http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10395644-52.html
Roofles. Hope these assholes can't sell them and have to stare at their banned console and cry. I mean, what's their worth if there is a new glut of non-XBL capable 360s on Ebay, Craigslist, etc? $10?
Going along with this:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/...leID=221601267Microsoft this week booted as many as 1 million players from its Xbox Live gaming service due to the company's belief that they modified their consoles to play games illegally downloaded from file sharing sites.
Wow.
That is way more than I thought were banned.
Yep. Think of what percent are up for sale on these sites, like what, 5%-10%? 50K or 100K 360s all competing to be sold at the same time?
$10 is pretty good deal for a working 360, even though you can't play online.
should buy it, gifted it to charity for kids, and get $200 tax deductible!!!
Yeah, seriously. Are banned consoles banned from getting patches/codecs as well? If not, and if they did drop way down in price, these would be amazing single-player gaming/video streaming boxes, ban or no ban.
Beautiful business move. How many of these idiots are so addicted to playing the latest games that they need to pirate it going to just go back and buy another XBox? They weren't paying for the games anyways, right? Microsoft just made money.
They're not bricked, right? I'm strongly considering buying one of these and getting some used games I've wanted to play, like Crackdown or even Saints Row 2 "Not the Shitty PC Port" Version. Hell, even the controllers are worth $30 apiece.
From unconfirmed reports from sankaku complex it looks like Microsoft is bricking the HDD
http://www.sankakucomplex.com/2009/1...wn-hard-disks/
Originally Posted by Bastables
Oh shit, now they're kidnapping people!
EDIT: Removed the quoted NSFW link.
Last edited by kerzain; 11-11-2009 at 05:37 PM.
Wierd site. Also, nsfw boobs aplenty there.
Hard drives aren't being bricked, they're just making the hard drives incompatible with non-banned boxes. (ie- I can't earn gamerscore on my banned box and then plug into my legit one and have it sync up online.) A banned console and its hard drive remain usable.
Whoa, that page is NSFW.
That's a valid concern, along with installing a larger, third party hard drive (mostly from the days when the standard drives were a lot smaller than they are now). Also, not every 360 game is region-free, right? That seems like a legit reason for modding. It's pretty shitty if people can potentially get banned when they aren't even pirating games.
I'm fairly sure that games comes with firmware required to play the game, so you can probably install latest firmware just by inserting the game.
For $10 I'd probably buy 1-2.
The unit is completely and irreversibly blocked from connecting to MS's XBL servers. No patches or codecs can be downloaded. You can still use System Link, as long as all games are using the same version number. However, the latest bans apparently disable hard drive game installation and Media Center streaming. You can watch and listen to media that's already on the unit's hard drive (or in the optical drive), but you can no longer stream media through the unit to another device. Downloaded content on a banned unit is still usable.
Furthermore, any save games you create on the banned unit are unusable on a legit unit, and it may also corrupt a legit XBL account. Meaning, using a legit account on a banned unit and then logging into that legit account on a legit unit may erase all of that account's Achievement points.
See this is the weird part, if the console is totally blocked from MS server, then how the heck do you even retrieve your legit account from the server in the first place, if even if you somehow magically get your legit account on a hacked 360, how the heck would MS even finds out since your hacked console is blocked from accessing MS server.
So I said, if the console is really really cheap less than $50, it's probably worth it to purchase and play single player games. just don't bother connecting to anything.
Ha! A bunch of the guys at work with modded 360 had this happen to them. It's a grand day. :)
So, just putting a homebrew hard drive on it was enough to get you banned? Do they have mod chips and such for 360s? I could see killing mod chipped machines, but if I went to the trouble of putting on a big drive so I could take advantage of buying their games as download content I'd be fucking livid.
I assume that the unit is still capable of connecting to the XBL servers, but MS still blocks the account and tags it and whatever save games you create while using that unit. Furthermore, the unit itself may be capable of tagging new accounts and saves created on it after the ban. The device basically becomes a landmine. MS apparently really wants to discourage people from using modded units, to the point of letting innocent second-hand buyers get scammed and their Achievements exploded.
basically don't connect to internet.
