Microsoft takes a stand against Achievement Cheating

The underground world of Achievement Cheating via trading gamesaves has been delt a big blow post-fall Dashboard Update. In the past year, a few websites have spawned on the internet as a place to upload your save game to just before unlocking an achievement. With some save games all you have to do is load it up and play 1 game and you unlock 1000 points worth of achievements !

People at the top of the Achievement Point leader boards have admitted to using gamesaves to keep pace. The former World #1 Ranked player ST The King retired because of all the cheating that has started happening. Now there's even a service where they will recover your gamertag on their system and play as you to get you achievement points, all you have to do is pay them some cash. I assume they are/were using save games as well.

So how does all this Game Save trading work? Well save games fall into 3 different categories (pre-fall Dashboard update). Some saved games are Unlocked which are generally games prior to April 06. This means you can freely trade these with anyone. The recipient just loads the game which typically is saved just before an achievement , does the action and up pops the Achievement toast. Some gamesaves are console locked which are typically games after April 06. These gamesaves have an ID tag embedded in them that is specific to the console it's made on. In order to use that game save, a 'Bypass' method was discovered that will trick the gamesave into playing on a different console. The last method of locking game saves is profile locked. The only way to use gamesaves that are profile locked is to also trade gamer tags with people in the gamesave community. When you recover the account and load up the game, the toast pops up. I would have thought that would award the achievements to the account recovery player who already has them and not the cheater but I guess this works somehow.

Microsoft is well aware that such cheating devalues the Achievement system. It has become such a problem that they are now actively trying to stop this from happening. The fall Dashboard introduces a hybrid locking system which renders most of these cheating tactics useless. Only some of the 'unlocked' style game saves currently work and to guarantee they work, they need to be re-done on an updated Xbox360 and then re-uploaded to a game sharing site. These game sharing sites are actively testing old game saves and there are a handful of games saves that are still giving up the goods free of charge.

I personally think Microsoft should encrypt the game using a 2 key system that uses the profile ID and the hardware ID as the keys. That would pretty much guarantee a game save couldn't be shared with anyone.

Word at MyGamercard.net is that they will also be setting up an algorithm that will flag gamertags they track as possible cheaters based on how many points they unlock in a day. If someone unlocks all 1000 points in Oblivion in 1 day, they're quite obviously cheating. I don't care how much time you have, there's absolutely no way anyone could get through all 1000 points of Oblivion in a single 24h period. So MyGamercard.net is aware of the problem and is working to flag cheaters or profiles of interest. I would expect other sites to follow suite.

The one method of 'cheating' that seemingly can't be stopped though is sharing your gamer tag with someone and having them play the game for you because you don't have time or it's not your type of game. There's also the method of hooking up with friends on Live strictly to unlock achievements. You can trade wins or whatever is needed to unlock achievements fast which is why online achievements are really pointless.

In the end though, not all Achievement cheating can be stopped. Much like game leaderboards, the Achievement leaderboard's top level is plagued with cheaters. But who really are they cheating? Achievement points aren't worth anything so why do people cheat to obtain them? I guess that's a question to dig into an future news article.