Live Support Clans

After Halo 2 it is a wonder why clans are not directly supported by Xbox Live, yet. Clans have had to make do on specific game websites, fansites like XuG, and forums. But it is the next generation of gaming, and these avid 360 gamers deserve far better. You should expect video chat rooms, clan  ranking, clan stats, and most importantly clan recognition.
   
To start off, clans demand a detailed ranking system to tell the difference between the top dog and the lowly members. So clan ranks should include at least a leader, officer, and members at a minimum. Clans should be allowed to take advantage of naming their own ranks and assigning them as see fit. For Example my very own Dirty South Clan would consist of the Bossman, some colonels, and share croppers. Everyone wants a pecking order that you can move up in.
   
Next up, a clan needs communication. A MSN Lobby attainable by the dash board blades will be the center of your clan. Although a MSN lobby might not be the case. A Live lobby is bound to happen. Chat channel for text chat should be made available for basic communication. A USB keyboard plugged into your 360 could take advantage of the texting feature. Video chat or audio chat can make small private clan meetings possibly among a group of four or five.
   
An invaluable resource for clans remains, statistics. Clans love to know where they excel and fall. Knowing which type of game each clan is good in such as: Racing, Shooters, Sports, Stealth, RTS, and even Arcade games could be made possible by counting the amount of wins and losses each clan member makes. This will attract certain clans. The very thought of statistically organizing clans can draw out fresh new ideas such as heaping all the achievement points of your clan members into one big clan gamer card. Or creating a leader board for separate clans.

At last, clans want recognition. Everyone wants to be in t he best clan ever, and even more importantly clan's want you to know that they are the best. Allow clans to make their own logo then allow the logo to be their avatar for individual gamer tags. Let clans duke it out in a console clan war. Give clans the necessities like ranks and communication while lending them comforts like stats then pamper them with recognition and watch them grow.

Make Smaller things Better

Life is worth living for the little things. Making the little things in Live more livelier  could do so much more for the  casual player, hardcore loner, and everybody else in between. Face it, Live has been holding back. They could be giving so much more in terms of stats, friends list, and general subscription. Add all the little things together and you'll find yourself in a totally different but oddly familiar.

The friends list is something Live does O.K. You are allowed 100 friends and a few ways to check out what's up with them. Some functionality includes seeing how long they've been inactive, join them in custom games online, and comparing achievements compare achievements. But the friends list has not reached its full potential just yet. Some friends are more up your inner circle than others you play with them all the time, you know them in real life, or they're all hot chicks. Regardless,  these friends deserve to be near the top of your list for easy accessibility, and your less dedicated friends belong on the bottom. Also it wouldn't hurt to be able to see where you are in other people's list.
   
In addition to clan stats, Xbox Live should keep track of gamer's individual statistics for all competitive games. Gamers want to know our shooting accuracy and how many headshots we made. Every online competitive game should at least keep track of how many games we win or lose. A long page detailing statistics for players will grasp Live's audience immediately. Also in stats allow others to see how much of a loser we are for slipping 200 hours in Gears of War. Checking how much time a person slips into a game is a great way to decide if you want him/her as a friend.
   
While revamping the little parts of Live add the finishing touches to the Arcade. Reasonably enlarge the cap size of the games for greater quality of graphics, gameplay, and additional updates that might come down the road in the arcade space. We, as gamers and game makers, also want to download and make XNA games without extra subscription. This will bring an original feel and flow to the Xbox Live Arcade. Not just older games that have been around the block but something signature unique to the XBLA players. Further more make arcade games easier to get to. Hitting the "RB" button to quickly access arcade games would also be quite nifty.
   
Even more room Live has to change for the good is subscriptions. Live has grown into a very large service spanning families and couples. Live should offer subscriptions to this demographic by offering double subscriptions, two cards and two accounts for seventy or eighty dollars. This would alone would help prevent sharing accounts among room mates, couples, brothers, sisters and etc.
  
In conclusion to this section, Microsoft still has a way to go to add the finishing touches to a lot of the small things that we have now. Microsoft's market place still needs a little change. Movie rents should be a bit longer, at least longer than a day. Live should message us about new game videos or demos. I'm sure the average Joe would love to know when the new GTA IV demo or video comes out. Microsoft points could be made more flexible and clear. Making Microsoft points and the content that you buy them with more flexibility will create less controversy. Let us give away points or full arcade games if we no longer want them. Where is the harm in that? Furthermore make points more clear by making one point the equivalent of a dollar. Two years off in the future we might see more small updates like the ones mentioned above.

The Community

If Xbox Live is all about the community then where is the community part? I go days playing with total strangers to find a nice ring of friends I play with rarely. I log online excited to find out that the developers of Gears are going to be online only to find that I just missed them yesterday. If Live is all about the community then why d o I go out of my way to an internet browser, not accessible by my 360, just to find a group of dedicated players, most of which on www.xbox.com. Xbox.com for some reason or another holds back features like: calendar, game with fame, and xbox news from the Xbox 360 that are excruciatingly missed.
   
Live may optimize a calendar for your community experience. Think of it as the Microsoft Works calendar from XP, but  for non-gaming or strictly gaming purposes on your 360. Tournaments, game with fame, and special releases (whether they be game updates or new games) are added to your calendar as a default, monthly. Also,  non-gaming related events such as friend's birthdays, anniversaries,  days off school, holidays, and T.V. schedules.  Another option for clans and hardcore teams is date inviting. Set a time and place as an invite for a further date of just a later time that day. The calendar should message you five minutes prior as a reminder of the invite.
   
If it is the next generation of Xbox live then why don't we already have memory space connected to our gamer tag specifically, so that any Xbox 360 connected to Live will have all your memory saves or other saves connected to your home hard rive the second you are logged in. This doesn't mean that the hard rive with the 360 should be chucked though. An extra copy of your memory should be kept in case anything runs amiss online. This way your game saves arcade games, demos, and videos in two places, so you always have back up, and buying a new 360 suddenly becomes less of a problem.
   
Other than software upgrades, people want to see different hardware other than the Xboxes accessible to Live. Microsoft has already made this a step by offering Live for PC without extra cost. People wish to be fully plugged into Live by their cell phones and Zune.  Allow your gamer card to have hard rive space as mentioned in the paragraph above. Then let the Zune access your gamer card. From there Zune can copy the music file to its own drive space. Your cell phone could be your Live Communicator away from home. You may send and receive text, voice, pictures, or even video messages. Though this might be farther out in the future integration of Live with other software is imminent.
 
The 360 console, itself, would be nothing without the third party support it gets. The software makers, themselves, make the games on Live worth playing. So on a large scale what they do is very much relevant. The third party has room for wings on terms of things they already have such as making use of the gamer zones and the 360 cam. With features such as statistics and arranged teams developers are on their own for now. In the future expect more of these features involved with the gameplay soon. Command and Conquer 3 for instance already makes use of the 360 cam. Though it is nothing like the functionality of the eye toy. Endwar is another RTS (Real time Strategy) that takes innovation with the mic. Expect more games like this in the future that are in the works now.

In the grand scheme of things it all comes down to the community and ways to integrate technology into that community which we will see more of over time. Tending directly to the clans in Live creates a home within Live for the people to call their own. Allowing the casual less clan oriented players to interact in Live with their friends and plethora of Live enabled technology games with their friends. But if Live is to pursue all of Microsft's dream then expect for the price to raise at least a bit.

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