Enhanced Support Service for Xbox 360

I had to pay for shipping today to send my 360 in! 25.00+tax! When do these changes take effect? this is my second warranty return!

Kudos to MS for making the needed changes to the 360 warranty! Now if they would only charge a reasonable price for their peripherals.

I shipped my 360 in on March 22nd, it arrived on the 28th, sent back to me on the 30th and UPS said it should be delivered to my house today.  Guess I just missed out of the free shipping and five day turn around.

"While I actually don’t believe the issues are any greater than average"

But have you seen the figures?

(or how many machines have you had break)

I haven’t, but the anecdotal evidence from friends suggest they may be higher than average.

Anyway not an issue to get bogged down with as the 360 is delivering where it counts

When my 360 broke, the thing that actually took the longest was getting the box from MS.  Once I sent off the 360, it took 2 days to arrive, 2 days to ship a new console, and 2 days to receive.  You can say what you want about hardware failure rates, but any company that can have that kind of turnaround time on broken consoles is doing a pretty good job.  Kudos to MS for trying to make the return process as simple and quick as possible.

Now if they could only figure out how to make my pinatas stop disappearing in Viva Pinata…

Does MS follow any industry best practices within these organizations, like ITIL?

My 360 has been fine since I got it in June but my sons broke and he got in in July of ’06. My co-worker sent his back twice for repairs. I think there is some truth to the 360′s breaking down more than the average game system. On the other hand, my Super Nintendo still runs like a charm but I have had bad luck with the PS1 & PS2 breaking on me.

Hm…  On my two returns before, one a special "older 360" case before the warranty upgrade and the other after that, on their receiving it, there was about a 1 day turn around with 2 and (on the post warranty upgrade) 3 day shipping adding to things.

It doesn’t actually sound like any faster service than what I had (maybe even a bit slower), but other people’s experiences may vary.

Mine was well over a year old when it broke and I only got one red light.  I have two friends that bought systems last summer that are getting the occasional bad disk read error when starting up their systems.  They never changed the default config to boot to the dashboard.

As someone that has had to have his launch system replaced, I’m really happy to hear this, but hope never to need it.

As someone who is now on his 3rd 360 since launch, I can say I have never, EVER had this sort of problem with any console and I’ve had consoles since the Atari 2600 in 1979.

My 24 year old Vectrex is still trouble free, yet in 16 months I’ve had 3 360′s!

T

It’s really strange – there are definitely folks who have had hardware issues (some of you have already commented), but there are tons of people who haven’t. Nothing I’ve seen internally or externally leads me to believe that the rates are anything higher than average… but I recognize that’s of absolutely no comfort to people who have had issues (especially multiple times).

What’s really both odd is that I don’t know anyone personally who has had a problem – either at MS, or friends of mine. Not saying it hasn’t happened, but that’s a pretty big audience of people with no issue. My very, very early retail console (employee special) was humming along with no problems until a few months ago (when I swapped it for early Elite testing).

Part of the problem is that the 360 really is flakier than most hardware (half of the people I know who own one have had it break on them), but a big part is that MS-sent refurbs are HORRIBLY flaky.  Once your first 360 breaks, you’re on a cycle of breakage.  

The first one I got back from service started flaking out inside a month; the second I got back started scratching discs inside a few weeks ("The 360 doesn’t scratch discs," the person on the phone helpfully explained to me; well, the others didn’t, but THIS one does).  The third one looked like it was new instead of a refurb, and it’s still working months later, so I’m hopeful I’m back on the normal failure rate train, but I sort of secretly suspect it’s just biding its time until I relax.  

launch console … get it home , its broke .

sent it off got a replacement 1 week later .

refurb launch console 1 month out of warranty, 3 red lights and a repair fee of 1/3 of the purchase price .

customer support ms ass , try harder MS .

next time , build a better box , as sucky as my ps3 game list is right now , i feel happier knowing its built better than my 360.

eep ozzy , i expected no comment from yourself , not the "it seems tobe a small number of consoles" line .

you will be telling my we faulty owners make up 3% of the systems sold next , one trawl round the internet chat boards will give you a fair idea of just how many faulty consoles there are out there . hell , try hitting a search up on ebay .

yeah im bitter , but within reason .

its annoying to see MS throw my trust away over the price of a repair fee for there faulty consoles .

