MS cagey over Live downtime News

"give you AN update".

:)

Compo is on the way...............mmmm I'll believe it when I see it

I like the way he says "it was never complete offline", maybe it wasnt but it was still impossible for me to play over live these arseoles get to sound more like politicians everyday.

Can I have the knitted socks option please?

yep, they're going to increase the x360 warranty by another 2 years as compensation. rrod ftw!

Well, from my point of view I was looking forward to escaping for a good few hours a day to have a real blitz on COD4 while I was off, so I was a little gutted about the problems. Even a couple of nights ago, the problems made my 360 freeze on 3 occasions.

Have not had this 'heavy' downtime ever, so it must have been a major problem or something.

Not sure it is fully fixed as I was still having some problems with Call of Duty 4 last night. At the end of each game the lobby closed - taking a lot longer to match a game and some of the blades on the dashboard hanging for some time before displaying info.

I was still having problems with this last night.

Maybe they will make silver subscribers wait two weeks for demos.

Seems to depend on what time you manage to sign in and what you try and do after that. Was signed in early yesterday (5:30pm-ish). Was "ok" until about 8 or 9 pm and then issues started when ever using blades to invite people to games etc. Basically when the peak US time starts to kick in then it starts having problems.

hanging dashboard is reallyannoying...I dont want to playonline, I just want to play acecombat...but I have to sit there and watch the little waiting circle for up to a minute...whats it doing? I rekon its downloading advertising...

Well it's still playing up a little but to be honest I haven't been as bothered as some. Reading posts on the Xbox forums, the way some people have been whining about it you would think they needed Live to breath! A bit of compensation would be nice though as it has been a week!

MS are a bit sensitive about the issue, some posts on the official website have been removed!!

"You may have noticed that the Live service has been having a few issues over the past few days," began Larry Hryb on his blog. "This includes things like signing in, matchmaking and account recovery. Not everyone has had problems, but I know some of you have and I wanted to give you and update."


LOL! Thats funny. Fixed below:


"You may have noticed that the Live service has been pretty much borked over the past few days because so many people actually tried to use the service over the Xmas period and we cant be arsed to pay to upgrade the outdated servers due to the fact that console ownwers are a lower form of life in Microsofts view," began Larry Hryb on his blog. "Problems include things like not being able to play console games. Everyone has had problems, but i dont really give a shit and we will all have a laugh when we offer total XBLA shite as compo"

I was trying to matchmake on Halo3 on new years eve and my xbox bleeped briefly then froze. On turning it back on I had the red ring of death. So you could say that the recently slightly rubbish live service has murderalised my box. Probably not true but the lingering suspicion will always remain in my brain.

Who's guessing on a free copy of Billiards and some Kameo gamerpics? lol

Oooooooooooooooooooh, that's what that was. It was taking ages to sign-in to my Live-enabled account just to play Guitar Hero offline.

Gold subscriber here. Gief st00f!!!

Raz76 wins the thread.

Spoiled a planned evening of COD4 for me, which is simply unacceptable.

@Madder Max

A fine translataion of the corporate nonsense spouted by 'major nelson'.

It's funny reading the comments on his blog. 29 December, people are posting sycophantic thank yous. By 2nd January people are waiting for the local school to open so they can run amock with a rifle to vent their rage.

Anyway. I went and bought a PS3 as a protest. It's not much - but I feel at times like this it's important to be a good little consumer. It's important to suck up second rate service and pay more money.

Thank the Lord for getting Mario Galaxy as an Xmas pressie!

I'm guessing that the compo will be "hardcore"
Probably a voucher for a fiver off Halo3.

I also noticed, everything slows down (big time!), around 23:00-01:00 GMT, which I think it early evening in US, when all those americans log in.
I wish Live wasn't present in every single suburban house in USA.

2 million new players joined Live during the XMas period. The service was hammered hard. Welcome to the real world, where having shitloads of customers on your network is hard to scale and maintain (victim of you own success)?. It is not like WoW never has/had server problems. :)

To be honest the service seems to have been intermittently struggling ever since CoD 4 came out as opposed to the last couple of days.

