Re: Xbox Live accounts - email expiry blunder (people with e.g. Hotmail-addresses: read)
That would seriously piss me off if it happened to me. I believe that there is a way for you to change the e-mail associated with your Gamertag (using the Account Management feature) but, of course, that doesn't address the problem of e-mails (such as hotmail) that expire before a gamer realizes that this has happened to him/her.
In my mind, achievement points are one of the main things that distinguishes between XBox360 and PS3 games (especially for those titles that are multi-platform). Yes, I know all about PS3 "trophies" but the implementation of that feature pales in comparison to achievement points to me. I can honestly say that if a title that I want is available on both consoles the XBox360 always gets the nod for me. Take away the "achievement points" aspect and the playing field levels considerably.
I hope that Microsoft is able to correct this e-mail issue or at least get the word out to gamers via the Xbox Live interface that a "stable" e-mail account should be used or else... yada, yada, yada. That way, those with such e-mail accounts should be able to set up one of the many free e-mail accounts such as g-mail that probably will not disappear without notice. But I'm not too confident that Microsoft will do this. In my experience they don't seem to respond to concerns involving user achievements or even the high scores in leaderboards (unless it directly threatens Microsoft or their network). I had an issue several years ago involving a very high leaderboard score in Bejeweled 2 that I had accumulated (over 500 hours of working on it and in the top ten worldwide on the leaderboard.). When a power brownout wiped out my Bejeweled 2 score on my console (resetting it to 0) I discovered that I would have to replay the game all over to reach the lofty score I had on the leaderboard. The leaderboard score was still on the Microsoft server, but it would go no higher until I reached that point again. All I can do is to watch helplessly as my "top ten" score sinks lower and lower in the rankings as others pass me by. I tried contacting several people at Microsoft Gaming regarding synchronizing the leaderboard score with the console score for a valid Gamertag but I never even got the courtesy of an acknowledgement of my questions. Even a response such as, "we are not set up to download leaderboard scores to your console because..." would have been better than nothing at all.
The XBox360 is a great system with some very cool ancillary features. Unfortunately, dealing with loyal customers isn't one of them.
