Mordiceius' Gaming Blog Flying Away on a Wing and a Prayer

The Major Flaw With XBox Live

So I've been playing a great deal of Rock Band 2 on the 360 this past week. Fable 2 just came in from Gamefly as well so I expect that will be taking up a lot of my time. I know that I'm a bit late on jumping into the next-gen console bandwagon, but the PC game front is pretty quite right now and for the immediate future. I do though have another write up to do on a game a played recently.

Anyway, all this gaming on the 360 has really opened my eyes to what the major flaw is with XBox Live. Had I not come from a strong PC gaming background it would have never bothered me as I probably wouldn't have noticed it. XBox Live seems to have a huge focus on bringing friends together to play games online but it lacks what I believe is a very important aspect of this: community tools.

Microsoft needs to take a look at what Valve did with the Steam Communities and just copy it. They could give it some hip name or something but either way, they need community tools.

It seems one of the big complaints by people I know is that the XBox Live friends list caps at 100 friends. This wouldn't be nearly a problem if they had the ability to create communities. At the current time everyone is just having to friend up everyone in their communities to keep contact on XBox. The implementation of Steam-style community tools wouldn't take much retooling and would be a major boon for XBox live. The friends list could take role of just being your more personal contacts the community would be your more associate-like contacts.

All in all, I believe the Steam Community is flawlessly executed in its present iteration. I would love to be able to have XBox community tabs for each community I frequent such as Gamers With Jobs, Something Awful, or a group from my WoW server.

Please Microsoft, please add communities.