Topic: The everything Xbox thread

Wow services are still down according to status! Sheesh, that's a full day outage! No SoT reprise for me today!

@blueocean nah, i was just posting the invitial notifications. Core was down first. Store/dl/licensing then was down. That's supposedly back up. FIFA is, oddly, reported as down all evening though.

@ThanosReXXX could be coincidence, but other unrelated online services seem to be having tons of problems this month as well. Makes me wonder if theres something else going on if the warfare variety.

Or rdr2 imploded Microsoft. Maybe Nintendo gets their turn in Smashcember.

@BrainOfGrimlock LOL The gentleman that killed you with a rifle because you accidentally raised your bow because of the controls and the town that considered you a criminal because your horse stepped on the corner of a vegetables field says it all. It is funnier as an anecdote than as real gameplay though. Red Dead Desperation 2.

I bought a lot of Assassin's Creed games on sales but I have only played the first which I really liked. I hope to like the others too.

As of time of writing, looking at the Xbox Support Twitter account it still appears to be down. Checking the actual site itself and yep, still down. Wow that’s one hell of a problem. They best get this fix by the time weekend begins.

@BlueOcean You might also want to consider turning the traction control off so that you can stop the car trying to right itself. Using the e-brake method is what the drift club story of Horizon 4 teaches, along with needing control and careful application of brakes to get a tighter line through some bends. Also, don't try the zones both ways. Stick to doing them from one side only and learn from mistakes. Me being an inconsistent noodle failed to do even that.

And I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this one before, but I just find it so funny. Someone during a Forzathon Live got blindsided by a train and went flying. They didn't even see it coming.

Why do modern games like RDR2 and FH4 have 16 control layouts but don't let you just map the buttons manually? In FH4 if you choose manual transmission there is no control layout with a button for the map, so not even Xbox accessories app can help you with that, wtf? I would sacrifice horn, quick chat and photo mode before the map. Yes, you can open the map from the menu but a direct access is much more efficient. A minor complaint is that you can't cycle the radios backwards because the left D-pad is always mapped to quick chat, this is a step backwards from FH3.

I have never played a racing game with manual transmission but I read that this is better for drifting, should I try? They also say to turn off ABS, traction control and stability control and to use a car for drifting (???).

It looks like this might be the first ever >24h XBox outage. I doubt Azure suddenly just fails, especially with Office 365 and SQL Server apparently not having login issues. I can't begin to guess what happened with XBox. All I can think of is, like the time(s) PSN was down for a week, a hack/DDOS attempt. I hope it's up tonight. Not that I'd mind more Starlink on Switch instead. Really fun game.

The whole "if you get an error code, delete your account for your XBox then recover the account" message is a little disquieting too.

@FragRed I feel bad that this is your introduction to XBox! It's not normally so.....Sony-like I had a 360 and don't recall it ever being down. I got my 1X in May, and it was, I don't believe, down once, until October. Now it's the 4th outage, and at 24h+ the longest one I think they've ever had! It's a little worrisome to me with over 200 digital games on tap that they're suddenly so unstable. Usually I'm the jinx on absolutely everything. Things that work perfectly for decades go to pot the moment I get one. In this case though, I bought an X1 and a few weeks later they introduce folders after 5 years of people complaining then giving up. You buy an X1 and they turn the servers off and go home. I'm really hoping it's back up tonight. It always feels uneasy having your entire digital library stripped for an unknown period. This is a pretty awful outage, or rather, series of outages, that I don't want to see become routine.

@BlueOcean Most people still prefer AC2 over all others...I still feel something about 1 just "works" in a way no other entry in the series does. I'll be curious after you've played both what your take is. I think for most players it's either going to be 1, 2, or Origins that becomes the favorite. 1 is slightly unique. 2 was the refinement of 1's formula into the more "HBO treatment" (their words) they gave the series for years. 2.5, 2.8, 3, 3.5, 3.8 are iterative (or regressive in the case of 3 at least before the upcoming remaster.) 4 and Syndicate were interesting games but not necessarily "AC" games, traditionally speaking. 4's a fun pirate game, but not really AC much at all. Origins was a reboot with a sort BotW-ification of the formula but a return to some of 1's concepts. Odyssey will be divisive. It's a total genre shift to RPG, some will love it, some will hate it, and some will feel it's not really "AC" with it's focus on more combat (like 3.) From what I've seen so far it can be played stealth though.

@BlueOcean That drives me crazy as well. Reminds of of MHGU on Switch, they added running to R3 click as an option in a weird menu to make it match World, but that means the map settings are only in the menu, and you can't remap. I also don't understand why games don't support full button mapping by default. Just creating a mapper would seem like no more effort than pre-configured controls. Even Platinum and FROM has been doing that. It's pretty sad when Japan starts adopting "do it your your own way" before Western developers.

I do turn off traction, stability, and ABS. I haven't tried the drifting challenges yet, but I do drift regularly in general. I've never used manual transmission though. If you have the Elite, there's a pre-fab Forza 7 manual w/ clutch controller config you can download in the Accessories app from Turn 10 that could easily be tuned for Horizon. I haven't done manual, but if doing manual without a wheel/stick/pedals setup, I feel like Elite is the only way to make it feel actually sane.

