Robin Hoods Playground

Microsoft began banning XBL accounts yesterday for "illegitimate pre-release title play". This is believed to be related to a pirated copy of Forza 3 which recently leaked early. At this time they appear to only be banning gamertags and not consoles. As always, robinhoodsplayground.com is against piracy so a disclaimer saying not to download and play games that leak early should go without saying. However, there are also a good number of people who have completely legitimate access to games prior to their release date...people who work in a video game store or rental store for example. Now that Microsoft has taken this step, they should also be careful about playing a game early, even an original disc.



Major Nelson also announced on his blog yesterday that "unauthorized Xbox 360 storage devices" will no longer work after the next major dash update.

Major Nelson wrote:
When Preview Program members start receiving the Xbox 360 system update next week, one of the changes is that unauthorized Memory Units will no longer work with the Xbox 360. If you’ve moved your profile or saved games onto one to “back it up,” you’d better move it back onto an authorized Xbox 360 storage device prior to taking the update. If you continue to use an unauthorized Memory Unit after the update, you will not be able to access your stored profile or saved games.

This appears to apply to 3rd party memory cards that do not have an official Microsoft seal of approval, and possibly also the "hacked" 120GB internal Western Digital harddrives that users commonly purchase and flash to work with the 360 themselves for less than half of the price of the official one. We won't know for sure until the preview program starts and some brave users with these devices test the waters.

In better news, iXtreme 1.61 is currently being worked on for all drives to add support for new wave4 games. There is still no ETA but it's good to know it's already in the works. Also, the team behind abgx360 has announced that they will be releasing version 1.0.2 with wave4 support in the near future. The release of abgx360 1.0.2 will probably coincide with the release of iXtreme 1.61.

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360mods

Perm-bans? I thought these were like 1 month bans.

Well I guess an account ban is better than a console ban.

not to me its not

I cant afford any ban. I got 30,000 microsoft points still.

I have like 12 different gamertag's so they dont really mean much to me. I have 1 main account that ive had for 4 years.

I guess if you had loads of M$ points on an account it would be worse to get it banned than your console.

That's true. I guess if it's just a profile ban making a different account would be the best idea since I have all those points on my original profile.

Thanks for the idea.
Just hope I don't get a console ban than that means I would have to get a new console but as long as I'm not using my orig profile my points should be safe right?

Well the reason I have so many different GT's is because I have one per console (a couple have 2 or 3) so when I download things they are key'd to that HDD and I dont need to be signed into live.

The media update is a MUST for me, so its a pain to have to recover your GT to the HDD, then sign into live just to watch a movie.