Now that that’s out of the way, relicense all the content that consumers bought on their old consoles to their new ones.

I’m also in the position of not knowing anyone personally who’s had one fail, so I have to think, is there maybe something environmental?   Is there a higher failure rate, maybe, for those who keep it up on one end versus level?  I always suspected that having them scratch discs was a result of that orientation. But what Mike Kozlowski posits is probably a good portion of the truth.

For comparison, I had one launch-day xbox classic have its DVD drive crap out after 2 years of hard use, but the second one’s still going strong, and haven’t had a bit of problems with the 360.

I wonder if some of the 360 problems are caused by power-spikes or brown-outs? I live in town between two large hydro electric dam’s and this time of year the grid seems to have alot of fluctuations(my 360 just died and last year it died at the same time!). I once recorded a voltage change of 6 volts over 24hr period at my place!

I know at work we have voltage and Phase monitors that we use on sensitive Refrigeration equipment just in case of severe power issues. Maybe we should throw away our standard surge bars and invest in some apc power backups?

My 360 has been running fine since April or May 06.  Same goes for all of my friends, though most of them have only had theirs since Christmas.

I would bet a portion of the bricked 360s are due to people:

-Not giving their 360 enough ventilation, like in an enclosed cabinet

-Using faulty add-ons, like the Nyko "Intercooler" (almost bricked mine, got 3 red lights of death, hurried and turned off my 360, waited a day, took off the intercooler, and it worked fine)

-Just doing stupid things, like dropping their 360s (maybe even the "good" people at Wal-Mart or Circuit City, or wherever you bought it from dropped it!)

But who knows.  I’m glad to hear of the new changes, but as someone else already said, I hope to not need them!

Enzo, I also suspect that "a portion" of them are due to that.  But I further suspect that a larger portion of them are not.  I keep my 360 on a flat, level surface with 6-10" of open space on all sides of it (and the front and left side completely open).  I am careful.  I am cautious.  I am a good consumer who wipes my electronics down with a damp lint-free cloth, metaphorically.  My Xbox Classic never broke.  My Dreamcast never broke.  My PS1 and PSone never broke.  My GameCube never broke.  My N64 never broke.  My Wii hasn’t broken yet (not that I’d notice if it did, as long as its valuable dust-collection feature kept working).

And I’m on my fourth 360 in less than 18 months.

I understand that things occasionally break at random, and in ways that aren’t indicative of larger trends.  I had a DVD player break on me, and hey, stuff happens.  The replacement was fine, and I didn’t worry about it.  But something that breaks repeatedly for me, breaks for multiple friends I know personally, and  inspires threads of woe all over the internet, well, that’s beyond anecdote and randomness.

I believed Microsoft when they said that the failure rates were normal and in the 3% range.  Later, when they said that "certain launch units" were failing at a greater than normal rate, I raised an eyebrow.  There’s no way I believe today that the 360 is anything like normally reliable.

This isn’t a problem with the people buying the 360, it’s a problem with the 360, and I can’t believe Microsoft as a whole is as unaware of it as our host here appears to be.

My 360 broke down after about 8 months of good use. I immediately had it "fixed" when I heard about the warranty extension. Microsoft, however, didn’t fix it, they gave me a new one (free shipping) – however, this pretty much blows because I had a lot of secondary "peripheral users" as I’ve heard them referred as: my wife loves the Arcade games, but because of the restrictions, she, even with her gold membership, loses all full access to every game I bought for her (under my Gamertag). This has to be fixed since I have spent a good chunk of money on those games.

I know of at least four people out of the 70 on my friends list who’ve had their 360′s die on them. Three of them had theirs fixed (one had to get his fixed two or three times now), and the other ripped it apart, flashed the DVD-drive and added bigger fans. He now enjoys downloaded games and a far quieter game experience…

My 360 still works, hasn’t had major issues and definitely no red lights.

