alt Hacker NewsI wanted to show my gf the halo 1 campaign, so I downloaded the 30GB Masterchief Collection via steam. When I launched it, I was greeted with a black box. After 1 Minute it was a microsoft login screen that looked eerily like a browser inside the game. Since I couldn't do anything else, the game was stuck at a sub 720p resolution. I said fine Ill just create an account. Yea so mail, firstname, lastname, birthday, country, email and email verification code later I had to do captcha which is clicking and holding down a button. "Help us against the bots" it said. I unironically spent 5 minutes clicking that button, then being stuck in a loop with "please try again" while my gf just sat there watching me.
Well I turned off MCC and gave up.
I don't want to know what life is like having xbox hardware
Replies
Microsoft stole my copy of Minecraft.
I had bought Minecraft before Microsoft bought Mojang, and eventually I was forced to migrate my Minecraft license to a Microsoft account.
After I had successfully created the account, logged in, and transferred the license, and ONLY after I had transferred the license, I was suddenly locked out of my account until I provided a phone number.
I will never buy a Microsoft product again, and I think I've done a decent job reducing the amount of their stuff that other people have bought, as well.
This is the same effect of wanting to watch an old film... If you want to do it the legit way, you will have to face all kind of hurdles, starting from finding a service provider that might have the film, then forget about all the modern audience "edits" they put on these things, at times the quality isn't even good, the audio tracks are messed up...
So you either give these jackals at least 30 to 60 minutes of your life (plus money) for the luxury of using their crap services and obtaining a half-assed version of what you want, or you just go to good old Forum McTorrent and get what you actually want for free.
> Yea so mail, firstname, lastname, birthday, country, email and email verification code later I had to do captcha which is clicking and holding down a button. "Help us against the bots" it said. I unironically spent 5 minutes clicking that button, then being stuck in a loop with "please try again" while my gf just sat there watching me.
From 2013
PLEASE DRINK A VERIFICATION CAN
In 2023, spent multiple hours setting up a Microsoft account for my GF just so she could play Minecraft. The process involved HTTP 4xx, 5xx, missing emails, activation codes that were "expired" even though they were less than 30 seconds old, countless instances of HTTP 302 (or JS / HTML based redirects?) that simply went to a landing page instead of redirecting to the "You've been authenticated" thingy and tons, tons and tons upon tons of captchas. Audio-based ones even, at some point! Some of the voices I could easily understand, others had like a thick accent or something - and English is not my mother tongue. The only thing driving me forward was a boiling hatred towards Microsoft.
Not related to the Microsoft gaming division, but yes, Microsoft products are a mess. I am forced to use Office 365 to do some slides for work, and I decided to use Office for macOS so I could use Claude extension.
All went relatively well, until I needed to share the slides with others using Office 365: my first try of sharing the slides by clicking the Share button inside Office for macOS caused it to upload to SharePoint as read-only: not even myself (the document owner) could edit it.
I said "fine, I will just upload the .pptx file manually", and it worked well enough, until the file came back with some comments for fixes: now if I clicked the "Open on desktop" button, it kinda created a local copy that I could never sync with the remote one, but they're still clearly the same file because it did show as the same file when I went to properties on both desktop and web versions.
At that point I was getting really pissed off, so I started editing locally and copying my changes to the remote version. Office still had one more surprise: I could copy whole slides remotely, but copying part of a slide (say a rectangle form with some text) would instead convert that part to an image. Seriously, what the f*ck Microsoft?
In Xbox's defence, pretty seamless. I am signed into my xbox account, which is a Microsoft account. When launcing a game all that account auth bullshit is taken care of.
My wife has her own account, and our accounts are bound to our controllers. When you press the xbox button you are immediately signed into your profile, and it's instant. When she launches a game with her controller, she sees her saves and vice versa for me. With Baldur's Gate 3 it even keeps all her mods separate from my mod-free setup.
Some game publishers (activision, ubisoft et al) require their own accounts, and that's usually also taken care of automatically. The xbox goes and sets up a profile on that publisher's system on first game launch.
