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Xbox Live: All your credit cards are belong to us!
12 comments- IT TOPICS:Personal Technology, Security
Geometry Wars for the Xbox 360 is very addictive. Play it for 5 minutes and you get hooked.
It's such a simple yet amazingly challenging game.
Mix the controls of Robotron 2084, a bit of asteroids, some physics ala Hawkings, the protagonist's ship from the game Tempest and lots of geometric shapes hell bent on your destruction and you got an instant classic ... oh and the background music is pretty cool too.
Anyhow, to really get the most out of it, you have to buy the unlocked version. Otherwise you are limited to 4 minutes of play time, which really isn't enough once you get pretty good.
Getting to the point at hand, we have an Xbox 360 at work that we play oftentimes during lunch and a bunch of us really like Geometry Wars.
We had been wanting to unlock it for some time, but no one had been willing to do the $6.50 charge to their credit card. So i decided to take the plunge.
As the Governator once famously said "Big Mistake".
So now my credit card is associated with the Xbox Live account that was set up on the 360. Problem is that this account is a shared account ... As in, it's the one we all use to play games like DOA4.
I figured, no problem, I'll just call Microsoft and have them remove the credit card from the account.
No dice. Not only won't they do it, but apparently, they can't do it and this is "by design" as if that makes up for this oversight.
So what are my choices? Delete the account in question or change the credit card used to another card.
I should add that the security involved with the account on the Xbox itself is very weak. Yeah, there's the 4 "digit" passcode that can be entered in, but there's very little protection (if any) when someone tries to purchase more Live points.
OK, so you are probably thinking "big deal, just delete the account and be done with it", but my point is this shouldn't be necessary. I can think of many scenarios where one would want to just delete the credit card from the account instead of having to jump through unnecessary hoops to either change it or to delete the account.
But Microsoft seems to have a policy of one Account per user and has purposely set up the system to enforce this at all costs.
I gotta tell you, nothing is more frustrating than calling a company's support only to be told that they can't and won't help you ... Oh so sorry, but you are screwed!
I've never been mad at Microsoft or their support until that call. And you know what bloggers do when they get mad ... they blog.
What should I have done instead of wedding my credit card to the account? Apparently I should have bought a prepaid card. Well gee, how about you guys frickin' give that option at the purchase screen. Or even better warn people with a huge blinking red sign that says *Klaxon alarms sounding* "WARNING, ONCE YOU ENTER YOUR CREDIT CARD HERE IT WILL BE IRRETRIEVABLY LINKED TO THE CURRENT XBOX LIVE ACCOUNT" *Klaxon alarms end*
By the way, if you are wondering why deleting the account is such a big deal, well as far as I can tell all of the saved data linked to that account will dissappear so unless I can find a way to move this data to a different account/profile all of our hardwork in DOA4 and PGR3 will go the way of the Dodo.
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