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[vintage_guitar]

QUOTE(bucko @ Nov 12 2009, 06:12 PM)

so I can read some decent topics on X-S without it going down with stupid "zomg i'm banned posts"...

I agree.

[tweak41]

I like the semantics here..."to protect our users"

Like a pirated game will bite you or something if you're not careful...

People know what they're doing, and they're not doing it to be malicious.  They're doing it cause they're cheap, bored, or trying to make a quick buck (which is bullshit).

BUT--Microsoft isn't protecting anyone by banning modded consoles.  Except maybe their own pocketbook when people go out and buy new consoles.  And even then you have retail stores losing revenue on busted consoles being returned in place of the new console these people are buying.  

Obviously piracy is wrong, but don't say you're protecting Xbox Live members.  That's just not true.

[supercheap007]

I might have a little bit more faith in this banning thing if they didnt ban people who put on extra harddrives.
Lets face it, 150 on a 120 M$ harddrive will get me a 1.5 terabyte at frys...

[ajennice]

I'll go on record to let everone here that thisks is such as swell idea hasn't heard all the stuff out there. 2 friedns I have that work at best buy and gamestop have reported lines of dozens of people wanting to return their consoles. Since both of them are in the gaming trend they know how to mod the consoles and have told thieir companies as well as the customers that on many consoles, there were no signs of any tampering. No warranty sticker issues, no case mods.. nothing to show they had opened/altered the console. The guy at gamestop even tries to play backed up games on the console and says that 90% of them wil not play a backed up game.
Either alot of people paid to have original firware re-flashed and the modder can really get around tearing up the warranty seal pretty good, or this ban has several holes in it.
My local game retailer has suggested in reporting this to the better business bureau/watchdog after an 80+ year old man and his wife brought in a colsom that was bought 3 days ago for them by their daughter so they could use the it as a DVD player, for netflix, and to keep in touch with the grandkids. Anyone wan' to go on a limb and this old couple is probably the pirate king and queen of the east? Also a buy/sell/trade gaming store had their DEMO console banned. No one opens a demo console.. hell it never leaves the store

Mine got hit and it never had any mods. Being I know a few people in the legal field we tookiti to a best buy and had 3 managers (store manager, department manager, and a geek squad manager) inspect it and sign a notarized letter stating it was not modded as far as they could tell. We then made copies and sent those to microsoft and the better business bureau with pictures of the console, then sent the actual console to the State attrney General.
IF it takes these steps to make them realized no everyone is the boy who cried wolf, then be it. Remember these guys said there was no RROD issue, then came out and exteneded warranties, said the dvd players didn't cause rings, then settled a 20million calss action suit and began a disk replacement program.. We all now the blue scrren of death and the vista issues. This ban was legit but affected alot of innocents of which MS will not help out. Period


As for the people stating piracy is what causes game prices to be so high.. that's BS!  Does andyone pirate gasoline? It's priced pretty high!  It's supply and demand... period. i saw fool forking out over 100.00 for a legit copy of MW2 3 days before it was released.  If someone will pay a substancial price ofr something, then you can't blame piracy. that's greed and profiteering.

Just by visiting the forums, you can tell they knew this would get out of hand. No one will give any inssigt to what ahppededn. All questions are met wit  preapproved copy and paste replies. Not may Moderators will even acknowledge some comcerns.. Usually when a company tell their employees to just use a prearranged reply and do not try to help, then that means they know something could of went wrong and they do not want to mislead anyone untill the facts are straightened out.

[ajennice]

Tweak hit a good note when said somethin about the retailers having to swap out the busted consoles.


It's going to be bigger than you think. The retailers get the grunt of all the negative in this. We can't go to Redmond, Wa and climb up in some xbox top level execs face so we do it, unmaliciously at he place where we bought it. They have zero control over it, but they do have to honor thier policies as well. If you have a warranty and your gets banned wrongly.. return it and make the store manager aware of it. The stores and distributor have a louder voice than we do as they buy these in bulk as we just buy (hope) one and make it last as long as we can.
What really sucks is in this downed economy alot of people are fed up with this and returning their consoel and just geeting a store sredit to use as holiday spending money. This essentiall takes about 215.00 per return out of that companues revenue.  the smaller gaming store will be hit the hardest as NOW people will not buy the 360 over fears of getting banned for no reason at all. This in turn (no piracy) wil cause the console and gaming prices to climb as Microsoft still has to cover thier overhead for their product.  If you need to have 1 million in sale and you miss it by alot, the next quarter you'll be raising the prices abouty 1-1.5% on all hardware and accessories licensed by your comapny. Beacuse in big business if you'rte losing money the stock holders are upset.. and upset stock holders usually end with CEO's losing their primo jobs and lusious salaries.

to answer GUE$$WHO - no one knows how they did this. no ne knows what the console/game updates do. They're saved on the console's memory as well as the hard drive's memory. They could of implimented a mole that now reads and reports the disk stats as well as the firmware on the console. It's just like firing up a PC after being turned off for a month. Even though you do not go to the windows update page to see if there are update, Windows will tell you.. Hey you got some updates. I think the last few console updates implimented this into our 360's
But to couter argue myself - why are unmodded console being banned??

If you've ever updated a PC prigram or DVD-rom firmware you'll notice you haceto agree to an EULA (end user license aggreement)...This was done when users initailly signed up for LIVE saying they agree with the terms...

[GU3$$WH0]

 HEY! (AJENNICE), what do you think about this part of the article after what i said in my post?

[/quote] In an interview with Sky's Anna Jones, Mr Lewis went on to defend the move.
"If it's clear someone is downloading pirated copies or have modified their Xbox in some way that will allow them to download games that they haven't purchased legitimately and yes we lock that account down and we're unapologetic about that," he said.

