XBlive banning not 100% infallible after all.

XP-200 · Sep 24, 2011

Well after years of claiming any and all bans they issued were 100% justified and the banning proccess is never wrong, it now seems thats not exactly true.....in the recent ban wave more and more people were complaining they had been unjustly banned from the xblive service for no reason, and the xblive team continued to insist that all bans were justified with each one investigated........this was of course until the bans started to spread to gaming and review site accounts and these sites started to run the story.......Stephen Toulouse has now posted a reply on the issue.

http://majornelson.com/2011/09/23/a-guest-post-from-stepto-regarding-console-suspensions/

Hi everyone, Stephen Toulouse here, "Stepto" on Xbox LIVE and the weekly Major Nelson Radio podcast. Most of you know me as the head of the Policy and Enforcement team for Xbox LIVE.

As I have noted many times on the podcast, the enforcement team exists to help protect the LIVE experience. One of the ways we do that is to prevent consoles from accessing the service that are involved in bad behavior such as cheating, fraud, running unauthorized software on the service, or playing illegitimate copies of games (to name a few). For the vast majority of our actions, our team reviews a lot of data, examines the behavior, and then we take action. In some cases, very rarely, we use software features on the Xbox itself to help us take action.

Recently, it was brought to our attention that a number of customers had concerns about the validity of a recent ban of their individual consoles, which they feel had been triggered inaccurately. In this case, the bans were related specifically to modded consoles. I take these claims very seriously, and after an initial investigation we have confirmed that a handful of banned consoles did in-fact appear to not have been modified or tampered with. We’re still conducting our review but the cause appears to be a software issue, not an error on the part of the enforcement team’s normal actions. It’s very specific and occurred between August 29 and September 9, affecting a very small percentage of users.

One of the most serious actions my team can take is to prevent a console from accessing Xbox LIVE. We make every effort to be conservative when taking that action. If there is any doubt that this step was taken incorrectly, we want to address it while at the same time protecting the service for our customers.

Therefore, while we are still conducting a thorough investigation, the enforcement team is taking the step of reversing the bans for the tiny set of impacted consoles in that time period. Again, while it’s an extremely small percentage of impacted consoles, the good news is that we know exactly which ones. If you believe you are affected, simply try to reconnect your console to Xbox LIVE. If it cannot still connect, that console was not a part of this issue.

Within a few business days, we will issue the primary account holder on the impacted console a credit for three months of Xbox LIVE Gold and 1600 Microsoft points. Since we know exactly who is affected, those customers do not need to take any action. Everything will be applied automatically. No keys or tokens to redeem, no other action to be taken.

I’d like to take a moment to personally apologize for the inconvenience this has almost certainly caused to the affected customers. You have my assurance that we are investigating how this error occurred and have since discontinued use of the software that was used. The Xbox LIVE community is the best out there and we regret the inconvenience this may have caused for our loyal members.

If you listen to our podcast (and I know many hundreds of thousands of you do!) you know I give out my email address in every episode. I read all the email there, and it’s Stepto@Xbox.com. Please feel free to give me your feedback. If you feel you have been affected by this situation, be sure to use www.xbox.com/support/contact so we can get you to the appropriate people to help.

As always, you guys are the reason I come into work every day. Thank you so much for making Xbox LIVE an amazing community and I look forward to hearing from you.
– Stephen Toulouse, head of Xbox LIVE Policy and Enforcement
Xbox 360, Xbox Live By Larry Hryb, Xbox LIVE's Major Nelson
Click to expand...

So basically if some review sites gaming accounts had not been banned and they had not run the story the old line of these bans are 100% justifed would still be the party line.........nice. LOL

LemonHaze · Sep 28, 2011

Does this letter also refer to the very recent "Market Place Theft" ban wave also? My account got banned and i've been on XBL for nearly 4 years owned about 6 consoles as they keep failing, bought loads of DLC + Games. It's a pain in the arse because I have to make a new account now and lose all my DLC and arcade games...**** MS i say!

slick3 · Sep 30, 2011

Like we give a monkey's a$$ of his apology ... we want what we paid for, not your apology ...

LemonHaze · Oct 10, 2011

It really gets to me that i can't access all the arcade games I was overcharged for in the first place!

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XBlive banning not 100% infallible after all.

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