19 ms·

I 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

by mawadev 2mo ago

I 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

epistasis 2mo ago
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.
- Lord-Jobo 2mo ago
  It’s like they dump “bad at programming and don’t care about it” juice right into the water supply.
  - dartharva 2mo ago
    All problems with Microsoft products are design and intent problems, not engineering.
    - bitmasher9 2mo ago
      The design and intent are bad, but let’s not discount the large amount of bad engineering too.
      - 0cf8612b2e1e 2mo ago
        There is some brotherhood of coders who will not acknowledge programmers are anything less than perfect. All bugs and errors are the fault of project managers.
      - epistasis 2mo ago
        If an engineer executes on bad intent and design goals and builds a bad bridge, that's also a bad engineer. Engineers are not serfs, they have enough income and agency to be responsible for the fruits of their labor.
        bitmasher9 2mo ago
        Is it 2019 again?
        epistasis 2mo ago
        Can you explain this to me? I think it's far more 2000s, when we were having debates about whether software engineers were actually engineers, with professional responsibility, or not.
        tavavex 2mo ago
        I don't think they're talking about the debate itself, but maybe about the software job market of the 2010s. Back then, software engineers were more scarce and valuable than today, hypothetically giving them much more leverage to say 'no' to bad orders. Nowadays, many people are just trying to stay under the radar and remain employed.
    - somenameforme 2mo ago
      WinUI 3 was upgraded to stable/release when it had literally thousands of outstanding issues, including stuff like [fully replicable] 'using drag and drop causes the program to crash.' That was about the time I started opting out of the entire MS ecosystem after investing decades in it. I can't even imagine the chaos they must have going on inside for them to be failing the way they are on the outside. I'm also curious what started it. They've never been a pinnacle of engineering, but things went really went downhill hard in more modern times.
      - robotnikman 2mo ago
        There's a reason why people either stick to Win32 or go with something like Electron when it comes to making Windows apps.
- mawadev 2mo ago
  You know whats the cherry on top? I got it working today and you have to download the actual halo 1 campaign as a DLC from inside or outside the MCC game. Even if I got it working yesterday, I'd have to wait for another download. What the 30GB MCC does initially is still a mystery to me.
  - tavavex 2mo ago
    I looked into it and apparently just the launcher itself is 16GB because it's filled to the brim with extremely oversized videos and sound files, on top of an already overweight base. All this is supposed to be the peak of game dev prowess. We've had like 50 years of game dev just to evolve to this. It's not just huge launchers - almost everything AAA that's made today feels like it was designed to appear flashy at first glance in some meeting for people who have no idea what they're looking at, while performance, technical features, and the most basic user experience considerations are thrown out of the window.
    - mawadev 2mo ago
      I mean yeah, just wait until you hear about Ark survival ascended: A game with a single 188gb ucas file extracts itself during update, taking over 400gb just to patch 2gb and then rezips itself.
      - themanualstates 2mo ago
        Oh my. E.g. OpenWrt's massive toolchain at least compiles down to tiny binaries to make up for itself.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    Why don't you literally just pirate it. You already own it, so it's not even immoral.
    - seki285 2mo ago
      Can't play multiplayer with friends... I think but I'm not sure. It seems to rely on Steam or Microsoft services for regular and modded play.
- reaperducer 2mo ago
  This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap. When you try to save a short-term buck by offshoring your workforce, you end up with long-term problems and brand damage. And now vibe coding is the new offshoring, so we can make things worse at scale!
  - bitmasher9 2mo ago
    When did the offshoring happen, because Microsoft has been bad for a long time. Even in the 90s there were so many BSODs.
    - pferde 2mo ago
      Well, the classic BSODs were not all Microsoft's fault, many of them were on 3rd party driver developers. I think the worse thing here is all the subtle breakages and inconsistencies in Windows, as well as in the MS Office suite of products, constant redesigns of things that worked, adding layers upon layers of "make-up" on top that obscures functionality, etc etc.
      - bitmasher9 2mo ago
        I think “The Operating System is fundamentally Unstable” is a much bigger problem than “First party applications are redesigned too frequently.”
        pferde 2mo ago
        You're right, of course. The point I was trying to make (badly) is that people have hatred for Microsoft for a lot more than just BSODs of decades ago. There has been bad engineering upon bad engineering for many decades, manifesting in all kinds of ways. And that's what this subthread was discussing, Microsoft being bad.
    - inigyou 2mo ago
      Microsoft in the 90s was doing things that hadn't been done before with Windows. And the NT line, converging to consumers at XP, solved many of them, and by now they don't have an excuse any more.
- keiferski 2mo ago
  It is strange to me that people are re-discovering this today, in 2026. Microsoft has always been half-baked, even in the 80s and 90s. Heck, my parents basically raised me (20+ years ago) by running a business fixing problems with Microsoft products for their clients.
  - ecshafer 2mo ago
    This is why Microsoft is good, there is an entire industry around fixing their nonsense. They are being a job creator!
    - 12_throw_away 2mo ago
      A very very limited defense of Microsoft and their whole "support vendor" "ecosystem": if you are selling a complex product, there is value in having a robust knowledge base of known problems with known solutions, and a huge base of people who know all the right workflows. A buggier product that's well known and understood is maybe even preferable to a less buggy product with poorly understood failure modes. At least back in the heyday of the NT kernel times, it seemed like there were "MVP"s or whatever that knew the right way to do everything. (Not that I would know, I don't touch Microsoft's shit with a 10-foot-pole)
  - wing-_-nuts 2mo ago
    I remember windows 2000 being pretty rock solid. I used it as my gaming os for years while folks struggled with windows me and windows xp (IIRC, xp did eventually become pretty good)
    - fireflash38 2mo ago
      XP and 7 were only good because it was based off of 2000/NT.
      - buran77 2mo ago
        Literally everything that came after Windows Me both in the consumer and server space is based on NT, to this day. So I'm not sure this argument weighs much. P.S. My personal opinion is that Windows could be a great OS but MS keeps intentionally saddling it with more and more shit in the name of getting more from the user, instead of giving more to the user.
- r_lee 2mo ago
  Azure is also such a mess. 10 redirects to get to the portal, when creating an account/etc. if you do one thing wrong it might just disappear from a tenant or not bind properly or something and then you gotta do it all over again (happened last year) I just don't know how this is possible, why is everything so broken?
  - taosx 2mo ago
    No owners, no responsability, no incentive to fix it. Ticket grabbers and checklist markers.
  - eterm 2mo ago
    And the official auth URLs are always such random crap that I'm surprised people don't get phished left right and centre.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242 This is why. TLDR: complete incompetence at all levels
  - robotnikman 2mo ago
    Compared to the old Win32 apps and settings menus of Windows Server, the Azure web interface is a disaster.
  - Rury 2mo ago
