Real Talk By: Ms Throwback

It’s been almost a week and a half since Xbox One’s release and we have a few things to talk about.  How are the games? Is the interface legit? What exactly is Ms. Throwback’s professional opinion on the matter and when is she bringing the real news? I’d love to answer all of these questions and more, I’d love to be reviewing titles for you, but I can’t, because Microsoft has once again let me down as a customer by selling me a defective system.

Now you may have seen the news articles stating that Microsoft has already admitted they are having an outstanding issue with some of the disk drives in the Xbox One.  Because of this If you tell Microsoft customer support about the problem and go through the Xbox One exchange plan, they’ll send you the digital code for a game of your choice: Dead Rising 3, Forza Motorsport 5, Ryse, or Zoo Tycoon.  (Which I already bought of course.) Since it’s digital, you should be able to play your new game while you wait for a replacement.  Microsoft has stated this has affected a “small number of Xbox One’s” I find that extremely hard to believe.  If this is the case for you great! Go for it, I did, but realize that this is no small issue.  This week brings you an article about Xbox One’s downfalls instead of a review because my personal Xbox One broke.  Yes dear friends I am no more than a week in and already on my second Xbox One console.  Let me bring you the truth.

About a half an hour into the setup of my Xbox One my system began to act glitchy.  I would be pushing buttons on my controller but the screen would be frozen and all the button inputs would catch up all at once on the screen leading me into some portion of the interface I wasn’t even trying to reach.  After about 20 minutes of fiddling with it by pushing a button, waiting 2 minutes for it to catch up, pushing a button, and so on, I figured I would call Microsoft customer support to see if there was something I could do about the situation.

I contacted customer support online as the wait time to contact them online was an estimated half hour as apposed to the 45 minute wait to call, which in of itself is ridiculous.  After approximately 40 minutes a customer support representative starts chatting with me.  After taking me through the usual, “are the cords hooked up properly” shpeal, and restarting the console four times I get frustrated and say, “okay is there just some kind of hard restart.  I know it’s not the cords of the system.  I’ve been doing this for over a decade something is wrong with the software or something.  How do I hard restart?” At this point my console now only freezes on the Xbox One introduction logo or goes to black right after showing it.  After 10 minutes of waiting for the rep to tell me how to hard restart (she obviously had no idea.) I hold the main button on the console down until it turns off and back on, the standard these days for a hard restart.  It successfully hard restarts but still doesn’t fix the problem.  Then I get a phone call from a friend that their Kinect has just stopped working.

At this point I am completely ticked off thinking about all I have been through with Microsoft when it comes to their Xbox consoles, so i let it all spill out. “I have been through five Xbox 360 consoles! That is 4 times as many Xbox’s as I have been through any other system in my entire life.  I still have the original Atari I owned.  The only other consoles that broke on me were a Playstation 2 which was replaced outside of the warranty, and a Nintendo DS which was replaced for another color they happened to release around that time and supplemented with three games on top of it (which they didn’t have to do.) because of all the merch I had registered.  Do you know what happened when my Xbox 360 broke? I had to go buy another one, because Microsoft decided to put a 90 day warranty on their original consoles, which is the worst hardware manufacture warranty I’ve ever known of.  My first one broke at the 110 day mark.  Microsoft then extended the warranty to a year, my second one broke after a year and three months, when I called again it wasn’t replaced, so I bought another one to which they extended the warranty to two years.  My third one broke within the warranty period, finally, so replaced it with another one which they sent to me already broken! I immediately sent back the fourth one to get my fifth and final one, which of course broke just before the release of the Xbox One.  Never in my life have I had such terrible quality assurance, and never have I had such horrible customer service.  What are you guys going to do for me?”

The response? “I’m sorry this has happened to you, I’ll go ahead and replace your Xbox One.  I’ve sent you a link to verify your identity.”

What happens when I click the link? It doesn’t even work! There is an internal server error so they have the billing department call me in the middle of the night to solve the problem.  The console was to arrive in 3-5 business days and it’s already been that, it hasn’t arrived.  Untimely and unprofessional service is all I’ve gotten with my Xbox One and needless to say I’m putting it out there.  I wouldn’t be complaining over just one mess up but this is ridiculous.  Microsoft’s customers demand that we get better quality assurance and customer service.  We spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars a year on consoles, hardware, software, apps, downloads and the like.  We shouldn’t expect to spend an extra 50-100 dollars on top of it to buy the extended warranty that Microsoft won’t provide.   We shouldn’t have to worry about day one launch consoles with disk drive problems, hardware/software issues, and Kinects that break.  We deserve a viable product on day one, not some half thought out piece of work thrown out into the industry.  Unacceptable, unappreciated, and despicable.  Microsoft should be ashamed to let such an amazing product have such little care and consideration.

@PlayLegit #XboxOne #Realtalk