So classic. Go Microsoft. I'll give you some names ;)

i think microsoft should get their nuts squeezed for poor grammar. "their" and "they" are plural pronouns.

" but I still rock his face at Halo" It doesn't matter HOW you rock Chens face, it still sounds rude....

How else would you refer to them without being gender specific?

@Soulxside: Well...

What happened to this person's Gamescore?
This gamer has been caught cheating.

Not all that tough.

I'm worried about this. I find the 360 MUCH too restrictive about saved games (I should be able to transfer saved games off of my HD not matter what profile I am logged in as, no matter what profile the saved game is under), and I've used one of those USB adapters to back my HD when I travel with my Xbox. I will also use one for transfer of files to my new Xbox whe I get a chance (no way I'm doing the sneakernet thing with my puny 64MB memory card).

I don't know how they detect cheating, but I hope I won't get flagged. I've grown attached to my profile, but even moreso to my achievement points.

Be careful.... They are watching us all.... We may get branded for life for posting on Giz!!!!

That would be an honor!

About time!!!!!

Finally, they should do this to those dbags that cheat at halo.

cant you just make a new account?

ha.... i dont use cheats....

does this mean like glitches that get you gamer points or like ligit hacking for gamer score? cuz if it mean glitches im f'ed

This works unless you learn to hack your gamerscore as well...

Not to mention you will ruin your eternal score and the gods of gaming will shun you fromn their realm and you'll have to spend the rest of your days as the ghost of winter-een-mas cheating.

@rb4dv: Aren't you suppose to start a sentence with a "capital letter" ? Since we are talking grammar and all now. ^_^ Maybe, I am just assuming this; but it seems MS would be implying that others have been caught as well. I didn't think grammar patrol would be on a site like Giz guess I was wrong.

@bosskev: +1 Grammar

@rb4dv: Actually, the use of "their" is correct as a possessive gender-unspecific pronoun. The people who label the singular gender-unspecific "they" incorrect are a brand of 60's-era grammatical prescriptivists who, quite frankly, are wrong. The only other construction that would work here is his/her, which is awkward.

Your use of 'their' is incorrect, however. Microsoft wouldn't "get their nuts squeezed", rather "Microsoft employees should get their nuts squeezed". If, you know, they were wrong.
/Grammar tirade.

@ThatsMrOffDutyNinja: Amen to the post on the caps--you beat me to it.
@rb4dv: The singular form of they is widely accepted.

Cheaters suck. And grammar-nazis suck, too.

As the saying goes. If you ain't cheating, you ain't trying.

Will this apply to accounts used on a cheating console?

@AmbroseP: Thank you. It was all just to poke fun of him wanting correct grammar. Not meant to be mean though.

@Topcat: /Grammar tirade. = Priceless, adding to watched list.

I love what their doing about this. :D

@Topcat: I don't buy this. Can you source it?

Branded!!! Scorned is the one who hacks....

John Mayer here.

It's a good thing Microsoft never makes mistakes [just like those who convict sex offenders]...

.... and the fact that this needs to be done at all is part of my beef with XBL in the first place. I don't care what douche-e achievements m0|\|k3y_b0yz_133t made at Halo, especially if what I am playing against him is something completely unrelated.

The whole scheme seems arbitrary and infantile to me; the kind of thing dreamed up by marketing people and masturbatory 13 year old boys.

And yes I am in fact equating people in marketing to hormone-driven teens. Their behavior certainly supports it.

I'm old and don't understand Xbox Live, so this really means nothing to me.

@x40sw0n, I do marketing for a living. You slightly offended me by equating me to someone who masturbates constantly and someone who's a teenager. Only half of that is correct.

Since each achievement gets a timestamp they've been snagging cheaters by looking for a large number of achievements being completed at about the same time. The save game cheats work by loading up a save game and suddenly you get a ton of achievements all at once.

Regardless, I still think the practice is somewhat lame. When was the last time you heard, "D00d, yer gamerscore is sooooo high!"

