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This topic has moved here: Subject: Halo 2 Vista & Live Family Gold Issues
  • Subject: Halo 2 Vista & Live Family Gold Issues
Subject: Halo 2 Vista & Live Family Gold Issues
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!!! Sorry, just realized wrong forum, this is Xbox forum !!!

I just spent about 10 hours on the phone with Xbox Support, GFWL Support and Microsoft Games Support and just about every avenue was explored to come up with this one conclusion.

If you transition your Gold Account to a Family Gold Account you will no longer be able to play Halo 2 for Windows Vista online. Browsing for servers yields no results, and attempting to manually connect/host to a game fails. However if you use any non Family account (just a regular gold account), then the servers come up straight away, and all online play works fine. We even tested on the same PC, without relauching the game, just switching accounts. Every single safety setting was enabled or allowed on the accounts, and this still didn't fix it. We tested for hours and used a half dozen accounts, they even had me setup new accounts, non-family, which got online right away... its just when you join a family plan that things go down hill.

Unfortunately for me, I am the Family Primary account, so undoing it would be much too troublesome to disband it just to play Halo 2 (but for those pesky last few achievements!).

Best the GFWL and Xbox folks could discern, is that while Halo 2 is rated M (on the box), the Live Servers think it is an unrated game, and the new Family settings for Xbox Live are unable to process an Unrated Game. Appears to be some sort of programming or database type issue. If perhaps, Halo 2 could be patched in order to send an M rating to the Live Servers, then all should work just fine... or so they believe.

If you are one of the growing number of people who can no longer play online, and you are a member of a family account, this is probably why you cannot get to the servers.

I don't think it will be resolved since all of the MS departments I spoke to are blaming each other. Since Bungie is on Skeleton Crew, I doubt anybody there wants to make this a priority, but the guys at Xbox Live thought that it could be patched at the game level. I am hoping someone at Bungie is willing to look into this, and I am happy to assist.

Single Player works fine, and you can sign into Live just fine, just cannot browse games, or connect to any game, even if you do a "join session in progress" with a friend who is able to play online.

One more thing, I don't think that this is related to the issues from early 2010 when the Browse didn't work for a couple months, but it might be. Perhaps during that period of time, MS was doing alpha testing of the not yet released Family Plan, and this issue was discovered at that time, thought to have been resolved, but crept back up.

[Edited on 04.21.2011 1:03 AM PDT]

  • 04.21.2011 1:00 AM PDT

I want her...

Could just make another silver account and play online with that if you really wanted to(you dont need gold to play online on gfwl)

  • 04.21.2011 5:48 AM PDT

This is the average H2 Fanboy.
Xfire: JacobGRocks.
50 in H2/H3? Great, but you still fail at this.

Here's the real reason: H2VSux.

The browse issue happens on non-family and silver accounts too. So it's not that. It's gfwl failing.

  • 04.21.2011 6:27 AM PDT
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This Gold Family account issue is unrelated to any other browsing issues, many of which Microsoft has posted work arounds for. The Gold Family account issue is a confirmed issue and is now an official reported bug with Games For Windows support.

  • 05.06.2011 6:06 PM PDT