Xbox Live - The Christmas Zombie

SEWilco writes "Xbox Live is not working, as mentioned 36 hours ago in an Xbox team blog. Even if you can get logged in, multiplayer matchmaking doesn't find enough players for games. For a while Zune Marketplace was also affected. At present Zune status claims 'Up and running' while Xbox Live status continues to say 'Users may experience intermittent issues logging onto Xbox Live. Our engineers are continuing to investigate and are working to resolve this issue. We apologize for any inconvenience.' This has been been going on for days." My assumption is that this is the result of lots of new XBLA users logging in with Christmas 360s.

Re:Predates Christmas

[gorbachev]

XBL seems to be straining. There have been more issues with the service in 2007 than all previous years combined (maybe the beta testing period excluded).

What's troubling is that the mean time between failure seems to be decreasing sharply, and Microsoft seems to be unable to prevent them from happening at all. And fixing is taking longer and longer.

Who cares?

[Slashdot Suxxors]

Who cares what the problem is? Just fix the damn service already. I pay Microsoft for XBL. It had better damn work. Me not being able to host a private match with some of my buddies for days on end is fucking ridiculous.

Re:Let's be fair...

[Anonymous Coward]

The XBOX 360 is a marvel of design and XBL revolutionized on-line play.

I can only assume you're British, as this is sarcastic wit at its finest, good sir! Pip, pip, and cheerio!

Re:Xbox Live is a major selling point for me

[oahazmatt]

Actually, I've noticed it is not XBL that I've been having problems connecting to, but the Messenger, as you've noted was having trouble. I can get signed in, play online games, etc, but Messenger will not load.

Server overload = Service Failure

[CharonX]

...... Even if you can get logged in, multiplayer matchmaking doesn't find enough players for games. ........ My assumption is that this is the result of lots of new XBLA users logging in with Christmas 360s.

So your theory is that because of a lot of new players, Microsoft can't find enough players for games? Would you care to rethink that theory?

Or it could be that countless new XBLA users are repeatedly trying to long onto Xbox Live, creating something like a distributed denial of service effect, which not only makes long-ins next to impossible, but also makes it difficult to stay logged in and finally negatively affects other services, like servers and match-maker too. Care to rethink your reply?

Re:This Is One Of The Reasons...

[Xzzy]

At least with a computer, there are LAN gaming options (although some game platforms may have LAN gaming capabilities, they don't seem to be as flexible or easy to set up, or even as well thought-out).

Every xbox game I have ever played that supported any kind of multiplayer also supported LAN based play. In fact early on, before XBL was running, it was all the games supported. Was one of the most painless things you could experience as well. Wire up all the xboxes to a hub, and every xbox that turned on would start talking to each other. Wouldn't even need a dhcp server working. Someone fires up a game and makes a server, everyone else can instantly drop in.

There may be a lot of good arguments to favor PC gaming over console gaming.. but the LAN situation ain't one of them.

Re:Predates Christmas

[Cheapy]

It must be you then! GET HIM!

I started to see problems after the 22nd. Before then, everything worked really well. I thought for a while that it was my wireless connection, but I guess not.

This is the only time I've seen XBL have issues, so I wouldn't judge it just by now. It's usually great. They just did an update a few weeks ago, so that might've done this.

Re:Predates Christmas

[Dan Ost]

Consumer loyalty is easily earned and easily spent.
That's why companies re-brand themselves so often.

Re:Xbox Live is a major selling point for me

[Blakey Rat]

It's not people buying new Xboxes. After all, when Halo 2 and Halo 3 came out, Xbox Live had no trouble handling the additional load from people who don't normally play on Live. I think it's related to their last software update, or perhaps some shenanigans from some game title out there now.

That said, this isn't a total outage. I logged on to Live just yesterday, sent some Viva Pinata items to a friend (yes, make fun of me, I played Viva Pinata!) and everything worked fine. If I hadn't seen this article, I'd never know there was an issue. I do realize, though, that playing Viva Pinata and sending an item is a lot different than playing Halo 3.

Re:Let's be fair...

[DaveCBio]

Blah, blah, blah, the same old tired rant from an ignorant PC gamer. I game on pretty well every platform out there on a regular basis and there is NOTHING that comes close to the slickness and universal integration of Live. It was good on the Xbox, but it's seriously fantastic on the 360. Show me anything on the PC that allows universal friends, voice chat, messaging, score comparison, achievements, etc. on the PC without having to cobble together a bunch of different applications that all your friends need to grab as well. It's truly plug and play online gaming.

Re:Up and running at 1:54 EST on 12-31-2007

[SleptThroughClass]

When you wait for two hours before getting 3 people in a game which requires 8 people, and the matchmaking times out after a few minutes... it's down.

Re:Let's be fair...

[Surlyboi]

I love the "ignorant PC gamer" tag.

That said, try playing online with more than 12 people at a time on an XBox. Or... choosing which server you want to play on.

XBox live has a lot going for it, but to claim it's better than a computer on every level is specious at best.