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Xbox Live: Later Impressions

January 15th, 2009 - 3:23pm

I ranted about it last week, and have spent more time since on Xbox LIVE in order to gauge whether it’s worth my money. I still think it’s priced too highly for what you get, but I do think I’ll go ahead and buy a subscription to the service once my trial finishes up.

A lot of the problems about my rant haven’t changed, but I’ve had some better experiences. I do think the need for stats (covered in more detail in the earlier post) is up there — I’d love a timeline of my achievements and breakdowns of how poorly I play online, and by game.

The worst (and best) thing about the service is the people, and providing negative feedback to someone doesn’t mean you won’t seem them again (I’ve seen people on a day after I marked them as “don’t play with this again”) but if you find a good group of people it can be brilliant.

I still say that every game must have dedicated servers (otherwise all I’m really paying for is a matchmaking/social service, and I already have facebook, twitter, et al) to eliminate poor quality home connections from lagging.

Finally, I should be able to nominate two profiles (or three, or four) on my account that can use the Gold subscription, with the condition being that the service only allows one to be logged in at once. This would be especially good for familes — if you have two kids and a parent with accounts it’d cost you $250-300 a year in subscription fees alone. “Nickel and diming” at it’s worst. I know it’s Microsoft, but c’mon, seriously? It’s almost as bad as the charge to change the gamertag!

So, conclusions:

• I’m going to give them a year
• I want detailed stats (or at least an API so I can get to them myself)!
• Why don’t games have dedicated servers (and why aren’t there areas for age groups, so I can get away from those annoying teens)?
• Let me have multiple profiles on the one Gold account!

Tags: gaming, internet, nerdy, ramblings, xbox, xboxlive