Another reason to hate the digital age
Posted: January 22nd, 2017, 11:12 am
I purchased the Call of Duty Infinite Warfare Legacy Edition over the Black Friday weekend sale for $55 figuring I did want to play Infinite Warfare (IW) so I was basically getting a $4 discount as well as Modern Warfare (MW) Remastered for ‘free’. As many people know, IW came on a physical disk and MW is a 73GB download. That doesn’t include the IW download but I really didn’t care about that as you will see. I didn’t start the downloads until after Christmas and that was my first mistake. I downloaded both during peak season at the same time. I also had smaller digital purchases in my queue. When I saw how slow MW was downloading, I cancelled it and moved on with IW and other downloads. None of the other were a problem.
Then I went back to IW and it was still slow. I tried a variety of things to see if I could get things to speed up:
• Reconfigured my Xbox One settings to continue downloading 24/7
• Pause/Resume
• Uninstall/Reinstall
• Hard Reset
• Waited a few weeks to give the Activision servers a break
Nothing worked. I searched online and sure enough, I was not the only person who was complaining specifically about MW but no solution was to be found. I couldn’t believe how active the forums were about this issue.
Since I had other games to play (and download), I figured I would continue putting it off until yesterday. Before I started my download, I had checked my network speed and had been playing Forza Horizon 3 online so I knew my network was running efficiently. My wireless download speed was about 4MB/s while my wired (Xbox One) was about 11MB/s. Then I started to download MW and the problem was back – approximately 400KB/s. If this speed stays consistent, it will take 7-8 days to completely download. I’m sure I don’t have a cap on my internet usage but that is still ridiculous.
From my perspective, things just got worse……although that can be argued which part of this ordeal was more aggravating. I tried to contact to Activision Support. As you can probably guess, there is no phone number to talk to someone and it wants you to log in to report any issues. I usually don’t like this method of communication since it just ultimately becomes another source of e-mail spam but I was ready to take the plunge. I was still unable to get to a point I wanted to so that’s when I decided to make an admittedly weak attempt at getting a refund – only for MW. That’s when I noticed that it wanted me to grant them access to my Xbox. “Activision needs your permission to: Sign in to Xbox Live and access Xbox Live and partner services on your behalf. Activision will be able to access and update your Xbox Live account and interact with Xbox Live services on your behalf.” & “Access your Xbox Live information anytime. Activision will be able to see and update your Xbox Live information, even when you're not using this app.“. I immediately quit. To be fair, there seems to be another way to log in using your Activision account but they succeeded in doing what they wanted. I gave up. I made a feeble attempt to chat an Activision ambassador but no one ever replied after an hour.
While I prefer physical to digital, I’m running out of space in my media room and I never really minded digital copies. As a matter of fact, with some of the Games with Gold downloads, I’ve been giving away my physical copies of duplicate titles. However, this whole experience with MW has soured me to the point of no return. I’ll continue to download free games, indie games, etc. but I will never allow myself to be suckered into this kind of purchase again.
I should mention that I’ve played the original Modern Warfare so this remaster was more of a bonus and I loved IW so I don’t feel completely ripped off but it’s certainly eye-opening to a very sad trend.
Then I went back to IW and it was still slow. I tried a variety of things to see if I could get things to speed up:
• Reconfigured my Xbox One settings to continue downloading 24/7
• Pause/Resume
• Uninstall/Reinstall
• Hard Reset
• Waited a few weeks to give the Activision servers a break
Nothing worked. I searched online and sure enough, I was not the only person who was complaining specifically about MW but no solution was to be found. I couldn’t believe how active the forums were about this issue.
Since I had other games to play (and download), I figured I would continue putting it off until yesterday. Before I started my download, I had checked my network speed and had been playing Forza Horizon 3 online so I knew my network was running efficiently. My wireless download speed was about 4MB/s while my wired (Xbox One) was about 11MB/s. Then I started to download MW and the problem was back – approximately 400KB/s. If this speed stays consistent, it will take 7-8 days to completely download. I’m sure I don’t have a cap on my internet usage but that is still ridiculous.
From my perspective, things just got worse……although that can be argued which part of this ordeal was more aggravating. I tried to contact to Activision Support. As you can probably guess, there is no phone number to talk to someone and it wants you to log in to report any issues. I usually don’t like this method of communication since it just ultimately becomes another source of e-mail spam but I was ready to take the plunge. I was still unable to get to a point I wanted to so that’s when I decided to make an admittedly weak attempt at getting a refund – only for MW. That’s when I noticed that it wanted me to grant them access to my Xbox. “Activision needs your permission to: Sign in to Xbox Live and access Xbox Live and partner services on your behalf. Activision will be able to access and update your Xbox Live account and interact with Xbox Live services on your behalf.” & “Access your Xbox Live information anytime. Activision will be able to see and update your Xbox Live information, even when you're not using this app.“. I immediately quit. To be fair, there seems to be another way to log in using your Activision account but they succeeded in doing what they wanted. I gave up. I made a feeble attempt to chat an Activision ambassador but no one ever replied after an hour.
While I prefer physical to digital, I’m running out of space in my media room and I never really minded digital copies. As a matter of fact, with some of the Games with Gold downloads, I’ve been giving away my physical copies of duplicate titles. However, this whole experience with MW has soured me to the point of no return. I’ll continue to download free games, indie games, etc. but I will never allow myself to be suckered into this kind of purchase again.
I should mention that I’ve played the original Modern Warfare so this remaster was more of a bonus and I loved IW so I don’t feel completely ripped off but it’s certainly eye-opening to a very sad trend.