It’s the Microsoft Amateur Hour September 30, 2008
Posted by Drew in : Rants, Technology , trackbackSome people have an almost irrational opposition to Microsoft and everything they do. I’m not one of them, when they do good things I praise them, when they do bad things I criticise.
So this morning they are well and truly in the corner with their dunce cap on. What has brought this about? The XBox Live upgrade.
Now I’m a huge Xbox 360 fan and am equally fond of the Live service. But in reality I use it mostly for download content, when I really get into a game the ability to add extra features/missions or whatever is a good thing. One such example of this was the game Oblivion. I lost more hours than I’d care to admit playing this game and added all the extra game elements just to make it really long. After several months away I decided recently to start again from the beginning and play through Oblivion all over again. That is after all one of the points of RPG style games, replayability.
So this morning I turned on the 360 and left it to boot up and …. no message about download content. Hmmmm. OK so continue where I left off and I am asked if I want to continue as some of the quests rely on downloaded content that is no longer available. Arrrrgh, hard drive problem! Err no. That’s fine. OK so I’m not logged into Live, easy, I’ll just do that. No, that doesn’t work, would I like to test the connection? Hell yes, let’s do that. MTU fail. Really? It was fine yesterday. I’m reliably informed that I need an MTU of at least 1364. Well I think you’ll find I already have that. Time to do some checking.
So a quick search on Xbox Live MTU fail gets me to the helpful Microsoft support page that tells me what I already know. I also already know that my Internet connection is fine because, well I’ve just done a search online. Keep checking. OK so now I’m getting somewhere, a few results down I get to an earlier issue that occurred when the Live service was down. Could that be it? Lets try xboxlive.com.
“Xbox.com and the Xbox Live® service are currently down for maintenance.
We’ll be back soon with amazing new My Xbox® features!”
I see.
Not happy.
Further digging tells me that this is in fact “planned” and it will be off-line for up to 24 hours. I look forward to the refund for the day that I have paid for but can’t use. Obviously I missed the email from the “XBox Live Team” to forewarn me about this, they helpfully email me about all sorts of upcoming titles but not that the service will be missing for a whole day. To add salt into an already sore wound the Microsoft blog post I eventually get linked to tells me that this downtime won’t actually turn anything new on, it’s just preparing for something later on in the year. No really, that’s what they actually said.
And low, after 24 hours the service returns and my MTU problem mysteriously vanishes and my downloaded content has helpfully returned.
So Microsoft, two important things that you need to learn (over and above the minor lesson that taking an online service down for a whole day for “maintenance” especially when you also tell us that this won’t actually give us anything new is beyond incompetent) are:
Firstly, don’t respond to a problem at your end by telling me there is an error at mine.
Secondly, the clue is in the name, downloaded content sits on my hard drive having been paid for by me, don’t stop me using it when your service is down, especially if you can’t ensure that the service is available at all times.
Right, back to Oblivion :-).
UPDATE
OK so it turns out that the XBox team did tell me about this by way of a message on the Dashboard. You know, the dashboard I hardly ever see as I tend to go straight into games and couldn’t access with Live down. Oh well, at least they tried!
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