I got an Xbox 360 about a year ago with the hope of using it as a media player for my HP Media Vault because it is supposed to be a DLNA-compliant media server. It’s not. You can get it to work by installing Twonkyvision’s server on the Media Vault (which costs another $40), but it won’t stream Divx/xvid-encoded videos, which pretty much renders it useless as a media player in my opinion.
I’m not much of a gamer myself, and so the Xbox 360 hasn’t gotten much use. For some reason that I cannot recall, I decided to upgrade my Xbox 360 silver membership (which is free) to an Xbox Live Gold membership which costs about $7.99/month. I figured I could always just switch back to the free membership if I didn’t use the Gold membership features. After a while of seeing that monthly charge appear on the credit card, I decided to cancel it. I first tried canceling it on-line via the webpage for Live, then through the Xbox console, and wasted at least a half hour before searching on the Internet only to find out that that only way to cancel it is to call up 1-800-4MY-XBOX (1-800-469-9269) to wait to talk to an operator. And that took an additional 18 minutes, most of which time I was on hold.
I really hate it when a company makes such an obvious attempt to hang on to subscription fees that it causes that level of inconvenience when attempting to cancel a service. Signing up took a few minutes and I didn’t need to call anyone, but canceling took 48 minutes from my life. So I’ll post this here for three reasons:
I hope someone Diggs this and maybe it will get the attention of the person Microsoft who can correct the situation. If they do, I’ll gladly remove this from my blog.
Well it was as easy as clicking the ON button. That’s not so hard… but it is kind of funny how they just beg and plead with you. “you’ll be missing out!” and “All your friends will be waiting for you.” (Which I know for a fact that most ofthem won’t because I don’t play all the games they play anyway.) But they did let me cancle easily enough (although they don’t quite tell you how) and I can get a membership thing card anytime which I think is better than monthly renewal anyway. Tha’ts how my friends do it, that’s how I’ll do it… if I don’t trade it in fr a PS3 like I plan.
I am so mad right now. we bought my son a yr gold membership back in november, my son played for over a month then they suspended the account saying the payment never went through we spent around 20 extra dollars sending them proof, and they still say the payment didnt go through. We said fine, take off the credit card we will just buy the gold pre paid card, its been a freaking month, last night they hung up on me 5 times when I tried to cancel, and they decided to hit my card an additional 4 times last night. oh by the way they have tried to bill me for 18 years worth of xbox live gold in the last 2 month. After we get this done we will never deal with this company again. I regret we ever even bought the xbox 360, not only should the company be shut down but they should go to prison for credit card fraud because that is exactly what they are doing, and just from reading all the responses Im not the only one this has happened to nor am I the only one that it is continuing to happen to.
On xbox.com, go to live, login, and go to your contact information, then go to modify membership level and click the word ON next to automatic renewal. It’s a hassle, but can be done online.