The first weekend in April 2007 I got back online after 140 days of internet absence (See SkyBroadbanned for full details of why).

My joy was dampened very soon after this as I tried to sign my Xbox 360 into Xbox Live!

From the start I had a problem logging into Live! It just would not accept my Gamertag. Apparently this was to do with 2 things:

1. The amount of time I had been offline.
2. The fact that my Xbox 360 had been sent for repair a few
   months ago and had been given a new "ID".

I had called the Xbox support line (0800 587 1102) a few weeks before these problems began to discuss how I could ensure that my precious gamerscore and achievements could be preserved during the repair of my Xbox.

I was informed by a member of the support team that when I get my internet connection back I should use the “recover gamertag” option. This, I was told, would "merge" my online profile with the one on my hard drive and put in place all of my achievements, gamesaves and gamerscore...

This was worrying as I had 6 months of gaming achievements on my hard drive and was a tad afraid that these would be overwritten by my out of date online gamer profile.

This is exactly what happened. . . .

I lost 1000+ from my gamerscore and 6 months of achievements from games such as:

• G.R.A.W
  (Completed on Hard)
• Call of Duty 2
  (Won the War on Hardened)
• Fifa 07
  (Various tournament achievements)
• Gears of War
  (1/2 way though the campaign on Hardcore)
• Rockstar Table Tennis
  (Various tournament and training achievements)
• Zuma
• Geometry Wars

And worst of absolute worst of the worst of all my gamesaves were gone. This means I would have to start over from scratch with all of them.

Gutted....

I spent hours and hours on G.R.A.W and CoD2 they were real tours of duty as I had them both on the ‘hard’ difficulty level.

Gears of War is not such a HUGE loss as I was probably only 1/2 way through the campaign, but this does mean playing though those terrible early levels again.

Table Tennis. Fifa and Geometry Wars really hurt as some of the achievements took hours to perfect, especially Geometry War’s “pacifism” achievement.

870 is my “new” gamerscore. Something which in no way reflects the hours and hours of work over the past 6 months.

I was on the cusp of 2000 which would have gone a long way towards my target of 5000 by the end of the year.

Sure, a gamerscore of 2000 for over a year of 360 ownership is still pretty lame. But it was hard bloody work, and now I have nothing to show for it.

The Lesson

If you, like me, loose your internet connection for a long period of time OR your 360 breaks down and needs repair, be careful. Do not make the same mistake I did and trust the Xbox Support muppets. Double check everything with online forums, chat rooms and other experts. This sadly was something I could not do becuase of my simple lack of an internet connection.

The one thing to remember is that your gamercard can only exist in one place at one time. The online version is absolute and will overwrite any offline version.

This includes gamesaves, something which I feel is a huge oversight on Microsoft's behalf.