More Transparency

This past fall I mentioned that I was off to Microsoft to work in on Visio as a Program Manager.  I had a great time, and learned a lot from the excellent folks over there.  In fact, I liked Microsoft so much, I’ve decided to go back there full time.  At the end of June when I’m finished here at Waterloo, I’ll be packing up and leaving Toronto for the rainy shores of Redmond, Washington.  My new position will be as a Software Development Engineer in Xbox.com.  This will likely expose me to a lot of the new developments Microsoft is planning for the future, which obviously I won’t be able to talk about here.  I will make an effort to post any interesting things from inside Xbox that are safely scrubbed but may not have floated out through other channels, insofar as I am able to do so.

Xbox Dashboard Update

The press release for the Dec. 4th Dashboard update has some cool stuff in it. Major Nelson has released a couple of new tidbits that we’re in the press release.

One of those two features fixes a major longtime problem with Xbox Live, although it’s not expressly stated in the release.

Previously, if you decided to move to another country (I hear people do that sometimes), you were screwed to the nines. The Live Passport framework locks in the country code when the account is created, and that country code cannot be changed. For things like webmail, it doesn’t really matter. The only result is that the advertising that you get is irrelevant to you in your new country.

But because an Xbox Live account is tied to a Live Passport, this has serious repercussions. Firstly, you need to pay for your account with a credit card who’s billing address is in the country your passport is linked to. What this means is that you would need to maintain an active billing address and credit card in your old country, just to be able to continue to pay for the service.

Secondly, you’re locked out of any content you might normally have access to in the new country (e.g. if you move from Canada to the USA, you would normally now have access to Xbox Live Marketplace TV and Movie content, something which is forbidden in the great white north).

The work around in the past has been “Start a new Xbox Live account”. Yeah. That means you lose all your achievements, your gamerscore, and any months of paid access you might have had left on the account. Additionally it means that you can no longer access any games you’ve purchased on XBLA from any machine, only the console you specifically downloaded them on in the first place. If that machine should happened to, oh, I don’t know, fail in some way, you’ve lost the title.

The potent point in my opinion is this. Starting today, you will be able to re-associate your Xbox Live account with a new passport account. The question is does Xbox Live retain a separate copy of the country code, or do they simply follow the pointer to the one used in the Passport account? If it’s the latter, all problems are solved tomorrow, and ye who change countries can rejoice in the streets.

On a related note: Canada (and some of Europe) is movie rentals on Xbox Live Marketplace on Dec. 11th! Yay for being slightly less of a second class citizen.

Gamerpoints vs Achievements

I’m going to have to throw this one over to my fellow Canuck, Nerfgun.  As previously mentioned, I’m quite the dainty trollop when it comes to achievements.  There’s something quite sadly affirmating about having the game pat you on the head and give you an A+ sticker.  Must be a Gen Y thing.

I hadn’t really given much consideration to the fact that Gamerscore and Achievements are not one and the same.  In theory the point value attached to a given achievement should indicate the relatively level of difficulty for earning that achievement.  However, at the end of the day, it would appear there is no actual policy regarding how difficult something should be for a given number of points.

 And really, that’s impossible to dictate globally, because there are some games that are just easy.  A raw gamerscore doesn’t really tell you anything about the skill of a player, it just theoretically tells you how much time they spend playing Xbox 360 games.  I’m not even sure that’s true, actually - Gabe and I have nearly the same Gamerscore, and I hear he plays video games like it’s his job.