The past few days I’ve had a hell of a time with XBL.

First I could stay connected for more than a few minutes without getting strange errors. Turns out I switched the MAC address on my 360 to match my laptop’s so I could use it at my hotel. It worked great in the hotel where I only had a single LAN line. When I brought it home and had both of them plugged in to the same switch; however, it didn’t work quite so well.

Once that was straightened out, I wanted to add MS points to my account. Every time I tried I got error code 80169d94 and some “Not available” message. At first I figured maybe it was a temporary problem on MS’s end. After a  few hours I began to suspect something else was up. I finally got around to googling the code today and it turns out that my account has been locked. Which means I need to call MS support and then convince them to transfer me to the credit department. From what I’ve read that isn’t going to be an easy task. I’m hoping I can find out what caused this and avoid it in the future. Right now I’ve got three possibilities:

1. Rapidly connecting and disconnecting from XBL because of the duplicate MAC addresses.
2. I bought points with my 360 using both the original and  changed MAC address.
3. Repeatedly traveling cross country with my 360.
4. Some combination of 1-3.

I’m going to give MS a call in the morning and see how it goes.

***Update***

0:00 Called MS Support someone picked up right away. She sounds a bit like a character I saw on Mad TV.

19:30 After spending 20 minutes S-P-E-L-L-I-N-G out all my information and explaining my problem I finally get transferred to Billing.

33:24 Billing confirms all my information a second time and makes me update using the XBL site. Transferred back to support.

41:50 Transferred to the supervisor. Apparently MS randomly audits the XBL information and if there is anything missing locks the account. Turns out when I originally setup my XBL account I entered my name as Ryan T and their system didn’t like that much. In 5-10 DAYS, MS will unlock my account and call me to let me know I can buy stuff from them again.

47:08 Done. For now.

***Update 2 - 9/01/2008***

MS called me twice.

The first time after putting my phone on speaker and turning the volume all the way up while putting it against my ear all I could make out was that it was the words “hi…xbox…call”

The second time I managed to get the number but they left the main support number. After 20 minutes on the phone all I had managed to get was a lot of voice prompts without an option to talk to a real person. I hung up and said screw it.

***Update 3 - 9/5/2008***

I finally made it home and managed to buy more points. FYI, Castle Crashers is awesome.