I hate it when I'm right

Well, I was right. With all of Xbox Live's issues there was bound to be someone to make a stink about it. Three people in Texas filed a class action lawsuit against Microsoft for not being able to connect to Live in December (and after last night you could extend that into January).

They supposedly asked for $5,000,000 for the pain and suffering the lost service caused them. What they don't know is that with a class action lawsuit that $5,000,000 judgement (if awarded) would be split between all the Xbox Live users. Since there are 6,000,000 users on Live we each would get about $.83 cents from the lawsuit. It doesn't sound like much but since a Gold membership is only $.13 cents per day that sounds about right, don't you think?

Besides if you read the papers filed these three individuals are suppose to "act on other plaintiff's behalf and in their best interest" or some other such wording. Who are these people to say what's in my best interest? They don't know me. And they probably don't know the whole story.

I've had a few friends put away Call of Duty 4 because of the terrible hassles you have to go through to get a match started. They haven't stopped playing altogether either. They just went back to older games. Gears of War and Rainbow 6: Vegas have been dusted off. They say they haven't had any problems getting into matches with those games. They still have occasional issues with getting connected to Live but once that happens everything is fine.

Reading around with some of the stories that have come out about this I found it funny that one story "uncovered" that in the licensing agreement we all had to agree to before activating our membership stated that there is no guarantee of uninterrupted service. If they had read their licensing agreed before checking the box maybe they would have know that. But be honest, how many of use have actually read the licensing agreement? I didn't.

I'm a very patient person. I don't mind waiting to get a game started. What bothers me the most about what's going on is that whole parties dissolve when a game match crashes. When that happens you have to spend the next 5 minutes getting everyone back into your party. Some people might not be on everyone's friends list, others might be booted completely to the main menu. By the time you get everyone back into the party it's time to find another match to get into. And then the problems start all over again.

One thing our party did last night was to start looking for matches other than Team Deathmatch. It seems everyone want to play that and the servers can't handle all of the requests. But other match types like Ground War, Headquarters, Sabotage, etc. are much easier to get into. You still get experience points and can complete challenges (those matches even have their own special challenges) so why doesn't everyone start playing them more often?

I just think this whole thing has been blown out of proportion. And gamers are going to feel the heat for it. Yes, we'll get a new Arcade game out of this as Microsoft's way of apology but what's going to happen to the online experience? And who are these idiots in Texas to say what I really want out of my gaming experience? And when I play Halo 2 or 3 can I sue Microsoft for a sexual harassment from the traumatic gaming experience of someone tea bagging me? What other lawsuits are gamers going to raise because they're not happy with their gaming experience? 'Cause let's face it, Microsoft (and the rest of the world for that matter) are just here to please us, right?

Man, I hate it when I'm right.