Poor Xbox Live Service

This is just terrible. Xbox Live has been unplayable since Christmas.

I've been a Gold member since I got my Xbox which was back in April. There have been times when Xbox Live has been slow at responding to requests from my Xbox. This has lead to inferior gameplay or not being able to play the game at all. If this happens, I normally check if I get a response from XBox.com (specifically my Gamer card). Usually, both are slow to respond. This indicated to me that perhaps Xbox Live is running at near capacity (I'm no expert but I feel that this is a valid claim). The problems with Live tend to clear overnight. When Halo 3 came out, there were a lot of server problems due to the number of people trying to play online. But I forgave them as I felt that both Bungie and MS underestimated the number of sales of Halo 3 they made. Besides they upgraded their servers quickly enough to handle the load.

But our current situation... A week. A week! A week of Xbox Live coming on and off is just not acceptable. We're paying customers here!

This is a quote from Major Nelson on the current state of XBox Live:
"(Saturday, Dec 29 @ 3:15p PT) As you may have noticed, over the last few days we have experienced record numbers of new members signing up for Xbox Live and record numbers of players online. This has contributed to some Xbox Live consumers experiencing difficulties signing onto the service. Our engineering teams have been working as quickly as possible to remedy the situation and have already made a number of improvements to the service. We are continuing to monitor service levels around the clock to insure optimal performance. We appreciate your patience during this time period and thank you for their ongoing support of Xbox Live."

So it looks like there are a lot of new Xbox owners thanks to Christmas and not enough capacity for everyone. It's a shame because most of them will be put off with the shit service (or should I say 'lack of service'?) that is Xbox Live and will never come back. What the hell are MS doing with our money that we pay for our Gold membership? They should be reinvesting it to upgrade their Xbox Live network. I am paying good money for a good service. But a week of downtime is not good at all! Any jackass could have predicted that the Live network was under a lot of stress (like I predicted earlier). Why couldn't they have upgraded it? Microsoft, are you expecting to not sell anymore consoles? Because that's the ONLY reason why you should stop upgrading xbox live.

Anyway, I have been very dissatisfied with the service levels of my Gold membership. So much so, I have actually bothered to write an email to Xbox Tech Support asking for compensation. I can forgive the odd one or two blips but this past week has been crazy. Get your act together MS or Sony will catch up with their PlayStation Network(PSN).

PS Happy New Year everyone!