Kotaku

I thought clan support would be its biggest new feature.

sounds cool, but what i would really like is a community friends list, like focused on individual games.

As much as I hate Microsoft for making faulty 360's (3 of mine). Xbox Live is a beast, too bad I won't experience it.

Nice to have the option, but its lame that you need to go to xbox.com to change it. If you're going to implement it, you should be able to change the setting on the dashboard.

How about they upgrade accounts that were made when under 18 and are now 18? I turned 18 this year and I want the benefits of having an adult account.

And I'm not deleting my account. ;/

All I want is cell-phone style predictive text for messages. Is that so hard?

Any BC updates coming? I have an unopened copy of XMen Legends II that I need to know if I should keep or return.

Do trust him banana. He just wants to get into your peel!

@etchasketchist: Then they wouldn't sell any chat pad things. Well not like they are selling that many. That is an awesome idea though.

@PlaidNinja: With the new XBox Originals thing coming, I doubt it. Why make it BC when they can try to re-sell the game for $15?

I like the networking idea, but it won't be a true social network until we can put up sparkley kittens, digital adoptable puppies, and long, completely useless chain letters and "surveys" on our gamer profile page.

@PlaidNinja:
Return it - buy MUA for 360 and thank me later.

@jayntampa:
Pray for clan support. With so many new, good, games coming out, there's no room to add the other people playing those specific games.

This seems kinda pointless...then again, I was never really a huge fan of MySpace to begin with, so "friends of friends" systems just seem kinda silly.

Like Myspace?

So I can get spam messages from fake women and abuse html to break people's 360s?

I can't wait.

This is pretty cool. I wonder if this will work during Halo 3 so I can find my friend's friend service record and saved files...

It's a great idea to kind of push this forward, but why stop at just doing little friends lists changes? How about letting people upload their own audio listings or video captured off of their game cams and make their own little Xbox Live profile page from within the service itself?

I can't wait for the update to be released without DivX support. Imagine, the dreams of a million people to view porn on their Xbox, crushed!

@edb87: Pssssssst... They're only making originals out of games that are already BC.

@etchasketchist:
I totally agree with you on this one. I'm mute, so the headset is pretty useless for me. Luckily, I have friends who are patient enough to wait for my messages. I know, I know, I'm too lazy to buy the stupid keyboard thing.

The T9 system seen on cellphones is probably copywrited and requires a expensive license or something. Still, it'd be nice to have.

dumb feature.. but oh well. still want 1680x1050 res support.

I wonder if this update will fix the error that causes my system to freeze up during playing of new games with the "error disc is unreadable or dirty" message while playing fine for older games.

@Katana3160: Hey totally honest and benign question about a fellow Kotakuite: are you deaf as well as mute? Really, no offense meant at all, just genuinely curious.

My cousin is deaf and mute, and finds gaming as a great equalizer.

My wishlist:
1) FIX DRM ISSUES.
2) Clan support.
3) When comparing games don't show XBLA trial games.

Friends of friends? /yawn.

"I wonder if this update will fix the error that causes my system to freeze up during playing of new games with the "error disc is unreadable or dirty" message while playing fine for older games."

@terry2070: Your drive is dying. This is how my three 360s, bless them, all passed.

So yeah. It would be sweet if they would add that 16:10 monitor support...

@FanDam:

Yeah, that makes sense considering that this is my 4th 360 and I just got it back from Microsoft a couple of months ago. I've had hamsters that lived longer than these machines.

@Gneiss: Totally agree... I've got a 1440x900 monitor that is my gaming 'tv', and the pixel-mapping on the monitor isn't particularly wonderful.

@BigWeather: "3) When comparing games don't show XBLA trial games."

Or just don't show any games where folks don't have any points.

I'm actually ok with friends of friends, but I think only friends should be able to see custom gamer pictures (ones taken with the camera). Anything else is too scary to even think about.

Fast forward to Dec 4....

"Who the fuck is Tom?"

I would like a way to put a note on each friend so I know who they are and where I met them. Like "Met XGamerTony on Steel Battlion: LOC" so I know not to remove the other big controller guys from my list a year later when I can't remember who they are.

It would also be nice to check and see by title which people on your list have it.

@megahurtz: I think that's just for the moment.

'more updates announced at a later date'......the 4th of december is only a week tomorrow(or today if in some parts of the world)...so they should announce everything pretty damn soon really

@Moonshadow101: That's why I told him the chances of anymore BC updates are slim. They'll just sell the ones that are BC so they can get money from it, as opposed to EBuncolandStop selling it used and MS not getting a penny from it.

@Chimaera: Hahaha!

Friends of friends... It's a bit of a shit feature.

Give me clans and divx and i'll be a happy chappy. As long as my 360 doesn't RROD death on me.... Please don't.

Am I the only one who the title of this article reminded of SNL Incredibly Gay Duo's Ace and Gary?

I am still holding out for H264 support and yes, DivX would be nice too.

