I have been an Xbox Live subscriber on amd off for the best part of the last decade and have never really had any problems, sure my launch day Xbox 360 got the RROD problem after a while(which was resolved promptly at the time I might add)… But who didn’t and even my original Xbox is still going strong today even under that layer of dust!

Recently however I did hit some problems decided to make use of the twitter based support team and I thought I would share my experiences so that fellow gamers might gain something from it and that it may serve as some constructive criticism for the Xbox Twitter Support and Phone Support Teams.

The Problem(s)

A friend of mine on twitter had mentioned to me that I could queue downloads from The Xbox Live Marketplace using the xbox.com website. This sounded pretty cool to me as I regularly download demos to try out before buying, so being able to find and queue content from work on my lunch break was quite appealing. So I logged into the website and tried to give it a go…

“To download content from the Xbox Live Marketplace you need to be over 18 years old. “

.. This was a little worrying as I am 28 years old now!!

I figured their was a problem with the site and thought I’d just leave it a few days but even after waiting it still presented the same problem. As things were I didn’t need to be able queue content from the website so I figured I’d just leave it be, which I did… until just after Christmas.

My (future) father in law and his wife kindly gave me some GAME vouchers for Christmas, so off I trotted into town to buy myself a new game which after much mind changing (and standing in queues!) ended up being the new Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit game. Having really enjoyed the older need for speed games I was really looking forward to getting home and giving this a go and giving the online game I’d heard a lot about a go.

When i got the game up and running and tried to set up my EA account I was immediately presented with a screen telling me…

We’re sorry, but you are not old enough to access EA’s online features

WTF!

So the slightly annoying age problem stopping me from downloading stuff from the website became a problem playing any EA game online. Needless to say I was fuming and it being in the middle of the Christmas break I was not expecting to get it fixed any time soon.

I had seen in my travels that Microsoft were offering xbox support via the @XboxSupport account on twitter and decided to give them a try and see if they had any ideas on how to fix the problem. They reacted very promptly and took me through performing various checks and possible but ultimately ended unresolved and I was recommended to contact EA’s own support team for help as they felt it was not a Microsoft issue. EA’s twitter proved unresponsive so I ended up contacting them via the phone and was again went through a series of checks but still no fix after quite some time on the phone to someone in the US. Their systems it seems take the Date of Birth from the xbox live account, so if what it stored on Xbox live is incorrect you are basically stuffed.

By now I was getting pretty annoyed and after having gone back to the @XboxSupport team again they gave me the number for the UK Xbox Support Team who were thankfully open during the Xmas break. My support rep (Called Lev) was very friendly and spoke me through removing and re-downloading my Gamertag to my console and even transferring my Gamertag to a new Windows Live account again with the correct date of birth set, but alas this was also fruitless.

Lev was very understanding and apologetic and told me he was going to pass he problem up to the specialists to look into it and see if there was anything they could do. Over the next week or so I had a number of calls from Lev to update me on what they had tried and how things were progressing and that they hadn’t forgotten about me.

Eventually though the final outcome wasn’t quite what i was hoping for but pretty much what i was expecting. The date of birth tagged on my account was wrong and due to their customer policy or controls at Microsoft this cannot be changed, FULL STOP.

I can understand this from the point of view of protecting children, but in this case it was causing me real problems.

Since the Xbox 360 was released the Xbox Live login system changed so that Gamertags have to be linked to Live.com (or hotmail) account and the date of birth is pulled from the account during setup. It would appear that when i signed up for my account way back when, I didn’t get asked for my date of birth so the account just got tagged with a date of birth of 2004! (which was the year the hotmail account was created) and that despite what I had entered on the Xbox itself my account had got stuck with a wildly inaccurate date of birth.

The end result

Microsoft very kindly said that in light of the problems that I had experienced and that I had to start a new Xbox Live Gamertag that they would give me 6 months free gold subscription. Whilst this wasn’t the ideal situation it at least gives me a chance to rebuild my account, gamerscore and save games, the most painful bit was starting my Modern Warfare 2 character from scratch when i was currently at Level 51!

Result: One  Happy Customer!

Closing thoughts

The support I received from both the twitter and phone support teams at Microsoft was very good, whilst the twitter account is monitored/maintained by a number of technicians they all had access to my problems history and once my case was started on the phone support my case was looked after end to end by the same person which gave things a much more personal feel and not the faceless “don’t care” attitude you get from a lot of call centers.

However I am not so happy with the policy covering birth dates. I totally understand there is a requirement to protect children from potentially unsuitable environments, for example the trash talk which unfortunately plagues some online games now. However when there is a problem on the account which is clearly a mistake the support staff should be able to update the database to reflect the correct date. Sure take security checks, or request proof of age, but a policy that renders your account broken due to a small oversight when signing up is a bit stupid. So… Bigwigs at Xbox Live, please do something about this so others in my situation aren’t faced with this problem.

I would be interested to hear if you have had any experiences with Xbox support good or bad in the comments.

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If anyone from Microsoft/Xbox UK should read this please give your support representative “Lev Gukov” a pat on the back from a job well done, and the same goes for the twitter support team.

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