Some 360 owners are really, really sad

[CitizenSnips]

http://www.escapistmagazine.co...-Lawyer-Tells-His-Side

In partial:

Prior to that apology, however, Smith and his co-plaintiffs Keith Kay and Orlando Perez had already contacted Gibson for help in suing for a partial refund of their $50 annual Xbox Live subscription fee. "When you have one person who is mad and they can't get a response, and they can't get their complaints addressed by a company like Microsoft, the only way to get their attention is in numbers," Gibson said. He also claimed that Microsoft must have known that Xbox Live would not be able to handle the Christmas strain, saying, "If they had not anticipated the sales, then they would not have put out that many units of the Xbox to begin with."

"They take the money for the subscriptions, but they don't make sure that the service is going to be there," he continued. "They kind of put the cart before the horse." According to Gibson, he has received more than 500 emails regarding the lawsuit, the vast majority of which supported the effort, and more than 50 people have joined in the suit since it was launched. He also said his clients aren't looking for a windfall with the lawsuit. "What they would like to see is Microsoft fix the problem," he said. "They'd like to be reimbursed for the money they spent when they haven't received the service, and hopefully it will make Microsoft do the right thing in the future."

Really? This is lawsuit worthy? Really?

"Dude, like, I totally paid fifty bucks for this, and I couldn't play Halo 3 for a whole day. Yeah I know Microsoft is giving us a free game... but fifty bucks dude!"

Doing the math, $50 for a whole year of service comes to a whopping $0.13 a day. Even if it was down for a week your minor inconvenience was worth less than a dollar. Now how much do lawyers cost? I'm assuming more than a dollar. Even if you lost it for a month, well I guess Microsoft might owe you a value meal from McDonalds.

Are peoples lives this easy and trivial where losing your ability to play online games for a while makes you froth at the mouth and sue? My house loses power on occasion during storms or what have you, but it's called life, you deal with the problems here and there and play with your DS until the lights come back on.

Plus you have to factor in that this is a class action suit, where even if the plaintiffs win the amount of money each gets would be a paltry sum at best, while the lawyer takes the huge piece of the pie.

 

[Heller]

while i understand where your coming from, this obviosly is not about the money.

Bunch of rich nerds that want to prove a point.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: Heller
while i understand where your coming from, this obviosly is not about the money.

Bunch of rich nerds that want to prove a point.

Exactly. Think about it...it might be more than a tad ridiculous to sue over something like this, but what will be the end result? MS wont ever let this happen again, and any other company in the same position would do well to not put themselves in the same postion.

The management at xbox live is particularly ruthless and disgustingly cheap. After I had returned my 360 because it broke, I had forgotten to cancel my recurring subscription. When I finally noticed the charge on my CC statement well after I stopped using it, I called up MS, and asked them if they could refund the most recent charges, because I hadnt actually used it. Nope. Even after explaining to the manager, and he himself confirming that he could see that I hadnt actually logged on in months, he absolutely refused to refund me the paltry few dollars.

I've had this happen before with another company or two and they've refunded my money. (AOL, Verizon) I've had money refunded for much less. Hell, I've called up my cable company because I was getting bad reception for a day or two, and they offered me a month ($50ish) in apology, and I didnt even ask for anything! I'm sure they didnt want me jumping ship to DTV.

But MS just stuck to their "policy." Their policy of "you have no other choice on the 360, so prepare to be ass raped".

So yeah, I'm not particularly on MS's side for this one. Its not about the money. Its about the greed and arrogance, that they can take your money, not feel obligated to provide the service, and when they fail in doing so, they refuse to refund a few cents.

Power to the people!

 

[Fingolfin269]

I don't know about the rest of you but I was unable to play Live for at least a couple of weeks during the only times I am able to log in. This could still be going on but I stopped trying to play a week or so ago. I got tired of it. Turning on my 360 was supposed to lead to fun and not frustration.

The fee is something along the lines of $8/month if paid per month and $4/month if paid annually, right? That adds up to a lot of cash given to MS for a service that was not working. Why would you feel bad for them?

(I am NOT signing up for a class action lawsuit.)

 

[Xavier434]

Originally posted by: Heller
while i understand where your coming from, this obviosly is not about the money.

Bunch of rich nerds that want to prove a point.

