I hope somone sues 343i and in the lawsuit it states, all people who bought MCC, get a full refund and a complimentary free year of XBLive for microsofts blatant disrespect of there loyal customers.
I was curious about this myself. See Xbox Live Terms of Use: "7.4 Class action waiver. Any proceedings to resolve or litigate any dispute in any forum will be conducted solely on an individual basis. Neither you nor Microsoft will seek to have any dispute heard as a class action, private attorney general action, or in any other proceeding in which either party acts or proposes to act in a representative capacity. No arbitration or proceeding will be combined with another without the prior written consent of all parties to all affected arbitrations or proceedings."
Also, last year's EA BattleField 4 class action suit has gone nowhere.
I don't know all of the ramifications of what sort of law would be necessary to regulate software companies and prevent them from shipping broken products. Perhaps it would have larger negative unintended ramifications.... but I do agree that something needs to be done. This is an all too common occurrence these days.
To a certain extent I do feel a little ridiculous about complaining about this... after all it's just a game. That being said, it is a product that has significantly less [working] features than what was promised.
In the case of the MCC it literally seems like whoever 343 outsourced to basically just shoddily copy pasted the code of 4 separate games together and printed the disc to make the holiday deadline.
Outside of a class action lawsuit, which seems unfeasible at this point... the best thing consumers can do is request a refund. It appears that Microsoft is honoring refunds on this product, although I'm not sure how the refund would work if you purchased a physical copy from a retailer.