They only thing it would take to curb this behavior is to have Microsoft pay people to play online in random matches. When they find someone that is abusing the service with inappropriate racial comments they record the individual for their records and then ban him. When you ban him for the first offensive it would be for a week, when he is caught again it would be for a month and after that a permanent ban. Word would get out quickly amongst other players of people getting banned for inappropriate behavior and it would greatly curtail this behavior.

It is a shame to have kids that shouldn’t be playing mature games in the first place have to be subjected to this sort of language. They hear these statements and think it is funny or cool and start repeating it themselves.

I personally have had someone send me a picture through Xbox Live of himself in a KKK outfit. It took me about an hours worth of complaining through several supervisors to get them to do anything about it. They eventually banned the user after they took the time to look at the image that was sent to me.

Come on Microsoft step up to the plate and start policing your service. The one thing and the only thing I like about the PS3 is that you don’t here as much racial slurs as you do on the 360? I could never figure that one out. Anyone have any thoughts on that?

I detest the ‘Party Chatting’ system in Xbox Live with a fervor! I could never understand why we really need party chat to begin with, life was fine before it. I guess I could see it if it were being used for watching the same movie via Netflix streaming with your friends. What it has turned out  to be though, is the best way for you and your friends to cheat. Why do I say this is primarily used for cheating? Let me give you an example: You and your friends are playing ‘Call of Duty: World At War’ you have dead silence and camouflage on, you sneak up and knife somebody on the opposing team. All of a sudden 10 seconds later a grenade comes bouncing in at your feet, it goes off and your dead.  Now you didn’t give away your position nor did your opponent notify his teammates where he was before he died. What happened was that the entire opposing team is in party chat and the guy you just killed told his teammates exactly where you are from his grave. Now how fair is that and there is no way to prevent that from happening.

Now here is another example of why this sucks so much, your team has eliminated everyone on the other team except one or two players. Again you are using camouflage and dead silence, so you can’t be seen on radar nor heard. You find one of your opponents and you sneak up on him then all of a sudden he does a 180 and starts firing before the turn is even finished and your laying dead on the floor. How did he know you were behind him? Because one of his dead teammates is watching his back in essence giving him eyes in the back of his head. This is so rampant that players now jump into the lobby of a game and ask if anyone is in private chat. If no one answers guess what you back out.

Here is another annoying scenario, you and a couple of buddies jump on to play together but you don’t have enough to form a full squad. No problem you get teamed up with another couple of players randomly here is where it really sucks. They are in private chat with themselves. So you can’t talk to them, warn them or discuss any strategy. They are in their own little world and could care less about anything except themselves.

Why can’t Microsoft just disable ‘Party Chat’ for any online matchmaking games i.e. Call of Duty, Halo or any other FPS? These games have built in systems for team communications and nothing else is needed. So why do they let this run rampant? All it does is ruin the experience for those that would like to play and have a good time with their friends. Come on Microsoft get with the program you can’t be that dense or can you?

*Photo by: Matt Brett

UPDATE: My mistake the reaming is even worse. The bundle does not contain a game at all these are the items in the bundle:

Official Street Fighter™ IV Xbox 360 Tournament Edition FightStick™
Official Street Fighter™ IV Faceplate and Console Skinz
Official Street Fighter™ IV Vinyl Wall Scroll
Xbox 360 Controller Extension Cable

I wish they would just cave in already and put together an online experience comparable to Xbox 360 and charge for it if they have to. Then they would have a very well rounded gaming system, until then they will always be plaing second fiddle to the 360.

That’s just my opinion I could be wrong, not!

The problem that I encountered is that two weeks ago I hit rank 5, however my percentage has remained at 0% towards the next level. No matter how many straight wins I get it doesn’t move past 0%. I posted my problem on Ubi’s forums, the maker of the game. I have not received a reply how to get around this problem. I did however get replies from individuals telling me they had the same problem. So I thought this might be more than a glitch I was having. I went to the Xbox Community Forums hosted by Microsoft and found there were more individuals having the same problem. I can only imagine there are a lot more people having the problem but not taking the time to post about it.