Seems MS's estimation of bandwidth consumption are about as good as their hardware MTBF calculations.

barnard666 "hanging dashboard is reallyannoying...I dont want to playonline, I just want to play acecombat...but I have to sit there and watch the little waiting circle for up to a minute...whats it doing? I rekon its downloading advertising..."

If you go right a couple of blade (think it the games blade) it doesn't have any live content so the blade is displayed straight away and has the play game thing at the bottom.

Any blade, but the first two on the left, I think.

"Not sure it is fully fixed as I was still having some problems with Call of Duty 4 last night. At the end of each game the lobby closed - taking a lot longer to match a game and some of the blades on the dashboard hanging for some time before displaying info. "

I had the exact same problem yesterday evening. Very annoying. And going on for days now!

tip: unplug you're xbox (from the inet). if you don't want to play online. after that, things should work as "normal" ;)

I've been disconnected from Halo matches a few times just as they start. I've then lost an exp point from my ranking as an extra reward, as they're assuming I've quit the match early.

you're xbox?

As in: you are an xbox?

So much for a paid service being 'better'.

@miiiguel

Yeah... my brother and I were playing all day yesterday and then at around 10:30 GMT we started getting the problems setting up a game, hanging dashboard, etc.

Alot of these problems have started since the X-box updaye before xmas.

"2 million new players joined Live during the XMas period. The service was hammered hard. Welcome to the real world, where having shitloads of customers on your network is hard to scale and maintain (victim of you own success)?. It is not like WoW never has/had server problems. :) "

Riiiight. Never heard of forecasting? Market data, due dilligence? Budgeting etc..... This is MS ffs! Idont want to hear that the Xbox Live dept wasnt budgeted etc blah blah. Its Microsoft...

The reality may be that it runs on servers which are close to end of lifecycle and prolly look like buses without wheels.

The blade which works on start-up is the "Media" blade. Cos that's intuitive when you want to play games on a games machine. Like when you want to play a downloaded title. Simple, boot-up, slide across a blade to "Games", select "Games Library", Select appropriate tab, wait 20 seconds for the XBox to list a directory, then scroll down to the game you want to play and select, then chose play!

See this is why I stick to solo games because you can never be disappointed when you play with yourself.

All this online gaming is fine and dandy when all pieces of the infrastructure are in sound, working order.

But as soon as you console RRODs, your wireless lan rolls over and dies, your ISP demonstrates its skill at being unreliable and disconnects you for hours or the Live service has a major coronary, you find that the lovely online experience is kinda lacking.

@JohnnyWashnGo
"because you can never be disappointed when you play with yourself."

Snicker, fnarr, guffaw, titter etc ...

"Dizzy you sound like a tool of MS. How can you defend them against this?. People had a few days off and the servers went into meltdown. If I couldn't fix this problem in a week at my job I would be fired. Heads need to roll over this shit. "

Not a tool... just somebody with real life experience and a pragmatic view on things.

You never played World of Warcraft have you?

Your servers don't have 8 million people hammering them. People need to get a sense of reality. When something doesn't work Internet emo boys moan like little girls. SADLY this kind of stuff doesn't always work as advertised. No use being emo about it... it will be fixed.

"The reality may be that it runs on servers which are close to end of lifecycle and prolly look like buses without wheels. "

Haa.. yes... if you ever get a job managing big servers farms you will know the problems. I am a software guy but I have worked on many projects for big companies with gigantic budgets for servers. And, in the end, they ALWAYS have problems when traffic increases in a big burst.

"See this is why I stick to solo games because you can never be disappointed when you play with yourself. "

:) That would make an awesome sig ;)

"you find that the lovely online experience is kinda lacking."
I'm not that dramatic (yet). I had > 50 weeks of flawless, and very good service (and I use Live mostly to socialize, rather then run-n-gun). I can't see myself playing in a disconnected device anymore. Live set, indeed, a new standard.