@NEStalgia Yeah sorry about that. I had an Xbox 360 and have been eager to play some of the games I still own on my X. Once I’ve played RDR2 and Horizon 4 that is. But I couldn’t do either because of the outage I somehow bought upon the world. This is why I would never be allowed in a data centre. Just imagine the carnage I’d cause just by my very presence

I find the timing a little funny for this outage.
Think about it. Microsoft put that status message up at near enough 14:30 GMT - half an hour after the Smash Direct starts. What with the leak saying that Banjo and Kazooie would be in the game, then about ten minutes after the Direct starts it's proven false.
Are we sure some salty Smash fans haven't taken it out on the Microsoft servers?

Because that would make sense.

@DarkRula You know, given the smash fanbase......that actually wouldn't surprise me even slightly. OTOH this is just the latest in a series of month-long recurring outages. I thought maybe all the Game Pass people getting FH4 simultaneously took down servers the first time. Then I thought maybe all the upgrades needed for releasing RDR2+Fallout were involved. They could be.

There was actually a 5th partial outage. My ISP (one of the big ones) was entirely unable to hit anything xbox login related (including the app, web login, etc) for about 8 hours maybe 2 weeks ago. If I accessed via my phone carrier it worked. Something was "broken" between the two, and it wasn't just a DNS update as I tried Google's DNS servers too. All month something odd/transitional has been going on with XBL. 4 actual XBL outages, plus at least one that broke a specific large ISP from signing in for an overnight period.

Maintenance/upgrades gone very very bad maybe.

@DarthNocturnal Where do I insert my credit card for XCloud?

@NEStalgia I'm looking forward to some xCloud news. Have had the opportunity to play AC Odyssey on Googles Project Stream and its been stellar! Very few hiccups at all, runs great on every pc I've tried. Granted I know I'm fortunate to live in what is essentially Silicon Valley east and most don't but if it's a smooth as PS has been they will earn my business!

@redd214 Yeah, that's the thing with streaming, if you live where you live, or Japan it can be excellent (though the video of AC:O on Switch showed frame pacing issues. Then again AC:O has frame pacing issue locally on X1X, too....

But if you live...basically anywhere else, game streaming is just so.....choppy. It depends how sensitive you are to frame issues though. I use local LAN streaming from 1X to my Surface Pro sometimes. It works well enough, but it feels latent to me. And that's with using the controller still directly connected to the XBox over BT, not going through the Surface. That's with zero more input lag than normally, on LAN. Same for SteamLink. So streaming over internet feels that much worse to me.

Still, if the price is right I technically have good internet for it. I just don't think the backbone can keep up

Servers back up according to status page! @FragRed

It's your chance to bring them down again!

@NEStalgia Wait till I sign back in Though good news, I can finally play RDR2!

@NEStalgia Xbox is not down, it's a sign-in issue for some people. I can sign in and play online since yesterday. FIFA is working fine too. I will let you know how much I like Assassin's Creed II as it's the next one that I'll play. I am having issues playing with manual transmission in FH3 and 4 even with the Elite controller so I went back to automatic. I haven't found any good explanation about how to drift yet, like step by step, because there is something that I am doing wrong and I don't know what it is.

@FragRed Don't worry, @NEStalgia is pulling out the drama over absolutely everything. He just said that his digital collection might be in danger and that Xbox servers have been down for over 24 hours. A sign-in issue turns into all servers being wiped out in his words. General rule: take with a ton of salt everything that he says. Every possible issue that has ever been registered happens to him defying every statistics rule. He should play the lottery, perhaps his implausible luck works both ways.

That's exactly what @NEStalgia would do if he could.

@BlueOcean IIRC these server issues seem NA specific. You may not experience it across the pond. FragRed and DarkRula couldn't sign in. DarthNoctural could for some reason. I probably couldn't, but I didn't try, knowing there was an issue and solution posted for having to remove and re-add your account if you get an error message, I figured it's best to wait for it to be working normally so I don't break anything through impatience.

Yeah, manual on a controller....there's just not enough buttons to work it well. Elite makes it less awkward but doesn't change that there's too few buttons. It seems like a feature best left for racing wheels & pedals.

I'd definitely turn off all the stability/abs/etc DarkRula mentioned. I mean I score "epic drifts" all the time even when I'm not trying. Or at least not consciously trying. I'm not the most consistent at it by far, as I'll lose control and go off course much more often than I'd like, but starting the drift shouldn't be too difficult. It's not MK8, but it's not too hard. The faster, the easier, but there's a sweet spot to not lose control - too fast and you go flying. Thanos's explanation is probably better than mine (he uses ABS and stability on, like you, though.) For me with all those off, I generally just accelerate, turn hard, tap the brakes lightly and then keep accelerating. No ebrake (those are for hairpins for me).

LOL, well if the sign-in servers are down.....you're kinda not going to be able to hit the other servers? The store/download/licensing server was also down part of that time as well, but if you can't sign-in it really didn't matter much. (Yeah if you're playing physical it might not matter. If you're playing digital, it's kind of a problem.) "This game can not be played on this account. Would you like to view it in the Microsoft Store?" E.T. can't phone home.

I won't deny my awful luck though It's true Sadly, the lottery thing doesn't work.