I own a 5 year old Xbox live account that I made, when I first got my Xbox, that I've been using on again and off again. Being the casual player type, I wasn't aware of any issues until I started recently purchasing microsoft points and upgraded my account to Gold status.
That is when I realized that my account was set as a child account. That wouldn't be an issue, except for the small handicap that I'm 28 years old. Attempting to promote my account to an adult account wasn't working either, because the option wasn't available to me. Thus the only explanation is that the birth date on my account hasn't reached 18 yet.
Now, before people start accusing me of putting in the wrong age, during the creation of my account, hear me out...
I've been talking to the Xbox Customer support for the past couple of weeks and just spent a good chunk of this day with them on the phone, trying to find out the current birthday of my account, to see what was wrong with it and I finally got to the point, where I was informed that the only thing I could do was to create a new account. That meant, sacrificing all of my microsoft points, prepaid gold subscription and lengthy gaming history. So I started doing just that.
Creating the new account was a relatively simple thing, until I got to the point of needing to sign up to Xbox Live. I decided I wanted to sign it up to my old Microsoft live account so I moved my old gamertag off it so I could sign it up to the new one. And that's where it hit me.
The signup process automatically collected all the information from my live id and used it to create my account; my live account carries my correct birth date.
This prompted me to contact Xbox customer support to ask what gives. They informed me that this service wasn't available 5 years ago, during the creation of my old gamertag, which finally got us to understand what the problem was. 5 years ago, their account creation process was designed so that all fields that were left blank were automatically filled. In my haste to get my account set up, I must have ignored the birthdate and the generic info that was placed there was the current date. Hence, as far as Xbox's concerned, I'm 5 years old today.
That means, that if I want to be able to fully utilize my old account, I need to wait a whooping 13 more years.
Now, I understand one fact. I bungled up. Obviously, I should have put in my birthdate at the time but hindsight is always 20/20. But the fault is also on Microsofts part. Since their company policy is that once you put in your birthday, it's set in stone, they should have barred me from continuing with the signup, until I was done filling in the information; not assume that I was 1 day old. I'm also gonna assume that I wasn't the only one to have impatiently pressed the "next" button, at the time, promising myself that I was gonna fill all these details at a later date.
And that's where I get to my point:
I propose a new service for old accounts that are still in service, which were created around this time, where people are allowed to submit a proof of their birthday, in order to have their account information fixed. Whether it be credit card details or passport, I'm sure some of simple system can be thought of, where people can make such a submission. As long as the process includes some sort of feature, where it's not too easy for children to abuse it.
