In a bit of current gaming news that spawned some “discussion” worth commenting on, Microsoft had some issues this past week regarding their Xbox Live service.
Now, I didn’t pay too much attention to this for two reasons – one, I was busy, and two, when I did fire up my Xbox One during said outages, just to check on things I actually had no issues, so as far as I was concerned nothing was amiss for me.
For others, however, things were different.
I had seen on Twitter Wednesday that there were issues. That happens from time to time, no big deal, I though. Then I checked my phone to see a set of text messages from my boss telling me he had 3 different people call in, in a span of 5 minutes, saying their Xbox Ones were “booting to a black screen” and asking if we worked on them. We do, and I’ve actually spent the past 2 weeks trying to figure out how salvageable a few “dead” Xbox One consoles we have sitting in the back actually are.
It was odd, however, to have 3 people in 5 minutes call about the same issue. He checked online and found out about the service issue on his end. Turns out the Wednesday outage was a server side issue involving authentication with the Xbox Live service. I don’t know details but from what I could gather the situation was this:
You boot your Xbox One. It finishes starting and begins to log into your account. It naturally connects to Xbox Live at the same time, but what happened was the authentication never finished. The result? The system just sat there in limbo.
Now, there is a piss easy way to bypass this – it’s called disconnect from the network. One person even said, when calling in, that if they pressed the home button on their controller they could access the menus provided, and as such could change settings. Had they gone offline, things would have continued as normal and they could play whatever they wanted — offline, of course.
That clearly, though, never occurred to anyone. Not that I would expect the average person to understand even the basics on how the system works, but still, it seems people didn’t think to check that there were service issues, or notice that the issue was happening when the system was trying to log them in — that naturally implies the issue might be with the “logging in” process and not maybe their console. Not saying this to criticize them, but really, learning how things work even in basic form does make life easier on all fronts.
In any case, a post was made on our page letting people know about this issue, that it was a service issue and that the odds were their consoles were fine, but this was a current problem. That’s when the fanboys came in.
I would notice this throughout the day, and over the rest of the week (it being Saturday as I type this) that the PlayStation fanbase was using this as a point to attack the Xbox userbase. Constantly. Nearly every comment I saw was someone knocking the Xbox One for this. Not just a “hey, that sucks that such can cause the system to never finish booting” which is something I would agree with, no, it was exactly the kind of fanboy laden “haha Xbox sucks look at this” kind of crap you would expect from kids. However, it was (debatably) grown people making these comments for the most part I’m sure.
Again, let’s make this clear: I am not giving Microsoft some kind of magically pass for this having happened. However, I’m also someone who understands technology, knows that things can fail from time to time (sometimes spectacularly.) I’m fairly certain this was a very special failure case, especially from the way Microsoft was discussing it on their Xbox twitter accounts. I’ve seen firsthand similar cases where the system simply doesn’t connect to live when you boot, and once service is restored it then happily reconnects no issue. This clearly wasn’t an issue that allowed for that which is also part of why I suspect this was a very unique failure mode – an “unknown unknown” kind of condition, if you will – that took the Xbox team quite by surprise.
The PlayStation fanbase commenting on this, however, clearly had no comprehension of this concept and naturally took it as a chance to knock the Xbox, seemingly ignoring the fact that their online services has had its own serious issues in the past: the 2011 PlayStation Network Outage being the most prominent example, that one caused by an outside attacker, and not an internal issue. Perhaps because a majority of these current PlayStation obsessed fans were certainly playing games on the 360 in 2011 they weren’t aware of this — that’s just my own speculation, however, but regardless it’s ignored by those attacking Microsoft for this recent set of issues.
Yes, I say set of issues because the service had problems again this past week for a short while, again, this set affecting some aspects of game purchasing and downloading of purchases – if I had to guess, simply a relatively minor issue with a different authentication system and one that looks to have been easily fixed.
Of course, the moment something doesn’t work right everyone cries online about it, rather than moving on with their day, trusting that the problem will be fixed, as it always is. The same group that took to attacking Microsoft for the earlier issue caught wind of this and continued their commentary, feeding their own ego’s (I guess) and sense of elitism, and the attacks continued…
One can easily check the status of Xbox Live from this URL.
Now, I honestly find this quite amusing coming from the PlayStation fanbase since from what I’ve heard, the PlayStation Network service is spotty in its own right. Generally good once in a game, it does have its own common issues. I’ve even noticed that my PlayStation 3 will sometimes simply say “unable to connect to PlayStation Network” and then later on be perfectly fine, matching what I’ve heard from others regarding the service being hit or miss when compared to the usually consistent Xbox Live Service.
Am I saying PlayStation Network is bad? Far from it. I just find it amazing that people who wish to talk so strongly against one service would ignore the problems in their own service. Wait, no I don’t! That’s completely typical of people who feel they have to defend something they use as a part of themselves – they feel attacked personally if you dare have anything other than the most positive statements to make on whatever it is they enjoy, and I just can’t stand that.
“But Chris, you’re doing the same thing here!” you may be thinking right now. No, I’m not. I’m countering the childish reactions presented by people. Were it the other way around, with the Xbox fanbase attacking the PlayStation 4 over something, I’d be on the same rant with the brands and consoles reversed. That’s not the gaming world we live in though, so that’s not the subject that I’m having to provide commentary on.
Don’t read me wrong either regarding the outage itself – as I said before, it’s one of those things that shouldn’t have happened, but sometimes things just happen. It’s to be expected as an inevitability and again, were the same kind of issue to happen on the PS4’s end, I’d be empathetic to Sony for the issue, as it would be for probably the same reason – a very special issue would have to happen.
That all being said, if you care so much about gaming, how about focusing on playing games, rather than attacking each other over the console choice some have made?
I have so much more I wish to say, but I’ll leave things where they stand here. More to come, as always.