The amazing thing about all this is the LIVE anywhere dream is slowly but surely materializing. Anyone who owns a Zune will know what I'm talking about because this is the same technology that is driving Zune's new social networking features and my friends list from LIVE is already visible in my Zune portal as means of sharing music. I have such a nice tingle down my spine when I think of all the places this can go :)

I would like a VIP friends list in addition to the regular friends list. The VIP list would list more information (what game they're playing, level, progress, achievement comparisons, etc) and the regular friends list would be where you dump people you might play with but they're not really 'friends'. They'd know that you're online (if you want) and maybe some other basic info.

My friends list starting getting too long for me (I don't like to have to scroll), and some of the folks I barely ever play with or even talk to.

Thoughts?

Being able to group your friends or set little notes on them would be awesome. I have too many friends on my list spanning message boards, real life friends, friends of friends and people met in-game; I don't know who anyone is anymore o_o

@Chimaera: LMAO

Id like some dashboard optimization. Loading the dash and profile is slower that poo on a cold winter day.

I would absolutely kill to have an alias setting on your friends list. I hate having to remember that DevDaMilfMan is my buddy Devin from work...etc...

Just give me the option of putting in someone's real name...thats all I want!

@BigWeather: Amen to #1. Even if it is only for warrantly-related issues.

@Moonshadow101: thats a wrong notion there. people want it to watch downloaded tv on.

ill be turning this feature off soon as its released. i dont want schmucks i dont know or worse, schmucks i DO know and dont want to hear from or hand my live tag to, sending me friend requests. in fact im amazed its not set to that by default. thats a major breach of privacy as far as im concerned. social networking shit should be opt-in only.

Friends of friends?

Sweet, now I can see who has and hasn't been cheating on me.

@red: True.

I have people on my list who send out a message every 2 months: "I am quitting Live forever" .....and then delete everybody they don't want to talk to, change their gamertag, and leave the rest of us on their list.

Now, the people who're still on MY list (that they're trying to avoid) will see them, assuming they can take an educated guess by gamerscore, gamerpic, played games list, or if the name is similar.

Definite privacy issues. I find it odd that it's not ONLY "Friends Only". So in theory, I could go to anybody on my players list and spam all their friends that X player is a cheater, scammer (PSU), has big boobs, etc.

@edb87: Err, do you realize that the Xbox downloads rely on that BC support? They're just monetizing it, so they can further justify the money they've spent making BC updates over the years.

@Billkwando:

Big boobs? This is XBox Live we're talking about here. You mean manboobs?

DivX isn't only for pirates. I use a tuner card to record live TV, and it would save me literally hundreds of gigabytes if I could convert those Media Center TV files into DivX format. I so hope this isn't just a rumor.

@Katana3160: you can use any USB keyboard, even wireless USB keyboards.

I am hardly ever overwhelmed by anything that Microsoft does anymore. At least give us support for DIVX so that your $400.00 media center can begin to compete with my $130.00 media center (modded original XBox) that has the added advantage of a 250 GB HDD, can run Linux, and, oh yes, can also run games from the HDD to bypass all of the problems associated with the really poor DVD drive.

Fifteen dollar downloadable original XBox games that one can find in the disk version with a manual for $10.00? So, basically, they download the image of the game iso to your HDD. Except that most Xboxes have a 20 GB HDD, 13GB of which is usable, and most XBox isos were anywhere from 1.5 GB to 6 GB. But no way to store the iso to a permanent disk once you've downloaded it. Sounds to me that MS is grasping at straws and trying to make the 360 look like it is much better than it actually is (all of MS's early 360 design decisions - ditching water-cooling, proprietary hardware, licensing fees to 3rd parties, incompatibility with original XBox peripherals - is coming back to bite them). The only thing the box had going for it was an early release and good development tools, which is the only reason it is surviving today.

I want them to fix the whole child account problem. I would just make a new one but then my achievements would be gone, and I would have to make a new tag, and I quite like my current one.

For the most part this sounds like a terrible update. I wonder if some of you who praised this bashed the PS3's FW. It added more functionality than this.

Why would I care about my friends' friends?
"Oh, I see my friend xXxMajorB0n3r69xXx is friends with |BoobsFTW|, HeH8Me and YurMom."

Sigh. Multi-person personal chat rooms. All I want. Really.

DivX please so I can stop converting all the time.

@Heart-Skull-Kid: H.264 support has been on Xbox 360 for almost a year now. Try it out, it's rad.

@vizion: Note that all the features of this update have not yet been announced. Please wait to bash the feature set until you know what it is. :)

Please tell me you can play divx dvds (data dvds with divx files on them)! That would be a dream come true for me.

@red: Word. As soon as Live sent me the message, I marched right over to Xbox.com and put the settings on "Blocked." Huge violation of user privacy. What's worse is that the Curious Georges can still browse your other friends' lists (considering that their settings aren't on blocked). So complete avoidance of this seems fruitless. This new feature is an invitation to spam.

@vizion: Oh Vizion, you're always so angry :) No one is comparing this to the PS3 other than you. Besides, they've revealed for major features so far in this update and there's more to come. The other sweet things about these bi-annual updates is that a slew of minor functionalities are added throughout LIVE and dashboard that just makes everything better. No update has yet to disappoint so far.

My only worry is that the HDTV thing won't be happening this spring which kind