40 Days #36: Make the dashboard resistant to Xbox Live outages

This screen clip is both hilarious and disturbing, because it was actually real at one point during the Great Christmas Xbox Live outage of 2007. I am not going to reopen the discussion of why that outage happened or how it was handled - that's all been beaten to death, repeatedly.

However, during that troubled period there was one thing that really worried me. Seemingly because the Xbox 360's dashboard is so closely linked to the service, when Xbox Live was broken, so was the console.

Signing in took forever, bringing up the various dashboard blades was massively delayed, and in general the whole console was acting flaky for weeks. Given the 360's already tarnished hardware reliability reputation, I - along with many other gamers - was seriously worried that my console was dying.

This console flakiness just worsened the already pretty unhappy service situation, because not only were gamers unable to play online, but even doing anything offline was an awful experience. At one point it was so bad that I was contemplating just yanking the network cable, but ended up just not using the console during much of that period.

Now, I understand that pretty much all of the blades feature some content that is being loaded from the service - ads, messages, friend status, etc. - but why can't the console just be smarter about knowing the status of Xbox Live? If it looks like the service may be having problems, shorten some timeout values so that all these queries just fail faster and we can get on with some local action. Microsoft could easily publish a network health flag inside the service that consoles can look for and modify their behavior accordingly. In fact, having a handy network status indicator would a good idea for the dashboard itself, so that gamers could quickly see if their problems are caused by service issues or something on their end. Perhaps a simple traffic-light indicator of Xbox Live health? I think a full description like the one above might overwhelm even high-resolution HDTV sets.

Another option would be to add a manual "game offline" switch to the dashboard - much like in, say, Internet Explorer - which would force the console to act as if it were physically disconnected from the network.

Service outages can and will happen. However, they should not affect what gamers can do with their consoles at home, and how that experience works during that outage. Last year's service problems clearly showed that Microsoft still has some work to do on the stability and reliability of the dashboard itself, in addition to the service as a whole.