Kotaku
The weeks long connection troubles many Xbox Live users have experienced since the holidays was due, according to Microsoft, to heavy Xbox Live server load brought on by a record number of users attempting to access the service. Xbox group marketing manager Albert Penello told us that "It's wasn't a malicious thing." He explained "We had the biggest concurrent day we've ever had on Live. We had more people than ever signing up on Live, it was 9 million, then 10 million, and it literally was that a lot more people were trying to get on, sign up and play than we had expected over Christmas."
The continued problems were a result of not simply too many people trying to connect and play on Live, but also that too few Xbox Live team members were in the office to react. "It's easy when we're all the office in November, but on December 25th, it's harder to get a hold of everybody," Penello said, later adding "I hope people feel like [giving away a free Live Arcade game] is a fair make good for the inconvenience."
Penello also came to the Live team's defense, noting that "I'd also say in seven years, this has happened maybe zero other times, but I can't remember a time when, other than the slow downloads we had when we launched Video Marketplace, we have had a service outage that wasn't planned."
While Microsoft's Penello and Jeff Bell gave us the impression that the problem is largely addressed when we asked at CES, some of us at Kotaku are still having connection issues, specifically gamertag recovery unresponsiveness. Unfortunately, I'm away from my Xbox 360 and can't report on my own successes or failures with the service. We've heard fewer complaints from readers over the past few days, but still want to hear from you if you're having troubles.
Comments
They better give me Omega Five Ikaruga and Rez HD or death.
That's bs. They should be more prepared than that. And I doubt millions more people just suddenly went online on XMAS day, a day that I would think less people would be online playing games.
Well the thing is, Luckily I have had my console in repair, Wait I said luckily. I haven't been able to play anything at all. But I guess I will take the free game.
You want them to kill you if you don't receive O5 or Rez?
Thats kinda extreme.
@Shindokie (psn and xbl):
Buy a DC and those games for about the same price, and keep them long after your Xbox 360's HD crashes.
i'll take the free game 4-shure.. I've cought up with my single player achievements this week cuz COD-4 has been terrible all week. I'll take a free game any day of the week, Thanks M-s0ft.
It is getting better but it still isn't back to 100% for me yet during peek hours. I had a hell of a time updating my new games the last couple weeks let alone any Live gaming.
@Kai_:
District of Columbia? I don't have enough to buy that sir. Sowwie :/ Yeah it would be a good idea. It's that i'm on a very tight budget so thats why i want them for free. Call me cheap but hey ill be playing it for free.
They're going to give Carcassone away for a week! Oh wait.
Coincidentally that was the one week I was out of town. Sucks.
I don't buy it...
@ticalmc2k2:
I don't know about you, but when I was a kid there was nothing I looked forward to more than showing off my brand new console to my visiting family members on Christmas morning. So it's not really that much of a stretch to think that there were plenty of new 360 owners who were eager to hop onto Live and try things out.
@Shindokie (psn and xbl):
I think he was referring to Dreamcast. Just in case I missed your sarcasm.
@ticalmc2k2:
And I doubt millions more people just suddenly went online on XMAS day
Small problems started the weekend before Xmas and it got worse every day after Xmas until after the new year when they started getting it to work better. It isn't a normal MS excuse they truly got hammered this Xmas and they clearly weren't expecting as large of a new user base as they got.
@Scazza:
Duh, It's FREE...
@ticalmc2k2: Ugh. You sound ignorant. Just say "I'm still upset!" or something but don't go talking as though you understand anything about running a global network.
@atomysk:
I agree with that, but at the same time there are tons of current 360 owners who were probably doing other things than playing 360 on Xmas day, so I would expect a slight increase but it would almost offset.
Leave it to Microsoft to turn a negative story into a marketing opportunity.
@Shindokie (psn and xbl): hah! not an easy man to please, gotta respect that.
well, i signed on in december, and got like 4-5 friends ot join, so i take a small part of the blame.
Wait, are they going to give away free XBL games? If so, it better not be crap like Peggle or 3d Marble Madness. I'll be PISSED.
@okenny :):
And you know something about running a global network? And another thing don't call me ignorant. Because it's they clearly just weren't prepared.
@ticalmc2k2:
I bet there were more than enough new 360 owners and live users. Plus I bet that there were plenty of current owners getting a certain game with a 3 in the title that were ready to fire up.
Wow, thats ironic. I finally got that ending for the first time today and I see it up on Kotaku. XD
How many people called a friend to have them go online and check to see if they(the friend) could get on?
I need to do that on Dead Rising...I hear it's tough. lol thanks Kotaku for that image! tanks vs. zombies. Oh...and honestly XBL will recover shortly. I'll wait to play any games online til that time.
@atomysk: you are 100% correct. I agree with you on this. I think actually on Christmas and after would be when the most people would be logging on and signing up. Unlike others in here that think when a kid (or adult) get the new 360 that they are just gonna put it aside and wait for later in the day to play and log in. LMAO yeah right... If it was the first gift I bet everything after the 360 will seem like crap. Anyone else get a pair of PJs..LOL
it should be ms points so we can choose the game what if we already have whatever they give, because I doubt it'll be the new ones since they won't make money if they do.
Ikaruga please!