To compound the problem are those scared about losing their rank. The latest trend on the ranked matches is to kick anybody off the server that is a lower rank than what the host is. You will see this posted all over the Xbox forums, people ranked 1s are quite upset at being booted off most of the ranked matches they join. I mean everybody starts off as a 1 and in order to rank up you have to play and win. They however are not being given the chance to even play most of the time, so how can they rank up? Microsoft has double edge sword here, do you remove the host’s ability to kick an individual? If they do, then the host doesn’t have the ability to remove someone that is a distribution to the game play of the other players in the match. I leave it to them to figure that one out. This however affects me now as I am being kicked out of matches because players are beyond level 5.

So I decided to take matter into my own hands and make some calls. The first call was to Ubi Software the maker of the game. The person I got there was very nice and informed me there was nothing they could do to help since I was playing on Microsoft’s Live servers not Ubi’s. So I called over to Microsoft Live support. My first call resulted in me being disconnected when asking for a supervisor, because the individual had no clue of what I was speaking of. My second call I made was answered by a very nice lady that really tried to help me but tried to blame everything but the kitchen sink on my problems.

The first thing she asked me was how I was connected to the Internet. I told her I had a 30mbit cable connection. She asked me if I was directly connected to the Internet or was I using a router. I told her I was behind a firewall but the appropriate ports were being forwarded to the Xbox 360. She said she never heard of my make of firewall and that Microsoft has a list of approved routers. I then informed her that I have an enterprise class firewall and that no $50 Microsoft approved router was going to replace it. I told her that according to the Xbox 360 network diagnostic that NAT was showing as open. In other words my Xbox 360 thinks it is directly connected to the Internet. This is because I have ports 3074 udp/tcp, 2074 udp/tcp and port 88 udp on the firewall being forwarded to the 360. She again wanted to go back to her list of routers, which I had to interrupt her and ask that she move on, the network connection is not the problem since I have being playing online since the 360 was released problem free.

She then moved on to the cache in the system which she had me clear. That did nothing so she moved on to asking me to delete my profile from the console. I told her that would do nothing for me but humored her and deleted my profile. She then had me recover my gamertag on the console which did nothing to fix the problem. I informed her that the rank sits on their servers and I can only see my rank from the leaderboards once I have connected to Xbox Live. She still thought that there might be a problem with my console so she had me create a new profile. While I was doing this she put me on hold. As I was completing the registration of the new profile, she came back and told me she spoke to her supervisor and there is a problem going on that they are trying to determine the origin of. She politely gave me a reference number and asked that I call back once I played a couple of games under the new profile.

I logged in with the new profile and after being kicked from about 10 matches because I was a rank of 1, I found one that I could play on. I played 3 matches and won them all. I went back to the leaderboard and it showed that I was at 65% of my next level. Everything was working as it should, it was not my console or my connection.

I once again called back to Microsoft this time I gave them the reference number and they connected me to the appropriate support person. Upon picking my call the young lady immediately told me there was nothing they could do about my rank being reset. I informed her that was not the reason I called. I went through my story again, this time with the added information with the new profile. Again she said there is nothing she could do. I politely asked for her supervisor, which responded “he will tell you the same thing”. I said that is fine but I would still like to speak to him.

The supervisor came on and listened to my story and said there is nothing he could do. I asked if this could be escalated to a higher level since I was not the only person experiencing this and pointed him to look at their own forums as evidence of this. He told me he was as high as he gets and this was a developer problem. In other words this was Ubi’s problem. I informed him of how this could be Ubi’s problem since I am playing on Microsoft’s servers and it was Microsoft’s server holding the ranking system. I then went on to telling him I basically have a $60 game I can no longer enjoy playing online because I will be kicked from virtually every game as players rank into the teens and higher. Again the answer was I can’t help you.

I then decided to bite the bullet and start from scratch and rebuild my rank for the ground floor. I then asked him how could I reset my rank back to 1? His reply was “I don’t know how to do that”. I asked if he could ask someone that did. He was really steadfast in not trying to help and responded that this was a new game and no one knew anything about the game itself. I then asked that the information I added about playing with my profile be added to my reference number in some futile hope someone might still look at it. I thanked the gentleman for being so helpful and understating about my predicament (Sarcasm).

