All posts tagged xbl

Xbox DEAD

By | 31 January 2011 | Video Games | 6 Comments

Apparently Microsoft’s XBL division is built upon the backs of gamers. I think that the last time that I renewed my account I must have used a credit card (defying all reason), which put me at Microsoft’s tender mercy. At some point XBL changed the terms of service making you opt in to auto renewal automatically upon give them a credit cart. Also, they removed the ability to disable this “feature” from the console, or web browser. The only way to disable auto renewal is to call XBL support can cancel it. I could have sworn that I did place the call, but I am sure I must have fallen for some other trap that automatically flipped the renewal flag on for my account, they make it pretty difficult to identify when it will happen.

My problem relates to auto renewal. Recently my XBL account expired, and I got the notice about the account expiring. So, I went down to Best Buy can cash in a couple of reward zone certificates to get a renewal card. I then went to xbox.com to redeem my card. Low and behold it wouldn’t let me. It kept forcing me to the billing information page to change my credit card information. With a message stating that the card would be charged $59.95 immediately upon being updated. I said screw that.

After speaking to one of the XBL reps the details of the scam were unfolded. Apparently, since auto renewal was turn on, they did not immediately shut off my account, instead they kept slamming the expired card while leaving the account active for a about a week. As a result, my account is now suspended pending paying an extortion fee to XBL. Since they allowed me to use the service for a week that basically constituted some kind of agreement to pay for the next year at their fully marked up price. Lame.

They will not even let me redeem the points that are already on my account, I’m pretty pissed. At this point I have two choices, I can either pay the extortion fee, or I close my account and start from scratch with a brand new account (losing the $20+ worth of point on my account).

XBL–

UPDATE: Well, I paid Microshaft’s blood ransom. And, my account status have changed to “active.” Now I just need to remember to disable the auto renewal before they obliterate me at some point in the future.

Good Bye Halo 2

By | 14 April 2010 | General | 1 Comment
IMG_2210

vanlandw and I play our final rounds of Halo 2 together

Today, I played my final few rounds of Halo 2 online. I seriously cannot believe they are canning XBL support for all Xbox games. It looks like Bungie knew some people would be coming back for a last round so they flooded the “Did You Know?” tips with amusing little snippets.

On the flip side, I honestly don’t think that I’ll miss it. We played several matches, only won two. And, I played just abysmally. I sealed the night by receiving an ass kicking in Big Team Battle. Yup, that pretty much sums up my entire Halo 2 experience.

Check out the miserable abomination that was my Halo 2 career

Best Laid Plans

By | 26 January 2010 | Rant, Video Games | 5 Comments

With vanberge‘s recent gamer score whoring run I had an idea. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get a quality gamer score? One that automatically weights games based on how good they are?

Well, I knew of a web service you could use to make your own gamer card. So, I thought that I could use it pull in achievement information, and then weight the games by their aggregate scores on metacritic (I was also going to have games older than four years automatically drop off).

The first hurdle was trying to find an api for metacritic. Let me save you some time, there isn’t one. What I ended up doing was writing a quick screen scraper that I could use to extract the information, and then cache in my database. It was a pain in the ass, but it worked.

The next phase was pulling in the achievement information. This is where the wheels fell off the truck. I had not tried to pull achievement information form this before and, I was horrified to discover that it only pulls “Recent” game achievements. Or, roughly the last twenty or so game you played. So, for me, it was missing over 13,000 of my total gamer score. That’s no good.

Upon doing more research into the matter, there is no public way to retrieve this information. Basically, what you would have to do is log into people’s accounts on xbox.com, and then download all the html files with achievement information, and parse them. Fuck that.

I declare this project officially dead for the time being.