$50 a year isn’t all that much, when you think about it. But it’s about $50 more than Nintendo and Sony are charging for their online services, making Xbox Live a premium service by default ($30 if you know where to buy cards online -Ed.). But for all that I love about Xbox LIVE, I have to admit there are times when I wonder where our money is going. This week’s column is mostly meant to draw Microsoft’s attention to a variety of problems with their service and in a few cases propose some stopgap fixes for you, the reader.

The most obvious problem is download speeds. These plague both parts of the service; actual content downloads (games, DLC packs, etc.) and the Marketplace interface. The download speeds tend to vary, but even at their best they seem to generally only keep pace with the Wii’s service. At worst, even on a properly configured network it can feel like you’re on dialup all over again. Just imagine how much ’fun’ it is to have technical problems downloading Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, compounded by taking the better part of a day to actually get it downloaded once that was cleared up. Does this hurt my interest in buying more games over a gigabyte in size? Absolutely. There isn’t much the end user can do about this if their network is already properly configured, so this ball is in Microsoft’s court at this point.

The Marketplace is even worse. On the Wii Shop Channel, pulling up product info takes about one to three seconds. It’s reasonably quick and responsive, even when I’m using a wireless connection. On the Xbox Live Marketplace however, it can take upward of fifteen to thirty seconds to fetch a list of downloads for a game or even bring up info on a selected item. I actually get faster service by pointing my browser to Xbox.com and searching around from there... and that works great for me, but I’ve got my 360 and computer hooked up to the same monitor. Not everyone has that kind of rig, and you shouldn’t have to use something else to get good results on something meant for another device entirely. Microsoft, whatever you’re doing here, you’re doing it wrong. I’m sure I’m not the only one who sighs and decides to hold off on buying more Microsoft Points because the interface takes forever to do anything. For those of you who can use it, I honestly have to suggest going through Xbox.com for your Marketplace needs until, or if, Microsoft fixes this.