I know you've all read stories about the elusive xbox 360 red ring of death aka RRoD, but it was just announced this past week that apparently the Xbox 360 has a failure rate of about 54%, which is absolutely unacceptable. If the iPhone had a failure rate that high there's no way that Apple would get away with it or let alone not want to immediately fix the problem, but that's apparently not how Microsoft wanted to deal with their problem. Instead of correcting the design fault (which I can only assume is what's causing this issue) they just beef up their warranty to 3 years and fix/send you a refurbished one instead. I don't know, personally I would rather buy a brand new system that had this problem fixed from the factory than have to send my broken one off to Microsoft for 3 weeks while they fix it (probably not the right way) or send me a refurbished one that was someone else's broken machine. This whole problem is absolutely ridiculous and despite Microsoft claiming that they've fixed the problem in the newer systems there are still people getting the RRoD on those consoles, none of them are safe... Now, including mine.
This isn't the first Xbox 360 that I've been through so I am familiar with the RRoD and it's pain. I bought a launch system the January after it came out, on ebay since they were impossible to find in the stores, and the thing worked great for a long time. Now, I'm not going to lie, I've modded pretty much every console system that I've owned in order to save a little money, but I figured that because of that I wasn't going to flash the firmware on my 360 and actually buy the games for once, plus it was kind of a pain in the ass to do the mod and I didn't feel like dealing with it. So I amassed quite a collection of games over the first couple of years and realized that a lot of the games I was buying I was beating and never playing again and it just seemed like a waste of money. Now I know what you're thinking, why didn't I just trade them in to GameStop or sell them on eBay or something. The thought had crossed my mind, but I always had this feeling like as soon as I sold one of the games I'd get this itch to play it or they'd release some sick DLC that I'd miss out on, so I kept every game.
