Goodnight, sweet prince: OXbox Live shuts down 4/15. Friends limit still gonna be 100

FyreWulff

http://majornelson.com/archive/2010/02/05/xbox-live-being-discontinued-for-original-xbox-consoles-and-games.aspx

I wanted to let you know that on April 15, 2010 Microsoft will discontinue Xbox LIVE service for original Xbox consoles and games, including Xbox 1 games playable on Xbox 360. Our first step in this process will be to turn off auto-renewals for those members who only use Xbox LIVE on a v1 Xbox. While I can’t comment on the specifics, this change will allow us to continue evolving the LIVE service with new features and experiences that fully harness the power of Xbox 360 and the Xbox LIVE community. We did not make this decision lightly, but after careful consideration and review we realize that this decision will allow us unprecedented flexibility for future features.

Sterica

I find it weird that they will shut down even the 360 compatible games. Maybe some new features will allow that.

FyreWulff

I think the number of people on OXbox Live just dropped so low that they were going to start losing money supporting them.

This is probably more just officially ending support for the original Xbox than specifically aiming to shut down OXbox Live games.

Gdiguy

I thought oXbox live was the thing keeping them from increasing friends list size / etc etc etc?

mantis23

Gdiguy wrote: »

I thought oXbox live was the thing keeping them from increasing friends list size / etc etc etc?

They have always said this was the case. I would expect this to lead to a friends list increase in a future update.

FyreWulff

Gdiguy wrote: »

I thought oXbox live was the thing keeping them from increasing friends list size / etc etc etc?

Nope. Nelson stated before that the reason FL size limits were not increasing was because the average friends list size is 20. Halo 2 also supports more than 100 friends.

So you're more than likely still going to have 100 friends for the foreseeable future.

FyreWulff

Also note that all of these games that have at least LAN mode can still be played over XBC. Including Halo 2, and Chaos Theory, and Phantom Dust.

The issue is that none of these games will probably be able to patch anymore, and also Live only content like Halo 2's Tombstone and Desolation will just disappear.

UnbreakableVow

I think the sadder scenario is that this means no more Xbox Originals

FyreWulff

I guess it kind of answers why Halo 2 never came out for it.

Unless they're cooking up a version with the Live stuff removed from the main menu.

mxmarks

Without the ability to group my friends list into games/catagories, I have no idea how anyone would ever want more than 100 people on the list.

Bullio

UnbreakableVow wrote: »

I think the sadder scenario is that this means no more Xbox Originals

The downloadable versions of oXbox games from XBL? That was stopped a while ago. What's up now is all we're getting.

Turkey

mxmarks wrote: »

Without the ability to group my friends list into games/catagories, I have no idea how anyone would ever want more than 100 people on the list.

Another thing they could hopefully add.

Willeth

FyreWulff wrote: »

Gdiguy wrote: »

I thought oXbox live was the thing keeping them from increasing friends list size / etc etc etc?

Nope. Nelson stated before that the reason FL size limits were not increasing was because the average friends list size is 20. Halo 2 also supports more than 100 friends.

So you're more than likely still going to have 100 friends for the foreseeable future.

Do you have that quote from Bungie for this to hand? I can't remember where I saw it.

h8b1llg8ts

I'm surprised this thread isn't 100 pages long by now. I thought more people would be raising a stink about this.

FyreWulff

Most everyone has actually moved on, though.


Also for those that think this means clan support, this Bungie employee post seems to indicate that MS has no plans to ever implement clans system-wide on the 360:

http://www.bungie.net/Forums/posts.aspx?postID=40455291

Jokes aside, the clan tools were hardly used in Halo 2, and the clan playlists used even less than that. In order to even get clans to work, we had to work with Microsoft who released an update for Xbox Live to even support clans, and it turned out not to be worth it (as again, the vast majority of Halo 2 players did not take advantage of the system). A lesson was learned.

Also ultimately, all the popular titles had LAN mode, which means you'll still be able to play other people over the internet with XBC.

