SIDEBAR
»
S
I
D
E
B
A
R
«
Cancelling Xbox 360 Gold Membership Is A Fucking Horror Show
Dec 12th, 2009 by Ice Cream Jonsey

Three months ago my brother wanted to play some stupid baseball game with me over the Xbox 360. Well, I never got around to getting the game. I thought we could play Warlords instead. He didn’t buy Warlords because I didn’t get the baseball game. Somehow, in this debacle, I upgraded my 360 account to “Gold” membership.

In a desperate, greasy cash grab, Microsoft demands money from you in order to play video games over the Internet. It was fucking sickening when they started this shit, and it’s equally shitty now.

Three months later, all I’ve ever used the service for is playing Robotron against people. Even that’s a fucking mess: two players go at the same time, and when the first player dies off… the second player’s game is immediately over. I know. I know!

So, I don’t want them billing me any longer for this shit. They’ve stung me three times now, made $36 off me, which would have allowed me to purchase every 360 Live Arcade game I’ve ever wanted. I’m going to document the process of attempting to cancel my account, because it’s a hilarious clusterfuck.

One word before I get started, however: for the most part, I’m very neutral on Microsoft as a company. The two things they do, consistently, as a company that absolutely drives me insane is continually change their fucking GUIs and refuse to adopt a consistent, multi-platform GUI.

Continually changing their goddamn GUIs means that every tutorial is out of date a few months after its created. I was going to take a bunch of screenshots of the hell I’m going through with the cancellation, but what’s the point? Their terrible, terrible Xbox.com site will have a major upgrade sometime soon, and all the work in documenting how terrible the last version was would be pointless.

I don’t think managers at companies really understand how this is such an abortion for the consumer. Any form of internal in-application help doesn’t work. It just doesn’t. Most of the time the “help” option in a program just takes you to a website that isn’t maintained. No, the way normal people get support for your product is to type in search terms on the net and read blog or forum posts. You have to maintain some consistency. I can understand the first major revision – initially, you need to get stuff out there so it works. Fine, fine. Next, you want to make it look nice. Cool. But to constantly rework GUIs like every Microsoft product… what a mess!

Honestly, I want to like their stuff. But I think the following conversation ought to happen:

MSN Messenger Team Lead, June 2008: We’ve completely reworked the MSN Messenger interface. It looks great. We’re proud of it.
Some VP, Somewhere: Excellent. Well done.

MSN Messenger Team Lead, December 2008:  We’ve completely reworked the MSN Messenger interface. It looks great. We’re proud of it.
Some VP, Somewhere: Haha erm. Okay?

MSN Messenger Team Lead, February 2009:  We’ve completely reworked the MSN Messenger interface. It looks great. We’re proud of it.
Some VP, Somewhere: Okay, this is your third rev in a year. You obviously wasted our time with the previous two. Do you have plans for yet another GUI revision? Were you working on … how many of these are you working on at once? Don’t you understand that, with GUIs, there is an end game? You’re all fired.

And again, I’ve logged an embarrassing number of hours through MSN Messenger. Of the chat clients I’ve used, it’s by far the “best” one. But – for instance – if you attempt to maximize the version I’m using, it won’t fully maximize. The upper bound is a few pixels from the top of the screen, just enough for, say, a full-screen browser window that ought to be behind it, to have its close/minimize buttons at the top-right corner of my screen. I have probably closed a browser window instead of MSN Messenger due to this infuriating error a hundred times. Clearly, someone decided that MSN Messenger ought not to adhere to the min/max protocol of EVERY OTHER FUCKING APP ON THE PLANET, and that person and the people who approved this behavior ought to be shot.

(Unless it’s a bug, but Jesus Fuck, how are bugs like that still happening. Anyway, I don’t think it’s a bug.)

But refusing to adopt any sort of consistent UI is a Microsoft standard. Why does MSN Messenger look nothing like Windows XP or Vista? Why does the 360 dashboard look absolutely nothing like that of the Zune? Why does Internet Explorer have nothing in common with Media Player? Why does Office 2007 look like it was the result of some terribly-mismanaged Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri cultural artifact exchange? I mean, I know why: Microsoft is a giant corporation and the divisions making the various products have absolutely no contact with each other.  But it’s not acceptable.

With that, here’s what I had to do to cancel my Xbox Gold membership.

1) I went to Xbox.com and signed in with a hotmail account. I won’t get into how dumb it is that they bought hotmail, and that my e-mail account for accessing Xbox live is now something I use for absolutely nothing else. As if there were a legitimate reason in the world stopping me from using zombieworld.com. I guess the fine they got for bundling their garbage wasn’t big enough, they haven’t learned a thing.

