New Xbox Live content excludes Silver subscribers

*RANT WARNING*

LOL, IMO XBL is the worst online platform I've ever had to deal with and it should be free too. XBox Live is the reason I've had to start physically removing my 360 from the network. If it's on the network every time I wan't to play offline I cop massive waits and lockups while it tries to connect to XBL over my congested internet connection, that sort of thing should be done asyncronously and only when I actually wan't to do something online damnit! Not to mention I've yet to find a game that'll match me with anyone even close to my skill level.

Then there's the money which if you do play online make the 360 the most expensive console, more so than the PS3, and you get NOTHING for that annual $80 that you cant get for free on pretty much every other only platform out there. There's no dedicated game servers, no meaningfull content, no service improvements, MS don't do any game netcode and only rarely do any updates to their XBL netcode (which adds a little extra overhead and can cause lag from too many non game XBL packets comming in BTW). Then they also charge extra for the content you download, I mean for $80 a year minimum they could at least discount stuff in the market place not that that's really a solution since the same kind of content is distributed for free, legally, on PCs.

I'd much rather my un-intrusive PSN style online implementation than the money sucking, over priced, over hyped pile of garbage that XBL is. As bad as sony suck with their programming I'd still take theirs over what MS make because there are just too many faults with MS products and too few updates to fix them.

*END RANT*

On the other hand at least it doesn't use friend codes, but that's about the only good thing I can say about it.

Thank god for PCs, that's where all the good online players are anyway, I'm sick of playing n00bs who can't even kill me with a controller (btw I suck pretty bad with a controller but somehow still manage to be one of the better, if not best players on a server whenever I play).

With Wii I agree 100% it's just crap, but PSN is well implemented, the first thing that struck me when I browsed the sore was I could browse the store without needing another activity to keep me interested while I waited for it to load (the XBL market place has been improved a little since then but at the time it'd take me an hour or so to find and start a particular download even when the net wasn't busy). PSN certainly is missing a few features that XBL has but I'd rather have the good quality essentials than a whole heap of buggy half-done features that I'm unlikely to use more than once.

I must admit that's one thing microsoft is going in the right direction with, but it's not as good as it should be and I'd also wager very inefficient (especially given how poor MS media formats are). There are also issues with the billions on invites I get to join games or get content for games that I don't even have (in particular Halo 2).

That's not the issue, the problems I have would be fair enough if I was playing or trying to do something that required a net connection. The issue is that I get these problems when I DONT wan't to do something online and it's poorly implemented anyway and should be asyncronous so I can continue doing whatever I want without the console locking up for 10-300 seconds (yes, it actually occasionly locks up for 5 min trying to get some info from XBL which sucks when I'm wanting to play an offline game).

Actually I said I was pretty ****, but it would seem the majority of players on XBL are even worse than me which is really quite dissapointing as I hate easy wins in multiplayer, I'd much rather a hard fought close loss.