Nice change in policy but you are still far behind XBox 360 Support in Europe. Over here shipping has been free from the beginning and the support people are much nicer, too

Karma,   I would laugh at all of the reports of defective 360′s going back Microsofts’ way.  No one I knew has had a problem with their boxes.  Mine went three weeks ago. And I had to send it back. I wasn’t chared a dime to ship it.  Box arrived I took it to the UPS store (Even thought I prefer Fedex) and off it went.  I got my xbox back last week. mine not a refurb. or a new one, my own.  That makes me happy to know that someone got their hands dirty and fixed my machine and I’m getting my own back.  After 5 years my first xbox had it’s system board toasted and MS replaced that for free and I got a refurb instead of my own back and I lost all of my game saves and data I had on the internal hard drive.  So I have never had a problem with customer service.  One complaint I do have that I’m not going to send my xbox back for is now my 360 has a burnt out led in the upper left quad. when laying horizontally.  It was not like that before I sent it in.  But It works and I’m happy.

I’ve been through two 360′s so far (new), and my friend has been through three (new). 3% failure rate seems like wishful thinking…  

Re: "eep ozzy , i expected no comment from yourself , not the "it seems tobe a small number of consoles" line .

you will be telling my we faulty owners make up 3% of the systems sold next , one trawl round the internet chat boards will give you a fair idea of just how many faulty consoles there are out there . hell , try hitting a search up on ebay ."

I’m sorry you feel that way. All I can say is what I’ve personally experienced and seen – it’s up to you guys to decide whether you believe it or not.

The one point I will make is that internet chat boards are not representative of the real world. The internet has an interesting way of magnifying a voice such that a vocal minority often has a much larger presence than probably relates to the reality of the situation. Just look back at all of the "PS3 doomed", "Xbox/Xenon Rumor" threads and the sturm and angst around those.

Not saying people who have had issues should be ignored – not at all! Just saying that it’s important to take the 10,000 foot view to get a sense of the situation.

‘i dont know anyone with a fault , so it doesnt happen’

‘all faults are caused by people not taking care of the system’

these types of comments are really frustrating for me , ive owned every console going , before some of you were a thought in your mam and dads mind , to say i dont know how to look after my consoles is ignorant.

as for internet chat boards not being representative of the ‘real’ world . i agree to an extent ,BUT , you can still get a fair idea of the problems out there by looking at them .

if everything was fine with the 360 console we would be seing as many broken PS3 thread as we do 360 ones , and we all know thats not the case.

Veto wrote: "if everything was fine with the 360 console we would be seing as many broken PS3 thread as we do 360 ones , and we all know thats not the case."

No, since the PS3 was a year later to market, and even later than that to Europe. And, they are still at less than a third of the total units compared to 360. It’s not at all a reasonable comparison.

Also, although I do look at the responses on internet regarding failures, it’s also important to remember that many people post in multiple places under different names. Yet, only one unit had the failure.

Why doesn’t MS cross ship on these repairs?  Why should the customer have to wait for a shipping box, then wait until his broken system gets to MS, then wait again to receive a repaired system?  It seems that MS is shipping out refurb systems; why not cross ship with a credit card from the customer as collateral?

I was reading this earlier and was interested that you know no one who’s had a 360 fail. I agree that it can seem worse than it seems because you are more likely to say ‘my 360’s broken’ than ‘my 360 is fine’. So out of interest I put up a poll this morning on a community forum that I’m a member of, 360m.co.uk. We have over 350 members and the only thing we have in common is we are all over 25 and all like gaming. Anyway the question was simple, have you had to replace your 360 because it failed, Yes or No? It was emphasised that people who had no problems needed to vote. It’s still going on but so far over 50% of members who’ve voted so far have had to get their 360 replaced/fixed, quite a few are on their 3rd or 4th console.