Seems to be working a lot better over the past couple of days for me, signing in and messaging etc. Though reliable multiplayer is still not there.

@Dizzy
Sure you expect problems. Shit happens. What you don't expect is several weeks of problems - which is how long this has been going on - with no real acknowledgement or official response from a company the size of Microsoft.

@Dizzy

If people pay for a service, a service that is constantly championed, then they have a right to be annoyed when it doesn't work at one of the few times they have enough free time to actually enjoy it.

I would probably be a little ticked off too, if it wasn't for the fact my machine died just before Christmas and was still at Microsoft while all this was happening.

Like someone else said, thank God for Mario Galaxy and maybe a little TF2 also ;) .

Xbox Live point blank refuses to recover my gamertag, which means I can't even use the sodding machine right now. Nice one MS.

""The reality may be that it runs on servers which are close to end of lifecycle and prolly look like buses without wheels. "

The storage array in "my" Datacenter looks exactly like that, and we bought it last month, and it costed twice the price of my flat.

Then again I do work in a big datacenter, and shit happens. Although, as long as it's not "downtime" we can get away with it (for a while).

p.s.: since I went multi-360, I realised that GT recovery sucks. It's better to have one's profile in an MU.

I've noticed some issues, yes, but I haven't been even a little bit annoyed at them, despite playing mostly online. This is the online world, people: expect hiccups from time to time.

Think back to the time before broadband (if you're that old - if not, well, I guess you're spoiled then). We all paid outrageous (outrageous!) sums for modem access, which was painfully slow and very unreliable *all the time*. Now we have considerably cheaper services which work very well *most of the time*. I think that's a huge improvement in a few short years.

If I couldn't access Live at all for more than a couple of days, yeah, that would suck. (Never happened!) But you can have actual *internet outage* for a couple of days - not merely Live - before the ISP has to compensate you (according to Finnish standards).

@DrDamn
" Sure you expect problems. Shit happens. What you don't expect is several weeks of problems - which is how long this has been going on - with no real acknowledgement or official response from a company the size of Microsoft."

Several weeks???? check with you ISP mate you have problems! Live has only had severe problems over the last week or so.

Am I and Dizzy the only people who understands that technology fails from time to time? It's a pain and fustrating but it happens and we just have to deal with it. I can't believe some people are actually thinking this is not a very big deal for MS and they don't care about fixing it!

99% of the time it works perfectly. Instead of getting annoyed while it's down go do something else, there is life after live.....

"with no real acknowledgement or official response from a company the size of Microsoft. "

True... companies should be much quicker to inform people of problems.

Major Nelson tried though.

Microsoft should put their hands in their pockets and buy some decent Cisco switches and stop taking handouts of crappy ones from the likes of Dell and HP.

Why do people constantly defend Live when it is clearly knackered?

Lets change the analogy to cars.

Poster one: I just bought a car when there was a massive rush on as it was when the new reg came out and it's stalling every couple of days - I am feeling a bit miffed that I haven't got what I paid for.

Poster Two: Hey I used to be involved in car making ya' know an' it's really hard especially when the new reg comes out - we made loads of em so of course half of em are going to be faulty, what do you expect - so stop moaning emo etc etc

And the classic - until you make your own car ya self you aren't even qualified to be unhappy that what you bought is borked.

EDIT: Or the other classic - Instead of getting annoyed while you car isn't working do something else like walk everywhere, there is movement after automobiles...

/shakes head

BadBoyBonner, bad analogy. Cars exist for more than a century. You don't patch cars. A car works by itself, it's not dependent of an ISP (or do you complain if there's too many cars on the road? - "give me my money back, I was in line for an hour!!!" - can I do that ?).
If your ISP fails (it never failed ?), do whine like that ?

edit:
"Why do people constantly defend Live when it is clearly knackered?"
Because it's been a very good service so far.

@ BadBoyBonner

Why do people constantly defend Live when it is clearly knackered?

If people are like me they defend it because, apart from the recent issue, we have absolutely no problems at all with the service and it works fine.