X Box 360 - anyone get kicked??

I don't know, unless this ends up on the front page of The Sun, or whatever, etc. then with Christmas coming up and in the current economic climate, I can see a lot of parents buying these boxes without having a clue about what has gone on.

I'm not even quite sure if all of these modified boxes have been modified for piracy. Quite a bit could be to get around region locked discs, etc. Why don't they ban the gamertag at the same time?
 
What is the point in region locking discs? Is it so they can control differences in price from country to country?
 
It was happening before DVD with NTSC and PAL VHS.

Seems a lot of effort for not a lot of gain really, it must cost them money to produce different versions of the same thing.
 
R_Nick said:
It was happening before DVD with NTSC and PAL VHS.

Seems a lot of effort for not a lot of gain really, it must cost them money to produce different versions of the same thing.
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Yeah, well PAL and NTSC are TV standards, the film distribution companies didn't really have a choice.

They have to produce different versions in any case because of language and cultural differences. Locking however stops you from playing a Japanese movie in Europe if you want to do that.
 
Ah yea never thought about languages. Bollocks.

Everyone should just learn English, best way forward really.
 
Count Duckula said:
My PC isn't region-locked, for some reason.

Which is nice.
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What baffles me is how easy it is to get regionless DVD players, thus rendering all the region locked discs playable. Got mine from Amazon, apparently they can't be sold regionless, but Amazon themselves will instruct you on how to set it to regionless.
 
WeasteDevil said:
They've banned 1 million XBoxes from LIVE. :lol:

Microsoft bans up to 1 million Xbox Live users - Games - msnbc.com

Was piracy really that widespread on the Xb360?
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Yes Piracy for the 360 really was that widespread. If you look at any torrent site, and have a look at the number of downloads of games torrents it will shoe you. An un-stealth patched versions of CODMW2 had something like 10,000 downloads in the first day.


WeasteDevil said:
I don't know, unless this ends up on the front page of The Sun, or whatever, etc. then with Christmas coming up and in the current economic climate, I can see a lot of parents buying these boxes without having a clue about what has gone on.

I'm not even quite sure if all of these modified boxes have been modified for piracy. Quite a bit could be to get around region locked discs, etc. Why don't they ban the gamertag at the same time?
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If you think about it, it is quite a clever thing to do, ban the xbox but not the gamertag. People are more likely to go out and buy another xbox if their gamertag is still available. If they were to ban both, it leaves people in the same position as a first time console buyer, and the lowered price of the PS3, makes it a very favourable option, something MS can't afford.


Interestingly, it seems that rather than just ban the console, they have also made it impossible to recover any gamertags onto the hard drive of the flashed machine, even when switched onto a different console.
 
esmufc09 said:
I've never had any of my consoles chipped. Don't really see the point. I don't mind paying 40 quid a game to be honest, good value for money considering the replayibility you get out of most of them.
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I had my PS1 chipped.

Those were the days - where you could copy games from the video shop.
 
WeasteDevil said:
So what's going to happen when unsuspecting people buy these boxes second hand? I'm not quite sure that Microsoft has thought this through.
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Its a good point. MS should set up a website with all banned mac addresses / serial numbers of blocked consoles.

People will be selling there blocked consoles on ebay or trading them in at Game, Blockbuster etc.

I hope people who have been caught also get there accounts deleted and all achievements removed.
 
I'm quite tempted to pick one of these up on ebay for a bargain. If it still plays games fine locally, that's fine with me. I'm not really one for the whole online gaming thing.
 
lynchie said:
I'm quite tempted to pick one of these up on ebay for a bargain. If it still plays games fine locally, that's fine with me. I'm not really one for the whole online gaming thing.
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Good call, never thought about that, how much are they going for?

And on the side, I have never seen a restriction placed on an electronic that hackers have not been able to crack. People will find ways to get around the block.
 
lynchie said:
I'm quite tempted to pick one of these up on ebay for a bargain. If it still plays games fine locally, that's fine with me. I'm not really one for the whole online gaming thing.
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how much you willing to pay? I have an elite, with a 120GB HDD.
 
No sympathy for any of these whinging spongers.

Also, only a retard goes onto live with a modded/chipped xbox. Anyone with half a brain would have one for live use and the dodgy one for local play.