I called back to Ubi, I don’t know why I just did. I Spoke to a lovely lady there and told her of what I just went through. She apologized for me having to go through it. I asked if there was some way of someone there speaking to Microsoft about the matter. She told me that there was nothing they could do concerning Microsoft’s own servers. She laughed and told me “They didn’t even inform us when they went ahead and reset everyone’s rankings back to 1, two weeks prior”. She did acknowledge that they have been fielding similar calls concerning the ranks being stuck at 0% from others.

I guess Microsoft’s stand on this matter is that we already have your money for the Live service and you have no choice other than using us for playing online so why should we care that your having a problem let alone fix it for you.

I hope enough people read this that it becomes a thorn in Microsoft’s side so that they get off their $^&es and do something to fix it.

Below are some links to similar problems being posted on Microsoft’s forums:

http://forums.xbox.com/10994474/ShowPost.aspx
http://forums.xbox.com/11289104/ShowPost.aspx
http://forums.xbox.com/10883847/ShowPost.aspx
http://forums.xbox.com/11359004/ShowPost.aspx
http://forums.xbox.com/10902794/ShowPost.aspx
http://forums.xbox.com/10942811/ShowPost.aspx

BTW.. I forget to mention, the reason the supervisor said he couldn’t help me is that there is no such problem. During their daily briefing this has never been mentioned. I guess they don’t read their own forums then. Ooops!

A couple of days ago Kotaku broke a story regarding a rumor about Sony’s soon to be announced ‘Home’ service. The story soon had them him hot water with Sony, who eventuality blackballed the site. Sony reversed its stance shortly after the quite public and loud outcry for its strong arming of a news outlet.
At today’s Game Developer Conference, Sony announced the ‘Home’ service. Below is the demo video of the service as well as a link to the Joystiq article describing the service and it’s availability.

Joystiq: PlayStation Home, the free virtual world of PlayStation 3

If Sony can pull this off properly, Microsoft will have a lot to worry about. However if Sony goes off into a tangent to build another Second Life environment for chatting rather than to bring players together, they will be doomed.

That’s just my opinion.

My next pet peeve is the lack of a headphone in the box. You have to buy either a USB headphone or a Bluetooth headset in order to talk to anyone online. When I received my Xbox 360 it came with a headphone so it was easy to talk to teammates or trash the opponent you just headshoted. I happened to have an old Motorola Bluetooth headset that I had purchased for a cell phone years back. I was able to pair that with my PS3 but I haven’t played any games yet where anyone else had a microphone set up yet.

Now on to the PS3 controller, it feels light and cheap and all the buttons and tumbsticks feel cramped. There are no external replaceable batteries for the unit. So there goes the idea of rechargeable batteries outside the unit as the 360 has. You have to charge it with a USB cable which you can also use to play tethered to the unit. However the cable is too short to use it for the latter function. The controllers uses Bluetooth to communicate with the PS3 and that’s where the functionality truly ends. I have had the controller loose complete contact with the PS3 once and spazz out on several occasions. When it decides to spazz out it will do what it feels like for several seconds at a time (continuely running straight or spinning while looking a the sky). It is too that point where I had to purchase a long USB cable just to play games so I wouldn’t feel like tossing the controller across the room when it misbehaved. This is not an isolated incident either, my brother is having similar problems with his unit.

The launch titles are basically pathetic. There are not many titles released that cannot be played on the 360. For the unique titles that were released at launch there was only one game that in my opinion was worth getting and that was Resistance: Fall of Man. Even that is not that unique, it is your typical first person shooter. The one thing I will give it is its length of single player campaign mode, it is very very very long.

Then there is the issue with the HD up scaling or lack thereof. You can read more about that here: IGN: PS3 Downscales 720p on Incapable TVs All in all Sony didn’t make very good use of the time it had to develop something to compete with Microsoft. I am pretty sure Microsoft is feeling pretty comfortable right about now after seeing what Sony presented to the gaming community. You know your product sucks when it gets bashed by the New York Times! I think my brother puts it in perspective the best “It’s a Blu-Ray player that happens to play games”.

**Update: I was informed by my brother “Venice Dre” (Live Tag) that I mis-qouted him. His actual qoute was “It’s a Blu-Ray player that also plays games that I can’t play on the Xbox 360″

Enjoy:

Best Buy Line: http://kotaku.com/gaming/ps3/ps3-campers-already-in-line-at-best-buy-213422.php

PS3 Manual: http://manuals.playstation.net/document/en/ps3/current/index.html