For those of you who value your Gamertag or Gamerscore (mine's so low that I couldn't care less), Xbox Live's Major Nelson is warning you to keep your account information to yourself. The consequences for sharing can equal account deletion. Forever.
By sharing your account, you're violating the Xbox Live Terms of Use, and if your account is stolen or "kept," it will have to be deleted, and you'll never see your Gamertag or Gamerscore again. Major Nelson also says that you can lose saved games and any points you have on the account.
With this warning comes another about save and Achievement tampering. Nelson warns that "bad things will happen" to these kind of cheaters.
We may remove the entire Gamerscore for an account that contains manipulated gamerscore. Let me be more clear: If you use tampered gamesaves to boost your Achievements and Gamerscore, you may sign in to Xbox LIVE one day and discover that we have removed your Gamerscore. Once we do that, you will never be able to re-earn those achievements on that account. Even worse, you might have your account and/or console banned from Xbox Live.
That hits home. Really, how important is your Gamerscore if you can't log on to Xbox Live again?
Dale North is Destructoid's Editor-In-Chief, a founding editor, and specialist in Japanese gaming. An accomplished musician, Dale was reporting from Japan during the earthquakes of 2011. Luckily, he got the fuck out alive and is home in America now with his wife and beloved corgi, Einstein. Dale is also a co-founder of Destructoid's sister anime site
Japanator. Likes Corgis, Sega Saturn, PSP, iPhone, Photographic tools.
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Contest:
3:03 PM on 10.30.2007
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Good idea, I would love to see that :p
Are you kidding? It would actually encourage me to cheat to get my own special spiffy tag or score.
But back on the point why do people cheat their gamer score if it unlocked things it would make sense but otherwise it does nothing. I guess some people see it as their overall gaming high score but if you didn't earn it or you have games you are ashamed of linked to you profile what is the point.
Dexter346?
I don't think they are worried about boosting. It seems they are going to go after people who trade save game files to instantly get achievments. There is also a way to get double gamerscore for certain early games if you change you country setting to Japan. I'm guessing those are the people that are going to be struck down by the hand of Major.
When you call to cancel your xbox live account they ask if you would rather sell it instead.
Thats entrapment.
The most I would really do for achievement points is play every class for one round in Team Fortress, or play a game again on a harder level or something.
Generally the points just give me that extra incentive to do things I probably would do anyway.
So yeah when you guys say you have a low gamerscore, do you play other consoles more, or just multiplayer games, etc? I am just curious.
Oh well, guess we'll see what happens.
I want this whole achievements thing gone I want to be able to download saves for games I'm stuck in again
cant you just use an online walkthrough or something? I can't really think of a situation where you would need a game save to help get you out of a spot where you are stuck...?
And I like that.
Ah dreamcast, such a wonderful time.
Back on topic, I doubt they're going to smack you down for playing Barbie Horse Adventures 2: Adventure Harder to get achievements. They're going more after the ones that cheat for score, not bloaters. Not even helping in halo 3, unless its glitching.my gamerscore is 1110, and would be about 2000 some odd points higher if I could have made my other account online instead of being forced to make a completely different profile. I even had over half the bioshock achievements, but im not playing the game through again just for the achievements. THat's something that needs to be fixed, is offline to online profiles.
You shouldn't be worried, as there's really no way to tell that I know of. All MS is doing is getting people scared.
fair enough if you want to unlock it all, but it sorta invalidates the point, doesn't it?
Besides, the dreamcast had some balls hard games, everything I have played on 360 so far was relatively easy, except maybe Rainbow 6 Vegas on Realistic difficulty, which just took persistence.
It does, but it really depends on where that cheating/save copying takes you. If it's just like single player levels or extra characters, thats better than using it to get achievemnt points ,it really does screw up the points system. And since thats what the articles pointing at, i'd have to agree with you. Just serving up and alternate viewpoint to something.
yep good point, i guess you should be allowed to access stuff like that if you want to, but yeah it does screw the points up.
I would think they would be able to tell, if I were to transfer my account between boxes multiple times, or if my account logged on from multiple IP addresses. Am I right? I have two friends' boxes that I planned on switching between, until I get my own. I also have my original Xbox, which I'm still able to log into.
I don't think you need to worry, what you're doing is part of the planned functionality of Live. I often have friends come around to my place, retrieve their tags to my console, play a few games, and then I either delete the tags or just leave them on my HDD (I don't have any reason to log into them, though). Because of this, my friends may get some acheivements for games they do not own, but it's hardly cheating, is it? The 360 is designed to work that way.
I think this story is being blown out of proportion, it's probably just people who use hacked or irregularly transferred save-files that have to worry. If you read Major's post, the thing about not giving out your gamertag is more to protect you from other people abusing your account once you give them the details, because all MS can do in that situation is cancel your account.