@TheIrishNinja:
Would you like to try and please, since MS isn't doing such a great job :/
@ticalmc2k2:
YOu my friend did miss my sarcasm but good correction and thank you :D
Actually, I do (very little since I'm not head nerd at my company) and equipment, bandwidth, location, and personnel to do so is rather expensive. Companies grow out their infrastructure based on expected growth. You see everywhere in news story that 2007 was an amazing year exceeding all industry projections. They planned and were still outpaced. Now they've learned a very important lesson that should hopeful benefit them, us (the user base), and even their competitors (you better believe this is going to be studied by the networking community). People are so eager to find a reason for hate that they make blind accusations. I just hope they fix this as soon as possible. If the same thing ever happens again then I'll be skeptical about their management and forecasting ability but the first time around, these things happen and you kind of have to except them.
My whole point is they should've been prepared for this. If it's so obvious that all these new owners would be logging on on Xmas, then why weren't they prepared for it? Maybe I'm wrong about the amount of people and I underestimate how many people would be on that day and after, but it's moot.
It's good to know why it's like this, but guys, just fix it. A game is a good free payment, but please.. please.. please.. Fix it!
Why can't they just give everyone 800msp, to spend on whatever they want in the Marketplace, video downloads or games.
Oh, wait. Obviously people with multiple accounts would get 800msp each, instead of one game for all the profiles they can buy 4 or 5 (if having 4 or 5 profiles). Ah.
@Shindokie (psn and xbl):
Touche! Except for the part about all three for free. That'd be nice, though.
@ticalmc2k2: Make up your mind, will you? "They should be prepared for this" but "it would almost offset". So prepared for what - NO load change? Genius is the best word to describe you, sir. Not.
Away from my 360, but I hope like hell it's working once I get back.
@Furious_Liver:TF2 name i_have_fleas. Frag me!: props on seeing an ending to Dead Rising; im still working on that. shit's tougher than i thought, going in with capcom difficulty assumptions (you know, onimusha, devil may cry etc).
As someone who has to manage a 5000 server cluster, I can honestly say that everyone here saying, "They should have been prepared," has no clue what they are talking about. Let's see you try to manage a user surge on proprietary software that enables millions of people to see millions of other peoples hundreds of millions of friends and then, when it breaks, know how to fix the already-very-scalable software to be yet even more scalable.
There are some problems you can just throw money at and some you can't. This is one of those problems you can't.
@TheIrishNinja: Serious on Dead Rising's difficulty. I honestly gave up on it! I thought the japanese gaming companies were all about making fun, easy games that we play for the gaming 'experience'
@ticalmc2k2: They DID prepare for it, the problem was they underestimated the amount of new users they would receive. Predicting something like this is not something that can be easily predicted. Let me put it as basic as possible. Say I'm having a party and I know that XX amount of my friends are going to come over and I get XX amount of beers for them. The day that the party happens, I get double the amount of people I was expecting because more ppl came over than what I had originally planned for and now I don't have enough beers for everyone. Do you now understand the situation that Microsoft had?
1000 MS points would suffice.
@Kai_:
Yeah i know. I was going to add or but i was on a role. YOu don't stop a gambler on a roll.
@BlahDev:
Make up my mind? I did, I thought they shouldve prepared better, and I was wrong about my own estimates, apparently so were they. What was I inconsistent with?
To everyone else who had logical and courteous responses to my apparent wrong feelings, thank you.
To those who had assholish and idiotic things to tell me, a more sarcastic thanks.
......and... Theres Waldo!
@TheIrishNinja: I thought it was batshit hard too, but then I did this one Scoop and holy fuck the game became 30 times easier. Heres a hint, that out of order ride that keeps moving around...do the scoop for that one and pwn the psychopath. The game really became SO MUCH EASIER and transporting survivors became MUCH LESS FRUSTRATING after that beautiful tidbit of information received at the end of the quest. Best of luck to ya. Oh, and urinate often. :D
I don't buy Microsoft's "too much success" excuse. My only Xbox live experience since September is with Halo 3 and the matchmaking started getting messed up when the new map pack came out December 11th. After that, I started noticing instances where I'd try to join my friend's party and we couldn't due to NAT problems even though we hadn't had any connection problems for the first two months of release, our settings never changed, and it said we all had OPEN NATs. Then when we were finally able to join there would be times where no matches would be found for 5 - 10 minutes so we'd back out and go back in and then a match would get found instantaneously. While these things didn't happen too often at first, their frequency has been steadily increasing the entire month since the new map pack was released. It culminated in yesterdays session where it took 20 minutes for my friends and I to get into the same party, then we couldn't find any matches for 40 minutes. Halo 3 essentially became a phone system because all we got out of it was the ability to talk to each other in the lobby. It's gotten to the point where today when I texted my friend to play Halo with me, he asked "is it really working?"
I really wish we could get some honest answers from Microsoft and Bungie regarding these issues. When Halo 3 first came out, there were over a million people playing it at times and absolutely no problems. Over the holidays, the most I ever saw was maybe 400,000. Since the problems, at least with Halo 3, started two weeks before the holidays and have continued to get worse well after the holidays, I'm definitely not buying their excuses. But I guess it's something we should expect with Microsoft given the fact that 90% of Xbox 360s fail at some point anyway. Their excuse with that would probably be that so many people want to buy the Xbox 360 that Microsoft just doesn't have enough time to figure out how to make it work properly.
Large chunks of the Live service are contracted out (Siemens being a major player I think) so I suspect that part of the problem was getting hold of those external engineers. Internally they have a lot more leverage, and they're also probably thinking very carefully now about their choice of contractors.