I have a 10 years old Xbox One, and every fucking time my family and I want to play a game, maybe once in a few months or so, it's always a struggle. Oh, let me download a few gigs of a system update. Oh, and the game you want to play needs an update too. Oh, and you are now logged out so go remember your password and type it using the controller. It's never a seamless experience that you would expect of a game console, which has one job: let the users play games.
They ruined Minecraft in the same way. Microsoft login tied, emails, captchas, losing auth, losing purchases because it can’t tie auth to the system.
Microsoft is a joke.
Reminds me of the fact that I lost my Xbox account because they shutdown hotmail. My account is working on my Xbox but the password reset options are not supported by the OS on the Xbox. And I can’t change the email of the account from an Xbox. The support wasn’t helpful either. I read that somebody with the same issue got them to change the mail by logging in and out while on the phone. I don’t have the energy to jump through these hoops.
Meanwhile, an illegal pirate version from torrents works flawlessly after installation and double-clicking on the exe file.
Rather than download the 30GB Master Chief collection, you might try downloading the Xemu OG XBOX emulator plus the original game on archive.org.
Ha! This is pretty much what happened to me on my steamdeck the night before last. Login via GitHub or something nonsense. I was too tired, I turned it off. I tried a few years ago and I ended up in and endless loop of login redirects. Totally broken.
Why on earth does this it require a login in to play!? I'd prefer to emulated the OG box version, but that is one emulator I've never got working.
I had a similar experience this weekend. Some friends got together, one got the new Halo campaign, and we looked forward to playing co-op, like the good ol' days.
Well, adding a screensplit co-op now requires a log-in, which requires a phone to register via a QR code, which, after about 5 minutes of trying, completely failed. So we just turned it off and played Catan.
Been there as well. You just want to play a game you own and end up making new accounts and sharing personal details, and even then might not even succeed.
This is a big reason I try to keep my old consoles alive. My OG Xbox is queued up ready for a clock capacitor replace so I can fire up real Halo CE any time I want!
xbox hardware
I had one I received as a gift. Every week or two it would boot up to its green Welcome screen and then just sit there animating itself gently, without being interactable in any way. This is how it does software updates. Apps that have problems with things like server outages tend to just sit there failing silently, eventually taking the whole machine down. Sometimes It complains that wifi is too unstable to install an update and demands a wired ethernet connection instead.
Every month or two my unit started locking up at random forcing a system reset and reinstallation. I'm not sure why, mainly it runs youtube, netflix and crunchyroll; I've never enjoyed the feel of the xbox controller for gaming. You can't get any sort of technical information out of it unless you want to pay $30 or so for a developer pack, which provides some basic OS utilities and lets you run your own unsigned apps. I briefly considered doing the latter so I could make dashboards and browse them on the sofa, but I grew to despise the xbox design ethos so much that I just bought a PS5 instead.
I also have a ps3, which has been going strong for >15 years and only ever hiccups if the power is cut suddenly and it needs to do a disk check/repair on its next boot - in which case it informs me clearly about what's happening and why. The only reason it's not my main console is that companies like Netflix and crunchyroll stopped supporting the platform. I still boot it up sometimes so I can watch things I paid for via Amazon prime without ads, because Amazon stopped updating their ps3 app some years ago but it still works.
I started out with MS-DOS back in the 80s... errr, the 20th century and was technically invested in Microsoft's way of doing things for years, as it balanced technical depth and accessibility with an approachable user interface, without the constant tinkering and driver annoyances of Linux. Nowadays you would need to pay me to use it. The only gripe I have with Sony hardware is that there isn't any way to self-sign software if you want to make your widgets or apps to run on your own machine. The closest you can get is installing Roblox and then using their free developer tools (engine + a Lua derivative).
> Yea so mail, firstname, lastname, birthday, country, email
Does anyone even provide real information? What is the point of even asking for a name?
Had the same thought but with the new Halo remake which I own on PS5.
On booting the game, you're presented with the text "Press X to join" in the second player slot. That's a lie, pressing X just makes the screen flash.
Had to search online what to do. Turns out you need a Playstation account AND Microsoft account, AND they need to be linked just to join as a split-screen player. However, no prompt or UI is implemented to explain or do any of those for a second player.
