Xbox One owners highlight glaring issues

Xbox One owners may be enjoying their games right now, but many of them are unsatisfied with the way the system has been pushed out to market.

The OS is really slick and eye-catching, but lacks many of the features gamers came to appreciate on the older Xbox 360. Now that the One is the centre of Microsoft’s attention, it’s expected that the company will be moving to fix any issues that users find.

And find them they did. It appears that a number of Xbox One owners on Reddit were not satisfied with presenting the information straight to Microsoft, and opted to set up a website to point out the issues that gamers have with the console and to ask for Microsoft’s feedback and participation on solving them.

Xboxfeedback.com takes user-submitted suggestions from a huge thread on Reddit or a Disqus-powered comments page hosted on the site itself. It appears that not only are moderators sifting through the submissions to filter out any spam and copies of existing suggestions, but the communities on the two sites are voting for suggestions themselves. Bad ideas or suggestions for issues that already have a fix in place appear to be heavily downvoted to avoid the threads filling up with negative suggestions.

The site has attracted much attention thus far, with Director of Programming for the Microsoft gaming network Xbox LIVE, Larry “Major Nelson” Hyrb acknowledging the site’s presence on Twitter and agreeing to forward the suggestions to the teams working on the Xbox One OS post-launch.

Some of the top features and suggested fixes are obvious, but others relate to functionality that players expected on day one. Below follows the top ten features that fans are requesting from Microsoft:

Xbox Guide functionality to return and work in-game
Friends as a tab on the home screen, not a separate app
Notifications when friends come online or when you receive a friend request
Hard drive space management notifications and options
View and rate recent players in multiplayer matches
Smarter Kinect phrases (shortening of required words to launch an app)
Ability to set game chat to use TV speakers or an attached headset or both at the same time
Controller battery indicator that appears system-wide
Open the Avatar store and have avatars from your profile on the Xbox 360’s Live client appear on the Xbox One
USB support for media, pictures and music

Don’t have an Xbox One yet? You can still contribute to improving the OS and its services by visiting the page and upvoting comments for suggestions for things that need to be fixed in the Xbox OS on the comments page or the Reddit thread.

We won’t get the Xbox One in South Africa for some time, but when it does reach us hopefully most of these issues will be a thing of the past.