Xbox Live customer support..

[GD]

Is pissing me off in a big way right now.

My Live account is due for renewal next month, so I bought one of those 12+1 month cards at the EB. I go to enter the code, and scratch off the back of the card. WTF, three of the letters are damaged in the process. So now I can barely make out one of them, while two of them are barely recognizable at all.

Alright, I can deal with this. I have a good idea what the letters are, so I try to enter what I think they are. It fails. I try multiple combinations, all fail. So I figure I'm screwed, but I thought I would try calling Xbox Live support anyway. They tell me they can't help me, to call the store. They give me a reference number.

I call the store, and they tell me once the package is opened they can't do anything. Great.

So I call MS back with my reference number, and I get a busy signal and then hung up on. Now I'm starting to fume. I call a third time, finally get through and speak to a different tech. This one seems to be more helpful, but in the end he says they can't do anything.

I tell him that is unacceptable. I paid $50 for this card, and I'm not willing to flush that down the toilet. So he puts me on hold while speaking to a supervisor. I sit on hold for a solid 15 minutes. He comes back, takes some account info, and puts me back on hold. I've been on hold for 20 minutes now, and I'm really starting to get ticked off.

The card has a 9-digit tracking number on the right side. You can't tell me that they can't figure it out with that number + the digits I have intact on the card.

So frustrating..

[Robb]

Im sitting here reading the terms an conditions on my xbox live points pre-paid card (I assume it will be the same as the subscription cards) and whilst it says it is no-refundable, and will not be replaced if lost or stolen, it doesnt say anything about damage.

Keep at them untill u get some thing, plus something extra for your inconveniance I reckon

[Shino]

Agreed. I've heard that Xbox support has gone to shit recently.

[GD]

Well I ended up spending nearly an hour and a half with them on the last call, and they still refuse to do anything. This is a supervisor by the way. The rep even admitted to me that they are no longer making the scratch off cards, but in usual Microsoft fashion they won't do anything about it until enough people are affected to threaten a class-action lawsuit.

Look what it took for them to address the 360 hardware failure rate? I'm on my third 360. As much as I like the console, and as much as I love XBL, I am very close to selling everything, cancelling my account and never buying another piece of software from them again.

[Shurikane]

But... you are on your third 360! That thing has been here since only 2005. I'd have given up after the first.


My Dreamcast died only this January, and I had bought it in 2000. Lasted 7 years and over 2500 hours of play. And the thing that broke was the CD reader's spinning motor. I can understand why.

[Shino]

[RivaOni]

My track record?

Atari 2600 (the sort of plasticy "lite" style model with the metalic strip, not the wooden one):

Played Centipede to the point where the console gave up, with a puff of smoke coming out of the back.

PlayStation (original flavour):

First one the spindle broke, it came off and wouldnt go back on.
Second one the connection on the back of the system for the aerial cable to go in stopped recieving a signal.

Dreamcast:

I'm on my fifth PAL machine, one had the Reset problem before there was a common fix for it, 4 of them the ports went, although I replaced the ports on my fifth one so its still going and my Japanese machine is dandy.

PS2 (chunky model)

technically I've had four of these.

System 1, it started stuttering on music, then while playing SSX On Tour I went pretty damn high and the level dissapeared from beneath me. Bought a second hand one to replace it (and took my faulty one in saying they'd sold me a faulty one) only to find that they had sold me an actual faulty unit, took that back, got it swapped, another faulty unit, got the final one tested, all was well and got a free controller out of it (and a free unboxed copy of Midnight Club 3 DUB Edition which was inside one of the PS2's)

My original XBox has an occasional disliking for anything published by EA, lasted for about a month at one point leading me to give up on Strangers Wrath. I've heard its the Samsung drives that do that, so the 360 may do the same at some point as mines got a Samsung drive.

[Shino]

Wow... glad I don't have your luck.

I had lightning strike my house a couple of years ago...

My dreamcast, gamecube and xbox all died on me b/c of it. AC Adaptors all died I think. Since the DC and XB were internal, not much I could do. Got a new AC Adapter for the GC, and that worked for a while now it won't read disks.

Funny thing is the other system on the same surge protector as all of them was the PS2, and it didn't die on me. It still worked fine. Even my system selector died on me. It was weird.

Not sure why the PS2 didn't fry. The only think I could think of is b/c the PS2 actually has a standby type mode so it was still drawing a bit of power while the other 3 were off. Have no idea if that could have anything to do with it, but it's the only real difference I could think of.

[ClericalApathy]

Never had a system break on me, never had to get one repaired. Then again I have a decent amount of electronics experience, and I can repair my own items if needed (Half the systems I own I bought used/broken for next to nothing. I paid 5 bucks for a broken xbox, only had to repair the IDE cable to the hard drive, another 5 bucks and 15 minutes. I had a fully functioning xbox.

Though even with my luck I am VERY wary of the 360, I handle it like it was my own fetus travelled through time. I keep the system near the AC vent with a fan pointed off the wall to circulate the cold air around the system. Even then I still get the occasional DRE. I had an A/V problem resulting a near red ring, was fixed easily.

Sucks is people do nothing but demand a more powerful system, and demanding it now, and are suprised when the companies actually listen. I would have been content with something that met halfway between the previous gen and this one, but was reliable (aka the Wii, while I may not like the line up of games, as far as consoles go, they built a pretty sturdy system).

[Shino]