Ok, setting out to do this BS. Feeling nostalgic about Halo CE LAN parties with 0 internet connection or accounts needed. She logs in with the PS account which she had to make to play another couch co-op one time a year ago. That itself was for no reason other than to boost Sony's MAU metrics but I digress. MS account made. I assume you need to create an Xbox gamer tag too, so we do that. Back to Halo, same flashing screen issue. No prompt appears to link the PS account to the MS account. I have a hunch that MS is incompetent and didn't implement the linking process except for the primary player. I'm right. You have to force close the game, switch the primary PlayStation profile to the second player, then relaunch the game. Finally got the prompt to link accounts. Now "Press X to join" works. Truly egregious how poorly implemented and communicated this is.
At this point we're 45 min in and have lost interest.
>I don't want to know what life is like having xbox hardware
For several years, you've been forced to login with a MS account on first boot.
> I don't want to know what life is like having xbox hardware
Fortunately, it's nothing like what you experienced at all.
the hardware is good
but it is so hard to give them money on it
i dread buying new games as it is a game of chance what way might work this time
I tried to login to Microsoft's account this week to play Sea of Thieves, and I literally couldn't log in for 30 minutes because it kept going on a redirect loop. Enter email, enter password, "we're checking your information", logged into into the account dashboard, but as soon as I clicked any button [1], got sent back to the login screen.
Tried two browsers to no avail. Found someone on Reddit that suggested resetting the password and finally managed to make progress. Utterly loathsome software, how the hell does a tech company exist when they can't even get their login system working properly?
1: all because I needed to change the country, now that I'm not in UK any more, as the game required age verification just to allow access to the multiplayer functionality. Thanks, Starmer.
> Since I couldn't do anything else,...
Sail the high seas my friend.
> I don't want to know what life is like having xbox hardware
It was pretty great up to the 360, but with the Xbox One everything went to shit. Game consoles were meant to be plug-and-play, today they are more hassle to setup than a PC with Steam (ok, I guess Playstation isn't quite as terrible yet).
I would bet that Microsoft is 100% composed of vibe coded slop these days. Everything they touch these days turns to shit.
I recently bought far cry 3 on steam and spent 20 minutes post-install trying to log into my ubisoft account between forgetting an old password, 2fa across multiple devices and a badly broken captcha system.
Silly, you should've paid $60 for the re-re-remake of halo one (which would still need a login i guess...)
Sorry though, i just reinstalled MCC yesterday to play Halo 1 myself, and lucky me my Microsoft account worked fine
Nothing infuriates me quite like an additional gaming account inside of a dedicated gaming platform. Running under a Steam/PSN/Xbox account and want to play the game you just bought? Sucks to be you. First create a Ubisoft/Blizzard/indie-studio-with-one-game login so we can better monetize something.
I've lost count of the times my buddy and I wanted to play coop, and I was forced to log in to my ms account for a split screen game. I remember back on the original xbox, and x360, using 'guest' just worked. Forcing people to login for couch coop is asinine.
And the Steam version is distinctly better to boot. The XBox Store version last I tried just straight up didn't work.
Microsoft's gaming division was in an absolute shambles and that was before they gutted it.
Eh. Recently I invited a friend over to play games. I have Linux so it's normal that shit doesn't work but I came across a bug where Steam would just casually take 300% of CPU when Steam Controller was connected and even if I managed to start the game, controllers wouldn't work. I couldn't debug the issue on time, so we did not play games. After she left I figured out that if I first connect the Xbox controller and then the Steam controller then it works, but if it's the other way around then it doesn't. Or in reverse, I don't remember and I'm away from my PC.
[dead]
[dead]
sounds tough. have you considered showing her an actually good game? just spitballing here
Hope you didn't preorder GTA 6 then :)
Or any Rockstar game on PC since Max Payne 3, for that matter...
Or Ubisoft titles etc etc.
This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap.
There's something seriously wrong in Redmond.
At least with linux, you can search on the web and find a forum post telling you the magic incantation. With Microsoft, you will be forced to consume some second-rate engineer's unmanaged, barely workable, edge case until it might or might not work.
Office on the web is a horror show this way.