There are no complaints at all at the service given by MS while the consoles are under warranty but this is a serious issue and needs to be addressed, because whilst it’s great that you don’t know anyone whose 360 has gone belly up, almost everyone else does.

I’ve just read back my post and apologise for the appalling grammar.

You’re delusional if you don’t think the X360 failure rate is higher than average.

Look, I’ve been playing video games since the Atari 2600. The Xbox 360 is the ONLY console I have ever bought brand new in my life that malfunctioned on its own and had to be sent in. I still have my original PS2 from 2000 and Xbox from 2001. Hell, my NES from 1988 still works perfectly.

But the Xbox 360? I am on my second one. My original one was purchased in August 2006. Just about everyone (with the exception of two people who got their’s in October 2006) I know that has purchased one has had to send their console back for repairs. Here’s a list:

– myself: console #2 (disc tray malfunctioned)

– Friend #1: console #2 (was putting circular scratches in discs)

– Friend #2: console #3 (red light of death x2)

– Friend #3: console #3 (red light of death x2)

– Friend #4: console #2 (red light of death)

– Friend #5: console #2 (red light of death)

Between the 6 of us, we have gone through 14 Xbox 360s.

That is utterly ridiciulous.

Look, I love the X360 and Xbox Live. But don’t come on here with your elite snobbery and say you don’t believe the failures are higher than average, because anyone with common sense knows they are way above average.

I’ve had my 360 since February ’06. Mine lays flat in a secure rack under my TV with great ventilation. Never had to move it at all. What I’m trying to say is that I take really good care of my stuff. 2 months ago, the DVD drive started giving me problems by not being able to read the 360 game discs. The message came up as something like this, "To play this disc, please put it in an Xbox 360 console".

Hello????

Since that started, I’ve had occasions when the disc would play first time and times when I had to eject and close the tray more than 10 times before the drive is able to read the disc. I’m in 2 minds about sending in my 360 for repair because I might be given a worse one instead. Can MS reassure me on this? My 360 is clean without even a single scratch. I bought the extended warranty and as of right now, it’s still under warranty.

You know, DVD drive technology has been around for so many years. Why can’t MS find a supplier that make reliable ones? None of my other consoles have ever broken down before (Dreamcast, PS2, GC) except for MS-made consoles. My old Xbox broke when the drive went kaput. You see a trend here?

all you people complaining are just babies. why do all of you need to be so rude? if I were MS, i’d ignore you idiots. either get your console fixed, or move onto PS3 and enjoy it as it collects dust.

for the one who has 6 friends and went through 14 360′s… do you think that is typical? are you saying failure rates are that high? get real… just because you and your friends don’t know how to take care of your electronics doesn’t mean 360 is built badly.

and "elite snobbery" – so easy to flame people over the net, in email, etc. but where are your manors? loser…

The irony

My third machine has just bitten the dust

No problem though, thanks to decent European consumer rights I should have a new machine by tomorrow lunchtime

Ozy: "All I can say is what I’ve personally experienced and seen"

Well, okay, but in that sense you’re no more authoritative than Random Internet Fanboy #37.  If you have actual information from someone in Microsoft that the 360 has regular failure rates, that’s something; but if you’re just reporting anecdote, well, hey, not ALL the 360s break.  I do have a friend who’s still on his original launch unit, shockingly.

Trellium:  As for the PS3 comparisons, there were plenty of "broken 360" threads on the internets by this time last year, and Microsoft was saying that there was nothing wrong and everything was within normal parameters (which they later went back on, admitting that there was a problem).  The lack of broken PS3 threads really is a qualitatively different thing, even comparing launch to launch.

Great news, but what about the rest of the world?

In Europe we have the exact same problems…

I think the only reason MS is instituting this change in its service is because of the bigger than normal amount of failures of the 360s.

Angry customers = bad press = bad sales.

Mike Kozlowski:

Irrelevant, since it costs nothing to toss a few comments into a thread. Fanboys of "competing products" that aren’t even released seemed to have jumped aboard that ship quickly, and it was one reason I started discounting.

