January 9th, 2008 · 5 Comments (http://sarcasticgamer.com/wp/index.php/2008/01/xbox-live-still-fked.html#comments)

by Lono (http://sarcasticgamer.com/wp/index.php/author/lono/)
http://sarcasticgamer.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/anger-m.jpg (http://sarcasticgamer.com/wp/index.php/2008/01/xbox-live-still-fked.html/anger-mjpg/)

I had exactly 45 minutes of sweet, uninterrupted game time from 6:30 to 7:15. The why is really unimportant, needless to say, with a kid an a wife, I’ll take whatever I can get nowadays. My first choice was Call of Duty 4…. naturally. That usually means playing online multiplayer, which means using Xbox Live. That I pay for. That usually works. Except for the last two weeks.

Read on for general frustration and liberal use of four letter expletives.
Ok, so I got comfy and popped CoD 4 into the machine, clicked Xbox Live and waited, and waited….
“Downloading Settings…”

WTF?

“Downloading Settings…”

“Downloading what f**king settings?” I said to no one in particular.

Then I thought, “I’ll restart the system, that usually fixes that.” So I reset the system, foolishly thinking that it was anything but Xbox Live’s fault for my f**king issues.

Then with a blip I was in. Ok… time to make a party. It appeared that my a couple of my usual Call of Duty 4 friends were on… couple of SG peeps like Animathias, VinDali, as well as a couple of GCN peeps.. DNelson and Breego. I proceeded to send out invites and….

Magically…I couldn’t. Well, that’s f**king great.

Just f**king great. What the hell is wrong now?

Who the f**k knows. Who do I look like? Major Nelson? I just want to play f**king Call of Duty 4 for crissakes.

Finally, DNelson sent me an invite and I finally made it into a party. It was myself, DNelson and VinDali. Except, that once I entered the party, I kept getting a f**king message saying that I needed a valid f**king network connection to play online… WTF? I was already online. MOTHERF**K!!!!!
At that point, I started getting a little pissed.

Then I heard VinDali say, “I keep getting a message saying that I can’t connect to the party.” The only problem with that statement was that he was already in the party.

For some reason that message magically disappeared without warning and the Xbox Gremlins finally left our party alone for five minutes. Five silent minutes, because at that point, DNelson’s microphone was off and he couldn’t communicate with us. Oh, and we also couldn’t connect to any matches… F**king Grrrreat.

We waited and waited, and waited aaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnndddddddd f**king waited.

Throughout this whole time, Animathias couldn’t even connect to the f**king party. Sorry bud.

After 30 minutes of that bulls**t, I was forced to say “f**k it” and quit out of Call of Duty 4.

Great, I thought to myself, fifteen f**king minutes left of free time and all I did was f**king wait in a lobby. F**king Microsoft.

Then, I threw Bladestorm into the system. It’s a single player game. No problem, right?

It f**king froze up on me.

Great. Just f**king great. Forty-five minutes of waiting and restarting and waiting.

Thanks Xbox Live. Thanks a F**king lot. It’s been two weeks of intermittent, “cross your fingers, god I hope this works” bulls**t. I’m tired of it.

We’re all tired of it. FIX THIS SHIT.

I swear to god, that “free game” better not be Astro Pop.

Welp, there goes the family friendly rating our site used to have.:p


I'm definitely getting real tired of this also. When you invited me to play CoD4 with you on Sunday, I kept getting some crazy error every time I tried joining the room until I finally just gave up. Thanks Microsoft.

Lol, a little heavy on the four-letter words, but I agree that Xbox Live is definitely still wonky, although I had no problems at all last night. I guess having 10 million accounts may have something to do with it.

I called Xbox Live support last week and asked what was going on. I mentioned that subscribers paid a fee to access this service and with this type of interruption they might consider some sort of compensation for the downtime. The support rep's response to me was that when you divide the fee by the number of days in the year is was some small change such as $0.13/day. My reply was that yeah well, multiply the $0.13/day by the number of people having problems. Needless to say he was less than interested in talking to me about it.

