Patuxent wrote:Anyone else having the problem with the inbox stuck on "loading..." forever? Is there a fix or is this problem on the Chessmaster Live side?
dosfx wrote:I'm still having this problem. It is a server side issue. The problem is there is nobody you can talk to in order to have it fixed. I've tried everything I can think of. I'm afraid you're probably just out of luck like the rest of us. We paid for a game that just doesn't work for us any more. I used to keep 12 message chess games going and check them every night before I went to bed. I did this from the day the game came out until it quit working. Its pretty frustrating. I guess all we can do is hope for some time of reset of the scores and other server side data.
dosfx wrote:Yes, once it quit working, it has never worked again. I try it from time to time hoping it will. I love Chess. I'm not great, but I do play competitively when I can. Now I just get a few games in on FICS before I go to bed.When I first started having issues, I noticed there was a game where there was no opponent listed in my list. It said I had lost, but I couldn't remember this loss as I hadn't finished a game recently. When I'd try to load the game it'd say the game was unavailable. I couldn't view it. I couldn't delete it either. I figured there was something wrong locally so I deleted the game and all the game saves from my hard drive. I downloaded the game again after and the odd game was there again. I figured there was nothing I could do so I just ignored the game. Less than a week later I got the loading error and the message chess feature of the game has not worked since.Since getting the loading error I have deleted the game and game saves several times. I've even upgraded to an Elite with a new hard drive and copied nothing over. The error still persists though.
dosfx wrote:I'm sorry to hear about your troubles. It sounds like you're having the same issue. I've talked to several others and they've all said it started with an errored game.This is really dissapointing to me. I bought a 360 the day it came out and I waited a long time for a decent chess game to come out in the marketplace. Although not perfect, chessmaster was a pretty decent effort. It is a social game. You do make friends and then one day due to no fault of your own its gone and there is nothing you can do about it. I just wish there was somebody you could get to fix this. I've talked to people at both Ubisoft and Microsoft and have gotten nowhere.Please keep me posted. I plan on posting here again if this issue ever gets resolved for me. As for right now I'm pretty much resigned to waiting for the server data to get cleared or another chess game to come out.
Thanks for keeping us posted on your progress. I did contact Microsoft twice. During the second call I was told it was Ubisoft's product and I should contact them. I did call Ubisoft and they told me the same thing you were told. Microsoft hosts the servers and is responsible for this issue. I called Microsoft once more explaining the problem again, telling them I had contacted Ubisoft and what Ubisoft had told me. The person I talked to gave me the same runaround, telling me Ubisoft was responsible. I did not get to talk to a manager. This is the point where I gave up. You've made more progress than I did.At this point I'm pretty confident the issue is server-side. I know Microsoft hosts the servers. Somebody is going to have to get through to the right person at Microsoft to get this fixed. Hopefully you'll be the one.As for my personal practices, I was able to have 11 or 12 games open at a time due to my rating and I usually had that many open. When a game finished, I always deleted it from my inbox immediately. The few exceptions were complex games I wanted to review later. In those cases I would save the game to my hard drive and then remove them from my inbox. I would say maybe 95% of the games I played I did not save before deleting. The other 5% I saved and still removed.When I ran into the weird game that couldn't be viewed or deleted, I was actually down to about 7 games. This would happen in situations where I had several games finish in the same evening, usually from people not playing any moves. When I had several spots open, I would first look for available games and take what was out there. If I had spots to fill, I would only place one challenge out there. I didn't want to put 5 challenges out and end up playing the same person in 5 games. From there, every night I checked my games, I would put out another challenge. I would do this nightly until my box was full again.I can only speculate what would cause this to happen. I wonder if it has something to do with the account you're playing against expiring. Its situations like that which developers don't always plan for.
Please keep me informed on your progress. I have replies to this post being emailed to me. I may put in another call myself. I would really like to use the message chess feature. I miss it.
Hi DosFx,I'm on the phone with MS support as I'm writing. They called me yesterday and left me a message that they had a resolution for me & provided the case number. I was out from work yesterday. I called MS back and of course have to speak to a Level 1 person again. They asked me questions, trying to piece together what's in the notes and what I stated already, which is a little frustrating. Then they transferred me to a manager in Level 2. She is asking me everyting again all over again as I'm writing this. This time even more detailed notes because she read back to me what I stated and allowed me to re-explain and wrote exactly what I stated instead of trying to interpret.
I noticed you stated that if a player's Live account expires while you are playing, this might happen. This is exactly what happened to me. The other player has a friend invite from me, never responded and when I check, the last game he played was Chessmaster Live and has never been online again. Probably got a 30 day Gold Free Trial. He never played and locked me up. He does appear as one of the players I've played Chessmaster with on the LeaderBoard, however what is interesting is that he's never played a game and never lost a game with an ELO of 600. She wrote all this down and is escalating to a Level 3 Service Rep.
I activated another gamer tag last night and I was able to get into the inbox to create and view games. I went back to my Skier7667 tag and was not able to create a Message Chess game because it told me I had 7 open games and needed to update my ELO or delete the games. Since I couldn't delete the games, I tried creating an Xbox Live game and was able to do that. I figured that if I played a game and won, it would raise my ELO and maybe that would work in the interim.
Well I was able to play, someone joined in, but I unfortunately lost, so my ELO for Live Chessmaster went down. Not only was it not so much fun to lose, but I didn't accomplish anything with regard to the Message Chess issue.
I think it would be a good idea if you would try too because they would see there is more than one person having this problem. People start the process, but give up because it's so frustrating, so MS thinks there really isn't a problem.
