BARTEK 0077 said:i can confirm that they re Just trolling - my friend have played the "oman discount" Games and his account and console hasnt been banned.i wouldnt hesitate checkomg out stuff like that because its legal.its Microsoft guilt that set It for free,not our
I never said they banned ALL Oman accounts or associated Xboxes and gamertags. Your friend was one of the lucky ones. For every person that wasn't banned, there is another that was. If some of the more liberal sites like xbox360achievements took the matter so seriously as to remove all postings about free pricing errors, I personally wouldn't go around reassuring people that it will never happen.
ChadMarc said:ive downloaded lots of games they have put up for free (mistakes or not) but ive never changed my region to do so. you wont get banned for downloading free items (mistakes or not) from your own region.
That's what I have been telling people (and myself) for the last 8 years, but now I will not state categorically that you won't get banned. In my case I moved from the UK to New Zealand a few years ago and at the time there was no way to change my account region. I carried on making my purchases from the UK marketplace (the alternative was create a new gamertag), and so I was able to download games that are free not by mistake (eg
Harms Way). Now let's say GTA V was priced as free by mistake in the UK (like when Angry Birds Trilogy was free in Russia recently). You are saying that those who download GTA V for free in the UK won't get banned, but would I get banned if I downloaded it from New Zealand with my UK account? The only answer I would give is "I don't know, maybe."
Dancsi27 said:People who got banned because of this it's because they shared their GT with friends and other people so they can grab the free games and download them onto their console too so they can use them with their GT.
That is what almost all of the people would have done, only "their friend" is themself. I expect very few people actually changed their GT region to Oman, since that means going without Live for 3 months.
It is true that if you share your GT with friends they "can grab the free games and download them onto their console" but they CANNOT use those games with their GT, only on the console the game was first download on can it be played by other gamertags. If anyone hacked a download to remove the DRM they should be banned. But that is not what most people were doing who got banned. What most people did was download content that was priced as free, by using a gamertag from a different region. Something people who live outside the US (where much of the free content is available) have been doing for years, but never have so many people and Xboxes been banned before. The only difference that time is that it wasn't just one isolated game and the content was not supposed to be free even in that region.
Dancsi27 said:Also, on WP8, you can switch region without affecting the hotmail/outlook account and switch back when you are done downloading a game or app (after restarting the phone). Same goes with the Xbox 360 3 months account migration utility that you can find on xbox.com, with that you can migrate your account to another region and change it back to the original region (after 3 months of course). I can take my Canada/US account and migrate it to UK/France if i wanted too), then I would have access to the marketplace in that region.
I know it can be done, it's just whether it should be done.
Dancsi27 said:If people are getting banned because they download free games from other regions where they don't live, then MS should remove this migration utility so people cannot use it in the future and get banned because of it. Why people should pay for MS stupidity all the time? The price error is not our fault, it's MS fault.
I totally agree with you, but because you willingly signed up for Xbox Live, Microsoft can do whatever they want to your account and Xbox without having to go into any details as to why. What they are doing may well break local laws, but you will need considerable time and money to be able to challenge their action, especially why you start the conversation with your legal concil that you saw something for free that should not normally be free and nothing prevented you from grabbing it.