    I once saw someone say something like this: "Working in a monopoly mega corp is like working for a 20 person company, connected to 20 other 20 person companies, connected to 20 similar entities containing similar 20 companies, with each group of 20 persons in each competing with each other for investment/budgeting." Maybe hyperbole... but to some extent I think that's about right. It's like you're not even a cohesive unit other than that thin marketing veneer facing the outside world. Things are often built in silos. Integration of products is almost always an after thought. Decisions/changes are done in response to outside markets or internal political games for promotional appeal and money. The turnover of people retiring, new hires coming. Most every mega corp today is nothing like it was 30 years ago. And so, things typically end up half-baked and the customer left wondering why the products are often such a mess. Now some companies do things better than others, and may have their stellar areas and their bad areas. Same goes for cities, and even countries, when you think about it.
- 0x3444ac53 2mo ago
  The bad part is that Microsoft (generally) used to have some of the best QA in the industry, and that was somewhat extended to Xbox. But they laid off their QA team a year or two ago because "AI will change everything!"
  - tempfile 2mo ago
    This definitely does not extend to games. I remember microsoft games having terrible UX over a decade ago (not the game, the account garbage around it).
    - 0x3444ac53 2mo ago
      So, I've had a pretty shit time with Microsoft products over the last ten years, but it wasn't quite as bad 5-7 years ago. Our disagreement on that might be that I'm only in my late 20s, so if you're older than I am, or had newer consoles than I had around that time, I might be a little more tolerant of jank. But according to the other replies, it seems Microsoft has been purging QA for years now.
  - vezycash 2mo ago
    >The bad part is that Microsoft (generally) used to have some of the best QA in the industry Blame Satya Nadella. He fired testers and turned customers to helpless beta testers.
    - 0x3444ac53 2mo ago
      Yeah based on your comment and the others, it seems he did an initial purge in 2014. QA doesn't get enough love :(
  - throwaway85825 2mo ago
    QA got laid off all decade ago. It's been 10 years of bugs like this weeks breaking boot on Dell's.
    - 0x3444ac53 2mo ago
- everdrive 2mo ago
  >With Microsoft, you will be forced to consume some second-rate engineer's unmanaged, Or, you'll find the official Microsoft documentation, but will just be out of date, or wrong, or otherwise will not reflect the actual Microsoft product in front of you. It's baffling that people say Linux is hard when I never need to work so hard to get basic things to work as I do with a normal Microsoft product.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  Microsoft is basically Oracle Lite. Oracle is not a software company, it is a government contract fulfilment company with a specialisation in software. Its function is to get money and the engineering department is only an excuse to tick all the boxes on a given contract so it can get paid. Microsoft is the same but also does corporate clients. The rest of us get the scraps.
- bilekas 2mo ago
  I don't have much to add except that people have the idea that this is a new low from microslop thanks to vibe coded Devs but it's really not. There has been for so long a culture of contractors being treated as printers. Then never given a long enough contract to receive any benefits because it is cheaper. Way and repeat. Nothing is fully understood and nobody knows where the focus needs to be. No wonder everything is in a state that it is. Garbage.
  - ColdStream 2mo ago
    There are stories of MS bringing in high school students to code core features on Windows 95/98 as a part of their summer intern programming. And you wonder why that system would to freeze up when ever you put a CD in and it had to spin up. They have always tried to cheap out on this stuff.
- AlexandrB 2mo ago
  > This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap. AKA: Slop. Microsoft was publishing slop before LLMs were even a thing, it's no wonder they were so eager to jump on the AI bandwagon once it showed up. Their company is uniquely set up to take advantage of a slop generator.
- still_grokking 2mo ago
  > This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap. > There's something seriously wrong in Redmond. I'd say: There is something seriously wrong with the people buying this shit since over 40 years. It's not like Microslop products weren't pure utter trash already decades ago. They got worse over time, especially lately with "AI", that's true, but nothing ever changed substantially.
- wartywhoa23 2mo ago
  I pretty much doubt it's incompetence. It all has been looking like a deliberately ill intent for quite a while.
- ponector 2mo ago
  >> There's something seriously wrong in Redmond. Is it? People are buying this crap, why should MS spend more money to increase quality? They will receive the same quarterly revenue but with lower profits. Shareholders will not be happy!
- hnlmorg 2mo ago
  It’s actually impressive just how badly Microsoft fcuked the online experience in Minecraft. It’s so bad that Occam’s Razor should suggest malice; because an organisation that large and that profitable surely cant be that incompetent at managing the sign in process for the world’s most popular game. Yes here we are. Back in the early 00s I coined the phrase “everything Microsoft touches turns to shit”. A reverse Midas touch. And unfortunately this is still proving true even into the 2020s
  - eleveriven 2mo ago
    The most damning part is that signing in isn't some obscure edge case. It's the front door to one of the biggest games ever made
- ColdStream 2mo ago
  To bring it back to Xbox a little. I recently picked up an Xbox one X, the late performance boost to their last generation. Firstly, the performance to price ratio is brilliant nowadays, when you get title at native 4K it is a really neat little thing to see. It can throw around a decent amount for a machine that is almost a decade old... except Halo 2 anniversary, the framerate is cooked on that one but does resolve a native 4K image, so there is that. But the system software quality is absolute rubbish. I have never seen any other system just trip over itself for just random reasons, it can be UI hang ups, installation issues, network connection issues, that it is constantly pinging their servers just to do basic things, endless random crash outs or any manner of similar problems. I never had that issue on their previous consoles or any other console for that matter. I mean once the software is going in a straight line, you can see the magic but the amount of junk to get to there is comical. an aside, the only game I can consistently have fail on Switch and PS4 nowadays is Quake 2 when you use their own hand picked mods, and yes, Microsoft owns Bethesda who releases it. Something is very wrong in Redmond. Yeah MS has always had a history of software quality problems but this feels very different. It is like they are just stacking abstraction layers on top of others and ending up with a rat-king of technology debt. Not just that but there seems to be a vibe of just general complacency, that is dragging it all down. Oh and their online web potart is some of the slowest most bug riddled trash I have ever seen online.
- robotnikman 2mo ago
  I've always felt the elimination of their QA department once the current CEO came in is what really started the decline in quality. Now they are being called Microslop for good reason.
- jedmeyers 2mo ago
  > This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap. Their PM motto is "quality is a feature", and obviously not everybody needs all the features.
- movedx 2mo ago
  > This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap. Whoa! Now hang on a minute. That's not fair. They've only been developing software for 51 years! It takes time to get good at these things, you know?
- binkHN 2mo ago
  Yep. I think Microsoft is planning to make all their money from AI; because all their other stuff is becoming wildly enshitified and I take every opportunity that I can to look for a replacement.