Yup and the way I see it our system of law was not designed to prove points like this one. I understand that sometimes when a business screws up and their lack of quality is absurd then lawsuits are sometimes needed to fix things but in this case there is no problem to fix that hasn't already been fixed. The line needs to be drawn there. No one's time should be wasted at this point to satisfy these rich nerds or their fan club. The only time where I believe this suit would be worth doing is if outages like the one over Christmas happened much more often, but the fact is that it doesn't. Honestly, even if they win the suit, what exactly do they expect to happen? Win e-peenis awards?

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: Xavier434

Originally posted by: Heller
while i understand where your coming from, this obviosly is not about the money.

Bunch of rich nerds that want to prove a point.

Yup and the way I see it our system of law was not designed to prove points like this one. I understand that sometimes when a business screws up and their lack of quality is absurd then lawsuits are sometimes needed to fix things but in this case there is no problem to fix that hasn't already been fixed. The line needs to be drawn there. No one's time should be wasted at this point to satisfy these rich nerds or their fan club. The only time where I believe this suit would be worth doing is if outages like the one over Christmas happened much more often, but the fact is that it doesn't. Honestly, even if they win the suit, what exactly do they expect to happen? Win e-peenis awards?

Its not fixed.

But the point isnt about whether its fixed or not. Its about MS's refusal to refund a few dollars or even cents for their admittedly broken service. Theres no excuse for that. Businesses screw up, sure, but the good ones not only admit they have a problem, but fix it ASAP and dont expect you to pay for their mistakes. Not doing so is an insult to their paying customers, and they deserve any and all sh*t they get until they FIX IT.

All we've seen from MS is a promise of a fix, and a promise of a free game that no one asked for. Sure, it was worse a few weeks ago, but I still have issues every night.

If they win the suit, you wont ever see an outage like this again, and if we do, we certainly wont be expected to pay for it. How is that a bad thing?

 

[Xavier434]

Originally posted by: BD2003

Originally posted by: Xavier434

Originally posted by: Heller
while i understand where your coming from, this obviosly is not about the money.

Bunch of rich nerds that want to prove a point.

Yup and the way I see it our system of law was not designed to prove points like this one. I understand that sometimes when a business screws up and their lack of quality is absurd then lawsuits are sometimes needed to fix things but in this case there is no problem to fix that hasn't already been fixed. The line needs to be drawn there. No one's time should be wasted at this point to satisfy these rich nerds or their fan club. The only time where I believe this suit would be worth doing is if outages like the one over Christmas happened much more often, but the fact is that it doesn't. Honestly, even if they win the suit, what exactly do they expect to happen? Win e-peenis awards?

Its not fixed.

But the point isnt about whether its fixed or not. Its about MS's refusal to refund a few dollars or even cents for their admittedly broken service. Theres no excuse for that. Businesses screw up, sure, but the good ones not only admit they have a problem, but fix it ASAP and dont expect you to pay for their mistakes. Not doing so is an insult to their paying customers, and they deserve any and all sh*t they get until they FIX IT.

All we've seen from MS is a promise of a fix, and a promise of a free game that no one asked for. Sure, it was worse a few weeks ago, but I still have issues every night.

If they win the suit, you wont ever see an outage like this again, and if we do, we certainly wont be expected to pay for it. How is that a bad thing?

I wouldn't count on that. You'll see outages in the future for other reasons. There is no service which never has an outage every now and then. I also played just fine on live for hours every day for a couple weeks now. What is the current status of the problem?

In regards to the money lost, the arcade game they offered is worth more than the money lost. Even if you don't like it that's fine but understand that MS cannot satisfy everyone. Many people might also be upset if they only got their money's worth of time reimbursed to them. Did you consider that? Basically, doing that instead would shut some people up and open the mouths of others. Granted, the time lost to you as an individual might be worth more than that, but MS can't be expected to somehow translate each individuals value of time into dollars and then reimburse them.

Lastly, no one knows exactly what the problem involves and why it is taking so long to completely resolve. Perhaps if every detail were laid out in front of us then we would have more of an argument, but even then I am sure tons of people who have no idea how to realistically solve the problem would start shouting useless answers and explanations about how they could solve it in less time. For MS, they probably look at it from a perspective that they are doing what they can but realize that there will always be those that complain.

This lawsuit, even if won, will change nothing.

 

[CPA]

It's Breech of Contract. I see nothing wrong with their lawsuit.

 

[oznerol]

What if your cable TV was out for over a week? How about your internet service? Maybe your cell phone didn't work for a week.

