From what I've read and watched regarding the people at Bungie over the years, I'm sure whatever they're planning will be fairly impressive and rewarding for that fellow.  Yeah, they probably won't be able to replace everything that was on that console, but I'm sure they're going to try darn hard to get as close as they can and probably a lot of extra goodness that wasn't originally there.

I'm excited to see what happens, and it's not even my console that was munged.

It's nice when a company does something like that. Everyone is blaming Microsoft for what happened but it was one person making a promise and either not following up on it or bad communications somewhere along the line which is to blame.

Well, Legend regardless of who is at fault, MS as a company reallly should step up and take the responsibilty of its employees.  Promise or policy is not issue here, the issue here is good customer service which MS is sorely lacking.  From my experience dealing with all 3 major console customer service, I have to say Nintendo is probably the best of the three.  MS could learn a lot from Nintendo when it come to taking care of loyal customers.

^^^ Can we please let the whole "MS is a big company, but they should have operated like a 20-employee company and made sure 1 console repair out of a million was handled in a very different way" comments go away? I can't imagine how a company of that size could offer extreme exceptions to their process when they have to deal with so many consoles. Try getting someone famous to sign your Wii, break something inside, and then send it to Nintendo with instructions to not remove any markings or give you another unit. Let's see how well it goes. It may work or it may not.

Why can't we just revel in the chocolaty goodness that is Bungie's goodwill and stop the MS bashing in every thread regardless of Thread Title?

^^Ah, but the problem is that they DID do something extra--wash the console off--that was NOT WANTED. What kind of idiot sees a system with lots of peoples' signatures and detailed artwork, and just rubs it off 'for free'?

 I don't think it's Microsoft's fault to be honest.  Microsoft has a strict set of policies in regards to refurbishing consoles and nowhere in those policies is it promised that a console will be returned to a customer with the same markings on the outside of it that it had when sent in.  An employee made a promise that went outside Microsoft's policies and Microsoft shouldn't be blamed when it was only following it's own policies.  That doesn't mean I don't feel bad for what happened to that person but I don't agree that it's an example of "Microsoft screwing a customer" as some people are trying to paint it as.

@thekitchensink

Someone who works in a console repair facility in Mexico, who may or may not speak/read English, and who probably never even saw the box the unit arrived in 3 departments before, let alone the letter that was in it. That guy has specific instructions to remove all markings... as far as he knows, that console is headed toward some *other* customer as a replacement console, and those signatures (that can be difficult to read even if you know English) and the drawing on the console probably looked more like graffiti to him than anything else. He probably can't even afford an HDTV much less buy a console to connect to it. And I can't expect the guy to worry about markings on one console out of thousands when he probably has a quota he has to meet just to keep his job.

I'm just really amazed by how people think large corporations work. It's not as if these large companies have the Customer Support staff sitting down the hall and having lunch with the repair staff. They're most likely in different countries.

Its nice to hear they are doing something for him.

whatever. I think this kid is a dumbass. If it was so unique and worth money due to its case, he should have shelved it and bought a core model and then just used his existing HDD.

Idiot.