Patches: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Before Xbox Live was released, many people were against patches, myself included. Patches can be easily be abused, and games release with more flaws than normal. A few months later, it's the exact opposite, I want more patches.
The Good
There have been 5 patches released for Xbox to my knowledge, with another planned. MotoGP was the first to recieve a patch, adding an option to view the scoreboard from the lobby, and taking steps to eliminate glitch times from the scoreboard, created when a player is lagging. They were successful.
NFL 2K3 and NBA 2K3 had a big flaw, if one player paused the game, the other couldn't do anything about it. Players would leave their consoles on until the other player disconnected and got a win. The patch fixed this.
Ghost Recon had problems, due to Xbox Live's Peer to Peer setup, servers have very high pings. Ghost Recon was setup to only show servers with pings under 200, but then people had a very hard time finding games. They raised it to 600, now you can find games.
The Bad
Now that Ghost Recon shows more games, joining them is a problem. It sits on a connecting screen, and all you can do is reboot your Xbox, or wait nearly 5 minutes for it to disconnect you.
MotoGP has no lag times, but since then there have been ways to exploit glitches and crash into a fence, and appear on the other side cutting out 30 seconds worth of the track.
The Ugly
Patches cost money to develop, and they don't get developed unless Microsoft pays the developers to make them. The patches must then go through Microsoft's certification before they are released, taking up more time.
The result is that anything not fixed in the first patch, will likely never get fixed. Now that there's finally the option to fix bugs in the games, they won't get fixed.
After owning Xbox Live for 5 months, I have come to the conclusion that I like patches. Microsoft has taken steps to prevent patches from being abused, but they have gone too far.
Developers are getting paid to work on projects, and when they finish one, they move on to another. Unless Microsoft is willing to pay for them to go back and develop a patch, we won't see one. There's a good chance a lot of the problems that are discovered will not be fixed, even though it is now possible. Also, even the smallest things must pass through certification before it is released, which can cause a major problem. Ubi Soft doesn't even need to fix Ghost Recon's problem, all they need to do is add a cancel button on the connecting screen, like when you connect via the friend list, and it would be just fine, you wouldn't need to reboot your Xbox to try again. But can Ubi Soft do the simple fix and release it? No, it needs to go through Microsoft for certification, and then get released.
What a pain in the ass.
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It's been a while since I have played 
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