A couple of days ago, my DA:I deteriorated and it seems it is not playable now due to disc problems.
It started approx. 10 days ago with missing game icons on the XBoX360 start page - soon followed with "disc unreadable" errors and now I suffer from freezes at load screens…. very annoying.
As I am at about 150 h gameplay, the disc already has spun a gazillion times in the drive. As I have read elsewhere, the developpers have, in order to shorten game load times, forced a split disc / hd loading procedure… stuff is loaded simultaneously from the game disc and from the hdd. That's why we don't have the option to install all files on the HDD.
The problem with that approach is that the game disc is always spinning (having caused the reported problems with the loud disc drive operation, mostly in earlier XBoXes). Discs that spin and are read constantly over a long time get hotter and hotter and thermal degradation on the disc is exponentially faster than at ambient temperatures (the famous entropic destruction of everything). Maybe the disc get 'literally' burned due to longtime spinning and being read. As a consequence, I think material stress just destroys the game discs much faster than what we normally experience from standard disc usage - I think this is what is happening to me right now.
I know there are other issues with freezes during loading, and there are disc errors in completely new discs which indicates that my theory might not apply everywhere, but I think it's rather consistent with my 'experimental' findings...
If thermal degradation of the game discs is an issue, it should be temporally remedied by using 'new' game discs…. the problem is I am not willing to buy a new disc… I want a disc replacement! AND I'd like to have the option to install EVERYTHING onto the HDD - I'd rather have longer game loading times than disc errors and subsequent game freezes...