- tombert 2mo ago
  I feel like what Microsoft is best at is making something and convincing everyone to use it before anyone has been able to thoroughly check how terrible it is, and by the time people have pointed it out, it’s too late and people act like it’s impossible to change. Windows 11 has been a shitshow, but Windows has basically been a shitshow since at least Vista, and maybe XP. People defend XP, but let’s not forget that Windows Update was still broken shitware on XP. The “system repair tools” have never worked for anyone ever in history. System Restore barely-if-ever worked. Office is a shitshow. Teams is a shitshow. Their entire web presence is a shitshow. Everything that MS does is a shitshow. And despite all of this, I am still stuck playing IT boy with my parents’ computers because they refuse to use an operating system that isn’t complete dogshit.
  - 71bw 2mo ago
    >And despite all of this, I am still stuck playing IT boy with my parents’ computers because they refuse to use an operating system that isn’t complete dogshit. There is no such operating system.
    - tombert 2mo ago
      macOS isn't perfect but it is decidedly less shitty than Windows. Linux has its issues but it's still less terrible than Windows.
- bmitc 2mo ago
  > This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap. That's not all true. .NET/C#/F# are all technical marvels.
- eleveriven 2mo ago
  The difference is that Linux usually fails loudly and gives you something to investigate. Microsoft software often fails behind five layers of UI etc.
- duxup 2mo ago
  My phrase is that Microsoft's software feels like it is POINTED AT ME to make me do / jump through whatever hoops they want first. Me getting things done is an afterthought. It's not just Microsoft of course, it's a lot of places (streaming platforms only seem to want me to watch very specific movies), but it's very noticeable with Microsoft. Microsoft used to be imperfect, but it was utilitarian and I felt like I could get on with my task fairly fast and someone somewhere working there thought about how they might facilitate me doing those tasks. Now they think of other things.
- Danox 2mo ago
  Over the years when Microsoft has to compete on a level playing field they are hopeless, they only know one way playing from a monopoly and when they don’t have it well they suck. Copilot will be the end of Nadella.
anilakar 2mo ago
Average Ubisoft game experience on Steam.
- jabroni_salad 2mo ago
  I was gonna say, this is every time the gang feels like firing up a round of Uno.
ToucanLoucan 2mo ago
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.
darren_ 2mo ago
[flagged]
pelagicAustral 2mo ago
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.
- dwedge 2mo ago
  I don't know if I agree with you with this example. Sure it's annoying to find a streaming service but once done it generally works. Usually true with a film or TV show through the "forums" too, but not always. Sometimes it's the wrong episode, sometimes it's the wrong language, sometimes one particular show keeps buffering even for no obvious reason. And even though it's quite rare, you never know until you're sat with your wife or friends watching it, because who checks the show in advance?
  - Retr0id 2mo ago
    If you're talking about those random malvertising-supported streaming sites then sure, but torrenting is not like this at all.
    - dwedge 2mo ago
      No, I'm talking about downloaded files. It happens maybe 2% of the time. You can't be sure the indexers are giving you the correct one.
      - dmantis 2mo ago
        I haven't encountered such a thing on private trackers for a very long time. Like, for years. They usually have a very decent moderation and if they say that an entry has some particular resolution/subs/audio then it has it. Sure, you have to stay as a seeder for some ratio/period in such trackers and can't hit-and-run, but it gives a warm feeling of contributions anyway.
queenkjuul 2mo ago
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
avhception 2mo ago
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.
- herbst 2mo ago
  As far as i am concerned they stole my Minecraft account by force migrating it and me cannot being bothered doing all that, all the time again.
- hbn 2mo ago
  It's wild cause it was so easy circa ~2010, back before Mojang was purchased. Microsoft makes a web login seem like some kind of lost knowledge like Roman aqueducts.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    Mojang was username+password later email+password, following industry trends (username is easily seen in-game so you only have to guess a password which for many people is easier than guessing their email). It continued to be so, and then Microsoft forced everyone to switch to a Microsoft account, deleting the account of anyone who didn't do so (in complete violation of Notch's original sales contract with players). If you watch the progress bar of Prism Launcher logging you in to a Microsoft account you see it logs into Microsoft, goes through a bunch of indirection, logs into Xbox (!!), bunch of indirection, then logs into Mojang. And then you get to launch the game. It used to be a simple endpoint with username+password -> auth token. Not any more with Microsoft!
    - frollogaston 2mo ago
franze 2mo ago
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
- mawadev 2mo ago
  I don't know and let me spice this up with another story: I have a ps4 and I undusted it a couple of weeks ago, then after a couple of os and game updates that took 2h to finish, they asked me to subscribe to playstation plus to play online and to basically use my internet. What exactly is the point of a console at this point?
  - badpun 2mo ago
    In 2026 a console is a streamlined PC that can't be used for anything else but games - but the gaming experience is easier and less frustrating.
    - flohofwoe 2mo ago
      > but the gaming experience is easier and less frustrating ??? It's not the early 1990s anymore where you had to fiddle with autoexec.bat and assigning IRQs to get your DOS games to run. The only "downside" of PC gaming is that the hardware isn't subsidized like game consoles are, so you're upfront investment is a couple hundred bucks more. But then you don't need a subscription for multiplayer gaming, and PC games are cheaper (80 Euros for a game? come on...)
      - badpun 2mo ago
        There's plenty of people for whom handling a PC is difficult. E.g. various popups (windows update, antivirus, microsoft nagging about microsoft account, printer nagging, "disk almost full" nagging, OneDrive file sync nagging etc.) alone are too much for my Mom, whereas she's handling her iPad (for example) just fine. Also, there are issues specific to gaming on PC - every time there's a technical issue with a game (which in itself is never a thing on consoles), the forum recommend installing different version of the video driver. It may or may not work, but it leaves you with an evening of technical troubleshooting instead of gaming. Not to mention that games on Steam do break, esp. older ones which are no longer actively maintained [1]. I haven't heard of such fails on consoles, probably because they're a much more stable platform. [1] E.g. Steam's Civ 5 has been breaking for a couple years now, going into low-res video settings and refusing to bring them back up. Why? Who knows! The only thing that seems to work is using "repair files" option in Steam every time that happens.
larusso 2mo ago
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.
- mkjs 2mo ago
  There's more to this story, you've forgotten your password or something. Hotmail accounts moved to outlook.com, just reset it on a PC.
  - larusso 2mo ago
    Microsoft constantly deactivated my hotmail account due to no usage (I only created it when buying the XBox at launch back then and them insisting it needs to be hotmail). So they deactivated the account. I can still log in with my credentials on my old Xbox but not via web or newer Xbox models due to TFA which I can’t setup.
0cf8612b2e1e 2mo ago
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.
fouric 2mo ago