A 'gamerscore', what a pathetic waste of time, effort, and life in general. I can't believe people put value into such trash. I would hope those of us over 12 would be immune to such stupidity, but judging by the other comments here I appear to be incorrect.

@forcetrainer: You can spot a gamesaver account by looking at their achievement list. The gamesaved achievements will have no date associated with them.

@Mr_Human: Wikipedia has an article on singular they that may or may not make any sense to anyone who is not a grammarian.

Of course, if you don't trust Wikipedia then you can take a gander at The Oxford English Grammar under section 4.34 (Forms of personal, possessive, and reflexive pronouns). It is a far easier read for us mortals.

The word "they" is the 3rd person plural subjective personal pronoun and the word "their" is the 3rd person plural dependent possessive pronoun. Being plural, those words are gender-neutral and indeterminate in number. The strict definition is that the number of individuals must be two or more but I disagree as I will explain. However after centuries of use of these words in the singular gender-neutral form, it has become accepted practice.

I disagree with the strict definition because the situation is really no different than the case of the 2nd person singular and plural forms. The words "you" and "your" are used explicitly in both forms because they are gender-neutral and indeterminate in number. The only difference between the two forms is the use of "yourself" and "yourselves" for the reflexive pronouns. In fact, this difference was the reasoning behind the introduction of the world "themself" some years back as a parallel of "yourself".

English is a funny language.

I will not address the second paragraph in Topcat's post because the thought of Microsoft and nut squeezing leaves me nauseous.

(I apologise for any grammar errors but it is 2:30 AM and it's been a long day. LOL)

@rb4dv:

Yes but the plural is used when it isn't gender specific. They could have used 'What happened to his/her game score

He/she has been caught cheating " but i think the other way is better.

Apparently Microsoft has struck a nerve with both cheaters and grammar nerds.

yawn

Didn't the Nazi's pull this tactic with a few folks?

If only it flagged accounts using strategy guides, too. To me, that's still a form of cheating.

Back in my day we called the Nintendo Power hotline and paid $2/minute for one stinkin' secret character in NBA Jam. We earned our secrets, dangit!

@Lizard_King: CHEATER!!

@flyboy: heh. Still waiting on my 12/23 Rock Band achievements from the XBL outage....think it's best for me to start over instead of using an older saved game now.

Actually, I'm surprised I didnt get more people questioning the validity of transferring to PC since MS never made such devices.

I have no such concerns as I don't own a console and never will. I still to the wide variety of PC games I currently play. Well not that wide, I pretty much stick to FPS games. That being said there are a ton of cheating douche-bags on live PC gaming as well. Punk-buster doesn't seem to keep any of the 9 yr olds or morAns out.

This has pretty much lead me to start playing team/squad oriented play on human vs. bot COOP servers. Its fun getting 4 or 5 (or more) of you're buddies together and taking on 50 or 60 bots; especially when the AI is cranked up and they get smart enough that if they were real, they'd accused of hacking right off the bat.

@x40sw0n:

What's with all the Achievement hate? It's not like if you're playing against somebody in Rock Band it constantly pops up and reminds you of what they did in Halo 3. The only way to find that is if YOU actively go search it out (by using the "compare games" feature).

Achievements are a fun way of marking what you've done. If a game dev does them right they make nice little challenges to get and show off (for the harder ones).

Very very very few people REALLY care about their gamerscore or what achievements they have in relation to other folks. Those people are not the norm.

Most of us just like the added challenge they provide and, if you like pursuing them, they are a nice way to add longevity to games.

And really they aren't any different than a level boss if you think about it. It's simply another challenge in the game. So it's ok to have a level boss or side quest in a game, but if you do it and get achievement points it all of a sudden becomes juvenile? That doesn't make any sense.

@rb4dv: John Mayer here.

Once again, the anti-grammar-Nazi internet dictum commonly referred to as "Frigg's Law" reaffirms its steely validity. (Any similarity between my own name and the so-called "Frigg's Law" is purely coincidental):
.

