By Tom Ivan
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.