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.
- avhception 2mo ago
  My original Minecraft account got lost in all these shenanigans as well.
  - wraptile 2mo ago
    Bought Minecraft on one of the first survival mode releases back when Notch was streaming himself making the game and Microsoft stole this from me. I'm not particularly sad about the digital access itself but this low-key meant something to me :|
- vaylian 2mo ago
  "Give us your phone number or we will hold your minecraft account ransom"
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    Happened to me every time I ever made a Microsoft account. It works for one day, then some fraud process runs overnight and if I try to use it the next day I need a phone number. Good thing I first discovered this on a throwaway account.
  - whycome 2mo ago
    Remember when people were allowed to share phone numbers? Like it was actually the norm
    - 2mo ago
wing-_-nuts 2mo ago
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.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  I wonder if this one is actually deliberate as a slop-pushing thing, or if it's actually a developer level thing where some devs assumed every player has an account.
  - fwip 2mo ago
    It definitely depends on the game. Some allow second (or third or fourth) players to play as "guests" (not signed in to any particular account), and some don't. Party games, or games designed primarily for co-op, are definitely more likely to allow guests. Weirdly, in my limited experience it seems that 'premium' / AAA games are more likely to require an account - I suspect it's because they want to be able to save unlocks/progress for those players. Perhaps they think it will incentivize those players to buy a copy of their own.
ratelimitsteve 2mo ago
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.
- piltdownman 2mo ago
  uConnect and the various 3rd party storefront/DRMs are a travesty on the Steamdeck - the Decky plugin Junkstore goes some way to remedying it, but Far Cry 3 is harder to get working than any number of tempermental Switch emulations with pre-cached shaders and other graphics hacks.
throwawayffffas 2mo ago
> Since I couldn't do anything else,... Sail the high seas my friend.
geraldwhen 2mo ago
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.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  And that's just the login system, not even mentioning the glacial pace of updates which end up consisting mostly of slop anyway (though I like the nether and aquatic update. Those areas were sorely empty before.)
beAbU 2mo ago
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.
- strictnein 2mo ago
  No idea why this is being downvoted, because it accurately describes the Xbox experience.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
walrus01 2mo ago
> 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 https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/632877-halo-4/66477630 https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/632877-halo-4/66477630
- mawadev 2mo ago
  What an absolute gem, thank you
- olivierestsage 2mo ago
  Most interesting part of this for me is the lukewarm response it gets from the initial replies. The sense of humor here was ahead of its time.
  - ticulatedspline 2mo ago
    the original was 4chan[1] , then it circulated around. It had better reactions elsewhere at the time. [1] https://copypastatext.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Doritos-Dew-it-right..png https://copypastatext.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Doritos...
- ColdStream 2mo ago
  Yep... It gets a little less funny by the year. I think some of the most prophetic writing in terms of specifics came from Richard Stallman that basically called it all out in the late 1980s, including social media. You may not always like what he has to say but he did think through how this stuff can be leveraged against the users.
flohofwoe 2mo ago
> 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).
- inigyou 2mo ago
  Note "up to the 360" is only two different consoles! The Xbox, and the Xbox 360.
nottorp 2mo ago
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.
strictnein 2mo ago
> I don't want to know what life is like having xbox hardware Fortunately, it's nothing like what you experienced at all.
MegaDeKay 2mo ago
Rather than download the 30GB Master Chief collection, you might try downloading the Xemu OG XBOX emulator plus the original game on archive.org. https://xemu.app/ https://xemu.app/
nicechianti 2mo ago
[dead]
accrual 2mo ago
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!
anal_reactor 2mo ago
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.
drnick1 2mo ago
> Yea so mail, firstname, lastname, birthday, country, email Does anyone even provide real information? What is the point of even asking for a name?
- DonHopkins 2mo ago
  Don't be such a racist troll. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49171881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49171881
ventana 2mo ago
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.
- criddell 2mo ago
  Does the XBox not have an option for doing those updates in the background or when you aren't playing?
  - ventana 2mo ago
    It probably does, but it's turned off the majority of time. It's still plugged in, so I wouldn't mind if it updated itself silently, but no, it does not do it when it's turned off.
  - yesb 2mo ago
    It does but it's not reliable. The update process is also the slowest imaginable other than Windows update. It takes several minutes at times just to discover which games need updates.
  - asdff 2mo ago
    If you haven't played a game recently it will punt it out of the auto update queue.
- 312c 2mo ago
  You can use the Xbox app on your phone as a keyboard for the console. Or you can connect a physical keyboard.
  - ventana 2mo ago
    Do you work for Microsoft by any chance? :) I mean, come on. The vast majority of services that have apps running on TV implemented QR code based login workflow ages ago, and it just works. For Xbox, logging in is always a struggle.
sph 2mo ago
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.
kokada 2mo ago
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?
yesb 2mo ago
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.
napierzaza 2mo ago
[dead]
jazzpush2 2mo ago
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.
pipes 2mo ago
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.
anigbrowl 2mo ago
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).
devil1432 2mo ago
Meanwhile, an illegal pirate version from torrents works flawlessly after installation and double-clicking on the exe file.
yoyohello13 2mo ago
I would bet that Microsoft is 100% composed of vibe coded slop these days. Everything they touch these days turns to shit.
- AgentME 2mo ago
  MCC and Xbox Live on Windows have been exactly this jank at least since MCC's Windows release in 2019.
aucisson_masque 2mo ago
When I see Microsoft, I run away. No one is perfect but Microsoft is really efficient at making me lose my mind.
wao0uuno 2mo ago
I hope you refunded it.
SequoiaHope 2mo ago
Thank you for sharing. MCC is nice when it works. I’ve also found that running the original Halo in Xemu emulator makes for an extremely lightweight, fast, and performant experience. It’s remarkable how heavy weight MCC is compared to the original games.
cryo32 2mo ago
I did that. Then got a refund immediately. Then quit Steam and never played another fucking game. Then sold the gaming PC. Moved to board games which are tangible and I can play with friends. Extreme? Perhaps but it’s better for me.
matheusmoreira 2mo ago
I bet the pirates had to suffer through none of that...
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
qu4z-2 2mo ago
I did this a couple of months back. Ended up refunding the game after spending nearly two hours "playing" the account creation game. If someone doesn't want my money, that's fine by me I guess.
eleveriven 2mo ago
The hardest part of the Halo 1 campaign is apparently defeating Microsoft account creation
frollogaston 2mo ago
New Xboxes come with cupholders for the cans.
zamalek 2mo ago
And that's a single player game isn't it? With required login...