Regardless of the ultimate cost of the service - you are still paying for it - and it is Microsoft's responsibility to provide said service.

While I don't really care for the lawsuit, nor will I be participating in it, it is completely valid and within the rights of the plaintiffs. I will agree with BD2003 in that lawsuits are a good way of preventing things like this from happening again.

 

[Queasy]

Originally posted by: CPA
It's Breech of Contract. I see nothing wrong with their lawsuit.

They won't win though. MS has a clearly stated portion of their TOS that covers MS's behind in the case of outages.

The plaintiffs would need a judge with a serious MS hate-on.

 

[KlokWyze]

Not receiving a service that you paid for.... while I don't really care that much (I use xbl), they are hardly in the wrong. Why is the original threadstarter so upset by this? You are upset because someone else is upset for a legitamate reason? This is the fucking United States. Dumbasses get millions for spilling coffee on themselves.

 

[Xavier434]

Originally posted by: ducci
What if your cable TV was out for over a week? How about your internet service? Maybe your cell phone didn't work for a week.

Regardless of the ultimate cost of the service - you are still paying for it - and it is Microsoft's responsibility to provide said service.

While I don't really care for the lawsuit, nor will I be participating in it, it is completely valid and within the rights of the plaintiffs. I will agree with BD2003 in that lawsuits are a good way of preventing things like this from happening again.

As queasy mentioned, they are already protected.

In regards to other services being out, I would expect compensation which MS has provided. If it became a continuous issue to the point where I feel my money didn't justify the amount of fun I was having, I would cancel. Lastly, I only support lawsuits when it comes to entertainment service outages to be worth it unless the odds are much higher than this one that good changes will happen. I do not believe this to be the case. I also only consider them worth it if the problem is either ridiculously severe (two weeks of a bad outage followed by a week of less than acceptable quality is not enough) or if the problem repeats itself a few times. A one time offense like this does merit a lawsuit if you ask me. I doubt that the ends will justify the means beyond providing personal satisfaction to geeks around the globe who support these two douche bags.

Originally posted by: KlokWyze
Not receiving a service that you paid for.... while I don't really care that much (I use xbl), they are hardly in the wrong. Why is the original threadstarter so upset by this? You are upset because someone else is upset for a legitamate reason? This is the fucking United States. Dumbasses get millions for spilling coffee on themselves.

Just because it is true, doesn't make it right and nor should we support it.

 

[DaveSimmons]

MS is the only one to charge for online play, and the justification is that it's so much better than free PS3, wii and PC online support.

MS is very well paid to run Live ($80+ million/year?), and running it properly should have included planning for a December surge of new customers.

They also knew that xmas break is when a lot of people finally have free time to play on Live, so it's one of the worst times to let it break.

In regards to the money lost, the arcade game they offered is worth more than the money lost. Even if you don't like it that's fine but understand that MS cannot satisfy everyone.

MS points or an extra month or two of service would have made sense. A game you don't want is worthless.

 

[Fingolfin269]

Originally posted by: Xavier434

Originally posted by: ducci
What if your cable TV was out for over a week? How about your internet service? Maybe your cell phone didn't work for a week.

Regardless of the ultimate cost of the service - you are still paying for it - and it is Microsoft's responsibility to provide said service.

While I don't really care for the lawsuit, nor will I be participating in it, it is completely valid and within the rights of the plaintiffs. I will agree with BD2003 in that lawsuits are a good way of preventing things like this from happening again.

As queasy mentioned, they are already protected.

To be fair, just because a disclaimer exists does not mean that disclaimer will be upheld.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: Xavier434
I wouldn't count on that. You'll see outages in the future for other reasons. There is no service which never has an outage every now and then. I also played just fine on live for hours every day for a couple weeks now. What is the current status of the problem?

In regards to the money lost, the arcade game they offered is worth more than the money lost. Even if you don't like it that's fine but understand that MS cannot satisfy everyone. Many people might also be upset if they only got their money's worth of time reimbursed to them. Did you consider that? Basically, doing that instead would shut some people up and open the mouths of others. Granted, the time lost to you as an individual might be worth more than that, but MS can't be expected to somehow translate each individuals value of time into dollars and then reimburse them.

