dictatrix's Blogs

{ found..did not write...someone else posted something about it before..just doing it again. :D }

Watch out, Xbox Live cheaters and exploiters: Microsoft has your number. According to Stephen Toulouse, head of Xbox Live policy, not only will cheaters' scores be re-set to zero, a tag will be added to their profiles indicating that they are cheaters. In other words, Microsoft is employing one of the oldest means of discouraging anti-social behavior in history: A big dose of shame.

"It resets your score to zero but it also puts a tag that you've been caught cheating on your gamercard," Toulouse said on Major Nelson's podcast recently. "Since that's a pretty big scarlet letter, we want to make sure that we're absolutely sure."

According to Xbox.com, 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,” Cheaters' gamerscores are reset to zero, wiping out "legitimate" achievements as well as purloined points. After the scarlet letter has been applied, cheaters are allowed to gain future achievements and the "player’s experience doesn’t change in any other way." Except that everyone will hate you, of course.

Microsoft promises it will be very careful not to mark legitimate gamers profiles with the cheater indicator, and they'd better be. According to the company, "The original gamerscore correction will remain permanent without any way to appeal."

I think this is a great step forward, and will work very well. Shame is a powerful motivational force, and if you're so obsessed with your gamerscore that you'd try to exploit something to get it higher, it obviously matters a great deal to you. So being marked as a cheater will likely mean even more to you. Maybe enough to get you to stop cheating, or at least think twice before you exploit the system.

I'm glad the cheating indicator is a life-sentence with no way of removing it. After all, there is no way for me to remove the evidence that the last game I played on my 360 was Leisure Suit Larry, and that's far more embarrassing than calling me a cheater. (Hey! I even earned an achievement!)

What do you think? Should cheaters be punished, or are exploits really the fault of the programmers of games and not the people who discover them? Ever been falsely accused of exploiting?