by mawadev 2mo ago

epistasis 2mo ago

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.

Lord-Jobo 2mo ago
It’s like they dump “bad at programming and don’t care about it” juice right into the water supply.
- dartharva 2mo ago
  All problems with Microsoft products are design and intent problems, not engineering.
  - bitmasher9 2mo ago
    The design and intent are bad, but let’s not discount the large amount of bad engineering too.
    - 0cf8612b2e1e 2mo ago
      There is some brotherhood of coders who will not acknowledge programmers are anything less than perfect. All bugs and errors are the fault of project managers.
    - epistasis 2mo ago
      If an engineer executes on bad intent and design goals and builds a bad bridge, that's also a bad engineer. Engineers are not serfs, they have enough income and agency to be responsible for the fruits of their labor.
      - bitmasher9 2mo ago
        Is it 2019 again?
        epistasis 2mo ago
        Can you explain this to me? I think it's far more 2000s, when we were having debates about whether software engineers were actually engineers, with professional responsibility, or not.
        tavavex 2mo ago
        I don't think they're talking about the debate itself, but maybe about the software job market of the 2010s. Back then, software engineers were more scarce and valuable than today, hypothetically giving them much more leverage to say 'no' to bad orders. Nowadays, many people are just trying to stay under the radar and remain employed.
  - somenameforme 2mo ago
    WinUI 3 was upgraded to stable/release when it had literally thousands of outstanding issues, including stuff like [fully replicable] 'using drag and drop causes the program to crash.' That was about the time I started opting out of the entire MS ecosystem after investing decades in it. I can't even imagine the chaos they must have going on inside for them to be failing the way they are on the outside. I'm also curious what started it. They've never been a pinnacle of engineering, but things went really went downhill hard in more modern times.
    - robotnikman 2mo ago
      There's a reason why people either stick to Win32 or go with something like Electron when it comes to making Windows apps.
mawadev 2mo ago
You know whats the cherry on top? I got it working today and you have to download the actual halo 1 campaign as a DLC from inside or outside the MCC game. Even if I got it working yesterday, I'd have to wait for another download. What the 30GB MCC does initially is still a mystery to me.
- tavavex 2mo ago
  I looked into it and apparently just the launcher itself is 16GB because it's filled to the brim with extremely oversized videos and sound files, on top of an already overweight base. All this is supposed to be the peak of game dev prowess. We've had like 50 years of game dev just to evolve to this. It's not just huge launchers - almost everything AAA that's made today feels like it was designed to appear flashy at first glance in some meeting for people who have no idea what they're looking at, while performance, technical features, and the most basic user experience considerations are thrown out of the window.
  - mawadev 2mo ago
    I mean yeah, just wait until you hear about Ark survival ascended: A game with a single 188gb ucas file extracts itself during update, taking over 400gb just to patch 2gb and then rezips itself.
    - themanualstates 2mo ago
      Oh my. E.g. OpenWrt's massive toolchain at least compiles down to tiny binaries to make up for itself.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  Why don't you literally just pirate it. You already own it, so it's not even immoral.
  - seki285 2mo ago
    Can't play multiplayer with friends... I think but I'm not sure. It seems to rely on Steam or Microsoft services for regular and modded play.
reaperducer 2mo ago
This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap. When you try to save a short-term buck by offshoring your workforce, you end up with long-term problems and brand damage. And now vibe coding is the new offshoring, so we can make things worse at scale!
- bitmasher9 2mo ago
  When did the offshoring happen, because Microsoft has been bad for a long time. Even in the 90s there were so many BSODs.
  - pferde 2mo ago
    Well, the classic BSODs were not all Microsoft's fault, many of them were on 3rd party driver developers. I think the worse thing here is all the subtle breakages and inconsistencies in Windows, as well as in the MS Office suite of products, constant redesigns of things that worked, adding layers upon layers of "make-up" on top that obscures functionality, etc etc.
    - bitmasher9 2mo ago
      I think “The Operating System is fundamentally Unstable” is a much bigger problem than “First party applications are redesigned too frequently.”
      - pferde 2mo ago
        You're right, of course. The point I was trying to make (badly) is that people have hatred for Microsoft for a lot more than just BSODs of decades ago. There has been bad engineering upon bad engineering for many decades, manifesting in all kinds of ways. And that's what this subthread was discussing, Microsoft being bad.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    Microsoft in the 90s was doing things that hadn't been done before with Windows. And the NT line, converging to consumers at XP, solved many of them, and by now they don't have an excuse any more.
keiferski 2mo ago
It is strange to me that people are re-discovering this today, in 2026. Microsoft has always been half-baked, even in the 80s and 90s. Heck, my parents basically raised me (20+ years ago) by running a business fixing problems with Microsoft products for their clients.
- ecshafer 2mo ago
  This is why Microsoft is good, there is an entire industry around fixing their nonsense. They are being a job creator!
  - 12_throw_away 2mo ago
    A very very limited defense of Microsoft and their whole "support vendor" "ecosystem": if you are selling a complex product, there is value in having a robust knowledge base of known problems with known solutions, and a huge base of people who know all the right workflows. A buggier product that's well known and understood is maybe even preferable to a less buggy product with poorly understood failure modes. At least back in the heyday of the NT kernel times, it seemed like there were "MVP"s or whatever that knew the right way to do everything. (Not that I would know, I don't touch Microsoft's shit with a 10-foot-pole)
- wing-_-nuts 2mo ago
  I remember windows 2000 being pretty rock solid. I used it as my gaming os for years while folks struggled with windows me and windows xp (IIRC, xp did eventually become pretty good)
  - fireflash38 2mo ago
    XP and 7 were only good because it was based off of 2000/NT.
    - buran77 2mo ago
      Literally everything that came after Windows Me both in the consumer and server space is based on NT, to this day. So I'm not sure this argument weighs much. P.S. My personal opinion is that Windows could be a great OS but MS keeps intentionally saddling it with more and more shit in the name of getting more from the user, instead of giving more to the user.
r_lee 2mo ago
Azure is also such a mess. 10 redirects to get to the portal, when creating an account/etc. if you do one thing wrong it might just disappear from a tenant or not bind properly or something and then you gotta do it all over again (happened last year) I just don't know how this is possible, why is everything so broken?
- taosx 2mo ago
  No owners, no responsability, no incentive to fix it. Ticket grabbers and checklist markers.
- eterm 2mo ago
  And the official auth URLs are always such random crap that I'm surprised people don't get phished left right and centre.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242 This is why. TLDR: complete incompetence at all levels
- robotnikman 2mo ago
  Compared to the old Win32 apps and settings menus of Windows Server, the Azure web interface is a disaster.
- Rury 2mo ago
  I once saw someone say something like this: "Working in a monopoly mega corp is like working for a 20 person company, connected to 20 other 20 person companies, connected to 20 similar entities containing similar 20 companies, with each group of 20 persons in each competing with each other for investment/budgeting." Maybe hyperbole... but to some extent I think that's about right. It's like you're not even a cohesive unit other than that thin marketing veneer facing the outside world. Things are often built in silos. Integration of products is almost always an after thought. Decisions/changes are done in response to outside markets or internal political games for promotional appeal and money. The turnover of people retiring, new hires coming. Most every mega corp today is nothing like it was 30 years ago. And so, things typically end up half-baked and the customer left wondering why the products are often such a mess. Now some companies do things better than others, and may have their stellar areas and their bad areas. Same goes for cities, and even countries, when you think about it.
0x3444ac53 2mo ago
The bad part is that Microsoft (generally) used to have some of the best QA in the industry, and that was somewhat extended to Xbox. But they laid off their QA team a year or two ago because "AI will change everything!"