Now is the time to jump in and reopen or start again. You are welcome to have my case # with MS if you want to (just PM me), that way when you call you can refer to it, so they will see that this is a real issue and not with just one person. I think this is associated with my gamertag or my Xbox 360, not a problem on their end - not true. It's on their end or the game itself.
Let me know what you think. I will be awaiting a call from them again - this time from Level 3 I was told. I just hope when they call I'm available so I don't have to start from Level 1 again. Level 1 told me they cannot directly patch me straight through to Level 3. Level 3 calls out, but does not accept calls in. Sounds the same as where I work. We don't want customers to contact our programers or support people directly. They have to call an extention and the support person picks up the call. If the support person calls the cusotmer and they are not available, a message is left to call the 800 number, not their own number. This causes the customer to almost start from scratch. That's why all my customers end up calling me directly when they can't get a support person directly, ha! ha!
Let me know how else I can help. The more of us that make the effort, the better chance this issue will be resolved.
dosfx wrote:Thanks for the update. I don't know how you persist. I gave up long ago. There is a failure in customer service here. I love my 360, but I have always felt like I've been on my own since buying it. Good luck and keep us posted. You're a lot more persistant than I am.
I've been missing message chess for a while. I played it every day for several months before it stopped working. I'm happy to say that I've found a suitable alternative on Facebook. Chess.com has an application there where you can play message chess type games, giving a number of days per move which you can set. The application tracks your rating, allows you to have multiple games open at once, saves your games and more. Based off of features, this application has so much more than Chessmaster's message chess.
I'm still hoping message chess gets fixed, but until it does, I'm happy to be playing this type of game again. If you're interested in this, you can find it by logging into Facebook and going to applications. Click "find more" and type in "Chess". It should be at the top of your results, but if it isn't, click on "most active users" and it will be. It'll say "Chess by Chess.com" and will have a picture of a green pawn next to it.
Hi dosfx,Well a resolution has been reached by Microsoft, however unfortunately it does not fix the problem with the game. A third tier rep named Jay looked at the problem and we played a lot of telephone tag over the last two weeks. I have to say he was responsive sometimes called me twice in the same day. Unfortunately when you call back you cannot get him directly and have to leave a message with one of the other reps that takes the call. We finally connected on Thursday and he advised me that he was sorry but there was nothing further he could do, however for my troubles they were refunding me the price of the game. He gave me the codes for the Microsoft points so I can add to my account.
I estimate this was the end of it or will they continue researching this. His answer was somewhat evasive and told me to continue checking the forum for any developments. This is probably a less expensive way for them to deal with this problem than to continue interfacing with me as they have the last two months. I'm sure that if everyone had this problem would do what I did it would be much more focus, unfortunately not everyone is willing to expend the amount of time or patience to deal with this.
I wonder if they deleted the fact that I ever purchased the game and allowed me to be purchased as new, would that fix the problem. Maybe that would disassociate my gamer tag from the game and it would appear that I am a new player even if I lose any progress in the game with regard to gamer score. I was able to verify that by using a different gamer tag associated with my Xbox, that gamer tag can play message chess.
The end result is that I really can't continue to complain about this issue due to Microsoft refunding the price of the game. I know I can play Chessmaster Live against the AI and on Xbox Live against other players, just can't play message chess. Unfortunately that is one part of the game that I really liked. There are also many that are play message chess and are not experiencing any problems. I think I was unlucky to play against someone that never made a move and for some reason that confuses the game and creates this issue. The error message that you get asking that you increase your ELO of course is impossible to do if you can access your inbox or create/join a game.
So there you have it-the end result. I'm not completely happy with the outcome because I was hoping they would fix the problem, however in the interest of customer satisfaction I can't say that Microsoft didn't do their part. Microsoft hosts the game on their servers, but they didn't write the code probably making it very difficult to fix this issue. For Ubisoft this game is probably very low on their agenda and unless a lot of pressure was put on them nothing is going to be done.
I may if I find some more free time e-mail certain executives at Microsoft Xbox and articulate what happened with this issue.
theninjahut wrote:Thanks to you guys above for posting all that info.The same problem just happened to me. The inbox just keeps loading and loading. It's pretty annoying as I've been playing this game every day - though I did have a break for a red ring of death once.It seems to me from what you guys are saying that they are not going to fix it. It can't be a very difficult bug to fix, but it would probably need ubisoft to spend some money, and nobody likes spending money do they?
Yes it's a pity this has happened. So you have tried to access your inbox and it’s just loading. It be interesting to know if:
1) When you try to create a message chess game, does it allow it or like me do you get the message that you already have too many games open and to increase your ELO?
If it does it probably would be best to delete it since you can't access your inbox, however I have a feeling that it won't let you-let us know.
2) Also did this happen to you because someone didn't make a move or just out of the blue?
3) Also go to your inbox and while it is flashing “Loading”, take a close look towards the top, does it tell you that you have any open games?
roygbiv6 wrote:Hi Skier I also just got this problem. Found this thread looking for a solution but am disapointed it doesn't look like there will be a fix for it. Glad they at least refunded you.I get a slightly diferent problem where I consantly get the error message "The chessamster live server is not available at this time. Please try again later." I get the same message when I try to create a game or try to do anything with message chess. As far as I can remember I dont save the games & I only had 3 on the go when it first happened. I did win a game by default the day before so maybe my opponent like yours didn't make a move or quit live.Also if I try to access my inbox I see text saying "You have no message chess events." above the error message box.