When is a survey not a survey?

So in the past couple days I had 2 survey invitations pass through my inbox—one from Microsoft regarding Xbox Live, one from Sony regarding the Playstation Network. The timing was certainly interesting, considering they were literally a day apart, but I digress. When I had clicked to take the XBL survey I had a fair amount of ideas about what sort of feedback I was going to leave, mostly due to my frustrations lately of the seeming lack of matchmaking that has been in effect for the top games I've been playing with friends, namely Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4. You know, just like everyone else with a 360. Anyway, long story short, my experiences in both games has been less than satisfactory since in almost every single match my friends and I have literally been paired with the worst players against the best players and have been losing by tremendous margins. When looking at the player ranks before a match it's no wonder it happens. My question is: seeing as how I'm paying $50 a year to play games online in a friggin' PEER TO PEER setup, how is it that my $50 isn't at least being well-implemented with great matchmaking, as is one of the supposed advantages of Xbox Live? There have been times I thought to shut off my console and sell the games on Amazon because I'm not having any fun getting completely slaughtered by people immensely outranking me. It's not fun. I don't feel I have to win all the time, but hell, at least once in awhile, or at least not lose by margins of 200+ points in a COD4 match of Headquarters (and for eff's sake, can I never ever be Op4 ever again? I've been stuck on that team 7-8 times out of 10 and it's getting ridiculously irritating to hear that guy yelling at me. Can we not hire more than one voice actor per side? Cripes).

When the XBL survey page loads I'm pretty put off to discover it's a whole whopping 3 questions long. These questions are over such topics as what do you spend your Microsoft Points on and what is your favorite feature of Xbox Live. I can't remember the third one, but it was very similar to the other two. So essentially, instead of being a survey to help better the Xbox Live experience, it was a PR's wet dream. A survey that can be spun in many ways to hail how great users find the XBL service to be. There was no real feedback, no possible way to help improve things, just questions that someone could say "Xbox Live is amazingly popular and our users are happy to spend $50 a year to connect to friends and *insert most popular survey answer here*!!" It was a complete joke.

On the flip side, when I took the PSN questionare I was presented with several pages of no less than 5 questions per page regarding such things as what I felt about PSN, what I felt about PS3, what features I liked most, what features I wanted to see most, and how I felt about the competition. For each of these questions there was a feedback scale of 1-5 with the range of extremely *satisfied* to extremely *dissatisfied*. It was a survey that easily can be used not only for PR (as any survey usually becomes, no doubt), or more importantly, to be used to improve upon a service and make it better.

The thing that really gets to me about this whole experience is that Xbox, the console and the experience that's supposed to be by gamers, for gamers, and have the best position of any of the consoles, seems to care the least about improving their service. They've officially gone the way of EA Sports' Madden series, essentially being the only show in town and resting on their laurels until they don't have a choice. To me, this was apparent in the last few dashboard updates which gave me next to no additional features I gave any care for. Windows Live Messenger integration? Gag me. Last thing I want is to be playing a game and have to pause every 5 minutes or less to respond to a message someone has sent me from their computer. Forgive me for wanting to play games on my game console instead of chat. DivX support? Shoot me in the face, why would I want that? The latest MPEG4 codecs including H.264, which have been supported much longer, have better picture and smaller file sizes anyway. And where's my private group chat? The feature that has been, in my experiences, the single-most requested feature on blogs and message boards each time an update is released that lacks it. This just screams "we will release minor features that no one really cares about, but one fairly big feature that some people have been requesting, but save the big guns for later on if there's actually some competition raised, that way we can get a big press release and try to steal the thunder of our competitors." Screw that. Meanwhile, Sony seems to be aware that online functionality is something they should've delivered but really haven't to its fullest and are making an effort to see how they're doing and see how they need to yet improve. Say what you will about how the PSN is in its current state, but for a first-time outing on a system as complex as the PS3 I'd say they're doing a damn good job. After all, I have my group chat in the XMB, something I can't do on 360. And, rumored to be in April but confirmed to be coming is the XMB update that will bring nearly full functionality of the PS3's UI in-game. Once that drops and we can do private group chat, messaging and custom soundtracks in-game.... where will XBL be? Sitting tall with its matchmaking that doesn't especially work? I can understand people's adversity to PSN in that it's a server-based mode of play so the servers could be shut off at any time, but with P2P you can play the same game for as long as you can still find people, but I've experienced far less lag on my PSN games than I have XBL in general and most of the time when a newer game comes out I tend to shift focus to the new one and not play the old much, if at all. Usually by the time servers have been shut down I don't play the affected title(s) anyway. I'd rather things be that way than in Halo 3 when I'm trying to shoot someone and the lag is so bad that their character is flashing from one side of my screen to another. And yes, I checked, it's not my connection. Unless for whatever reason it needs more than 7mbps down and 800kbps up (hint: it doesn't).

Dear Xbox Live division: just because you're on top doesn't mean you can have a nap. I'm paying you an annual fee and you're making more money in advertising than you need to fund the operation yourself, so how about you put that money to use. Sincerely, BrokenDesign