Those with no brain would have a PS3
 
CassiusClaymore said:
No sympathy for any of these whinging spongers.

Also, only a retard goes onto live with a modded/chipped xbox. Anyone with half a brain would have one for live use and the dodgy one for local play.

Those with no brain would have a PS3
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That doesn't make any sense. 1) If you get caught online, all that is going to happen is that you are restricted to offline play, so you don't really gain anything by having 2 xbox's, in that respect.

2) Up until now, as long as you used stealth patched games, it was unheard of being caught.
 
Personally I can't believe that they went through so much trouble (and they went through a lot of trouble) with the rest of the device to try to stop this type of thing, and then let a BenQ DVD drive confirm if a game was valid or not.
 
WeasteDevil said:
Personally I can't believe that they went through so much trouble (and they went through a lot of trouble) with the rest of the device to try to stop this type of thing, and then let a BenQ DVD drive confirm if a game was valid or not.
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The cynic in me leads me to believe they knew about this all along and have some degree of control over it...

'Ooh conspiracies'
 
WeasteDevil said:
They've seemingly stamped out online game piracy, but you'll just get a new one for playing online and keep your old one for playing pirated games offline.
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thats exactly what i'm gonna do....

the only thing i play online is COD and the odd game of fifa

the savings you make on games like fallout 3 etc... still make it very worthwhille
 
WeasteDevil said:
Personally I can't believe that they went through so much trouble (and they went through a lot of trouble) with the rest of the device to try to stop this type of thing, and then let a BenQ DVD drive confirm if a game was valid or not.
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What do you mean by that?
 
Hmm, wonder if mine is banned. I've had an old one banned a couple of years ago but got a new one about 14 months ago and modded it about 2 months back. I only play legit games online and don't have xbox live connected when im not playing a legit one.
 
WeasteDevil said:
The XBox itself is basically as locked as the PS3 is. However, they let the DVD drive tell the main system whether a game is valid or not, and that's where the security hole is. The main system trusts what the DVD drive tells it.

XBOX: Is this game kosher?
DVD DRIVE: Yes Sir, it is!
XBOX: Ok then, lets go!
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:lol: orite. Yeah i see what you mean. The BenQ bit confused me, thought you were getting at something else and my drive is a Hitatchi.

So how does the PS3 work in that respect?
 
RonaldoVII said:
Hmm, wonder if mine is banned. I've had an old one banned a couple of years ago but got a new one about 14 months ago and modded it about 2 months back. I only play legit games online and don't have xbox live connected when im not playing a legit one.
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Not banned :cool:
 
adexkola said:
Good call, never thought about that, how much are they going for?

And on the side, I have never seen a restriction placed on an electronic that hackers have not been able to crack. People will find ways to get around the block.
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Surprised Weaste hasn't yet pointed you in the direction of the PS3.
 
1871_Biscuit said:
:lol: orite. Yeah i see what you mean. The BenQ bit confused me, thought you were getting at something else and my drive is a Hitatchi.

So how does the PS3 work in that respect?
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I mentioned BenQ simply to highlight that they chose third parties to make their drives, and then trusted those with game authentication. I think that with the PS3 it's all done in the console firmware itself, and you can't load bootleg firmware, just as you can't on the XB360 (you could at one point, but they shut that off).
 
Lets be honest, the 360's (and previous Xbox's) hackability has lead in some degree to it's success against the unhackable PS3.
 
How successful is it if around a million people are downloading their games instead of buying them?
 
Weaste knows a lot more about this stuff than me, but I was under the impression that hardware didn't make much if any money for them?
 
R_Nick said:
How successful is it if around a million people are downloading their games instead of buying them?
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Who is to say they would buy the games if they weren't downloading them? I know I wouldn't. My modding for personal use etc does not harm m$ in any way
 
R_Nick said:
Weaste knows a lot more about this stuff than me, but I was under the impression that hardware didn't make much if any money for them?
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Probably doesn't this time around, I was just explaining why the piracy wasn't exactly detrimental to MS.
 
WeasteDevil said:
Well, it's 3 years in, it's still not been cracked. Neither has the XB360 at its core, they just made this DVD drive feckup.
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Hypothetical question: if it wasn't for the dvd feck up, and efforts were concentrated at the core instead, do you think it would have held out til now?
 
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