"Frigg's Law:
 Anyone who corrects someone else's grammar on the internet has a greater than 90% chance of 1) being wrong, 2) including grammatical mistakes of their own in the text of the purported correction, or 3) being a dick. The more the grammar-corrector pursues their correction in a thread, the closer that percentage approaches 100%."

@wilsonma29:

"I will not address the second paragraph in Topcat's post because the thought of Microsoft and nut squeezing leaves me nauseous."

From Merriam-Webster:

nauseous

Main Entry:
nau·seous
\ˈnȯ-shəs, ˈnȯ-zē-əs\
Function:
adjective
Date:
1612

1 : causing nausea or disgust : nauseating
2 : affected with nausea or disgust
- nau·seous·ly adverb
- nau·seous·ness noun

usage: Those who insist that nauseous can properly be used only in sense 1 and that in sense 2 it is an error for nauseated are mistaken. Current evidence shows these facts: nauseous is most frequently used to mean physically affected with nausea, usually after a linking verb such as feel or become; figurative use is quite a bit less frequent. Use of nauseous in sense 1 is much more often figurative than literal, and this use appears to be losing ground to nauseating. Nauseated is used more widely than nauseous in sense 2.

I always preferred vocab to grammar. :-)

@frigg:
"John mayer here."
Thats sooooooo 2 days ago......

I thought that I was the only tech/Engrish nerd. Ah...Gizmodo is now even more "home".

Let's not start on the Oxford comma, boys. Keep it civil.

Frigg's Law applies here.

@Out2gtcha: "Thats sooooooo 2 days ago......"

As an Amish person (Mennonite, actually), I tend to live in the past.

Oh yeah... John Mayer here. :P

@frigg:

"As an Amish person (Mennonite, actually)"

So does that mean you're involved with that Mennonite Disaster Service?

Why do people care about their gamerscore? I mean, people go to all sorts of ridiculous lengths to boost them.

There is no meaning to it - it's just a number. You don't get extra prizes from Microsoft, you don't get discounts, there is no special meaning to them. It's just a number that increases as you play more.

But people would pay others to boost their gamerscores (seriously!), even buy crap games for the "easy points".

@Worf: I think it's neat to get achievements, I've played games much farther than I would have normally to get the points, and had fun doing so. I'm still in search of the elusive 100% game, but it's part of the fun, and it does add an additional layer to the game. I found myself preferring to purchase games for the 360 instead of the PS3 (Rock Band, Lego Star Wars and Orange Box) primarily because of the fun that achievements add.

@BonoMan: It is a bit odd to hate on achievements. I don't know the number off the top of my head, I know it's relatively low, and I don't care. I think it adds to the fun, and really I don't know if games today are suppossed to be fun or not. The only reason I can see to be neagtive is because someone wants that feature on their console of choice, so yeah, a jealosy thing.

Xbox Live: Serious Business.

People already know I'm a horrible human being the moment they see me. But it's nice to know I can keep up appearances online, too.

@Worf: Actually Microsoft and Old Spice ran the Experience Challenge or whatever where you could get prizes by upping your gamerscore. Wasn't anything big but it was cool.

Then 360Voice.com and Old Spice teamed up again for a much much much larger Experience Challenge where there were tons of "challenges" going on and gave out tons of prizes from Microsoft Points to HD-DVD players (whoops) and also gave away tons of free Zunes by random to people playing the challenges.

So actually you can, at certain points, get prizes for ePenis scores!

But really though it's not about the number of the score, but rather having fun getting the actual achievements.

Frighteningly sad. Sadly frightening. Ultimately pointless.

I think they need to only give you achievement points for games you actually own. Not rent. Not borrow. :P That would lead to some weight to these scores in my opinion. And likely cut down on point whoring unless someone really wanted to verify they bought a copy of Pretty Pwnies adventures in Boom! Headshot.

@Yeebles:

Yes but the plural is used when it isn't gender specific. They could have used 'What happened to his/her game score

that seems rather rude and exclusionary towards hermaphrodites don't you