- tempfile 2mo ago
  This definitely does not extend to games. I remember microsoft games having terrible UX over a decade ago (not the game, the account garbage around it).
  - 0x3444ac53 2mo ago
    So, I've had a pretty shit time with Microsoft products over the last ten years, but it wasn't quite as bad 5-7 years ago. Our disagreement on that might be that I'm only in my late 20s, so if you're older than I am, or had newer consoles than I had around that time, I might be a little more tolerant of jank. But according to the other replies, it seems Microsoft has been purging QA for years now.
- vezycash 2mo ago
  >The bad part is that Microsoft (generally) used to have some of the best QA in the industry Blame Satya Nadella. He fired testers and turned customers to helpless beta testers.
  - 0x3444ac53 2mo ago
    Yeah based on your comment and the others, it seems he did an initial purge in 2014. QA doesn't get enough love :(
- throwaway85825 2mo ago
  QA got laid off all decade ago. It's been 10 years of bugs like this weeks breaking boot on Dell's.
  - 0x3444ac53 2mo ago
everdrive 2mo ago
>With Microsoft, you will be forced to consume some second-rate engineer's unmanaged, Or, you'll find the official Microsoft documentation, but will just be out of date, or wrong, or otherwise will not reflect the actual Microsoft product in front of you. It's baffling that people say Linux is hard when I never need to work so hard to get basic things to work as I do with a normal Microsoft product.
inigyou 2mo ago
Microsoft is basically Oracle Lite. Oracle is not a software company, it is a government contract fulfilment company with a specialisation in software. Its function is to get money and the engineering department is only an excuse to tick all the boxes on a given contract so it can get paid. Microsoft is the same but also does corporate clients. The rest of us get the scraps.
bilekas 2mo ago
I don't have much to add except that people have the idea that this is a new low from microslop thanks to vibe coded Devs but it's really not. There has been for so long a culture of contractors being treated as printers. Then never given a long enough contract to receive any benefits because it is cheaper. Way and repeat. Nothing is fully understood and nobody knows where the focus needs to be. No wonder everything is in a state that it is. Garbage.
- ColdStream 2mo ago
  There are stories of MS bringing in high school students to code core features on Windows 95/98 as a part of their summer intern programming. And you wonder why that system would to freeze up when ever you put a CD in and it had to spin up. They have always tried to cheap out on this stuff.
AlexandrB 2mo ago
> This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap. AKA: Slop. Microsoft was publishing slop before LLMs were even a thing, it's no wonder they were so eager to jump on the AI bandwagon once it showed up. Their company is uniquely set up to take advantage of a slop generator.
still_grokking 2mo ago
> This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap. > There's something seriously wrong in Redmond. I'd say: There is something seriously wrong with the people buying this shit since over 40 years. It's not like Microslop products weren't pure utter trash already decades ago. They got worse over time, especially lately with "AI", that's true, but nothing ever changed substantially.
wartywhoa23 2mo ago
I pretty much doubt it's incompetence. It all has been looking like a deliberately ill intent for quite a while.
ponector 2mo ago
>> There's something seriously wrong in Redmond. Is it? People are buying this crap, why should MS spend more money to increase quality? They will receive the same quarterly revenue but with lower profits. Shareholders will not be happy!
hnlmorg 2mo ago
It’s actually impressive just how badly Microsoft fcuked the online experience in Minecraft. It’s so bad that Occam’s Razor should suggest malice; because an organisation that large and that profitable surely cant be that incompetent at managing the sign in process for the world’s most popular game. Yes here we are. Back in the early 00s I coined the phrase “everything Microsoft touches turns to shit”. A reverse Midas touch. And unfortunately this is still proving true even into the 2020s
- eleveriven 2mo ago
  The most damning part is that signing in isn't some obscure edge case. It's the front door to one of the biggest games ever made
ColdStream 2mo ago
To bring it back to Xbox a little. I recently picked up an Xbox one X, the late performance boost to their last generation. Firstly, the performance to price ratio is brilliant nowadays, when you get title at native 4K it is a really neat little thing to see. It can throw around a decent amount for a machine that is almost a decade old... except Halo 2 anniversary, the framerate is cooked on that one but does resolve a native 4K image, so there is that. But the system software quality is absolute rubbish. I have never seen any other system just trip over itself for just random reasons, it can be UI hang ups, installation issues, network connection issues, that it is constantly pinging their servers just to do basic things, endless random crash outs or any manner of similar problems. I never had that issue on their previous consoles or any other console for that matter. I mean once the software is going in a straight line, you can see the magic but the amount of junk to get to there is comical. an aside, the only game I can consistently have fail on Switch and PS4 nowadays is Quake 2 when you use their own hand picked mods, and yes, Microsoft owns Bethesda who releases it. Something is very wrong in Redmond. Yeah MS has always had a history of software quality problems but this feels very different. It is like they are just stacking abstraction layers on top of others and ending up with a rat-king of technology debt. Not just that but there seems to be a vibe of just general complacency, that is dragging it all down. Oh and their online web potart is some of the slowest most bug riddled trash I have ever seen online.
robotnikman 2mo ago
I've always felt the elimination of their QA department once the current CEO came in is what really started the decline in quality. Now they are being called Microslop for good reason.
jedmeyers 2mo ago
> This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap. Their PM motto is "quality is a feature", and obviously not everybody needs all the features.
movedx 2mo ago
> This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap. Whoa! Now hang on a minute. That's not fair. They've only been developing software for 51 years! It takes time to get good at these things, you know?
binkHN 2mo ago
Yep. I think Microsoft is planning to make all their money from AI; because all their other stuff is becoming wildly enshitified and I take every opportunity that I can to look for a replacement.
tombert 2mo ago
I feel like what Microsoft is best at is making something and convincing everyone to use it before anyone has been able to thoroughly check how terrible it is, and by the time people have pointed it out, it’s too late and people act like it’s impossible to change. Windows 11 has been a shitshow, but Windows has basically been a shitshow since at least Vista, and maybe XP. People defend XP, but let’s not forget that Windows Update was still broken shitware on XP. The “system repair tools” have never worked for anyone ever in history. System Restore barely-if-ever worked. Office is a shitshow. Teams is a shitshow. Their entire web presence is a shitshow. Everything that MS does is a shitshow. And despite all of this, I am still stuck playing IT boy with my parents’ computers because they refuse to use an operating system that isn’t complete dogshit.
- 71bw 2mo ago
  >And despite all of this, I am still stuck playing IT boy with my parents’ computers because they refuse to use an operating system that isn’t complete dogshit. There is no such operating system.
  - tombert 2mo ago
    macOS isn't perfect but it is decidedly less shitty than Windows. Linux has its issues but it's still less terrible than Windows.
bmitc 2mo ago
> This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap. That's not all true. .NET/C#/F# are all technical marvels.
eleveriven 2mo ago
The difference is that Linux usually fails loudly and gives you something to investigate. Microsoft software often fails behind five layers of UI etc.
duxup 2mo ago
My phrase is that Microsoft's software feels like it is POINTED AT ME to make me do / jump through whatever hoops they want first. Me getting things done is an afterthought. It's not just Microsoft of course, it's a lot of places (streaming platforms only seem to want me to watch very specific movies), but it's very noticeable with Microsoft. Microsoft used to be imperfect, but it was utilitarian and I felt like I could get on with my task fairly fast and someone somewhere working there thought about how they might facilitate me doing those tasks. Now they think of other things.
Danox 2mo ago
Over the years when Microsoft has to compete on a level playing field they are hopeless, they only know one way playing from a monopoly and when they don’t have it well they suck. Copilot will be the end of Nadella.

