And so it begins. Modded 360's officially banned from Live

D

doobiwan

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http://gamerscoreblog.com/team/archive/2007/05/17/545414.aspx

Keeping Xbox LIVE Fair

One of the great things about LIVE and the unified community is that we work hard to create a level playing field for all gamers and have a no tolerance policy towards inappropriate behavior like hacking or cheating. As part of our commitment to our members, we do not allow people that we have detected to have modified their console to connect to LIVE. This is an important part of our efforts to try and maintain a fair gaming environment for the large majority of gamers that play by the rules. This topic is more important than ever given the recent release of the Halo 3 beta. As a result, some consumers that try to login to LIVE who we detect have illegally modified their console will get an error code (Status Code: Z: 8015 - 190D) when trying to connect to the service. These users will not have their account automatically banned from LIVE, but they will no longer be able to access the service from the console they modified.

We have stated in the past that customers can only enjoy access to the Xbox LIVE community through the use of a genuine, unmodified, Xbox console and we will continue to enforce this rule to ensure the integrity of our service, the protection of our partners and the benefits of our users.
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About time.
 
This is for consoles that have been "chipped" right? I wonder if someone will be able to bypass it with a different "chip"?

BTW, what does "chipping" mean anyway? Do they add a special chip in the console?
 
Toxin said:
BTW, what does "chipping" mean anyway? Do they add a special chip in the console?
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Yes. You have generally needed to modify consoles to remove region coding and allow booting unsigned code. Region codes are put in place to allow overcharging for games. Typically PAL region consumers are charged much higher prices than those in the US NTSC region. Preventing booting unsigned code is meant to lock out unapproved development. In theory this ensures that only quality software is released for the console. In practice it meant anyone who couldn't afford the hefty devkit fees couldn't develop or learn to develop for the console system.

So far the XBox 360 has not lived up to the no region lock promise for games and it is still locked for movies. It remains to be seen whether the PS3 keeps to the promise of not locking games to a region, but I expect it will still need to be modified to allow playback of imported movies.

Toxin said:
This is for consoles that have been "chipped" right? I wonder if someone will be able to bypass it with a different "chip"?
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All good modchips can be disabled. When disabled they cannot be detected. If there aren't yet any for the current consoles there will be in time.
 
Noxi, I'd call that a bit harsh, but not untrue. Region locks are at the developers discretion at the moment and there are a lot of 360 games that are not locked. GoW's and Rainbow Six come to mind.

All consoles contain anti piracy measure, so you can't run copied games. "Modding" is the overall term used to describe circumvention of these measures. "Chipping" is circumvention via a physic chip (duh ;)) that fools the console into thinking it's running a legit app.

The 360 "Mod" is not a chip, some smart cookie figured out a way to flash (reprogram) the chip that controls the DVD drive in the 360 and fool it into not checking if a game is a copy or not, so a lot of folks refer to these xboxes as "hacked" rather than chipped.

Noxi, as far as "blocking" learning console development, how do you feel about XNA?
 
The isssue is not mod chips but folks uploading their saved games for others to download and play and thus getting achievements and gamer points without playing the game.

Microsoft download every one of these save games (which contains your unique console id) from the websites and added that to a block list so that when you load it it will corrupt it.
 
tibby.dude said:
The isssue is not mod chips but folks uploading their saved games for others to download and play and thus getting achievements and gamer points without playing the game.

Microsoft download every one of these save games (which contains your unique console id) from the websites and added that to a block list so that when you load it it will corrupt it.
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You are getting two stories confused here...

They are clamping down on share cheating but they are also blocking modded consoles from logging onto Live!.

What they are also doing is banning the user of the modded console as well so that your possibly fake gamerscore can not be increased any more even from an unmodded console.
 
I am a bit behind the news it seems ... so that can now detect scumbags with reflashed drives that use cough cough "backup" discs ... it is so easy for them to read the IDE drive firmware and to a hash on it and compare that with manufacturing date.

Very sneaky bastards to time it with the HALO 3 public beta test but good for Microsoft :).
 
Yeah I love that line....

I presume this ability was included in the Spring update and like you say they have kept it quiet until the Halo 3 beta...

I heard a lot of people complaining that they got strange "Game Over" messages from the Halo 3 Beta and now they cannot connect anymore..

Talk about it really being Game over :D
 
I have no problem with modding of consoles...You bought it do with it as you please...but please, PLEASE! dont bitch and moan when Microsoft do something to stop you from using there additional services!....because then I laugh at you....if your smart enough to get it modded you should be smart enough to understand the consequences...LOL@U modders:p
 
Spot on Z3r0.

It's does cause quite a bit of friction over second hand purchases. I imagine the 2nd hand 360 US market will move more to in person transactions away from ebay.
 
Another reason for "Modding" is to allow for game cheats by circumventing the built in controls that prevent modified versions of clients. So MS kicking these guys protects the Live service as well as making pirating a little less attractive.

As to whether a new fix will appears soon to bypass the current detection scheme. Absolutely. Don't know if that will help you with your banned 360 though. Once it's banned, it probably stays banned. So you will have to apply the new fix on a new 360. And I bet you MS have x other detection schemes waiting that have not yet been revealed.

Agree that you will really have to be brave (or stupid) to e-bay a 2nd hand 360 now.
 
doobiwan said:
The 360 "Mod" is not a chip, some smart cookie figured out a way to flash (reprogram) the chip that controls the DVD drive in the 360 and fool it into not checking if a game is a copy or not, so a lot of folks refer to these xboxes as "hacked" rather than chipped.
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I am aware of this. It is a fairly useless modification because it appears to do nothing to remove region coding for movies and games. Proper modchips for the 360 will provide the full range of features. Hopefully someone can even provide a tool to boot games off a hard drive.

I am also aware of the list of 360 games and that there are some examples of publishers not locking their games, but there is no reason to even give them the option. They can choose to only officially release a game in a single country, but they are not entitled to decide it cannot be exported/imported by others. It is an anti-competitive measure.

doobiwan said:
Noxi, as far as "blocking" learning console development, how do you feel about XNA?
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It sounded like a good idea.
 
z3r0 said:
if your smart enough to get it modded you should be smart enough to understand the consequences...
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It is well known that you don't try to connect to multiplayer services with your modchip enabled.
 
noxibox said:
It is well known that you don't try to connect to multiplayer services with your modchip enabled.
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Heres a great idea that Microsoft could use that I just thought off in 2 seconds... do you think they managed to think of this yet?

Everytime the machine is turned on check the hardware, if there is something that should not be there change the 'ModFlag' to True...

When the box connects to Live check if ModFlag == True. If so disconnect.

This would get around all those intelligent people who disable the Modchip before connecting...

Now I wonder if any of the thousands of developers at Microsoft have managed to think of this :rolleyes:
 
I wouldn't be surprised if it does that already. At the very least if it's checking when you hop onto Live it's stopping the most important offence - cheating.
 
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