Xbox Owner Thinks They've Found A 'Major Design Flaw' That Impacts Game Performance

Over the weekend, a pro Halo player known as Brett Leonard (or "Naded") took to social media to highlight what they think is a "major design flaw" on Xbox consoles that's actually hurting performance in games.

Leonard first posted about this on December 18th, suggesting that "Xbox messages are tied to how your console and games run", and then followed up with a big explanation on December 27th about what they've been experiencing and how they've managed to implement a workaround.

In short, they say that by removing their large list of friends (over 1000!) and messages on their Xbox Series X, they found that not only was the UI running at "supersonic speed compared to before", but that "it actually completely changed the way my inputs were counting on Halo, how the aim felt, how smooth the game was, my shots were registering faster than before".

"I instantly started feeling the difference compared to when I was playing hours just before, all because I deleted my friends. My zoom functions were feeling completely different/faster especially the light rifle in Halo 4, inputs were instantly registering faster than ever before, and there was no pause in the inputs when a lot were pressed. I don't know what all this means, but that is a major design flaw and a major issue if your account is tied to how good the game feels."

Again, they've taken to social media today to recap their experiences after removing friends and messages:

"After removing as much as possible from my account including the 1000+ friends, instantly the user interface once again improved in speed while also making the games completely different. Shot registration was faster, all games in general including any animations played at max speed very smoothly, inputs were no longer getting eaten by background processes from constantly checking the 1000+ friends. So all input lag on movement, aiming, and any other eaten inputs were 100% completely removed. The "turbo glitch" and some other odd glitches like the "rejoin glitch" (where it gets stuck in rejoining forever) also were fixed after all the data removal.

In conclusion, removing your friends, messages, and any other data from your Xbox account greatly improves your overall experience playing games, especially ones that have constant inputs."

Of course, this is only one person's experiment and there's no guarantee of a "major design flaw" behind the scenes, but it certainly sounds like they've done their research — and it isn't the first time something like this has been reported.

In fact, a musician known as "M3RKMUS1C" reportedly shared a similar story a decade ago:

"When the Xbox One introduced the Windows 10 update it was almost impossible to play BO3 because they forced every privacy setting to be on The result was having hundreds of thousands of people follow my account, send me messages and crash my Xbox from session joining. It was an unplayable mess

"Crazy to see that it still seems to be a problem for the Series X. Seems like the overall issue is the Xbox UI causing performance problems, and it scales depending on the amount of messages/followers/friends you have."

For what it's worth, Brett says that "following" people on Xbox rather than adding them as friends is the way to go, suggesting it's "much more lightweight" and doesn't impact performance in the same fashion.

It's still best to take all of this with a pinch of salt, especially considering it's not been mass-reported, but we'd love to hear if you've experienced the same issues — come and tell us in the comments below!

Are big friends lists affecting your Xbox performance? Let us know in the comments section.