2) After clicking on some screens that were unhelpful, I got to “Modify Your Billing or Personal Information.” Again, this website is unlike any other Microsoft site or product that I’ve ever used before.

3) This directed me to the Billing and Account Management Site at live.com. What the fuck does that have to do with anything? I consulted a couple other Google Searches to ensure that I didn’t want to be there.

4) I somehow got to this page, don’t ask me how, because I couldn’t reproduce the process: http://support.xbox.com/support/en/us/xbox360/kb.aspx?ID=907817&lcid=1033&category=xboxlive

It helpfully states, “If you purchased a pre-paid membership and you do not have a renewal set, you will drop from the Gold membership tier to the Silver membership tier when your Gold membership expires.” And I just have to shake my head, as if there’s any fucking option to not have it renew. Way to go, I just found the most useless sentence in Microsoft Product History.

5) Again, I have no idea how I got there, but I found out where my credit card was listed. I thought it best to just remove it as a valid form of payment. I am instead told that there’s an outstanding balance on the card. What the fuck does that mean? If there’s an outstanding balance…. charge the fucking card!

At this point, I’ve given up. I search Yahoo! Answers for two things – how to cancel this abomination through the phone, and how best to kill myself.

I then have to call up the 1-800-4myxbox number and talk to a person to cancel my account. They make a half-hearted offer to get me to convert to a yearly membership in exchange for the full cost of a yearly Gold membership (that will no doubt renew) and 800 Xbox points in blood money. 800 points, wooo, I could play Qix++ for seventeen fucking minutes and complete it. WHAT A DEAL.

So I dunno – they told me on the phone that they’ve actually charged me a couple weeks after they’ve turned on service, so I’m going to get charged again on December 15th for services previously used. This means that the biggest software company in the world can’t:

– Allow you to terminate services through a website

– Allow you to select a method of service that doesn’t automatically renew

– Instantly kill services and require a partial payment for previously rendered services

– Charge you at the time your service begins like every other fucking web product in the world

I mean, they can do these things, they simply don’t want to. And that’s what’s so goddamn infuriating. People are making a lot of money to have stupid, stupid, stupid decisions implemented, and for Christ’s sake, I wish them all dead.

I Would Totally Get Castle Crashers
Sep 9th, 2008 by Ice Cream Jonsey

Castle Crashes is a new little beat-em-up for the Xbox 360. And I would totally get it. There are only two real problems. The first is that I now have a 360 backlog. I want to finish Braid. I want to get… er, farther in Space Giraffe. I haven’t even seen 5% of what there is in Dead Rising. I also purchased Bionic Commando: Rearmed, because people over at Caltrops seemed to be having fun with it.

A backlog! On a system I just bought. This is in addition to the non-gaming backlog around there, which involves getting a vacuum cleaner that works more than three times (seriously, it’s easier to fucking kill Dracula than it is to buy a reliable vacuum cleaner in this country) addressing the fact that my cat has turned every wooden surface into his own personal scratching post (if we did kill Dracula at home, this cat would be disintegrating the stake in like two minutes) and finding a permanent solution to the orb spider-brimming hedges in the front lawn (orb spiders attract bats, which, well, you can see where I am going with this).

I don’t think that there is a chance that the Castle Crashers devs are reading this, but if they do encounter this post, I’d just like to say that the game is adorable, is a very amusing button masher in a world it never knew, and — from the demo — it definitely seems to be worth fifteen bucks. No question.  

There’s been some discussion about the higher prices for Xbox Live Arcade games, and honestly, since I purchase the “points” in $25 blocks, as long as the games aren’t costing more than that, I don’t care. If they get to be like $30, then I — the gamer! — have to step up and buy fifty bucks worth of Xbox Points, and I’d like to start a family someday. That ain’t going to happen if I find myself having long conversations about “Xbox Points,” for Christ’s sake. So, anyway, when I get sick of one of the other 360 games I have, Castle Crashers is next, and that’s the highest praise I can give a demo. (There are also some problems with on-line play, so this gives me and them some time to work on our issues.)

The other thing I had for this post, which isn’t specific to CC (which lets you play a long time in demo mode) was regarding just how little time you get in the demo for Robotron 2084. Maybe it’s just because the game is ridiculously addicting, but it stops after the second level, which even a hoof-handed sped like me can get through. I can’t keep going back to the demo because I am going to drop five bucks on the game “just to have it” on the 360. Yet, the 360 gamepad’s analog controllers are frigging primed for Robotron. I must have ten systems that will play Robotron. If they had let you play a couple more levels into it, I’d remember how terrible I am at the game and this feeling would deflate, but they are far too clever for that. So, good, although evil, work with that demo, too.

»  Substance:WordPress   »  Style:Ahren Ahimsa