Banishment from XBox Live?

[mr_pikachu]

Wave of bans hits Xbox Live

I'm posting this story for two reasons. Reason #1 is the main point of the article:

As many as 600,000 Xbox 360s were banned from the Xbox Live service this week in the latest in a series of crackdowns by Microsoft on illegally modified consoles.

The banned machines -- a "small percentage" of the millions of Xbox 360s around the world -- are alleged to have been modified in ways that violate Xbox Live's terms of service, but Microsoft won't say exactly how they can tell, nor exactly how many users were affected. Banned consoles can still play games, but can't connect to the Xbox Live service for multiplayer gaming, content downloads or software updates.

"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 today.

...And then there's reason #2.

The bans were apparently timed to coincide with yesterday's release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, expected to be by far the biggest gaming event of the year. One affected Call of Duty fan, a self-confessed software pirate called "Raz," told the BBC about his disappointment.

"It was a big day yesterday, the latest game we've been waiting months and months for. We've played the whole series and this one's come out, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2...I sign in online and next thing I see, 'Your console has been banned from Xbox'...now I don't know what to do," he told the BBC's Newsbeat.

Have we found our former Other Pokemon Games mod... modding consoles?

Discuss!

[Houndoom_Lover]

XD That's epic gold right there....Bugger, if that's the case, I bet our Xbox is banned at home too.

Fuck.

[Drago]

Think this one is more VG material, Bri? I'll shift it on over.

Anyhow, I was earlier associating the name Raz with one of the vacationing Toads on Mario RPG, but I much prefer the concept that he's off somewhere, modding Xbox consoles in a sweatshop and cackling to himself.

Personally, I kinda say that the modded folk have it coming. I mean, you're not supposed to do it - so why shouldn't Microsoft have a right to ban you from Live if you do? The video games industry is overpriced and needs adjusting, but that doesn't justifying illegally modifying your console.

[Telume]

This is why Wii = Win and Xbox = half-fail

I say half because of that and half-win because Xbox has a LOT of good games on it right now. But then that's kind of offset by the fact that some of them are multi-platform.

And personally a Wii is 20392309 times easier to mod than an Xbox, then again. I don't HAVE a freakin' Xbox or Wii so what would I know. Furthermore I wouldn't want to mod it because what happens if my Wii breaks. I don't wanna rape the warranty up the fucking ass harder than a spiked ogre mace just to import games.

[Master Rudy]

Let this be a lesson boys and girls......as far as the newer consoles go DO NOT MOD THEM!

Older consoles before the age of online gaming were a different story. In most cases they usually had an easy bypass that would allow you to play imports. As far as newer consoles go I don't know how they can tell. However in Microsoft's defense I highly doubt they'd have a way to tell if it was modded to play imports or modded to be able to cheat.

In any event don't do this guys. Even if it's for the innocent purpose of playing imports bear in mind that any modding will void the warrenty. In the case of the 360 and it's high failure rate/RROD this is something you don't need to contend with. You may want to be careful with older systems that are out of warrenty as well......I've heard about cases of companies refusing service on modded systems.

[Telume]

Man, most old systems had full support for imports because back in the day Japan was NTSC too. Now they're part-PAL so you kinda have to mess around.