So today I got home from class early, around 2:45 because my 2 o'clock class got cancelled for like the eighth time this semester and I went to grab groceries at Walmart and came home. I decided to do what I do normally to pass my time and that's play Xbox with my friends. I'm pretty juvenile like that. So, I booted up the console, it connects to my WiFi fine the first time (a rare oddity in an of itself) and I go to boot up Social and start a party with some of my good buddies.
...and then Xbox Live craps out and says that none of my friends are online. Every single person in my minuscule 20-25 Xbox Live friends list is offline. Odd. I text one of my friends "Hey, it says you're offline" and they reply "So are you!" So we all decided to do hard-resets on our Xbox consoles and wait. Two-ish minutes later we are all back online and going to start an online party. I look on my friends list and it says they're all online and ready to join. I start a part and invite them. Once I send the invites, Social crashes and the connectivity crashes. All my friends are branded "offline" by Xbox Live and that's that.
Shit, you gotta be kidding me. This has been my one and only gripe really about having an Xbox One over a PlayStation 4. Microsoft's gaming social network is absolute garbage. I can't complain all that hard because I'm not at Microsoft HQ busting my ass to make sure all of the kiddies can play their games with their little friends, but here's the thing; It's not even the fault of the game companies responsible for the servers. It's Xbox Live in-and-of-itself. Microsoft alone is responsible for Xbox Live in my eyes. It's not even like today was just a bad day in Xbox Live history. This regularly occurs most days. I don't know what Microsoft's deal is but I find this Social functionality to be a joke. Either we get into a party and five minutes later we're all booted, or one of us is booted, or the party sends invites to the wrong people, or the party doesn't send the invites we request, or the entirety of the Social menu is down and all players are listed as offline, or the internet in one guy's house causes the entire party to crash, One time I joined, got booted and joined again, only to be booted two minutes later again. This happened at least seven times. Seven goddamn times I got booted and had to join again, each time not knowing whether or not I'd get back into the party. Here lately I've been having problems keeping myself in the party just when I'm trying to boot a game. The habit I've gotten into is starting my Xbox, starting a party or joining an existing one, and then starting and playing a game. A lot of times, in the time it takes for me to start a game on my Xbox One the party decides it doesn't like me anymore and dumps me. So then I have to wait for my game to load before I go back into Social, restart Xbox parties and join it again.
A lot of times I wonder why I bust my ass to make sure parties work during games. Xbox Live's reliability has plummeted worse than the DOW-Jones. Nowadays I don't even trust Xbox Live as far as I can throw it. Each time I start a party I always anticipate some sort of hiccup or blockage of connectivity before my play time is over. Don't even sit there and blame it on my internet. My internet may be your typical student apartment "High-speed internet", but it can get the job done. I join Madden games and GTA Online worlds with ease. The fucking Xbox Social on the other hand, can't get off its epileptic ass long enough to let me give my friends a fine "how do you do?!" much less riveting conversation.
When did Microsoft decide "We want better games, better online worlds and gameplay, some fun little do-dads with your avatar, but OH, this 'Xbox Social' function has got to go. Better yet; cut it's functionality down to bare minimum so that people think their Social experiences are getting better when really we're robbing them of their health and precious time by having them reset their Xbox for the twenty-seventh fucking time just so they can chat with their friends while they shoot their friends!" A mere fifteen years ago this kind of functionality was a pipe dream amongst Bill Gates' most promising stoner programmers. Now it's flourished into the grand motherload of overhyped, underwhelming, minimally functional, waste-of-bandwidth piece of software I've ever seen. They've gotten fucking lazy over there, I'm telling you.
Microsoft please, if you see this. If anybody from Microsoft sees this, please, take initiative for what you've done. Safe guard your creation, don't let it dwindle down to a carbon copy, video game-centered derivative of "phone tag" that it's becoming.
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