MS Ban Hammer - 10.30.09

OK i updated to IX 1.61 last night,
I've played GTA which wasnt properly stealth patched before i updated,
Didnt play GTA early,
Havent played Boardlands / UFC / Red fraction,
Just got the Xbox Update and not banned! Thank f...

 

How can you tell if someone on your friendlist is banned? a person who played borderlands almost a week before release hasn't been on since 10/30.

 

Unless there profile has been banned, you cant

 

Ok, im on 1.61 with a benq drive...i Have played games pre release, but not online (disconnected all cables)

evidently i have discovered that this is irrelevant as it can be apparently flagged even iff online, and then banned when you go online.

Does anyone yet know where this "flag" information is held, and will clearing the cache before logging into live help any?

 

Hey just wanted to add more information that could help I talked to the guy who modded my console and he's done over 100s of them and what he said is causing it is the actual updating of the fw because Microsoft is able to tell how many times the drive has been turned on with a sata cable not from the console if that makes sense. Like I said early I didn't do the mod just relaying info to help people out. So it would seem the more you've updated the fw on ur drive the more of a red flag you've sent off.He also told me there is a way to reset it but probably better to wait for that right now. Also he told me to stick to the iso disk before playing wave 4 games for now and I shouldn't have a problem. I haven't been banned and have been playing forza 3 and the new gta as of right now. Also he said it's mainly people that have played games early or had bad rips of games. Hope this helps

 

um just to verify, ALL my games were checked with abgx and i STILL got banned.now, i THINK i had to make sure i had to have some kind of drive key or something for my cd drive or whatever, if jungle flasher 1.6 didnt automatically do this for me, then i guess my 360 was a friggin beacon to M$.....


1 more thing...i said before in recent post that only my console was banned and not mytag.....i was wrong...its both.EVERYTHING associated with my gamertag(saved games created players etc.) if i try and move it via a memory card its gonna be a corrupt file. my gamertag only exists on my modded 360 that was banned....glad i had a 1-year just laying around.....

 

On XS forums theres a lot of talk about people being banned that used jungelflasher while dosflash arent.. can someone confirm this?

 

Ok this is just a stupid opinoin, no this would not have any effect as you were using the same firmware

 

So can i assume the wave is over??

 

I would assume that anyone playing games pre-release is going to get flagged for the simple reason that if you gain achievements, those are sent to your Live profile...so even if you play offline and wait until the game is released, Microsoft is going to see that you gathered achievements on specific dates/times before the game was at retail....

I realize this doesn't explain the people who wait until the game is released to play it....

It could be completely possible that when you flash your console by powering it from the power-brick and using a SATA-PC cable, an error log is generated and sent to MS for analysis, and they are now just pruning the logs and seeing who has turned on their console without SATA powered on...it's not impossible to have a BIOS-level error log of such an event that saves somewhere on the console, and next time you connect to live it uploads the error log. In fact, it would make sense from a service-level perspective, as MS can see what issues are affecting consoles without the user filling a bug-report...Windows does remote-error reporting, no reason to assume the 360 doesn't either.....just a thought.

 

^ If a console getting banned because of gaining-achievements-before-official-release-date were true, won't that make a risk even if you transferred the HD containing those 'flagged' achievements to another console?

 

its nothing to do with achievements i dont think, because there is no date information associated with gaining an achievement.

 

Hi,i was wondering whether i will i lose the ability to install games into the console if i update without connecting to live,(from torrents or system update files from game discs)?I'm running a ixtreme 1.6 flashed liteon xbox 360 that has never connected to Live(not available in the country i live in)

 

Exactly. Achievements are only date stamped if you earn them while you're logged into Live. The console does not retain the current date and time if you unplug it from the wall unless you log into Live when you plug it back in, then it syncs the date/time, so they cannot possibly know when you earned an achievement if you earned it while playing offline as you have to set the date and time manually in the system settings. If you plug your console in and forget to do that, the year would say 2005, so if they used that for a date stamp, you'd have played every game early, even the legit ones!

They can tell that you've played a game early if, for example, you play MW2 offline now and then you log into Live and play a totally different game, because details of any MW2 achievements you've earned will be uploaded when you connect to Live - they just won't be date stamped, but they know you've earned them before the release date as the game's not out yet.

Only people that have been banned are losing the ability to install games. When you try and log into Live and you see that you're banned, it must trigger a flag in the dashboard that disables game installs, so unless you have been banned, the ability to install games is unaffected. Oh yeah - that only seems to happen with permanent console bans BTW, not the permanent gamertag bans (such as the recent Forza 3 bans).

 

so does that means i haven't been banned at all, and its safe to run games like Wet and Brutal Legend???????

 

No ban for me.

Haha to the people bragging about not getting banned after being ****s about it. Sorry to hear for the genuine peeps.

 

updating my xbox now.......


crapping myself .......

Looks like no ban for me(for now)

 

You will only know if you're banned if you try and connect to Live and it says that your console has been banned. If you do try and connect to Live and that happens, then at that point the ability to install games will be disabled. If you haven't tried to connect to Live for a while, then you could be banned - you just don't know it yet - but you have to connect to Live and get the ban message in order for them to "flick the switch" in your dashboard that disables installs.

 

Lets say you get banned. How does that affect your hdd? Could you buy a new arcade and still use your old hdd with it ok?

 

It doesn't affect the actual drive, but it does block your ability to install 360 games to the hard drive.

Yeah. When they block game installs, it's only on the banned console. If you attach your hard drive to another unbanned console, everything will work as normal.

When you download DLC and XBLA games, DRM ties it to the console and gamertag, so if you do get a new console and clip your old hard drive to it, you will need to be signed into Live with the gamertag that downloaded the content in order to access it. You can't play downloaded XBLA games offline or with any other gamertags or they will just revert to being demos. To get around this, you can use the license transfer tool on Microsoft's site. Once you've used it, you have to download all of your content again (although it only downloads the actual licenses, so it takes a couple of seconds per item) and then you can use it all offline or online and with any gamertag on that console. You can only use the license transfer tool once per year though.

So yeah - If you get banned, get a new Arcade console and attach your hard drive to it, transfer the licenses over and re-download them, and you're back up and running exactly as you were before the ban.