 7-series. That solves what, exactly? It's a scam created by the legal industry and enabled by their buddy lawyers in government.
Can we maybe start reserving the whole class action thing for, oh, I dunno, toxic waste dumping, or something like that?
The reason Xbox Live keeps going out? They are revealing new software at CES to be used with the 360's that will turn them into TiVos... Buy stock now.
Apparantly all of Twitter's accounts are in the negative karma, and he has to resort to anonymous "M$" bashing. How pathetic.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
What a load of crap. The PS3 and the Wii have as much DRM as the Xbox 360. Get over yourself. I took the plunge and bought an Xbox 360 + HD-DVD drive a few months ago, and am quite pleased.
Please, troll somewhere else...
http://www.zombieapocalypse.tv/
He get's all the way through the several of the campaigns and the system makes this sound like it's eating the DVD. You have about 30 seconds to lock up at that point. Needless to say, he was insanely pissed that he had to re-do the campaign, even though the second time he heard the sound he immediately went to "Save and Quit". For most, this sounds trivial, but beating Halo 3 on Legendary is a huge pain in the ass and sometimes several hours of effort for a single campaign. The upside, the XBOX360 controller has withstood huge G forces and shock from cross-room hurling into large, fixed, and hard objects. I've tried at times to destroy it to no avail. Too bad the same people didn't make the drive.
If you haven't played a game for a few weeks, the system will check for an update. I was completely locked out of playing "Saint's Row" because it couldn't connect to update. Yes, I could have played off-line, but I mostly play all my games on-line. I think that's the real disconnect between the people pissed and those who say "Get over it, it's just a game". Imagine if Microsoft said, "Get over your Blue Screen of Death, it's JUST a computer." GM, "Get over it, it's JUST a car...freakin WALK, the cavemen did it!!!"
If you really enjoy gaming, and really enjoy online gaming, it's extremely frustrating. I'm hooked and got my roommate hooked (twice). After we destroyed on Rainbow6:Las Vegas, we moved on to Halo3. We're both officers (in the game, ironically, I'm also one in the USAF) and trying to make rank, so it's something we work hard on and greatly enjoy.
That is why Xbox 360 will never win the next gen console war, there network can't handle a popular game like WoW.
Yeah, primitive.
Get this:
Does RFOM/Warhawk continue when the hosting party goes offline? No. Primitive.
Do above games fix exploits in maps and actively ban users who use exploits? No. Primitive.
Do above games have a good ranking system outside of "everyone levels up" where your level is proportional to your skill? No. Primitive.
Do the above games allow hosting parties to boot you because you're doing well (So their team has an advantage)? Yes. Primitive.
Does everyone playing 40 player games have a lag free experience. Fuck no. Primitive.
Do the above games offer heat maps of battles? No. Primitive.
Do the above games offer online coop campaign? No. Primitive.
For the ghost town that is PSN!
Wow. Ok, look, I feel I need to help you out here.
- Go get an X-Ray done.
- Locate your funny bone on the X-Ray.
- Check funny bone for fractures, major or minor.
It was a joke, learn to take one. I have a 360, I just finished playing a couple of rounds of Halo 3, and I love the system as whole.Sheesh...
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
Ah, nevermind, I see that was posted in response to another comment, my bad.....
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
Honestly, the author took this posting over at the official xbox site, and then snipped together almost every single sentence with 'Whitten said'. Although, to be fair, I think about 15% of the middle of the article has some original thought. (The part where they explain what xbox live is). Of course, they could've just linked to the pages describing membership, instead.
The author then failed to cite the original article. What a piece of journalistic crap. PCWorld, MacWorld and Peter Cohen should be absolutely ashamed of themselves for writing and publishing this drivel.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
The score today: 6 15-minute games in 9 hours of Xbox Live matchmaking. I think it's still broken.
I never understood why as soon as something goes wrong, people turn to a law suit. Why don't they go back to playing Xbox live instead of sitting in a court room? Then, I'm an Aussie... we don't sue everyone at a drop of a hat.
"zune service status Status: Users may experience issues when attempting to log into Zune Marketplace. We are looking into this issue. We apologize for the inconvenience." http://www.zune.net/en-US/support
You should watch Team America for an analysis of the benefits of being a big enough dick, my friend. I think that's part of the GOP platform, actually.
.01% chance of response.
And it looks like one black fella is actually the most likely person to be president at this early stage of predicting. The USA is far from perfect, but it is getting better.
Just think, the type of crazies who used to murder blacks or capture them for sale now trolls slashdot for a
With the exception of Office, MS never has the best quality. They always have great marketing, as we see with the entire Halo series, and they always have cunning but cut-throat business ideas, such as paying studios for HD-DVD loyalty or getting their OS included with most computers sold by default.
But Microsoft doesn't have the best quality. They are all about quantity. They are the Chevrolet of the software world, and it's a great model from the stockholder's point of view, though not the best model from the customer's.
I prefer my 360 because of game selection, but I know this is a unique situation that may not last. And I never expected my 360 to be supported perfectly or for a long time (just compare the xbox 1.0 to either Playstation 1 or 2).
So it should surprise no-one that there are problems. Generally, people accept MS because they have to to get access to something else. I can't play bioshock or Halo 3 without an XBOX. I can't run all my shareware without Windows, I can't get that thinkpad without windows, etc etc. For me, it's worth dealing with all the problems, but Microsoft totally deserves a lawsuit. They took millions of dollars and there is no way they didn't know these problems were coming. They knew that after updates, the load on servers would decline, so t hey saved some money. Probably a lot more money than the lawsuit will cost, by the way. MS is lame is a very smart way.