Looking at the last Top 10:

1 Halo 2 - play via XBC with LAN mode
2 Star Wars: Battlfrnt 2 - LAN?
3 Counter-Strike - XBC LAN,
4 Splinter Cell Chaos - XBC LAN
5 Fable - XBL was just signing in so you could see friends list, not really a loss
6 Conker: Live Reloaded - also believe this had LAN
7 Star Wars: Battlefront - LAN?
8 Doom 3 - XBC LAN
9 SW: KOTOR - Live sign in for friends list and content download, nothing else
10 SW: Republic Commando - I assume this is just live sign-in.

aBlank

h8b1llg8ts wrote: »

I'm surprised this thread isn't 100 pages long by now. I thought more people would be raising a stink about this.

I'd imagine it doesn't effect most people so, for once, they aren't making a shit storm about it :P

h8b1llg8ts

aBlank wrote: »

h8b1llg8ts wrote: »

I'm surprised this thread isn't 100 pages long by now. I thought more people would be raising a stink about this.

I'd imagine it doesn't effect most people so, for once, they aren't making a shit storm about it :P

That is really disheartening. I find about half of my Xbox Live time is spent on the oXbox. It can't be that hard to just keep peer to peer going is it? People are still playing Dreamcast games online for crying out loud ...

http://dreamcast.onlineconsoles.com/phpBB2/portal.php

FyreWulff

I have a feeling the true reason is that OXbox Live is the last cord they have to cut to completely stop supporting the OXbox. I imagine at some point they're actually losing money to continue to train people for support (for when you call 1-800-4MYXBOX). There's also the fact that you can't just sign up for OXbox accounts, you always had to put in a time code first. I imagine they've stopped printing OXbox compatible time codes for ages.

And for all we know, out of the 3,000 people still playing Halo 2, maybe only 100 of them are actually on OXboxes.

h8b1llg8ts

I know there aren't actual numbers out there showing how many people play oXbox game on Live but I can imagine it's in the 1,000's if not the 10,000's. Why shutdown something that seems so easy to just keep in place?

Question for tech guys. How hard would it be to set up a server to run peer to peer games. Does it draw a lot of bandwith? Would it need to be a large server?? What???

FyreWulff

There's numbers for Halo 2 on Bungie.net. (players online as of this post: 79)

And you can even tell it's getting even lower because the ratio of players:games is getting closer to 1:1, which means people are signing on but only playing one or two games and then signing off.

Halo 2 has been the #1 OXbox Live game since it came out.

So any other game on there is going to have much less people than Halo 2.

I don't think it's bandwidth, I think it's administrative costs.

anoffday

Crap. I never got the Splinter Cell 1 DLC. Now would probably be the time, huh?

Also, we should go out with a bang. Someone put together some custom Halo 2 matches or something. What a waste. Tombstone is a remake of my favorite map in any FPS and it was released when Halo 2 was already dying, and now it'll be lost forever.

h8b1llg8ts

FyreWulff wrote: »

Most everyone has actually moved on, though.


Also for those that think this means clan support, this Bungie employee post seems to indicate that MS has no plans to ever implement clans system-wide on the 360:

http://www.bungie.net/Forums/posts.aspx?postID=40455291

Jokes aside, the clan tools were hardly used in Halo 2, and the clan playlists used even less than that. In order to even get clans to work, we had to work with Microsoft who released an update for Xbox Live to even support clans, and it turned out not to be worth it (as again, the vast majority of Halo 2 players did not take advantage of the system). A lesson was learned.

Also ultimately, all the popular titles had LAN mode, which means you'll still be able to play other people over the internet with XBC.

Looking at the last Top 10:

1 Halo 2 - play via XBC with LAN mode
2 Star Wars: Battlfrnt 2 - LAN?
3 Counter-Strike - XBC LAN,
4 Splinter Cell Chaos - XBC LAN
5 Fable - XBL was just signing in so you could see friends list, not really a loss
6 Conker: Live Reloaded - also believe this had LAN
7 Star Wars: Battlefront - LAN?
8 Doom 3 - XBC LAN
9 SW: KOTOR - Live sign in for friends list and content download, nothing else
10 SW: Republic Commando - I assume this is just live sign-in.

Is there a list of LAN enabled oXbox games. I would like to compare them to what I have and may miss ...

mxmarks

anoffday wrote: »

Crap. I never got the Splinter Cell 1 DLC. Now would probably be the time, huh?

Also, we should go out with a bang. Someone put together some custom Halo 2 matches or something. What a waste. Tombstone is a remake of my favorite map in any FPS and it was released when Halo 2 was already dying, and now it'll be lost forever.

