Hi there. You might know me as one of those blokes who uses your service as and when he feels the urge to play against someone but doesn’t have anyone around to play against physically. You know, like most people who use it.
You’re so grateful for my (however sporadic) custom these past few years you’ve decided to give me Xbox Live for free. Now, I realise this might have something to do with changing my name to Barry Scott but hear me out.
You might have seen this video on YouTube of a guy who isn’t quite so happy with your cancelling service. It’s a guy who goes by the username "fattyolumpkin" so he knows he isn’t exactly god’s gift. All he’s asking is that you actually let people off of your service.
I got 3 months Xbox Live to try out your Halo Reach beta and sufficed to say it was quite a good beta testing phase. The rest of the time I played Call of Duty on there, like pretty much any guy would do. It’s pretty fun, sure, but I had no real intention of playing it after the remaining time on my Gold subscription ran out. Y’know, I’m not that sad.
But Xbox Live, the Internet’s getting irate. Like Mr O’Lumpkin mentioned before, there’s no obvious way to cancel it online. You’ve got to phone up some premium number to try and get the guy on the other end of the phone to understand – despite how I can only guess how bad the line is the other end – that I said ‘I want to cancel my account’ rather than ‘I’d like to hear a million and one reasons why I should keep paying for something I can get on my computer for free’.
You actually listened around the turn of 2009 and allowed people living in America the option to not automatically renew their account only if they got there in time.
How about you do that for the rest of the sodding world, eh?
Where the option should be for us UK residents to turn off the automatic renewal (which, as a tiny two-letter text link, is complete unfair) there’s just a dummy button. It’s like "Oh yeah, you’re going to pay through the nose for this service soon. Hope you’re okay with that. Oh you’re not? Well, tough shit you… you… bastard."
The only way I can get you to stop charging me for stuff is to change the card details of mine you hold. At least now you can change that online whereas before I had to ring you up and wait about a week before you’d even get back to me on it. So now you’re trying to charge Mr Barry Scott who doesn’t live anywhere near me, who has a card that has expired, for me to use a service I don’t want anymore. Well done you.
In short, you don’t want to upset the Internet. Okay, you’ve pretty much pissed off 3 million websites with your antics, maybe you could listen. This page is just a drop in the ocean to all the others that are similarly worded, but I’m hoping it’s the one that breaks the camels back.
Hope you realise how restrained that post was. If you want to see how bad I can rip into something, just take a look at what I say about other things.
Yours sincerely,
Matt.
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