My brother (who is a tad younger than me) called Xbox Live support and when the rep answered the phone he said...

"Tell Bill Gates to fix Xbox Live now!"

...and hung up. As I said, he's a tad younger than me.

Yeah so I finally start playing COD4 online for the first time last night. I was able to play around 5 matches in an hour and a half, but i couldnt play with any of my friends. Everytime i was in a party with my friends it would either freeze or spilt us up and send us into individual matches. If this turns out to be the regular I dont think ill be playing this for long

Sorry, but I had to smile...exactly the same thing happened to me and my buddies yesterday and the day before...have you checked the number of players that were supposed to be online Lono? When we started CoD4 it said something like 312 000 players online. After staring at the "downloading settings" message for 10 minutes I got really bored and went back to the CoD4 start menue for just 10 seconds, then I switched back to "Live" and suddenly there were exactly 0...I repeat: ZERO Players online. I repeated the procedure and voila- 312 000 Players online again within 20 Seconds...that s**t went on for about 30 minutes...before all of us quit the damn thing.
By the way-I've noticed that CoD4 online seems to work fine during the early morning hours but after 7 in the evening?-forget it!
Why I had to smile? Well...my buddies and me are all noobs around level 20 and we live in a little village with the lamest web connection you can imagine in the middle of blackwood forrest down here in germany...nice to see that you folks over there with all your skillz and technical support share the same great X Box Live experience as we do ;-)

It didn't seem THAT bad last night, me and a few friends managed to play 1 game I think without a single problem..

I remember when me you and dave tried to play, God I hate xbox live some times..

It was working fine for me two days ago :)

Welp, there goes the family friendly rating our site used to have.

Yeah. 0_o

It took 3 days for me to get to play pinball on XBL, it needed an update and everytime I attempted to connect it gave me a weird error message and kicked me out. Last night XBL was being really odd as well, kept on throwing up strange error messages about it inability to connect to the internet, even though it was already connected and (friggin slooowly) downloading a demo. Find it a bit strange that they have already announced the compensation before fixing the problem.

Hey lono... Just a heads up... You were most likely double F**ked by online stuff. While XBL is still having issues, IW were also having major issues with their servers on both the 360 and PS3. Their excuse? They didn't know there would be this much flow over the holiday seasons. So Demonware's servers crashed. The same crap for COD4 has been happening on the PS3.

Sometimes you'd sit infinitely on the Downloading Settings screen for COD4.
Sometimes you wouldn't be able to join anyones party.
And Sometimes it said you wouldn't have a network connection and boot you wherever you were at to the home screen even though your connection is working fine.

IW finally started fixing their servers this morning with an update. They couldn't sooner because their employees were on vacation. Heaven forbid they actually come back from their Bahama vacation a couple of days early to help the people who are essentially paying them... but alas it's hopefully fixed now. I haven't checked the servers yet as I was unconscious when they were updating the servers.

I went back online after 10pm cst. Didn't really have any problems after that. That doesn't excuse the other fifty service interruptions in the past week though...

i had no problem online but then again i was playing team fortress 2 and Halo3 not COD4.

"WTF? I was already online. MOTHERF**K!!!!!

At that point, I started getting a little pissed."

LOL. :D

Back to the topic, I find if funny how on Major Nelson's podcast, they were talking about how everything is back up and running perfectly. =\

LONO you nailed it I have been PiSSed all week with the same message

"WTF? I was already online. MOTHERF**K!!!!!

At that point, I started getting a little pissed."


hahaha got me on the floor laughing. Good article. ^_^

Yeah, I was sitting there wondering why I had no rank by my name and farting around with classes when I got a Invite from Lono.
O.K. cross my fingers...
Hey I'm in, but what the heck is that message telling me I'm unable to join?
There they are! I see Nelson and Lono right there, what are you talking about???

