[tomster2300]

I thought I'd give a quick follow up and an explanation on how I finally got my issue resolved. I tried the phone support once more and finally got my issue bumped up to an "investigative team" (I laughed at this), who said they would call me with any additional information. I didn't believe them, so I went ahead and posted on the official xbox live forums a thorough, polite post explaining my issue, my attempts to resolve it, and the unhelpful service I had experience thus far. Within the hour one of the xbox live program managers responded and offered to look into it for me. Within another hour I was told my account was corrupted and beyond recovery, but I was given a free year of xbox live service. He also looked into the status of my phone support inquiry and said they were waiting on me to call them back so they could give me a free year as well. He said to call them and redeem that one too.

So, within two hours of posting online I was given acknowledgment of my issue and one free year of xbox live. Compare that to one month's worth of weekends calling tech support, during which I was given the run-around and frequent disconnections. I finally received one free year of xbox live that was redeemable upon me calling them back, but even that was the complete opposite of what they told me to do during our last conversation.

I am very appreciative of the two free years of service, and I made sure to respond to both the manager and in my xbox thread concerning his quick resolution. Regardless of this, I still feel Microsoft has dropped the ball. I understand their size makes it difficult to fully serve each customer, but their current and recommended form of support / contact is a complete and utter joke. Before their big winter xbox update, the contact email form on their support page would not even work. It would show an error message after clicking send, despite the amount of time you spent logged into the site.

I hope they get their act together soon, although I highly doubt they will.