One Million Xbox Live players banned.

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Microsoft 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.

"All consumers should know that piracy is illegal and that modifying their Xbox 360 console to play pirated discs violates the Xbox Live terms of use, will void their warranty, and result in a ban from Xbox Live," Microsoft said in a statement.
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http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/peripherals/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=221601267

Woah.
 
I modded my Xbox, to play roms on it.

I did not and will not mod my Xbox 360.
 
I assume this is for all the Borderlands / MW2 rips?

Have they had a banning this large before, say for Halo 3/Gears etc?
 
My favorite quote when it comes to any industry attempting to stamp out piracy, be it software or movies or music, is this:

"You can't stop the signal, Mal. You can never stop the signal."
 
They(The 1 million) got no-one to blame but themselves IMO.

I do not have my 360 modded and never will.

Only reason I modded my old PS2 for example was to be able to play imports, sadly on the XB360 no mod removes region-coding and on the PS3 luckily all games are regionfree.
 
There was a piece by the BBC newsbeat team (a section mainly for kids I think, but I saw the MW2 link and clicked it) about some Raz kid who was 18 (kind of new where this was going when he has a name like that, what a chav) and had his banned.

He was 'completely gutted' when he fired up MW2 and went to sign in online and got the banned message.

He spent £75 to get his Xbox chipped and has about 60 pirated games.

I read the whole article with roaring laughter in my head, with absolutely NO sympathy.

You pirate games because you dont want to spend money, you get banned or if I had my way; arrested.

Nobody to blaim but yourself. Youre everything thats wrong with the industry when it comes to losing money and people getting let go due to the company not making enough money.

Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. I point and laugh at your patheticness.
 
Ennui said:
My favorite quote when it comes to any industry attempting to stamp out piracy, be it software or movies or music, is this:

"You can't stop the signal, Mal. You can never stop the signal."
Click to expand...

Much as I love that quote and movie, they literally just stopped the signal for a million people.

As systems get more and more closed, it's going to become easier and easier to stop piracy.
 
In related news: 1,000,000 xbox pirates are stupid. Trying to go online with a modded box? All that downloading, you'd think someone would have clued them in on the deal. I don't even have an xbox 360, and I've known that for years. I wonder how many would have tried to play Modern Warfare 2 online, before it was even released! Oh lol
 
I wonder how many will get another one and just do the same shit again.
 
seanconnery said:
As systems get more and more closed, it's going to become easier and easier to stop piracy.
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You'll never EVER be able to stop piracy of any sort. There has been pirating since the 80s, probably the 70s. It's never, going, to, stop, ever, in, life. The commas were needed for extreme emphasis.
 
Someone I know got their 360 banned. lol.

It their own fault.
 
Ren.182 said:
Someone I know got their 360 banned. lol.

It their own fault.
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Exactly.

I actually knew a few who got theirs banned, and there's a very notable difference in reaction, the teenager ones are generally pissed and seem to think Microsoft has no right to do what they did to them.

The older ones however(mid 20s and older) generally acknowledge the fact that they modded the consoles on their own choice and thus it was their responsibility and no-one elses, and that they were aware of the possible consequences.

The ones I feel pity for are the few ones that probably weren't modded, but got detected in error regardless.
 
?ynast? said:
There was a piece by the BBC newsbeat team (a section mainly for kids I think, but I saw the MW2 link and clicked it) about some Raz kid who was 18 (kind of new where this was going when he has a name like that, what a chav) and had his banned.

He was 'completely gutted' when he fired up MW2 and went to sign in online and got the banned message.

He spent £75 to get his Xbox chipped and has about 60 pirated games.

I read the whole article with roaring laughter in my head, with absolutely NO sympathy.

You pirate games because you dont want to spend money, you get banned or if I had my way; arrested.

Nobody to blaim but yourself. Youre everything thats wrong with the industry when it comes to losing money and people getting let go due to the company not making enough money.

Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. I point and laugh at your patheticness.
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I read that exact article yesterday too. What a load of drivel, I can't believe the BBC let this guy put it up under their name.

Let me quote some of his moronic questionings...
I wasn't expecting it. I was just like, 'OK, what do I do now? Is this just a joke?' So I thought, 'Let me restart the Xbox'. I restarted, signed in again, same message. I did that three times, same message. I was pulling my hair out thinking, 'No, why me?'
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It's like telling someone their dog's just died. It was pretty much like that for me. I love it, I love playing Xbox live. I play with my mates all the time. It's just a good laugh, we all sit there chatting, playing games. Now I don't know what to do.
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I still think they should lower the prices. There are 16-year-old kids out there, they don't earn money so they go screaming to their parents saying, 'Can you buy me this game?'

