Meanwhile, Party Chat is perhaps the most controversial of the new features on Xbox Live. On the surface, I love it; I had fun talking with some friends while we each played different games just the other day. But it’s prone to randomly dropping users for no good reason, even when all people in the party have plenty of bandwidth free. That’s a pretty big problem, because it’s a hassle to get everyone back together again and pick up where your chat left off. Worse, and this has been going on for months, people are using Party Chat to essentially cheat in online play. Many games have it so that their in-game voice chat cuts off if your character is killed, but these games obviously can’t drop you from Party Chat. The end result is that dead players can essentially do a form of ’ghost recon’ (yeah, I’m trying to be witty) for their teammates. Both sides can do this with a little coordination, but some people don’t want this sort of thing in their game. Even if they’re okay with it then it can lead to the remaining players being extremely slow and cautious, dragging games out far longer than it should.

As for Party Chat randomly dropping you, there aren’t many elegant solutions right now. Some people with favourable phone plans could just call their friends up, but that’s not always convenient. You could also use Skype, but this requires you to be near your computer and not everyone keeps their PC and Xbox 360 together. Neither of these are really all that acceptable since Party Chat should work seamlessly for the end user, but once again this is primarily Microsoft’s issue to fix.

When it comes to using Party Chat for cheating, this is nothing new. People have been using exterior methods to get around ’death’ blocking communication for a long time. It’s hard to blame game designers; there’s only so far they can go before their anti-cheat measures become intrusive, and many popular games were released before this feature even existed on Xbox Live. Nonetheless, it remains the most convenient way to cheat in this way, certainly more efficient than text messages or voice recordings. It would be nice if Microsoft had a way to let developers mute users from their party when killed in-game, and that’s a great solution going forward... but I’m not sure what can be done for games that are already released. I suppose they could be patched, but good luck convincing publishers to spend the resources on it since this issue isn’t really their fault.

Ultimately, these problems are hard to tolerate. Xbox Live was ahead of its time back on the original Xbox, but today we see all kinds of problems. Party Chat is both buggy and has unintended (but obvious) uses for cheating, the Marketplace is depressingly slow to browse, and download speeds range from being generally acceptable but not great, to inducing a sigh as you realize you’ll be staying out of multiplayer games for most of the day. This might be okay if Xbox Live Gold Memberships were free, but you pay $50 a year for this. Meanwhile Microsoft’s competitors have services that are about as good and cost nothing to the end user, and offer more than Xbox Live Silver accounts do. These sort of problems will eventually hurt the goodwill of 360 owners, so it would be in Microsoft’s interests to get on the ball and fix these issues.