Microsoft booting modders off Xbox Live

Joansie : do you know how the console market works ?

Console makers don't earn any money on the hardware (they often lose money on it), but on games licence !

So your friend who buy a 360 for its 'special ability' actualy make MS loose money !!! And I'm not sure they are used to it ;)

its "soldier"

It's not without precedent, so stop acting suprised.
Am I the only one who remembers they did the exact same thing when Halo2 went live?

Oh, boo hoo. Wah, wah, wah. This company won't allow me to steal their products, I will ban them and then whine about it on online message boards.. only misspelled and grammatically mutilated. I swear, the internet children get worse and worse every.. single.. day.

your lucky all their doing is banning you from live. The FBI could be knocking on your door.

but i love that all these modders and pirates are getting banned!! please cry some more, the comments are priceless i love to hear the crying and whining! lol.

Woa! What is all this talk about NAT? I'm about to replace my Cisco PIX with and 1800 series router so I can add an additional internet connection and run Optimized Edge Routing to load balence between 'em. Do I need to NAT specific ports to my 360 to avoid this or something?

@ Dark-Pen

No, it's not. It's really not. :D

"On the note of backups. Take care of your games and you won't have this issue. People always bring up the fact that they want to copy their games to make sure their original stays in perfect condition. This is crap as the majority of pirates out there use this excuse...."

Anybody else here old enough to remember when the first point on the install guide for games was...
"Before installation, back up your original game disks."?
BTW, that's word for word from the install sheet for the first Wing Commander.

I'd love to mod my 360 to play legal backups. I have a home movie server which I would love to extend to video games.

Unfortunately, I had a feeling this kind of thing would happen. :(

TheSky: Yes I know how it works and a part of the marketing battle between MS and Sony concerned who delivered most consoles to the market. More consoles sold, more games produced, more reasons to buy a console. MS shouted very loud when they bragged about 10 millon consoles shipped. The 'I buy it becuase it is moddable'-people are definietely not a small part of those 10 million.

Add to that the 360's sub-par-build-quality making/forcing (it's up to you to decide) some of us all to buy a new one when the first one got smoked and we're out of warranty.

Getting banned from Live is all in the calculation when you decide to mod your console. I personally couldn't care less. You win some lose some as Lemmy would have said. So come on Dudes and Dudesses. Stop the silly bashing. You gain nothing except letting the world know that you have nothing really important to say and the risk of actually displaying your stupidness. ;-)

Go play some games instead. That's what we love.

Ah - I get it ... "enemy SOLDERS" -- cute... sort of...

Good riddance to the self-righteous hackers and pirates. No one will miss them.

"your lucky all their doing is banning you from live. The FBI could be knocking on your door."

My lucky? Whose doing? You need to learn to spell--and then go study law, because you're clearly ignorant of that topic as well.

"Tell You what, Some people who mod their xbox 360s do it because they can't afford the overly priced games which developers/companies release. "

I'm going to steal a Maserati because it's priced to high for me to purchase.

"its "soldier"

Posted at 9:13AM on May 18th 2007 by Dark-Pen"

It's solder. As in soldering. Learn the concept of "the pun".

I wonder what % of the anti-piracy posts are Microsoft cronies...

Right. Few things about the mods that are out as I type this.

1) The firmware is ONLY used to boot pirate copies. You cannot region free a game that is not already region-free. Remember, a lot of 360 games work in any region out of the box.

2) You cannot boot unsigned code (eg. homebrew) or modified code (eg. an image of a disc that has been modified in any way as it would void the current signature), so modding does not make cheating any easier.

Now, at work I've modded 6 peoples consoles and they all have the Halo 3 beta. I don't do pirate copies for them or even have my own console modded, I don't ask any questions just make a quick pound out of them.

Out of those 6, only one has been banned from XBox Live so far and they've all played Halo 3 pretty much the same amount of time. The one difference with that person? He had a pirate Crackdown. I still don't think MS can see properly who has a modded 360, due to this evidence I suspect that the only reason some people are banned is because they were stupid enough to use a copied Crackdown which will have the same key as the rest of them. If they didn't see THAT coming, more fool them!