Thats my only problem with this - the DLC. I paid for the stuff, and I still want to be able to get it since my oXBox has died a couple times now, and I'm sure the one I currently have will die sometime too.

Can oXBox LAN to XBox 360? I could go in and re-download everything to the 360 and then just keep transferring the files to HD's over the years.

Time to go re-download that extra Brute Force stuff, as my buddies and I still play Brute Force now and again...

FyreWulff

Yes, Oxboxes and 360s can LAN with each other.

FyreWulff

So, the first ever confirmation by a MS employee that OXbox Live contributed to the 100 friends limit (but not Halo 2)

Guess what though? Still ain't gonna be raised.

http://carnage.bungie.org/haloforum/halo.forum.pl?read=965720

It is true, and it's a technical limitation that made a difficult decision easy. The problem that still exists is the decision to dedicate assets to produce a change that benefits an extremely small percentage of XBL users who actually get anywhere near 100 friends.

Raiden333

Calling it right fucking now. Within the year, you will be able to have more than a hundred friends... For the very small fee of 800 microsoft points, of course.

FyreWulff

Of course it'll turn out that some big 360 game crashes if you have a FL size over 100 and then whoops

h8b1llg8ts

I hate to beat a dead horse but with almost 20,000,000 Xbox live gold members paying about $50 a year they can't afford keeping the servers going?

Raiden333

h8b1llg8ts wrote: »

I hate to beat a dead horse but with almost 20,000,000 Xbox live gold members paying about $50 a year they can't afford keeping the servers going?

Our membership fees help to fund and keep running all the exclusive features we hahahahahaha I can't even finish that sentence.

TelMarine

I knew this day would come, although I must admit, they supported the original xbox live a lot longer then I thought (I thought it'd be EA style, force you to buy the new ones after a year or two). You have that tunneling program to keep playing sure (which is gonna suck lag wise i bet), but this is the reason why, in my opinion, anything that depends on companies providing the servers for you sucks, which is why there was uproar about dedicated servers (although seems like a lot people were full of shit since they supported the product they vowed to boycott) on modern warfare2 and subsequent games that don't use them. From my knowledge, the console space has never used them in the way it does on the PC space, but they are quite important. Companies will never go for it though (and on the PC space are going away from them) because you playing old games doesn't make them money. It is really incredible how some games still have some players here and there, take for example SHOGO: Mobile Armor Division. There are a few people that still play it online, quite amazing. People DO come back to old games and with services disappearing they won't be able to.

FyreWulff

It wouldn't have mattered if these games had used dedicated servers if the master server was going down.

cloudeagle

h8b1llg8ts wrote: »

I hate to beat a dead horse but with almost 20,000,000 Xbox live gold members paying about $50 a year they can't afford keeping the servers going?

A money-loser is still a money-loser, especially with a public company that has to keep its shareholders happy. If there's a choice between losing a fair chunk of money on a service a few thousand people (tops) will ever find useful going forward and throwing it into the money bin, the bin will win every time.

Which is a bit ironic since the stated plan of the oXbox was to lose money yet establish a foothold into the console market, but here we are.

Willeth

I wonder if the 'a small percentage of Xbox Live users get anywhere near 100' is based on actual data or is extrapolated from the 'average Live users have 20 friends' stat. Because for starters, if they're including Silver users in that it's a meaningless statistic, and secondly, the fact that people do hit a hundred means that the average isn't accurate. I'm at the point now where I'm deleting people I regularly play with so that I can fit other people on. The criteria I base that on is if I can access their tag through another friend's list - I think I could easily hit 150 people who I regularly play with in various games.

Silver users skew the average one way, and power users skew it the other. I'm sure that we can trust MS to do proper research into their numbers, but whether or not they've been presented to us properly is another matter.

fragglefart

Well, here's to more features on the 360 with a bit of luck.

(I never owned the Oxbox)

Raiden333

I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if they're counting the "X% of 360s are never even connected to Live" as 0 friends for the sake of keeping the average low.

Squirrel Rancher

The problem with their numbers is that it doesn't account for metatags.

meatflower

Willeth wrote: »

I wonder if the 'a small percentage of Xbox Live users get anywhere near 100' is based on actual data or is extrapolated from the 'average Live users have 20 friends' stat. Because for starters, if they're including Silver users in that it's a meaningless statistic, and secondly, the fact that people do hit a hundred means that the average isn't accurate. I'm at the point now where I'm deleting people I regularly play with so that I can fit other people on. The criteria I base that on is if I can access their tag through another friend's list - I think I could easily hit 150 people who I regularly play with in various games.