Lastly, no one knows exactly what the problem involves and why it is taking so long to completely resolve. Perhaps if every detail were laid out in front of us then we would have more of an argument, but even then I am sure tons of people who have no idea how to realistically solve the problem would start shouting useless answers and explanations about how they could solve it in less time. For MS, they probably look at it from a perspective that they are doing what they can but realize that there will always be those that complain.

This lawsuit, even if won, will change nothing.

Outage like this = almost 3 weeks and counting and still not as reliable as it was pre-xmas. They dont want to get sued again next year. Even though like queasy said, its more than likely written into into the TOS, so the case probably wont go anywhere, but its bad press and leaves a bad impression on all the new gamers that just got xboxes.

No one has ever tried to sue blizzard for their outages, and WoW players most likely take this sh*t far more seriously than most XBL gamers. Why? Immediate accountability and immediate extensions, before anyone needs to sue or even ASK. And they probably lose about a million for every day they give an extension.

I'm sure there are plenty of people that would rather have the game, but the fact that they arent offering extensions or refunds, even after calling, is absolutely ridiculous.

Frivolous? The money - yeah. The principle - no.

Wrong? Absolutely not.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: DaveSimmons
MS is the only one to charge for online play, and the justification is that it's so much better than free PS3, wii and PC online support.

MS is very well paid to run Live ($80+ million/year?), and running it properly should have included planning for a December surge of new customers.

They also knew that xmas break is when a lot of people finally have free time to play on Live, so it's one of the worst times to let it break.

In regards to the money lost, the arcade game they offered is worth more than the money lost. Even if you don't like it that's fine but understand that MS cannot satisfy everyone.

MS points or an extra month or two of service would have made sense. A game you don't want is worthless.

Exactly. A free DLC game of *their* choice is a nice gesture to make if Sony or Nintendo's free network goes down, but its really not worth all too much in the end.

If a reliable service isnt part of the package, wtf am I paying for? I seriously can not think of ANY other company that would charge you during such a widespread outage.

 

[Xavier434]

Originally posted by: BD2003

Originally posted by: Xavier434
I wouldn't count on that. You'll see outages in the future for other reasons. There is no service which never has an outage every now and then. I also played just fine on live for hours every day for a couple weeks now. What is the current status of the problem?

In regards to the money lost, the arcade game they offered is worth more than the money lost. Even if you don't like it that's fine but understand that MS cannot satisfy everyone. Many people might also be upset if they only got their money's worth of time reimbursed to them. Did you consider that? Basically, doing that instead would shut some people up and open the mouths of others. Granted, the time lost to you as an individual might be worth more than that, but MS can't be expected to somehow translate each individuals value of time into dollars and then reimburse them.

Lastly, no one knows exactly what the problem involves and why it is taking so long to completely resolve. Perhaps if every detail were laid out in front of us then we would have more of an argument, but even then I am sure tons of people who have no idea how to realistically solve the problem would start shouting useless answers and explanations about how they could solve it in less time. For MS, they probably look at it from a perspective that they are doing what they can but realize that there will always be those that complain.

This lawsuit, even if won, will change nothing.

Outage like this = almost 3 weeks and counting and still not as reliable as it was pre-xmas. They dont want to get sued again next year. Even though like queasy said, its more than likely written into into the TOS, so the case probably wont go anywhere, but its bad press and leaves a bad impression on all the new gamers that just got xboxes.

No one has ever tried to sue blizzard for their outages, and WoW players most likely take this sh*t far more seriously than most XBL gamers. Why? Immediate accountability and immediate extensions, before anyone needs to sue or even ASK. And they probably lose about a million for every day they give an extension.

I'm sure there are plenty of people that would rather have the game, but the fact that they arent offering extensions or refunds, even after calling, is absolutely ridiculous.

Frivolous? The money - yeah. The principle - no.

Wrong? Absolutely not.

If the they don't completely resolve it soon, I will support this lawsuit but only because I want them to completely resolve it more efficiently. It would not be out of any hope for more preservation in the future.

If I were convinced that it will work to change anything substantial for the future then I would support it. However, as you have already mentioned, there are a lot of nasty things that have already happened to them as a result of this outage such as the bad publicity and sales hits. I am convinced that those reasons are enough to guarantee the changes in terms of quality and increased problem prevention for the future that you and the supporters of this suit want. I believe the suit is overkill and useless.

 

[EvilComputer92]

Originally posted by: CitizenSnips

"Dude, like, I totally paid fifty bucks for this, and I couldn't play Halo 3 for a whole day. Yeah I know Microsoft is giving us a free game... but fifty bucks dude!"

