Xbox Live bug found, by me. Just.... Super.

[fedexin]

**Minor Rant Ahead**

Black Ops came out and my stepson was really into it and asked about mutiplayer online. After being a loyal xbox live subscriber since '06, and having no issues at all, I decided my family could use some accounts as well for some online gaming. I signed up for a family gold account, and associated one of the available slots with an account on my machine. After some minor setup issues, including the need to create a new windows live account, all was well.

Some new DLC came out last month for Black Ops, and I wanted to let him download it for himself, with his own gold account. The family center allows you to grant an allowance to child account from the parent account. Great!

So I granted the allowance via my computer, and then we went to his account on the xbox. There's 1200 MS points ($15) in there. Boom.

He goes to the store, selects the Escalation pack, and hits purchase. Up pops a prompt for a password. Uh oh.

See, when you create a gold account from the family center, it goes to over to windows live for an auto generated email and password, and only shows you all of this info once. Its something like [email protected]. You can find the email again easy enough, but the password only appears once. They don't email the new account info to the parent account, and there is no personal data associated with it since it's auto generated.

No personal data means there is no way you can prove you own the account to get a password reset email sent to the parent account. Email recovery messages never came, even though the system said it was sending. Phone reps told me that it takes possibly 5 days for an email from that system to go through, call again next week.

The connection between the parent and child accounts, a rep told me, cannot be seen by the current Customer Support software at MS yet. They can see I gifted the points to the other account, but the system won't allow me to take back the points, its a one way street.

After literally a F&*#$NG month on the phone with Xbox live support (Several hour-long phone calls a weekend, for 4 weeks now.) they're not going to refund me the money. The 1200 points will sit unused in a locked account.

[BoringSupreez]

Make a big stink about it to Microsoft, that''l help. I'm not being sarcastic here, you really shouldn't just roll over and let them take 1200 points off you if you don't get a working product.

[fedexin]

Make a big stink about it to Microsoft, that''l help. I'm not being sarcastic here, you really shouldn't just roll over and let them take 1200 points off you if you don't get a working product.

I've been searching for emails/contact numbers, all I can come up with so far is major nelson. Anyone have a contact inside?

[MrHealthy]

Submit your story to The Comsumerist. They speciallize in reporting on stuff like this.

http://consumerist.com/

If it gets published Microsoft might 'make good' with you.

[Flake]

Consumerist is a good idea - basically, you want to set up a situation where giving you your points is cheaper than dealing with bad publicity.

[fedexin]

Thanks for the advice, I emailed the Consumerist!

[pankakes123]

My advice, don't waste your time with Black Ops.

[Flake]

My advice, don't waste your time with Black Ops.

...that's not exactly the advice the OP was looking for, you know?

[dsheinem]

My advice, don't waste your time with Black Ops.

My advice: set pankakes123 to "ignore"

[Pulsar_t]

I despise Black Ops, but pankake's advice is misplaced, even though I utterly agree with it.