Silver users skew the average one way, and power users skew it the other. I'm sure that we can trust MS to do proper research into their numbers, but whether or not they've been presented to us properly is another matter.

I'm sorry but do you understand stati...not even statistics, numbers? If 10,000 people out of 1,000,000 go over 100 on their friends list, that does not mean the average "is wrong". It means they're outliers, and everyone else has 20-40 friends.

You sir, are an outlier. Too 'effing bad. Don't blame the math though.

Raiden333

meatflower wrote: »

Willeth wrote: »

I wonder if the 'a small percentage of Xbox Live users get anywhere near 100' is based on actual data or is extrapolated from the 'average Live users have 20 friends' stat. Because for starters, if they're including Silver users in that it's a meaningless statistic, and secondly, the fact that people do hit a hundred means that the average isn't accurate. I'm at the point now where I'm deleting people I regularly play with so that I can fit other people on. The criteria I base that on is if I can access their tag through another friend's list - I think I could easily hit 150 people who I regularly play with in various games.

Silver users skew the average one way, and power users skew it the other. I'm sure that we can trust MS to do proper research into their numbers, but whether or not they've been presented to us properly is another matter.

I'm sorry but do you understand stati...not even statistics, numbers? If 10,000 people out of 1,000,000 go over 100 on their friends list, that does not mean the average "is wrong". It means they're outliers, and everyone else has 20-40 friends.

You sir, are an outlier. Too 'effing bad. Don't blame the math though.

I think he meant that it's impossible to determine the true average number of friends, since the people who WOULD have over a hundred cannot.

Deadfall

Even though it's just about impossible to find even one game outside of the weekend, I will miss signing in to play Crimson Skies online.

troublebrewing

Regarding the friends list, some dude at G4 thinks differently.

"Phew," sighed Xbox group product manager Aaron Greenberg. "God, I've been answering this question for so long. It's something that the team's looking at. It's more complicated than you would think. I know you have actually covered yourself in some detail and I think it is something that we're hoping to address. Exactly when that happens I can't say because there's some technical requirements tied to it. But I can tell you that, just like consumers, I share the same frustration and I, too, want more than 100 friends, and so know that we all want that and that we are working on getting that fixed."

Read more: http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/702384/TheFeed.html?utm_source=g4tv&utm_medium=twitterblog&utm_campaign=so-0907-twitterthefeed-702384&cmpid=so-0907-twitterthefeed-702384#ixzz0egrlcOZT

Willeth

Raiden333 wrote: »

meatflower wrote: »

Willeth wrote: »

I wonder if the 'a small percentage of Xbox Live users get anywhere near 100' is based on actual data or is extrapolated from the 'average Live users have 20 friends' stat. Because for starters, if they're including Silver users in that it's a meaningless statistic, and secondly, the fact that people do hit a hundred means that the average isn't accurate. I'm at the point now where I'm deleting people I regularly play with so that I can fit other people on. The criteria I base that on is if I can access their tag through another friend's list - I think I could easily hit 150 people who I regularly play with in various games.

Silver users skew the average one way, and power users skew it the other. I'm sure that we can trust MS to do proper research into their numbers, but whether or not they've been presented to us properly is another matter.

I'm sorry but do you understand stati...not even statistics, numbers? If 10,000 people out of 1,000,000 go over 100 on their friends list, that does not mean the average "is wrong". It means they're outliers, and everyone else has 20-40 friends.

You sir, are an outlier. Too 'effing bad. Don't blame the math though.

I think he meant that it's impossible to determine the true average number of friends, since the people who WOULD have over a hundred cannot.

I'm aware I'm an outlier. I'm also aware that the vast majority of Xbox Live users are Silver users who have very little reason for a friends list when compared to Gold, and is the main thing dragging the average down (which is my main point, not that because I could have more friends I should).

The amount of people on a Silver user's friends list is almost entirely irrelevant when discussing the issue, because the primary purpose of such a list is to allow people to play matches online with each other. If they include Silver users when calculating an average for how many people that list should accommodate, the results are going to be skewed downwards.