The COD4 Beta, and other demos/betas/halo 2

I have been receiving tons of email from people losing their streaks while playing the COD4 Beta. Let me explain what is going on.

One feed we use to track what you play is your gamercard. If the game appears on your gamercard and is in your most recent played list at xbox.com, that is one way we see what you play. This is the "primary" way that we see it. It allows us to ask Microsoft "What did <gamertag> play yesterday" and we get back a list of games.

The second feed that we use for FULL members, is the presence feed. this is the feed that tells people what you are online playing at all times. The only way for us to monitor this feed is to take a snap-shot every 20 minutes of what that feed says and store it. At midnight when we get all of your games off your gamercard, we merge it with the games we "watched" you playing during the day.

Now the reality is, lately Microsoft has seen some serious degrading service with presence. All of the community sites that use this feed are starting to see really poor performance. What this means is that we ask the feed what you are playing and it sends back NOTHING. It times out. It gives no answer. So it shows you as playing no Demos, or Betas... or Back compatible titles like Halo 2.

For those of you playing ONLY the COD 4 beta, this means that you have nothing on your gamercard (cause betas don't show up there) and you have nothing tracked by presence... which means that you lose your streaks and the Xbox says you didn't play anything.

So here is a friendly warning: Always, always, always play an arcade game or something before doing anything. If you play one thing that appears on your gamercard, and THEN play the COD 4 beta, even if the beta isn't tracked through the presence feed, you will have something to keep your streak going. Please please try and do this... because the presence feed just isn't working well enough to trust.

If things keep performing poorly with the presence feed, we may need to pull it from the site and stop tracking demos/betas... it isn't fair to you that you expect it to track what you play and it isn't fair to us to have to keep manually going into everyones accounts and repairing the missing data.

Sorry for this long explanation... we are doing the best we can with these feeds, but as more people register and all the xbox community sites using this data continue to grow, certain parts of the data were never meant to support some of the things we are doing. The presence feed for tracking non-retail and non-arcade titles is one of those growing casualties.

Thanks for your patience! Keep those streaks alive! Play a live arcade title before your major gaming sessions! I recommend Track & Field! ;)

Comments

[Sh0cktrooper]

I noticed on theliveeye as well that there are a lot of blind spots these days.. I hope ms does something about that :) I'll follow your advice at least ;)

[Ted aka StarMerc698]

I've noticed I'll get a presence feed as long as I played something else. I played Lost Planet, Sonic 2, and Halo 2 yesterday, and all 3 appeared

[Trapper Markelz]

@sh0cktrooper - Yeah we are all getting hit by the service problems. In an attempt to help reduce the load, we upped our caching from 10 minutes to 20 minutes on presence... but they get a lot of "blind eye" and we do too.

@Ted - There really is no formula... the presence feed will run fine some parts of the day, and stop working other parts of the day... some people are lucky to play during the good times and other people are unlucky... so it really just can't be trusted at this point.

[Biotoxin]

so that's what broke my streak, I played halo 2 for a few days
bummer

well I've got time I'll just get a new streak, I think I'll be visiting 360 voice more often now though, I need this kind of info

[Ex6]

I lost my streak too yesterday for some strange reason, but I did NOT play any demos or old games. I did a lot of Army of Two and got the "Stonewall" achievement in it yesterday: http://live.xbox.com/en-US/profile/profile.aspx?pp=0&GamerTag=ex6

Hmm... WTF??? xbox.com sais

Army of Two™ (EU)
Last Played Online: 10/11/2008

And when I click on it:

Stonewall: Kill 30 enemies using the Riot Shield melee attack
30 points: Acquired 10/13/2008

WHAT is going on in MS???