"Innocent second-hand buyers" were already scammed by whoever sold them damaged goods. It's like saying that if Microsoft could identify stolen property and disable it until it had been returned to its rightful owners, then they'd be letting innocent second-hand buyers get scammed. Just like purchasing stolen goods doesn't give you legal rights to them, purchasing damaged or altered goods doesn't give you rights to own correctly functioning copy thereof.
It might give you rights to sue the (re-)seller for fraud or a refund or something, but as long as you believe it's just for Microsoft to ban anyone for modding, you shouldn't object to them banning resold modded boxes either.
A banned unit can look identical to a legitimate unit, and you won't know the difference until MS has already deleted your Achievement points when you attempt to connect to XBL. Let's be clear: You apparently get no warning about what is about to happen. MS doesn't even tell you that it's happened. When you use that account later on a legitimate unit, all of your Achievement points disappear. If there was simply a system notification of some kind that the unit had been banned, then the second-hand buyer could simply try to get their money back from the scammer without any negative effect on their account. The way it works now, buying a second-hand 360 isn't much different from a game of Russian Roulette. Conveniently, this situation encourages people to buy brand-new 360s from MS instead.
I must have missed where you explain how this is any different from buying identical looking stolen goods. How it's different at all from the above case, particularly since stolen goods can be exactly physically identical (as opposed to modded XBOXs, which have physical differences).
You buy them, it's your fault. If you were fraudulently sold them, it's the sellers fault. If you bought a stolen car, you don't get to blame the police for repo'ing it, the original owner for exercising his rights, or lowjack for enabling said rights to be executed... you get to blame the thief who actually committed the crime, or the parties selling the stolen goods, but you don't blame enforcement.
The big problem is people selling them to GameStop. But they do take your address and ID right? So if someone comes back and says it's borked then they can refund it.
Yeah I kind of want to know more about this.
When you log into your XBL account into a banned Xbox, it apparently takes something away from you that you cannot get back, and it does not warn you that this about to happen, and you don't find out until later. With stolen goods, you at least have the opportunity to recover your money and will have lost nothing but time.
And a car isn't a good analogy, because a legitimately purchased vehicle comes with documentation that establishes your ownership of it, and you can contact the police and ask them if the vehicle has been reported stolen before you purchase it. Here, nothing has been stolen. It's been secretly *broken* in a way that apparently erases your Achievements if you try to use it, along with most of the unit's features getting permanently knee-capped.
Like I said, if MS simply inserted a system notification telling the user that the unit had been banned, without taking any action against their Achievements, it would be nothing more than another story of caveat emptor.
And you're losing what else here? Your ever-valuable gamer cred? Pride? How is this different?
You'd have a good point here if achievement points were not completely worthless. As it is, all you're saying is that you take your gamer score too seriously.
If you have one of those cheap Hong Kong hard drives from eBay will you get banned? Or is it a certain software you have?
Modding your system doesn't make it region-free, as far as I know. That seems weird to me, but I'm pretty sure the only reason people flash their drives is for playing burned discs. It's not like the Wii, where there's a pretty vibrant homebrew community and legitimate reasons to hack.
I don't use Live that much beyond getting DLC, so if I were a pirate and this happened to me I wouldn't really care. I could still play single-player games, and Microsoft is just preventing me from giving them money whenever they release the next interesting Arcade game.
Another hypothetical example: some friends I know paid for that EB warranty where they just hand in their system for another used one in stock if it stops working or grinds too loud. If they got a system from EB that was previously banned -- not impossible since many mods don't leave any outside marks unless you are specifically looking for it -- and log in to get all their saves and scores gone, that's a legitimate reason to be peeved. While MS and others would surely love to end all trade-ins and offer no recompense for this situation, all EB would be able to do is work out some store-credit apology. I know I'd be more than annoyed to be sooooo close to getting all the orbs in Crackdown to lose that and all my other points. Count me in the camp that takes my score too seriously. It's mediocre but it's mine :)
I'm pretty certain Microsoft is not banning people for plugging those cloned drives into their machines. After all, there's a pretty large divide between that and people deliberately modding their consoles for the sole reason of pirating software.
They did say something a few weeks back about the latest firmware update disabling unauthorized third-party memory and transfer products, but I don't think that extends to the HDD drives. Way too many of those floating around for MS to start banning people that didn't realize they were buying fake merchandise.
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