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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised that torrentfreak would take this view. Perhaps Microsoft needs better internal controls if they don't want their games to leak a month before release? Once it's leaked, you can't really blame people for playing the game and telling people about it. Information wants to be free, and all that.

What purpose does account suspension serve? People will just initiate a chargeback for their membership fees and create a new account with a new username. Or worse, switch to PS3 and forget all about Microsoft.

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> Once it's leaked, you can't really blame people for playing the game

According to the article, Microsoft can and did. And they're legally in the right, and probably have the moral high ground too.

> People will just ... create a new account

Accounts are full of things that people like to keep.

> Or worse, switch to PS3 and forget all about Microsoft.

Is it really worse to lose the problem users?

That would almost be a net win. Higher rev per console, for sure.

> Once it's leaked, you can't really blame people for playing the game and telling people about it.

As a fan who has followed the Halo series for more than a decade, I can certainly blame somebody for spoiling the ending. Especially if they're spitefully tricking people into accidentally reading the ending, not just having discussions in threads marked SPOILER.

Seriously, if The Empire Strikes Back had been leaked back in the day and trolls were running around Hacker News saying "VADER IS LUKE'S FATHER!" wouldn't you be annoyed?

> Or worse, switch to PS3 and forget all about Microsoft.

That would be a win for Microsoft. "Hey, Sony, we're sending you some of our customers, for free! They're free because they don't pay for games. Hehehe have fun, much love, Bill"

That's a bit of a problem with the internet , it's very difficult not to trip over spoilers.

This is especially true here in the UK for US TV shows, since in many cases there is at least a year between airing in the US and the UK.

"Rickrolling" people with plot-spoilers has nothing to do with "information wants to be free". That is what the article is targeting mainly. The other part, microsoft catching the mouse, is just to be expected on a closed system.

Some high profile copyright-circumventers have a "don't pirate games" view. They've suggested people have two xbox360s; one cracked for homebrew and programming, and another for legit games online. They seemed to agree with MS and the mass ban of cracked boxes.

And there are a (admittedly small) number of people who only pirate things i) that are not available legit ii) as a try before buy, with deletion for content they don't want and purchase for content they do want.

TF usually has sane commentary. And their biases are open and upfront.

> What purpose does account suspension serve?

I'm usually tempted by this kind of thing but value my account too much to chance it. I think there are many wishy washys like me who could use another account/console to do piracy properly but aren't really into it at that level, just opportunistic if it's there and easy to do. A small penalty like banning is all that's really needed to deter us.

> Or worse, switch to PS3 and forget all about Microsoft.

Halo 4 won't be on the PS3. Halo is a Microsoft property. Part of the Xbox lock-in.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_(series)

I'm going to diverge a moment here as say that it's incredibly difficult to prevent big budget software from leaking. When you have hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals involved in the process, some of which who inevitably just won't care about the franchise or value "internet" cred more than keeping the game a secret, you're in a hard place. Putting more internal controls in can drastically slow things down and get in people's ways, and it can build ire when people feel like they're being treated like irresponsible children instead of employees. Then once you start gearing up CD production... You've introduced thousands of underpaid laborers who probably don't really care about your franchise.

Back on point, you can absolutely blame people for playing the game and then maliciously attempting to spoil the ending for others. Pirating is not a passive action. Some people believe information wants to be free, but since my pay is dependent on information/software as currency, I'm not about to subscribe to that ideology. Since I like the products that have come about from people willing to pay for information, I'm not going to evade paying the creators.

If you've been banned your console is useless -- you can't make a new gold account anymore.

Your console is not useless. When you are permabanned they will mess up your NAND and make your saves invalid, and you won't be able to connect to live again without modifying the keyvault on your console (on ones where this is possible). They used to just ban your console and not your account, so you could keep your account and just go buy a new console, mod it, and be playing again within a week (after the ban wave was over).

A friend of mine actually figured out how much he was paying for the console every year, about $200-$300, and then figured out how many games he had pirated (at what would be $60, roughly, a piece) and came to the conclusion that it was worth pirating all of his Xbox 360 games and face being banned every November. If you own 5 games that were purchased new, that's a console's worth of money right there. We did that for a couple of years until they started banning our accounts for the JTAG exploit.

Microsoft is unethical in what they do when they ban people on Live and corrupt their NAND, but they've probably got legal powers to do that based on the Live EULA.

Funny that you switch gears and talk about ethics after basically saying it's much cheaper to steal than to buy products and actually support the people making your entertainment.

I'm very surprised that they are "corrupting" files. I don't disbelieve you, but I'd be very interested to read some more about that.

I thought they'd learnt their lessons from the "Tree of Evil bares bitter fruit" thing.

This 1985 article mentions the tree of evil string. It also mentions MS thinking about dropping copy protection on some software to help get more market share. Kind of scummy behaviour, in my opinion.

(http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=OC8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA8&#...)

(Oh Google, your funny URLs.)

This PDF also talks about the psychological tactic:

(http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/SE-20.pdf) (on page 417).

I seem to remember people actually losing data to this, but perhaps my memory is faulty.

I meant useless in terms of online play.

Also, I don't think it's fair to take into account how many games he pirated. He should only count games that he would've paid for in the first place.

Before my xbox was banned 2 years ago, I would pirate almost every game that came out for xbox -- even if I only played it once.

Now that I pay for games, I'm pretty particular about what I buy.

Microsoft has Account and Console bans, and it has variations therein; there can be a total console ban that extends to all of the accounts on it as well, there can be temporary console bans, full eeprom ban, etc. as well as simple account bans.

It's also unfortunately not a perfect system. On the original Xbox, there was an autoban trigger for an inordinate amount of negative feedback on an account. It made for some interesting retaliations when you utterly destroyed someone and their friends in a game.

> People will just initiate a chargeback for their membership fees and create a new account with a new username.

More than once for the same console? More than once for the same credit card number? Microsoft can make the ban pretty harsh if they want.

Microsoft have a history of banning consoles, and once they're banned there is no way of getting them running on Live again.

Every now and then a big wave of console bans comes along and eBay is filled with people flogging their banned consoles.

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