anilakar 2mo ago

Average Ubisoft game experience on Steam.

jabroni_salad 2mo ago
I was gonna say, this is every time the gang feels like firing up a round of Uno.

ToucanLoucan 2mo ago

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.

darren_ 2mo ago

[flagged]

pelagicAustral 2mo ago

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.

dwedge 2mo ago
I don't know if I agree with you with this example. Sure it's annoying to find a streaming service but once done it generally works. Usually true with a film or TV show through the "forums" too, but not always. Sometimes it's the wrong episode, sometimes it's the wrong language, sometimes one particular show keeps buffering even for no obvious reason. And even though it's quite rare, you never know until you're sat with your wife or friends watching it, because who checks the show in advance?
- Retr0id 2mo ago
  If you're talking about those random malvertising-supported streaming sites then sure, but torrenting is not like this at all.
  - dwedge 2mo ago
    No, I'm talking about downloaded files. It happens maybe 2% of the time. You can't be sure the indexers are giving you the correct one.
    - dmantis 2mo ago
      I haven't encountered such a thing on private trackers for a very long time. Like, for years. They usually have a very decent moderation and if they say that an entry has some particular resolution/subs/audio then it has it. Sure, you have to stay as a seeder for some ratio/period in such trackers and can't hit-and-run, but it gives a warm feeling of contributions anyway.

queenkjuul 2mo ago

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

avhception 2mo ago

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.

herbst 2mo ago
As far as i am concerned they stole my Minecraft account by force migrating it and me cannot being bothered doing all that, all the time again.
hbn 2mo ago
It's wild cause it was so easy circa ~2010, back before Mojang was purchased. Microsoft makes a web login seem like some kind of lost knowledge like Roman aqueducts.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  Mojang was username+password later email+password, following industry trends (username is easily seen in-game so you only have to guess a password which for many people is easier than guessing their email). It continued to be so, and then Microsoft forced everyone to switch to a Microsoft account, deleting the account of anyone who didn't do so (in complete violation of Notch's original sales contract with players). If you watch the progress bar of Prism Launcher logging you in to a Microsoft account you see it logs into Microsoft, goes through a bunch of indirection, logs into Xbox (!!), bunch of indirection, then logs into Mojang. And then you get to launch the game. It used to be a simple endpoint with username+password -> auth token. Not any more with Microsoft!
  - frollogaston 2mo ago

franze 2mo ago

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

mawadev 2mo ago
I don't know and let me spice this up with another story: I have a ps4 and I undusted it a couple of weeks ago, then after a couple of os and game updates that took 2h to finish, they asked me to subscribe to playstation plus to play online and to basically use my internet. What exactly is the point of a console at this point?
- badpun 2mo ago
  In 2026 a console is a streamlined PC that can't be used for anything else but games - but the gaming experience is easier and less frustrating.
  - flohofwoe 2mo ago
    > but the gaming experience is easier and less frustrating ??? It's not the early 1990s anymore where you had to fiddle with autoexec.bat and assigning IRQs to get your DOS games to run. The only "downside" of PC gaming is that the hardware isn't subsidized like game consoles are, so you're upfront investment is a couple hundred bucks more. But then you don't need a subscription for multiplayer gaming, and PC games are cheaper (80 Euros for a game? come on...)
    - badpun 2mo ago
      There's plenty of people for whom handling a PC is difficult. E.g. various popups (windows update, antivirus, microsoft nagging about microsoft account, printer nagging, "disk almost full" nagging, OneDrive file sync nagging etc.) alone are too much for my Mom, whereas she's handling her iPad (for example) just fine. Also, there are issues specific to gaming on PC - every time there's a technical issue with a game (which in itself is never a thing on consoles), the forum recommend installing different version of the video driver. It may or may not work, but it leaves you with an evening of technical troubleshooting instead of gaming. Not to mention that games on Steam do break, esp. older ones which are no longer actively maintained [1]. I haven't heard of such fails on consoles, probably because they're a much more stable platform. [1] E.g. Steam's Civ 5 has been breaking for a couple years now, going into low-res video settings and refusing to bring them back up. Why? Who knows! The only thing that seems to work is using "repair files" option in Steam every time that happens.

larusso 2mo ago

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.

mkjs 2mo ago
There's more to this story, you've forgotten your password or something. Hotmail accounts moved to outlook.com, just reset it on a PC.
- larusso 2mo ago
  Microsoft constantly deactivated my hotmail account due to no usage (I only created it when buying the XBox at launch back then and them insisting it needs to be hotmail). So they deactivated the account. I can still log in with my credentials on my old Xbox but not via web or newer Xbox models due to TFA which I can’t setup.