Doing the math, $50 for a whole year of service comes to a whopping $0.13 a day. Even if it was down for a week your minor inconvenience was worth less than a dollar. Now how much do lawyers cost? I'm assuming more than a dollar. Even if you lost it for a month, well I guess Microsoft might owe you a value meal from McDonalds.

Are peoples lives this easy and trivial where losing your ability to play online games for a while makes you froth at the mouth and sue? My house loses power on occasion during storms or what have you, but it's called life, you deal with the problems here and there and play with your DS until the lights come back on.

It obvious from reading this that you don't even have Xbox Live. First, the outage didn't last a day. It's been going on for nearly four weeks now. Second, it went down at a time when many people are are off from work because of christmas break. That's when people are most likely to be spending time online with their friends.

 

[tdawg]

Originally posted by: BD2003

Originally posted by: Heller
while i understand where your coming from, this obviosly is not about the money.

Bunch of rich nerds that want to prove a point.

Exactly. Think about it...it might be more than a tad ridiculous to sue over something like this, but what will be the end result? MS wont ever let this happen again, and any other company in the same position would do well to not put themselves in the same postion.

The management at xbox live is particularly ruthless and disgustingly cheap. After I had returned my 360 because it broke, I had forgotten to cancel my recurring subscription. When I finally noticed the charge on my CC statement well after I stopped using it, I called up MS, and asked them if they could refund the most recent charges, because I hadnt actually used it. Nope. Even after explaining to the manager, and he himself confirming that he could see that I hadnt actually logged on in months, he absolutely refused to refund me the paltry few dollars.

I've had this happen before with another company or two and they've refunded my money. (AOL, Verizon) I've had money refunded for much less. Hell, I've called up my cable company because I was getting bad reception for a day or two, and they offered me a month ($50ish) in apology, and I didnt even ask for anything! I'm sure they didnt want me jumping ship to DTV.

But MS just stuck to their "policy." Their policy of "you have no other choice on the 360, so prepare to be ass raped".

So yeah, I'm not particularly on MS's side for this one. Its not about the money. Its about the greed and arrogance, that they can take your money, not feel obligated to provide the service, and when they fail in doing so, they refuse to refund a few cents.

Power to the people!

Your gym won't refund you the monthly fee when you don't use it during the month. MS is not the only company to ever suffer from a server outage or interruption, yet they're giving us subscribers something in return for our troubles for that period of time. Currently, I am able to successfully connect to COD4 games with no issues, so Live is working for me.

 

[Krakn3Dfx]

Microsoft clearly states in their XBL agreement that they can not be held financially responsible for lapses or problems with the service, I'm not sure why this case even has legs at this point. All it's doing is keeping XBL users from getting information updates on the problems with the service and potentially keeping MS from providing restitution for the time they were down with a free game or whatever, which they've said they were going to do.

If logging online and playing CoD4 is this important to you that you need to file a lawsuit because you can't, it's time to re-evaluate your situation.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: tdawg

Originally posted by: BD2003

Originally posted by: Heller
while i understand where your coming from, this obviosly is not about the money.

Bunch of rich nerds that want to prove a point.

Exactly. Think about it...it might be more than a tad ridiculous to sue over something like this, but what will be the end result? MS wont ever let this happen again, and any other company in the same position would do well to not put themselves in the same postion.

The management at xbox live is particularly ruthless and disgustingly cheap. After I had returned my 360 because it broke, I had forgotten to cancel my recurring subscription. When I finally noticed the charge on my CC statement well after I stopped using it, I called up MS, and asked them if they could refund the most recent charges, because I hadnt actually used it. Nope. Even after explaining to the manager, and he himself confirming that he could see that I hadnt actually logged on in months, he absolutely refused to refund me the paltry few dollars.

I've had this happen before with another company or two and they've refunded my money. (AOL, Verizon) I've had money refunded for much less. Hell, I've called up my cable company because I was getting bad reception for a day or two, and they offered me a month ($50ish) in apology, and I didnt even ask for anything! I'm sure they didnt want me jumping ship to DTV.

But MS just stuck to their "policy." Their policy of "you have no other choice on the 360, so prepare to be ass raped".