"GU3$$ WH0"

[Strumpet]

QUOTE(tweak41 @ Nov 13 2009, 05:40 AM)

Obviously piracy is wrong, but don't say you're protecting Xbox Live members.  That's just not true.

If you look into communities such as se7ensins then you know what people can do when they have the ability to mod iso's . So yes I would go as far as saying its a legitimate claim that they are protecting xbox live users albeit a very minor number would use them techniques

[GU3$$WH0]

QUOTE(GU3$$WH0 @ Nov 13 2009, 02:44 AM)

(AJENNICE),  

                      I know somebody that has two moded 360's... 1 played back ups online (banned) & the other never played anything online (unbanned)... he went online today (didnt play any back ups) with the (unbanned) console & was fine... so because of that person i know... that part of the article i pointed out... plus what "c4eava" said... quote "suspect theyre going hard on the warez releases & incorrect use of abgx"... thats why believe its not the fw... bugged games can easily be planted & abgx could be crippled with a virus or worm of some sort... that notifies  M$ & logs everytime you played an illigitimate copy... qoute ("overwhelming evidence") will get you banned from xbox live says a microsoft spokesperson...

"GU3$$ WH0"

[d-range]

QUOTE(trick91 @ Nov 13 2009, 05:28 AM)

if they can stop you from installing games to the harddrive, what stops them from doing the same thing for future dash upgrades?  it locks you out of upgrading the dash hence u cant play anymore games offline either?

They'd have to embed each and every check directly into the dashboard then, without a way to verify CRC's, SS's etc. online, since you wouldn't be going on XBL anymore. They'd have only 2 ways of detecting a modded box left: direct inspection of the firmware, or some kind of indirect check on response times, disc jitter, that kind of stuff. The first seems very unlikely, the drives aren't made to have easy access to the firmware from software, in fact they are made to make it as hard as possible. The second could always be faked by hacked firmware as soon as the actual detection method is known (which it will be eventually). Also it seems to be a little thin to go on, crippling a console just because the disc doesn't look like a pressed one. Last but not least I think they might get into legal troubles crippling a console just by inserting a disc, instead of crippling it because you're using said disc on their online service.

That said, I don't even think Microsoft is out to get all pirates, they just want to wipe the XBL service clean of modders. There's little to gain disabling the <1% of modded consoles that will never, ever be able to go online, right now about 3% of the consoles appears to be modified, but that number will certainly drop when XBL + modded console is effectively made impossible.

[ynwa]

Dont see how you can blame MS for banning consoles. Did people really expect them to do nothing and just let people mod their consoles and download games for free? You have to expect that they will do something and you take that risk.

[Exobex]

Microsoft aren't protecting Live from piracy.  They're protecting themselves from another million E74/RROD timebombs that would otherwise have failed under warranty and needed replacement.

[nitussi]

Suck it up everyone --you all knew the hammer was coming, it happens every year this time ..and don't tell me you are not going to go out and buy another console and MW2--it's November and the winter, and you need and fiend for live because you are stuck in the house all day. M$ knows this. Why you think the hammer always come in the winter time? Why you think the biggest games come out the same time? It would be stupid for them to drop it any other time of the year. They also want the sells of MW2 to be leeps above the ps3 version, and they can't have that if half the people playing it, are playing pirated versions.

So suck it up! Because I believe for most people here, spending $200 on a new console a year is not a bad trade off for all the free or cheap entertainment you had all year long.. and you know what I mean!

[minipower]

[/QUOTE]
In an interview with Sky's Anna Jones, Mr Lewis went on to defend the move.
"If it's clear someone is downloading pirated copies or have modified their Xbox in some way that will allow them to download games that they haven't purchased legitimately and yes we lock that account down and we're unapologetic about that," he said.
[/QUOTE]


So? do they have people looking for people that have downloaded games..??

What if someone downloaded a game on your I.P. that had a modded XBOX360, But you do not have a modded xbox360 yourself.

Also is it ileagal to download something and not use it?

[Ranger72]

QUOTE(Strumpet @ Nov 13 2009, 02:52 AM)

If you look into communities such as se7ensins then you know what people can do when they have the ability to mod iso's . So yes I would go as far as saying its a legitimate claim that they are protecting xbox live users albeit a very minor number would use them techniques

It could also be said they are protecting legitimate user who pay hard earned money on their games from people who didn't.

[shage]

MS aint stupid, what do they lose by you fixing your box? You void your warranty, you risk getting caught, all equals a new box, ms makes shit on the titles of the games. Recents sales of the xbox and the layoff of masses with more to come show that they needed a plan b, the plan b was get mw2 out and push the ban button. Why because 600k fucking retards will run out and buy their 14th xbox to get back at ms. Thus pushing their sales numbers up, over inflating their income which should be illegal and the sec should be looking into it.

If you mod you get fucked so be it, but one it shouldnt be national or world news, a little girl abducted from a trailer park in the middle of nowhere doesnt even get the much press. Fucked up, but a company who releases shit design of consoles, found guilty of a faulty design, and what do they do cut back even more to save money because ms figures prob 20% will mod it, so 20% will void their warranty, and roughly 50% of them will make it out of the warranty, leaving what 30% to actually fix, and people say fuck that because you call them talk to some 3rd world country who treats you like its your fault that their box fucking broke, and then tell you its going to be weeks to get your console back. Thank god nintendo didnt do this with the 8bit because people wouldve junked the whole idea of gaming, how many of you still have the 8bit, and how many of you could plug it in and turn it on and play it right now if wanted, you come to me in 20 yrs and show me your box do the same fucking thing, rant done lol