0cf8612b2e1e 2mo ago

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.

fouric 2mo ago

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.

avhception 2mo ago
My original Minecraft account got lost in all these shenanigans as well.
- wraptile 2mo ago
  Bought Minecraft on one of the first survival mode releases back when Notch was streaming himself making the game and Microsoft stole this from me. I'm not particularly sad about the digital access itself but this low-key meant something to me :|
vaylian 2mo ago
"Give us your phone number or we will hold your minecraft account ransom"
- inigyou 2mo ago
  Happened to me every time I ever made a Microsoft account. It works for one day, then some fraud process runs overnight and if I try to use it the next day I need a phone number. Good thing I first discovered this on a throwaway account.
- whycome 2mo ago
  Remember when people were allowed to share phone numbers? Like it was actually the norm
  - 2mo ago

wing-_-nuts 2mo ago

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.

inigyou 2mo ago
I wonder if this one is actually deliberate as a slop-pushing thing, or if it's actually a developer level thing where some devs assumed every player has an account.
- fwip 2mo ago
  It definitely depends on the game. Some allow second (or third or fourth) players to play as "guests" (not signed in to any particular account), and some don't. Party games, or games designed primarily for co-op, are definitely more likely to allow guests. Weirdly, in my limited experience it seems that 'premium' / AAA games are more likely to require an account - I suspect it's because they want to be able to save unlocks/progress for those players. Perhaps they think it will incentivize those players to buy a copy of their own.

ratelimitsteve 2mo ago

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.

piltdownman 2mo ago
uConnect and the various 3rd party storefront/DRMs are a travesty on the Steamdeck - the Decky plugin Junkstore goes some way to remedying it, but Far Cry 3 is harder to get working than any number of tempermental Switch emulations with pre-cached shaders and other graphics hacks.

throwawayffffas 2mo ago

> Since I couldn't do anything else,... Sail the high seas my friend.

geraldwhen 2mo ago

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.

inigyou 2mo ago
And that's just the login system, not even mentioning the glacial pace of updates which end up consisting mostly of slop anyway (though I like the nether and aquatic update. Those areas were sorely empty before.)

beAbU 2mo ago

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.

strictnein 2mo ago
No idea why this is being downvoted, because it accurately describes the Xbox experience.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]

walrus01 2mo ago

> 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 https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/632877-halo-4/66477630 https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/632877-halo-4/66477630

mawadev 2mo ago
What an absolute gem, thank you
olivierestsage 2mo ago
Most interesting part of this for me is the lukewarm response it gets from the initial replies. The sense of humor here was ahead of its time.
- ticulatedspline 2mo ago
  the original was 4chan[1] , then it circulated around. It had better reactions elsewhere at the time. [1] https://copypastatext.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Doritos-Dew-it-right..png https://copypastatext.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Doritos...
ColdStream 2mo ago
Yep... It gets a little less funny by the year. I think some of the most prophetic writing in terms of specifics came from Richard Stallman that basically called it all out in the late 1980s, including social media. You may not always like what he has to say but he did think through how this stuff can be leveraged against the users.

flohofwoe 2mo ago

> 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).

inigyou 2mo ago
Note "up to the 360" is only two different consoles! The Xbox, and the Xbox 360.

nottorp 2mo ago

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.

strictnein 2mo ago

> I don't want to know what life is like having xbox hardware Fortunately, it's nothing like what you experienced at all.

MegaDeKay 2mo ago

Rather than download the 30GB Master Chief collection, you might try downloading the Xemu OG XBOX emulator plus the original game on archive.org. https://xemu.app/ https://xemu.app/

nicechianti 2mo ago

[dead]

accrual 2mo ago

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!

anal_reactor 2mo ago

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.

drnick1 2mo ago

> Yea so mail, firstname, lastname, birthday, country, email Does anyone even provide real information? What is the point of even asking for a name?

DonHopkins 2mo ago
Don't be such a racist troll. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49171881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49171881

ventana 2mo ago

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.

criddell 2mo ago
Does the XBox not have an option for doing those updates in the background or when you aren't playing?
- ventana 2mo ago
  It probably does, but it's turned off the majority of time. It's still plugged in, so I wouldn't mind if it updated itself silently, but no, it does not do it when it's turned off.
- yesb 2mo ago
  It does but it's not reliable. The update process is also the slowest imaginable other than Windows update. It takes several minutes at times just to discover which games need updates.
- asdff 2mo ago
  If you haven't played a game recently it will punt it out of the auto update queue.
312c 2mo ago
You can use the Xbox app on your phone as a keyboard for the console. Or you can connect a physical keyboard.
- ventana 2mo ago
  Do you work for Microsoft by any chance? :) I mean, come on. The vast majority of services that have apps running on TV implemented QR code based login workflow ages ago, and it just works. For Xbox, logging in is always a struggle.

sph 2mo ago

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.

kokada 2mo ago

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?

yesb 2mo ago

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.

napierzaza 2mo ago

[dead]

jazzpush2 2mo ago

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.

pipes 2mo ago

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.

anigbrowl 2mo ago

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).

devil1432 2mo ago

Meanwhile, an illegal pirate version from torrents works flawlessly after installation and double-clicking on the exe file.

yoyohello13 2mo ago

I would bet that Microsoft is 100% composed of vibe coded slop these days. Everything they touch these days turns to shit.

AgentME 2mo ago
MCC and Xbox Live on Windows have been exactly this jank at least since MCC's Windows release in 2019.

aucisson_masque 2mo ago

When I see Microsoft, I run away. No one is perfect but Microsoft is really efficient at making me lose my mind.

wao0uuno 2mo ago

I hope you refunded it.

SequoiaHope 2mo ago

Thank you for sharing. MCC is nice when it works. I’ve also found that running the original Halo in Xemu emulator makes for an extremely lightweight, fast, and performant experience. It’s remarkable how heavy weight MCC is compared to the original games.

cryo32 2mo ago

I did that. Then got a refund immediately. Then quit Steam and never played another fucking game. Then sold the gaming PC. Moved to board games which are tangible and I can play with friends. Extreme? Perhaps but it’s better for me.

matheusmoreira 2mo ago

I bet the pirates had to suffer through none of that...

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

qu4z-2 2mo ago

I did this a couple of months back. Ended up refunding the game after spending nearly two hours "playing" the account creation game. If someone doesn't want my money, that's fine by me I guess.

eleveriven 2mo ago

The hardest part of the Halo 1 campaign is apparently defeating Microsoft account creation

frollogaston 2mo ago

New Xboxes come with cupholders for the cans.

zamalek 2mo ago

And that's a single player game isn't it? With required login...