Gates said:
"Never doubt the power of software,"
"This is just the beginning," "The trend here is clear. All media and entertainment will be software driven."
My suggestion to all those who value open source: If you own an xbox or any other products from Microsoft, get rid of them and never buy another Microsoft product again. Do not continue to fund this organization. "Never doubt the power of software" indeed, thanks to DirectX Microsoft has a monopoly on gaming. If you still boot to Windows for games, or use an xbox for games, you are one of the problems. If Silverlight takes hold, and something mysterious happens to Flash, kiss your current Linux web multimedia experience goodbye. This battle will continue until YOU STOP FUNDING MICROSOFT!
Refuse anything offered as so-called "free" from Microsoft, what is the overall price of anything they offer for free? Do you want gaming freedom? Convince companies to drop support for DirectX!
Now...just throwing this out there...pretty straight pitch, no curves or anything but wouldn't the EULA indemnify Microsoft from this? Furthermore, what is their lawsuit based on? Lost gaming time? can someone PLEASE film the court proceedings, that crap would be better than an HBO comedy special!
So Jesus, Mohammed and Abraham walk into a Bar....
You assumption is wrong because they don't need to estimate the number of XBox'es sold, they can get the exact number from the number of Live subscriptions sold.
Even as Xbox Live and Zune are crawling in the mud, the news is only full of Gates' promises to add video and other services to it. Yeah, adding more stuff to a nonfunctional service will help a lot.
I see some of you defending Microsoft's actions and others of you blaming them for the X-box live issues over the holidays. I think most of you dont really understand why this is happening. Here is my take on it... Its simple really, Microsoft is counting the beans just like any other company does now adays. They knew they were going to get a huge influx of new subcribers this christmas so rather than upgrading the servers to meet the estimated demand they decided to wait and see how many new subcribers they would get. If they try to guesstimate before christmas they run the risk of falling short and having to upgrade twice... if they overestimate they build more service than they need. Either way a lot of companies do this and its bs. I knew this was going to happen so i wasnt mad at first, i was excited, but after over 2 weeks of garbage service im starting to get pissed off. I cant even play cod4 at all only halo3, and i cant always get into halo, or i get kicked... or i shoot the same guy in the back for 10 min before i realize the server is losing connectivity. Microsoft pays people to do the math and figure out much money they will save by waiting to upgrade to meet the demand. Then when the service sucks for a few weeks or a month they apologize and give us a crappy game to show they care. Its a lot like when you work your arse off at your job and your boss.. "to show the company's appreciation".. takes everyone out for pizza rather than give you more money. Its a nice gesture but in the end its really just a way for them to save a ton of money. Same thing with the free game...i bought 3 months for 20$ I think they should just give us all a free month of service providing they can get it fixed inside of a month. other than this i love my xbox...
tsk tsk tsk.
How vulgar...
Hahah, either a Sony fanboy or an MS hater modded this. It hurts because it's true and even Sony knows it.
Umm, Microsoft owns the rights to the 360 brand. Therefore, every console that gets made, they have to give a license to. Every license they pass out is guaranteed to be associated with hardware sold. Granted, not EVERY system will be hooked up to the net, but come on, that is the point of it. So, let me get this straight, MS makes each one, therefore knows how many are going to be out in the wild, their servers get hit with less than the number of consoles that they knew could be out there and they still had problems? Something doesn't add up. How could they NOT know how many people were going to at least attempt to make an account? Xbox sales == attempts for signup. How could they NOT have an idea of how they needed to scale. Not only that. Did Christmas change it's date this year? What the heck do you think would happen on Christmas day? Did they think everyone was going to wait until support hours the day after?
They wanted sales, they got sales, then couldn't handle the sales they had hoped for. Come on.
One Token Ring to Rule them All, One Search Engine to Find Them, One WAN to bring them in, and TCP/IP Bind them...
Jeez guys, I don't see why you make this lawsuit sound so outrageous.
1) This $5 million suit is not 3 people claiming $1.66 mil apiece. It's a class action; the eligible class is probably either XBL Gold users, or gold & bronze.
2) I see this suit as legit; this much of an outage really reduces the value of the gaming system. People say "oh it's not a big deal". But, I bet some people get the time for real marathon gaming sessions only during holidays. For instance, if someone managed to get 1/3rd of their year's gaming time in during holidays, and the box had a 5 year service life (possible if the person upgrades consoles frequently) that would mean this holiday outage reduced the total value of the system by 1/15th for that user.
3) So, the EULA specifically says there's no service level guaranteed. Well, this is certainly so people don't complain about the odd few-minute flakeout or maintenance window; I don't think any judge would find this reasonably protects against service literally being down or flakey for weeks on end (without even a good reason like some natural disaster or the like). After all, a phone company could then put in a clause like this, never install a phone line I ordered, then keep billing me for it, based on the clause that they don't actually guarantee providing me any service.
4) They really handled this badly. If it really was from this influx of new XBox360 purchasers as has been claimed, they really should have taken down the XBL signup page until the XBL service was expanded to handle the load of at least existing users. This of course would piss off new XBox360 owners, but would I think be better than pissing off new owners AND current ones by having the service be flakey for everyone.
Note, I'm not saying for sure that the class should WIN the case. I'm just saying I think the case certainly does have merit. If I had an Xbox360 I would be pissed, and if I had a Gold subscription I would be VERY pissed.
I don't own a XBox Hard Drive you insensitive clod! But seriously... I can only assume (yes I know what that makes me) it will be a download, so anyone without a hard drive won't get anything. Except a little more leverage to buy a vastly overpriced hard drive. £130 for 120Gb? Puh-leez...