The other thing on Live is you hit the guide button and the blades freeze for like 5 minutes and your left wondering do I need to reboot or just go grab a beer at the pub?

I ended up switching to Assassins Creed.

Could not help but think of this
ouSU8D5DUv0

One Arcade game is not enough compensation for all this crap.

BTW, are the American XBL servers somehow separated from the European ones [if there actually are any European ones]? I have not been experiencing any problems recently (except a few days after Christmas), nor have my friends here.

When they're having Live troubles, the xbox.com support page usually states that some customers may experience problems. It must not be a system wide failure or just a couple of their multiple servers or something.
I dunno.
I'm not the man, the myth, the legend - DDL

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! I'VE HAD IT WITH THESE MOTHERF**KING [GREMLINS] ON THIS MOTHERF**KING [XBOX LIVE]!Sam Jackson
:p

halo 3 was still screwy last night...
i want a freaking good XBLA game.
lol

One Arcade game is not enough compensation for all this crap.

BTW, are the American XBL servers somehow separated from the European ones [if there actually are any European ones]? I have not been experiencing any problems recently (except a few days after Christmas), nor have my friends here.

I believe the American XBL Servers are run by Limelight Networks. In fact there's a quote from Ernie Chen from Xbox Live on this page.

http://www.limelightnetworks.com/partners.html

Now I really don't know if I should be talking about Limelight as my Stepfather works there. But they do run the servers for Myspace, Steam, him and a friend have also told me the Xbox Live Servers are here in Phoenix as well.

Anyway what I do know is a ton of people have taken time off over at Limelight for xmas and then some. They really didn't that that much of a crew in after xmas, and I know a few people are still out of town. So chances are all the XBL stuff going on could be something over their at Limelight.

Yeah, logged on to play some CoD last night, spent 8 minutes being told I needed a network connection.. then Lono sent me upwards of 4 invites.. 2 of them froze the game and forced me to restart, the other 2 simply told me I couldn't join the host, or that I needed a network connection.
Tried TF2, not a single match showed up on the list after 15 tries, so I decided to try Halo 3. One hour after I sat down in front of my Xbox, I was playing a 3v3 laggy match..

Oh, and tried the Paradise Demo, sat on the "connecting to Paradise servers" screen for 5 minutes, went and made a sandwich, and had yet to connect. I don't care much for an arcade game, I'd just like it to be fixxed.

It's been a frustrating coupla weeks...I trust that "E" will get things running smoothly, eventually. I hope it doesn't take too long.

I addressed this problem recently i have had the same problems with only ****ing cod4 not halo jesus or anything else but cod4, and you know what I just quit cod4 and have been playing halo. (but i still have trouble with the "couldn't sign into messenger problem" and I'm messaging my friends fine when it says I'm not f you xbl)

This kind of reminds me back in the 90s when AOL was something more than just a joke. (Not by much.) They had too many subscribers, and not enough servers or bandwidth. So their fix was to boot you off line if you weren't "actively" using your connection. Such as, if you were reading a web page that took more than 3 minutes to read. Boop, you were kicked. Man, I miss the days when a 56k modem was top dog.

I'm talking a break from xbox till this all blows over. I'll just stick to my laptop. Until microsoft finds a way to charge a fee for matches on the internet

Was anyone having trouble with COD4 in the weeks before the Live f*ck up - cos I was......

yea me to it was before it ****ed up completley i had problems getting in matches.

Hurry up and get this thing sorted microsucks!!

This kind of reminds me back in the 90s when AOL was something more than just a joke. (Not by much.) They had too many subscribers, and not enough servers or bandwidth. So their fix was to boot you off line if you weren't "actively" using your connection. Such as, if you were reading a web page that took more than 3 minutes to read. Boop, you were kicked. Man, I miss the days when a 56k modem was top dog.

Yeah man, those BBS pages were awesome! :rolleyes:

TEXT FTW!!!

Lono it was working better for us last night (Xbladeadeatha Remember :) when we were playin nothing wrong happenend