Background:
I currently have two 360s and neither of them are modded nor have been repaired by non MS locations. One is a refurbed Pro that MS sent me when my first Pro RRoD’ed. The second is an Arcade with a 60GB drive added all purchased new. I also have a Official 64MB memory card. I have an 8 yr old daughter that plays game demos and Rock Band as well as other family games.
I have been thinking about buying her a TV and a DVD player for her room. While reading the Consumerist.com, I came across an article about the recent bannings and the posters feeling that it was a false positive. One of the forum poster suggested selling the 360 on EBay with a notice that it had been banned and buy a new one.
Banned ones are going for under $60. I got to thinking that since they can play the XBOX games, I bought, as well as DVDs that maybe I could get her one of those for her room. I am not looking for a modded one just one that is cheap (therefore most likely banned) I do have a few questions/concerns about this.
MOST IMPORTIANT!!! I would like to have the banned XBOX on the network in order to push video to it from a PC. Is there any danger of my other 360s or user accounts getting banned because of the banned 360?
Would my daughter be able to use a memory card (official one not USB or 3rd party) to transport her profile/saved games from the non-banned 360 to the banned one and vis-a-versa without risk of the profile getting banned?
In a nutshell, I want to use a cheap but banned XBOX as a DVD player, offline XBOX game player, and multimedia from PC box. I also do not want the banned 360 to jeopardize my legit 360s.
I am not willing to drop another $200 for a brand new arcade version to have just those functions.
Please let me know if there is anything that I would have to be careful about.
I contact XBOX email support and have only gotten cut and paste responses. I posted on thier message boards and have not gotten any responses.
Does anyone here have any suggestions or experiences with this?
MS bans specific Xboxes from Xbox LIVE occasionally for a couple of different reasons. The two most well known are if you’re found cheating your “gamerscore”, (achievement points), or if they’ve determined that you’ve modified the hardware in some way. There was recently a story about a mass purge of systems, something like hundreds of thousands, that made the rounds on the various videogame news sites.
To the OP…
If you don’t think you’ll ever want to go on LIVE with the banned system it should be all good. The banning only affects the direct connection to LIVE, and I believe it checks specific serial numbers so your other systems should be fine. Transferring data between systems shouldn’t be a problem either as none of that functionality is tampered with.
You wont be able to transfer the saved games from a banned to an unbanned 360. One of the things Microsoft is doing is when a console is banned, making it so that all saved games are corrupt/unplayable on another system (I believe what they’re doing is encrypting the saved games in a way that only the banned 360 can decrypt).
If you take a saved game from the good 360 and then play it on the banned 360, your saved game file will now be unplayable on the good 360.
I was not planning to have the banned XBOX go on LIVE ever. I was jsut worried about getting my other two 360s getting banned because of “guilt by association” if the banned one tried phoning home for some reason.
I was hoping by using a memory card as opposed to a HDD that she could save games and migrate them back and forth.
In particular, there were recent mass bannings of people who were playing an unreleased game on Xbox Live. The only way to have played that game was to have a modded Xbox 360, thus in essence “proving” their guilt.
MS only bans “systems,” i.e. boxes. They cannot ban IPs, since a lot of people, households, apartments, etc, share external IPs. What they ban are specifically the Xbox 360 equivalent of MAC adresses; an unique identifier for each and every box. Your LIVE account should be fine, if you have an existing one. You can even extract the content/saves, etc by extracting the harddrive and putting it into a non-banned box.
MS policy is to monetarily punish, not necessarily prevent, people who mod their boxes. Buying a banned box for offline play should be unproblematic, but I would encourage you not to since you have no legal recourse if the sales site should be a scam.
This is only true as long as you don’t use the saved game (and subsequently save over it) while playing on a banned Xbox. Any saved games created on a banned Xbox will be unusable elsewhere. If the saved games remain untouched, they’ll be fine to transfer to another Xbox.
When I first thought about this it was about a week ago. Since then I have seen people promoting them for offline use. That seems to have driven up the price. I should have gambled and got one then.