Xbox Living

Oh, this just keeps getting better. And by “better”, I of course mean “worse”.

First, a quick recap: during the holiday season in December, Xbox Live experienced a few hiccups in its service, and for a while gamers would randomly get disconnected or would have trouble connecting and finding games. (This is the first “major” performance/availability issue in Xbox Live’s 5-year history.) On January 4, Microsoft came forward and apologized for the network issues, explaining that the increase in subscribers over Christmas was even greater than expected. They promised a free Xbox Live Arcade game to every Xbox Live user. A few days later, a lawsuit was filed by a group demanding $5 million U.S. in compensation for the downtime.

So, yesterday, Major Nelson (aka Larry Hyrb, Xbox Live’s director of programming) said on a webcast that he can no longer provide Xbox Live members with updates about the network issues because of the lawsuit. Naturally, commenting on the reasons for the outage could effect the pending litigation, so they have to keep everything quiet until the suit is resolved.

Annoying, to say the least. The issues seem to be mostly, if not completely, resolved already (at least on my end things are running great). But this is almost certainly going to delay the free game we’ve been promised — and in the unlikely scenario that the group suing Microsoft wins, or gets a decent settlement, I’m probably not going to see any of that money. So what good is any of this to me, an average Xbox Live customer?

I’ve seen a lot of complaints online in forums and on blogs that Microsoft “must have expected” a rush in traffic and should have been more prepared. Aside from the fact that Microsoft admitted its own disappointment, you have to consider that the system jumped from 8 million users in November to over 10 million during the holidays. Microsoft says they’ve weren’t expecting to cross the ten-million mark for another 6 months. An error, yes — but since when are you an expert, Mr. Random Forum Troll?

So much fuss over so little. If these lawyers are so hungry for a lawsuit they can come up North and go after my cable company… at least they’ve had real, unexplained downtime and consistent signal degradation on HD channels — and they charge way more than Xbox Live does.