The Christmas break/vacation was, for a lot of us, a time to just relax and catch up on some serious gaming time. But if you owned a 360, that experience was seriously flawed due to Xbox Live servers constantly being broken.
The worst of the XBL weirdness occurred this week as a great deal of gamers was frozen out of their accounts due to serious glitches in the system.
While some just chalked the problems up as just part of being a gamer, others have not been so understanding and are demanding that Microsoft compensate them for the downtime by offering Microsoft points or games. The typcial price of an Xbox Live Gold account is $50 per year.
Torifle, a user of the Xbox.com forums stated:
"…I understand some glitches for a few hours. Stuff happens. But to have an outage as long as this one was is completely unacceptable. I paid for this service. If my cell phone were down several times for stretches during the course of one week or my cable or internet, etc., I’d expect to get some sort of compensation. A free month, at the very least.
"I am now asking this of MS. I love my Xbox and the primary reason is Live. My Wii gathers dust and I got rid of my PS3 because their online suck. XBL is totally worth the $50/year – when it works reliably. So, MS, how about some compensation for this downtime? Either some MS points or a free month of Live. And some assurance that this won’t happen again."
The post generated a flurry of comments in agreement but all the complaints evidently caused a lot of heat and the Microsoft forum administrators have now locked the thread.
Whether Microsoft plans to compensate the Xbox Live community for the online disaster of the past week is unknown at this moment. But one thing that is evident is that many new Xbox Live members and veteran users of XBL were very disappointed, to say the least, about the lost gaming hours due to the spotty service.
Should Microsoft make amends to pay back XBL users for the broken service, or should this be just seen as a one of the expected consequences of gaming?
[via xbox.com]
