Happy New Year? - I just got back into town from a trip to Boston so I haven't had any of the issues with Xbox Live I've been hearing about (and while I'm a game geek I don't take my 360 with me on vacation), not that I had any issues the week before either. However, I guess quite a few gamers have and Microsoft has decided to take all the complaints seriously and do something to compensate people for the lack of service. While I'd rather be writing about my drunken New Year's, my first fantasy football championship or the Celtics/Rockets game I went to last night, an email I received from MS takes precedence. Below is the email sent out by Xbox Live GM Marc Whitten an hour ago. .
Dear Xbox LIVE Members:
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During this past holiday season you helped us break a number of Xbox LIVE records. 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.
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As a result of this massive increase in usage we know that some of you experienced intermittent Xbox LIVE issues over the holiday break. While the service was not completely offline at any given time, we are disappointed in our performance. I would like to take this moment to thank you each and every one of you for your patience and understanding as our team has worked around the clock to return the service to a stable state.
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At the same time we would like to offer a token of our appreciation to all of you in celebration of record success for the service. And as a thank you for your loyalty during this holiday period, we will be offering all of our Xbox LIVE members around the world access to a full Xbox LIVE Arcade game that will be available to download free of charge. In the coming weeks we will be sharing the specific details of this offer with you. Thank you again for helping make Xbox LIVE everything that it is today!
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Sincerely,
Marc Whitten
General Manager, Xbox LIVE
.
During this past holiday season you helped us break a number of Xbox LIVE records. 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.
.
As a result of this massive increase in usage we know that some of you experienced intermittent Xbox LIVE issues over the holiday break. While the service was not completely offline at any given time, we are disappointed in our performance. I would like to take this moment to thank you each and every one of you for your patience and understanding as our team has worked around the clock to return the service to a stable state.
.
At the same time we would like to offer a token of our appreciation to all of you in celebration of record success for the service. And as a thank you for your loyalty during this holiday period, we will be offering all of our Xbox LIVE members around the world access to a full Xbox LIVE Arcade game that will be available to download free of charge. In the coming weeks we will be sharing the specific details of this offer with you. Thank you again for helping make Xbox LIVE everything that it is today!
.
Sincerely,
Marc Whitten
General Manager, Xbox LIVE
.
A freedownload of an XBLA game is nice, especially since this wasn't an issue for me but personally I'd prefer some MS points, 800 would do the trick, to buy whatever I want. I'd hate to end up with something lame like Shrek-N-Roll or even worse, a game I already downloaded. Have any of You had a problem with the service? Is so, what was it and what do you think would be fair compensation? Let me know.
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3 comments:
Happy New Year!
I had some issues, probably best to describe as 'spotty'. It dumped us out of live during a game, after about 15mins of trying to get signed in things finally came around. It did this twice.
I like your idea of 'take points, do whatever', or the option to choose an arcade game.
Congrats on winning your FFL title you cheater.
-your better looking sibling who's vastly superior in Halo
When trying to sign into LIVE in the dashboard, sometimes it'll take a minute or so before my menus are active. Just the little icon with the lights making circles around it go on and on. Then when it does, I try to join a COD 4 game and it does "searching for games" for about 3 minutes before telling me I need an active connection to play online. I do the connection test and everything is fine. If I can actually get into a game, about half the time, I get "connection interrupted" and the game quits. Not just on me, but everyone in the game. You can hear them complaining about it. Then, if we get all the way through the game, sometimes we get "server time out" before getting back to the lobby. Then we start the whole thing over again. In COD 3, it wouldn't let me join a game at all for about 10 minutes. If I chose the game type, it would have a list of games, but constantly "could not connect to host" or "all players". When I did a quick match, it would get to "joining" and that's where it sat for 10 minutes before finally getting me into a game. Once in the game, it was laggy as hell so I just quit and played some PC games for awhile. Then I thought I would give Halo 3 a try. Halo 3 hooked right up. Halo 3 is known for taking awhile to get into games, but it hooked right up with a full game. After that, I quit and tried again. Worked fine. Seems like the folks working on the issue are working on perfecting service for their biggest game first. COD 4 should be in line soon to be worked on.
BTW, this is LAST NIGHT I'm talking about. Not Christmas or the week after.
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