So yeah, I'm not particularly on MS's side for this one. Its not about the money. Its about the greed and arrogance, that they can take your money, not feel obligated to provide the service, and when they fail in doing so, they refuse to refund a few cents.

Power to the people!

Your gym won't refund you the monthly fee when you don't use it during the month. MS is not the only company to ever suffer from a server outage or interruption, yet they're giving us subscribers something in return for our troubles for that period of time. Currently, I am able to successfully connect to COD4 games with no issues, so Live is working for me.

If you cant go to the gym anymore because youre crippled due to their faulty machines, it would be a bit dick for them not to refund you a few bucks if you forgot to explicitly cancel your membership. Its not like I just chose not to sign on, the 360 just imploded.

Then again, I've never been to a gym that wasnt run by dicks trying to force you into contracts, but in my general experience, most companies I've dealt with in these kind of situations have gone out of their way to keep me as a long term customer, rather than telling me to screw off for a short term gain. Its not like theyre not aware 360s break, and break often. I'd have thought they'd rather have me buy another 360, but I guess they somehow knew deep in their heart of hearts that I'd get another one eventually, and there'd be only one place to turn.

The ironic part of the whole situation is that the main reason I forgot to cancel it is because I've never actually had to pay just to be able to play online. To this day, I'm still not sure what we're actually paying for.

MS doesnt run the game servers, theyre hosted by users. Demo downloads have always been free online, not to mention theres plenty of advertising support. The gamertag/friends list/invitation etc is really nothing more than a glorified IM client, and nobody pays for IM, hell, even MS gives away messenger for free. I certainly hope no one thinks that we should actually pay for access to the online store, especially when they go as far as to charge $1-2 for little .gif profile pictures.

So if its not a fast, stable service that I'm paying for, I don't know what the hell else it could be.

 

[Robor]

Okay this is probably a stupid question but I'm going to ask anyway...

I don't play much on XBoxLive - maybe a couple of times a week. A couple of weeks ago my friend and I were having difficulty getting his system to see my coop Crackdown game. I would launch the game and invite him and either he wouldn't get it or he'd accept the invite and would never enter the game. Other times I would have the game running and try to send him an invite but the 'Invite a friend' option was grayed out. The odd thing was he could send me a message and I would receive it. We were rebooting our systems and eventually got the game running but had random drops and had to do the reboots until we could get hooked back up again.

Is this what everyone is taking about?

 

[BladeVenom]

A reputable company would stand behind their product and offer a money back guarantee if it's customers weren't happy with their product or service.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: Robor
Okay this is probably a stupid question but I'm going to ask anyway...

I don't play much on XBoxLive - maybe a couple of times a week. A couple of weeks ago my friend and I were having difficulty getting his system to see my coop Crackdown game. I would launch the game and invite him and either he wouldn't get it or he'd accept the invite and would never enter the game. Other times I would have the game running and try to send him an invite but the 'Invite a friend' option was grayed out. The odd thing was he could send me a message and I would receive it. We were rebooting our systems and eventually got the game running but had random drops and had to do the reboots until we could get hooked back up again.

Is this what everyone is taking about?

Yep, thats exactly what we're talking about. It was so bad at one point that you would just be greeted with the pulsating circle on the home screen, and couldnt do ANYTHING, but now its mostly limited to incredibly irritating problems like the one you describe, rather than a total breakdown.

 

[Robor]

Originally posted by: BD2003

Originally posted by: Robor
Okay this is probably a stupid question but I'm going to ask anyway...

I don't play much on XBoxLive - maybe a couple of times a week. A couple of weeks ago my friend and I were having difficulty getting his system to see my coop Crackdown game. I would launch the game and invite him and either he wouldn't get it or he'd accept the invite and would never enter the game. Other times I would have the game running and try to send him an invite but the 'Invite a friend' option was grayed out. The odd thing was he could send me a message and I would receive it. We were rebooting our systems and eventually got the game running but had random drops and had to do the reboots until we could get hooked back up again.

Is this what everyone is taking about?

Yep, thats exactly what we're talking about. It was so bad at one point that you would just be greeted with the pulsating circle on the home screen, and couldnt do ANYTHING, but now its mostly limited to incredibly irritating problems like the one you describe, rather than a total breakdown.

Hmmm... That was pretty annoying. It would have been nice if MS had sent out a broadcast message to alert users the problem was on their side. My friend and I were pulling our hair out. After learning that I hope the lawsuit goes on so MS learns something from this.