@ 66

There has been reports of people being banned from using halo 3 code, i think time will jsut tell who will be banned or not.

That is a good point... of the people who were ban, were they using a backup of Crackdown?

Whatever your reasons may be for modding - it doesn't matter. The thing is, Microsoft owns Live. When you subscribe to it, you agree to play by their rules. If one of those rules is "no modded consoles", and you play on a modded console, they've got every right to kick you off, plain and simple. It's just like going into a casino - you play by the house rules, or you're out on your ass.

Now i just wish Sony would do this to the people using custom firmware on their PSPs

I just wonder about the supposedly large amount of people claiming to NOT have a modded Xbox, but their console was banned recently anyway...

Everyone should know that modding your console will do this. We all knew it when we modded our original Xbox's, and I think we all kind of knew this would happen with the 360 as well. I am not convinced that M$ has a reliable way to correctly determine who is and who is not using a modded 360, but over time, they will figure it out.

I do not have a 360 yet, so I guess maybe I don't even have room to talk, but I am really interested to find out how many people got their consoles banned that were perfectly legit, and I also wonder if M$ is going to give retailers some way to test for the "modded" 360 so that they don't get bombarded with seemingly legit returns or second-hand sales and then have to eat the cost later because it was useless on Live...

"The 'I buy it becuase it is moddable'-people are definietely not a small part of those 10 million."

Posted at 11:34AM on May 18th 2007 by Joansie

Ok Joansie, don't you know that people who mod are in the MILLIONS and MILLIONS! Please, I don't care if people mod but don't blow it out of preportion man. I think the number is probably in the 100 thousands and probably not as big as you think. And out of ten million that is a small number. Most people have better things to do like modding their car or house not their freaking videogame system. Believe it or not some people buy a console just to enjoy games and other multimedia apps just by turning on the power button! LoL

BTW if you post a reply and all u have ta say is, "Duuuurrrr you don't know how spell. hehe I feel good about myself now." like some of these other lame people, please don't bother. Not that you would bro but I just thought I'd say that just in case.

I'm in utter disbelief at you people. LOL Let's just face the facts, whoever hacks gets hijacked by the Microsoft. That's it. He shoots, he scores, *applause

Also I heard that the people who did the hack sold their information to microsoft so they in turn uncrack their uncrackable microsoft-labeled machine. Can anybody shed some light on this?

Here's a little information for you guys so you don't go around sounding idiotic:

A modded Xbox 360 can only play UNTOUCHED, UNMODIFIED copies of games.

A modded Xbox 360 CANNOT be used to hack or cheat or in ANY way exploit a game.

A modded Xbox 360 CANNOT be used to play imported games. The region code is part of the signed unmodifiable parts of the game.

There has not even been a wee tiny little bit of progress ANYWHERE towards making it possible to modify game files, hack, cheat, etc.

Everything you see that says this ban was to "stop cheaters" is absolute, 100% pure undiluted bullshit.

These bans came down in order to stop piracy, and for absolutely no other reason at all. Anything else you hear is a lie.

This information is provided as a public service because way too many of you guys apparently believe anything a PR rep from MS or Bungie posts on their blog.

@23:

They *do* ban (some) modders from the street. You can't put a nitro boost on your car for example. That doesn't stop it from being done on private tracks though.

As is with this ban. It's MS' network, MS' rules. Don't like it, don't log on, use a different network.

All tho i undestand some peoples desire to mod for imports or what have you. But I have a difucult time understanding why there is such a large outcry over preotecting the modded community over reqyesting region free games and stuff as standard functionality from the start.

in the same sense MS can implement a ladder system. If you want to pley competitavly needs to meet some system check. Doesnt make much sense to create a scene for everyone that owns a system.

ha ha ha ha suckers about time .im a honest 50£ a game bloke luv playing online i always play by the rules.and i know a friend at work thats mod is console im currently taking the fucking piss out of him.well done ms great move .n cant wait for console v pc wars over live has i have xbox live +a laptop running vista so im geared up for games for windows which i get free because its basicly xblive on pc ha ha ha ha fucking pirates kiss my arse im luving it

wow...finally.