That, plus my comment that of the true stories of failures, they are not indicative of a widespread problem if it is the same group of people reposting on various threads.

Don’t believe everything you read on internet.

If MS is fine with the failure rate, and they are picking up the costs of it including shipping then I tend to believe the money trail. Put another way, if MS had a high failure rate and a high cost of fixing/shipping each failure, they would be strongly motivated to resolve the issue.

I truly believe the issue I had was caused by Lost Planet.  I never had any problems until I started playing that game.  The game would freeze on me at different parts and on occasion I’d hit the same are of the game and it would crash my system.  I ended up trading the game in and got a new copy.  I got the same issue with the new game but this time I got the one red light when i restarted the 360.  My 360 worked great for 13 months until I bought Lost Planet.

Ozzy, my comment from yesterday isn’t popping up, but to repeat: It seems that failures seem to be clustered rather than widely distributed. That is, a small number of people (who happen to know each other) have a very large number of failures, rather than many people having a small number of failures.

If there’s data on how these broken 360s are distributed, then Microsoft may be able to pinpoint it to a particular distributor, manufacturer, batch, or usage pattern.

Trellium

you are looking in the wrong place for the money trail . microsoft would pay whatever shipping and repair fee’s they could to keep bad press out of the market .

im not biased , the 360 is really badly built , it just happens to have some fantastic games and online service , that even convinced me to go buy a brand new system , i just grabbed the extra 2 year MS warranty this time aswell , the first time ive ever needed to for any console .

my nes is still working fine , if it crashes .. all i do is blow on the cartridge

Sorry, I am looking at exactly the right place for teh money trail.

If MS is happy to pick up the bill for "really badly built" 360′s then I think it is clearly in their best interests to fix the issues. I simply can’t see an argument otherwise.

Are you saying MS prefers to lose money? That’s just plain stupid, and frankly it’s not the MS I have known for so long. They really do like profits, in spite of your point of view.

So, if there is an issue its up to them to fix it rather than random anonymous posters on the internet.

Is it irritating to have your 360 (or other useful gadget, for that matter…) puke on you?  No question. However, I’m going to side with Trellium on this one.

"If MS is fine with the failure rate, and they are picking up the costs of it including shipping then I tend to believe the money trail."

Microsoft as a company has a vested interest in getting this division profitable – Not something they could do easily if every other 360 they shipped out the door required warranty service. While they are certainly interested in customer satisfaction with the platform, they are also bound to share holders. If the failure rate were anywhere near as bad as random internet poster #37 implies, it would be in Microsoft’s best interest to correct it and do so quickly.

MS have already made a loss on the actual 360 itself, they make money from peripherals and games therefore it is important to make the user base as large as possible and those users to buy as many extra controllers, cameras, games, etc. as possible. Admitting the 360 has a reliability problem would not help attract new customers and that’s what they need to make a profit. Fixing broken 360’s and shipping them back out to people is expensive but not as expensive as giving them a new redesigned 360 or putting off potential customers and the whole brand dying.

BTW I don’t for one minute think the failure rate is 50% but neither do I think its 3-5%

"BTW I don’t for one minute think the failure rate is 50% but neither do I think its 3-5%"

if it’s 5%, and 10 million people have purchased a 360, that means 500,000 people have had a 360 break on them.

that is a pretty huge number. If anything, I bet you that the number is far less than 5%. (isn’t typical failure rates around 2% for electronics usually?)

a half million voices on the internet yelling "my 360 broke!" is very loud, but it’s still just 5% sold.

Xbox = FailBox

360 = number of days it will last before failure

ㄳ

FailBox said:

"Xbox = FailBox

360 = number of days it will last before failure"

Thank you for the excellent example of what internet does. You get random posters giving out some random piece of unsubstantiated opinion, with no regard for anything but their own blind obedience to some arbitrary other product.

It’s these sorts of posts that inflate the issue so it appears far worse than it is.

Truly, thanks for the marvelously insightful post, FailBox. I couldn’t have said it better myself.