Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb, director of programming for Xbox Live, took a few minutes last week from preparing Xbox.Com and Xbox Live for the launch of 360 to talk to me about life at the heart of the Xbox s online service.
His team s latest efforts has been in upgrading the official Xbox site's My Xbox that went live late last week.
"Xbox Live and the website and the forums, everything is all interconnected now, it is a very complex service that is running really well," he said. "We ve gone through all of the scenarios that our different members are going to be up against and have concentrated on making the transition as smooth as possible."
"People expect Xbox Live to work like a telephone, they don t want any problems."
And one of the biggest problems online gamers can face is fellow gamers.
Almost since day one of the 360 Live's design, Hryb s team has been making sure people don t get driven away by obnoxious gamers or cheaters.
Having analyzed four years worth of online play data, Hryb feels fairly confident that this time around cheaters and griefers will be cut to a minimum.
The first step toward cutting down on inter-gamer friction was creating Live s four zones. When a gamer signs on to play they can choose where they want to hang-out.
"We did a lot of research on people's play styles and how they approached the game," he said.
What they found was that gamers who hang with people of their own play style tend not to harass as much.
The second step in grief relief was beefing up the feedback system. Right now Xbox Live only supports positive or negative feedback.
Under the new version of Live you can be much more specific about why you did or didn t like a person.
The 360 network will also match you up with other gamers for online play different. Now, the system relies more on the friends of your friends to decide who you should play with.
Hryb was reluctant to discuss details about the new security features when it comes to cheat prevention, but he did say he was very happy with the end results.
Hryb says that this time around, online experience is going to be a top priority for many gamers and that Microsoft has a four year leg up on the competition.
"They (Nintendo and Sony) are still showing a couple of slides here and there and keep waving their hands," he said. "We have millions and millions of hours of watching people play online. We rebuilt Live around the Xbox 360 using that data."
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