Fair enough, one game once in a while but the amount of games coming out, good games, everyone wants to play them all. And for them to pay £50 a game?
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You've been paying nothing sonny, so shut up. Also, why do you think you should be allowed to play every game? Nothing is owed to you, do you get annoyed you have to pay to see every film at the cinema?

I've probably saved about £600 and I've copied roughly 30 or 40 games. A lot of them I've downloaded or I've taken off friends that have downloaded themselves.

To be honest, I've contemplated whether to move to Playstation 3 or buy another Xbox. I wouldn't do it again but I really don't know if I'm going to get the Xbox again now."
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Yeah..play the victim card after admitting to that degree of piracy. Disguise your fight against the 360 all you want, but you just want a PS3 since you know you're finished on the 360 and you'll probably want to get that chipped too.

Oh and to conclude:
One Radio 1 listener Raz says he was gutted to be cut off just as he was about to play the new Call of Duty game.
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Which he pirated. And...

My name's Raz, I'm 25 years old, I'm a massive Xbox gamer. I play every day after work and all day on the weekends.
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25 years old? He sounds like he's 14. Time to man up, you're pathetic.
 
Hectic Glenn said:
25 years old? He sounds like he's 14. Time to man up, you're pathetic.
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Indeed, if he's 25 and working like he claims, then he doesn't even have the basic "I'm a child so I can't afford it!" argument.

What a f*cking moron.
 
Meh, they had it coming. Violate the EULA and you should expect this sort of thing to happen.
 
I dont believe the BBC allowed them to say hat stuff on their website. They were clearly pirating the games (even admitting to it). They should have just passed their details onto the police.
 
Hilarious. The mock indignation at it all is what's even more funny.
 
What the **** is up with this "oh games are too expensive so I warez them." I'm a student who makes like 500e/month, from that I pay every bill; rent, food, beer and I still have money to buy 1-4 games every month.
 
seanconnery said:
Much as I love that quote and movie, they literally just stopped the signal for a million people.

As systems get more and more closed, it's going to become easier and easier to stop piracy.
Click to expand...

True, but let me know when movies, music, and games stop getting cracked or leaked and traded through people and the internet. I don't think that will ever stop unless we have some kind of fascist controlled internet.
 
I think they leaked MW2 as a strategy to catch pirates.
 
VirusType2 said:
In related news: 1,000,000 xbox pirates are stupid. Trying to go online with a modded box? All that downloading, you'd think someone would have clued them in on the deal. I don't even have an xbox 360, and I've known that for years. I wonder how many would have tried to play Modern Warfare 2 online, before it was even released! Oh lol
Click to expand...

This is something that was made clear to me a little while ago. It's not as simple as just 'not going online'.

Microsoft stores small cache data on an isolated section of the hard drive; this takes info from all over the xbox, alerting itself to any unlawful changes at all. This means that even if you didn't play online at all, if you even just CONNECTED to XBL at ANY time after playing an un-checked copy of the game(which is where it gets complicated, the specifics which are deemed a no-no too talk of because of a certain thread sticky), you can get banned.

tl;dr, Microsoft is watching you all the time. The only way to make sure you don't get banned is to never connect at all, which many people would not like to do because they want to play their legal multiplayer games.
 
Way to go Microsoft. At least this shows that there is clearly piracy issue on the consoles not just the PC. My mate got banned a few hours ago and he just laughed it off, he knew it was comin and he had a good run. What's the deal with the BBC publishing that? The guy's admitting to piracy which is illegal and trying to get sympathy for it.
 
Probably thinks other pirates will sympathize. But all other pirates do is laugh at fallen pirates. It's harsh on the open seas.
 
Ren.182 said:
I dont believe the BBC allowed them to say hat stuff on their website. They were clearly pirating the games (even admitting to it). They should have just passed their details onto the police.
Click to expand...

To which the police will do nothing. Tell the content owners and let them sue for whatever civil action they think is appropriate.
 
Are they actually banning the players now, too?
 
I actually like this type of news. Serves them right. 1 million is a massive number too. They must have been collecting data for quite awhile and they just now brought out the ban hammer. That's the way to do it.
 
Of course this won't stop pirating, and the douchebags will always have an answer that somehow mystically explains how they are entitled to pirate games.

EDIT: I was under the impression you can only ban people from Xbox Live or something.
 
I find this kind of strange that Microsoft actually banned the consoles, effectively making them null forever. 'Tis the season for shopping, I suppose.
 
You can ban consoles? I was under the impression that you could only do that with online Xbox Live accounts.
 
The modded consoles have been banned from using XBox Live, offline use hasn't been affected.
 
Actually banning the console also affects some offline features. You can't install games to the HDD anymore, and every achievement you get while banned will be ignored, even if you buy a new console the achievements gotten in the banned console will not apply. And possibly something else I had forgotten.
 
Is there any way of restoring a modded 360 back to normal?
 
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