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Microsoft To Brand Cheaters’ Gamercards
Microsoft says it is attempting to clampdown on underhand Xbox 360 play by tagging cheaters’ gamercards.
"Through a combination of profile resigning - which is against our terms of use - or what's known as glitching," people "try to trade profiles as fast as they can to confuse the console and it might pass an achievement," explained Stephen Toulouse, who heads up Xbox Live policy, on Major Nelson's podcast.
Toulouse went on to imply that simply resetting gamerscores has not been a sufficient means of stamping out cheating.
"I'm going to go ahead and admit that the bar is a little bit higher than that... It resets your score to zero but it also puts a tag that you've been caught cheating on your gamercard. Since that's a pretty big scarlet letter, we want to make sure that we're absolutely sure."
The “cheater” label “can be observed on Xbox.com, and through the player’s view of their gamercard on a console or PC connected to Live,” Microsoft says on the Xbox website. “They are still allowed to legitimately gain future achievements and the player’s experience doesn’t change in any other way,” it adds.
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I'm in my 40s and i still get a cheap thrill from seeing my xbox gamer score going up.
I should get out more...
I'm around 43k myself. I should get out more too but I can't whether I want to or not. A job, wife, 3 kids (one of them is only 8 months old) really kill any chance at free time. I still have The Pitt and Broken Steel to play.
Even though you got a lot going on, the DLC's you mentioned are worth the time spent, as you probably know.
I'm in my 30's, don't have a wife or kids but still my job takes all my time (with OT and working at weekends), leaving me sometimes too tired to play any games... instead I just go to bed and sleep. :~~~~
I hear you there. Last night I DVRd Deadliest Catch (an awesome show BTW), watched that and the wife and I watched American Idol (she got me into it). We were done with those two shows and it was about 930. I was already starting to doze off so gaming was out of the question. I'm trying to find some time for Fallout, this weekend I'll have to finish the pit, I just got through the train tunnel and am pretending to be a slave so I think I'm about to start tearing people up. Yeah..sleep, starting to be really important to me as of late lol.
Achievements are for children with ADD. I wish they'd go away.
Jesus Christ, could this article be more pointless?
Um.....what a non-issue. If you cheat you get punished, end of story.
It would be good if they could punish other kind of cheaters ,like the kind i frequently come up against on street fighter2 hd remix..
What happens is just when i beat someone in a ranked match they quickly quit the game so it doesn't register as a loss against them and i dont get the ranking points for beating them.
A simple patch where if you quit early it automatically counts as a loss against the quitter and a win for the other guy would be ideal. (for this game anyway)
So I don't own an Xbox; so forgive my ignorance, but do people really see a 0 & wonder - "What happened to someonw else's Gamerscore?".
The live community is a pretty active one. We frequently check people's gamercards, compare achievements, etc. and most of us don't take cheating (boosting rank in Halo, profile switching, etc.) lightly. If someone's gamertag is tagged with something like that, then anyone that person plays with with that account will see that he's a cheater so it's pretty significant.
And as far as achievements being pointless, I beg to differ (not referring to you indrema). I think it has been one of the biggest innovations this gen. It's a way to share with the community what kinds of games you play and how you play those games. If I see someone with the mile high or brass balls achievement, my respect for them goes up. If I see someone has a boosted gamerscore with 15 different child/movie games my repsect for them goes down. 1250 gamerscore in Oblivion, 1k in CoD4 or CoD2 (super difficult to get 1k in either of those games), 1525 in Halo 3, etc. really shows how dedicated the person is. And I have no problem with people with a smaller gamerscore it's not about that, it's just a way to connect to gamer's with similar playstyles as your own. If it wasn't for achievements, I'd have no idea what type of gamer people were.
I have mile high, best achievement ever :)
Nice jb, that one is tough. I actually thought that one was impossible. You literally have to know exactly where to reload, where to regain your health, who's where, etc. (as you obviously know). I think getting 1k in Cod2/4 was the hardest thing I've done on my 360 so far. I've thought about going back to Bioshock and trying for brass balls, but I don't know if I'll have the patience (or time).
Brass balls would just involve save scumming constantly, not very interested. COD4 as you say was a massive challenge, mile high took me 4 hours of retrying, 'no fighting in the war room' just as much :)
couldn't agree with you more nick. Gamerscores are like a detailed account of the players live gaming history and the persuit of them often encourages the player to get more out of the software they have bought. Without gamerpoints I wouldnt have seen all their was to see in Mass Effect as the achievements demanded completions with different classes and allies. They allowed me to appreciate mass effect even more than i originally did because without them i wouldnt have gone through the game more than once.
So right MIles. Mass Effect IMO is one of the best examples of how to do achievements right. The game stands on its own as a great game without achievments but with achievements it ads so much more. I went through that game about 4 times and never did I get bored with it. ME's achievements encouraged multiple playthroughs and it was a game paced perfectly enough and was enjoyable enough to play through it multiple times to get the weapon/character class, level 50/60, difficulty, biotics, etc. achievements. I still need the, "Beat most of the game with X character in your party" achievements.
You put it perfectly when you said it's a detailed account of their live gaming history. My only achievement boosting came with the rental of Avatar...everyone makes mistakes.
Mass Effect is highly over rated. Probably just scrapes a Killzone in my opinion.
Nick/Miles...get a room FFS. Actually, i'm starting to think Nick & Miles are the same person!
congratulations on starting to think wall e
The fact that you aren't denying my point says it all.
LOL, MS fanboys.
If we were in fact the same person, wouldn't it just be, "LOL, MS fanboy"? You know singular as in no S at the end of the word?
So Miles and Nick post a reasonable discussion of achivements and get called fanboys and insulted. Some people are idiots.
jb1, yeah they're an unfortunate side effect of the EDGE forums. I've gotten used to it by now. You gotta treat them like children and ignore them.
By errrr responding to them??
So I shouldn't be responding to you right now then? I'm playin, you're alright Arron. ^^
Well, I wasn't going to respond but when I saw a chance to make him look more stupid than he already had himself I had to take it. I actually ignore quite a bit of nonsense on these forums.
Edit: Actually, I looked back at my comment and I actually didn't respond to what he said, he made a comment that miles and I were the same person, I never responded to that. I just made fun of the fact that he made the comment that we were one and the same person, yet called us both fanboys. His lack of consistency is proof he just wanted to run his mouth.
Thanks, Microsoft. I'm sure someone cares, somewhere.
Unlike your tiresome, anti-microsoft BS comments
So someone slags MS...who cares, get over it!
*ZING*
The players Gamerscore is pointless. Those Gamerscore points are of no use what-so-ever, you can't buy anything with them or trade them for Microsoft Points.
Achievements? What achievements? If the player isn't rewarded with games, MS points, or other goods for gaining achievements (and thus upping their Gamerscore), then what of use are they?
Achievements are pointless and just a cheap way of trying to get the gamer to complete their games, purchase other titles or buy DLC.
Achievements...one of the most pointless components in videogames history.
I don't see how achievements are any more pointless than gaining any kind of 'score' in a game, I can't trade my high-score on pac-man for anything either.
I personally like the achievements that aren't obvious or received just as part of playing the game. I still remember gaining the 'Irony' achievement in Bioshock and having a good laugh about it, it was like a private joke between myself and the developers. I personally don't bother with the achievements related to beating a game on the highest difficulty without dying etc, but thats the great thing about achievements, I can choose to completely ignore them without having any effect on the game whatsoever.