I feel the pain of everyone...then I feel nothing.

Recently my 4th 360 gave out on me.  It was an Elite model that I had purchased nearly 1 year ago.  Fortunately, I had bought the Best Buy warranty for it and they were very good about swapping it out for a new one.  They even threw in the Kung Fu Panda/Lego Indy Jones game that was in the new bundle. So, now I'm very happy with the Best Buy experience, I'm not too thrilled with Microsoft but have learned to expect broken 360s at this point, and I'm really glad to not be down a box.

Over the Holidays I've had a couple of opportunities to play Rock Band with friends and family which is always a great time.  Except.....all my download content is tied to my old Elite console.  Not a big deal at home because I always have a Live connection.  Unfortunately if I take the box to a friend's house, they don't always have a high speed connection or a router nearby to connect to.  So none of my d/l songs are available to play.  I tried re downloading the content to no avail so I decided to call 1-800-MYXBOXSUX to see what could be done.

I made the mistake of not registering the new box right away so I had to enter in all my personal info and Xbox info to start the process.  The first tier agent had no clue what to do so they take all my information (GT, home address, phone, name, console S/N, etc.) and pass me on to tier 2 service.  Tier 2 service doesn't seem to know much more then tier 1 although she does have me try a couple of things that don't work.  I'm then passed along to another agent, but not before giving all of my information to her again.  Once I get to the 3rd agent, I'm told that M$ has a DRM transfer tool online that I can use to get this to work. 

"Oh wait" he says.  "You're going from an Elite to and Elite so that won't work." 

"OK, then what should I do?"

He then tells me that I have to get a copy of my receipt to Xbox support and they will do a manual DRM transfer....in 5-10 days!

"I'll just need to get some personal information." he says.

"Uh, no."  "I've given that out 3 times already, if you don't have it by now, that's your problem."

What I don't get is why the first 2 agents couldn't have figured that out an hour ago.  I guess if I had sent the box back to M$ to be replaced with an old "refurbished" model, they would have already transferred all the DRM material. Because I went to BB and exchanged for a brand new model though, they're unequipped to deal with such a scenaro (though you'd think it would have come up 1 or 10,000 times by now).  At this point, I get the fax number, find my receipt and reside myself to deal it Monday morning when I get to work.

That was Saturday.  On Sunday evening, after cooling off a bit and thinking things through, I decided to look up this DRM tool on Xboxlive.com to see what that was about anyway.  Curiously, I could find nothing about it.  In fact, I went to look at what boxes it showed me registered with and noticed it still had the old one there but not the new one.  I decided to try and register it and found no link to do so.  I thought that was wierd so I tried to look it up with IE instead of Firefox and got the same result. I tried serching again with IE for some info on the DRM transfer tool and got nothing.

I logged out of the Big0ne account and signed in with the AAA 2o2p RB account and searched again.  Presto! first link was instructions and links to do the transfer.  WTF!  Did MS block me out of using the DRM tool?  I copied the address and signed back in with the Big0ne account and pasted it directly into the address bar and was able to get it to show at that point.  I decided to screw what M$ says and just try it online anyway even though "it doesn't work from Elite to Elite". 

Guess what?  It works just fine.

The only real hitch to the whole thing is that I then had to go and re download every song I ever downloaded on the old box.  If you know me, you know that's a ton of content.  It took nearly a half hour to simply click "download again" for everything.  Needless to say, I was not in much of a mood last night by the time I actually got a chance to get online and play.

So what did I learn?  Well there's the obvious.  Microsoft support sucks.  Then I wondered why.  I think the problem is this.  I was clearly calling some million square foot call center facility in Bombay or some such place.  Every call taker there is simply reading from a script.  That's the problem.  I would guess that not a single one of these people have ever played on an Xbox much less owned one.  So when I'm describing a problem and using terminology that anyone reading this blog would get, they have no clue.  That must be why they keep rephrasing my problem and repeating it back to me over and over.  They're trying to make my pretty plain problem fit into they're neat little script because if I say "Rock Band Song" to them, I might as well be speaking Klingon.  The worst part is that there's not a damn thing I can do about it.  Oh sure, I could get rid of my 360s and never deal with them again, but that's a shit ton of money down the toilet if I do so.  While the 360 breaks often and the support sucks, they're both just good enough that I don't have to deal with it often enough to make it not worth my while.  I'm guessing M$ knows this and I'm guessing this will never change.