if someone uses your account to get points and buys content wouldnt that content be yours to download as well? I mean they had to use your account in the first place so there would be some trace of the purchase in your account history.

You may not have wanted the fifa content but if you had the game yourself then you would have the ability to use it as well.

on topic...: What i am wondering is if there are so many of these stolen accounts with such small things then how does MS know who is real or not? Anyone could call them up and say their account has been hacked and try and get some kind of credit back if they bought something they didnt want.

MS does not offer refunds so this could be a new way of getting refunds for purchases people make but are then have 2nd thoughts. Some accounts that have been hacked are legit but how many are people just trying to get in on the action?

Where does personal responsibility fall into things?

nothing is unhackable the only thing you can do is make it to hard to hack so its financially or not worth the effort to hack.

Ok i did not mean the service itself, but for some reason i feel that there is more theft, phishing going on in xbl than psn... Abit strange.

***That is a first time I have ever heard anyone claim brute force attack is a breach of security. ***

You're kidding me, right? Letting brute force attacks to continue in this manner is a sign of weak security protocols, ie a breach of said weak security protocols.

Here are the standard and widely used methods in which brute force attempts can be prevented.

- Intrusion Detection/Prevention Systems: installed at various firewall levels. Detects and handles unusual activity from various sources and over a specific amount of time.

- Account login disabled upon multiple failures to log into the system with an e-mail sent to the account holder on this action and a link to unlock the account.

- CAPTCHA enabled after a single, unsuccessful login that is tied to the username/e-mail address on file to require it for all logins until a successful one is made.

Honestly, not having protocols and a system to handle such simple attacks isn't a sign of a weak security system that can be breached? This isn't the 90s.

And none of this is 'high security'.

It's a weakness of the password system in general.

MS used a CAPTCHA after 8 attempts, which pretty much falls under the category of:

***- CAPTCHA enabled after a single, unsuccessful login that is tied to the username/e-mail address on file to require it for all logins until a successful one is made.***

You must have a very weak password if brute forcing with 8 attempts was a success.

Also, displaying a CAPTCHA after ONE failed attempt is plain disgustingly user UNfriendly.

***Honestly, not having protocols and a system to handle such simple attacks isn't a sign of a weak security system that can be breached? This isn't the 90s.***

In fact, MS captcha is pretty strong strongest as illustrated by PWNtcha inability to "guess" the answer unlike many other "weak" captcha's:

http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/PW...

Hint: scroll down to the bottom titled "Other captchas and hard captchas"

***MS used a CAPTCHA after 8 attempts, which pretty much falls under the category of: ***

Actually, they failed because what they didn't do is tie the need for CAPTCHA to the username/e-mail. The problem is that the CAPTCHA could be easily avoided by going back to the initial login page and trying 8 more times.

You see, the brute force wasn't just 8 times in a row, it was thousands of 8 times in a row on the same account.

These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse

Contractual agreements are not the same as “gentlemen” agreements. If you think that they work with their distributors a month before production then their entire business model is trash. They work with companies like nvidia constantly for building the graphics cards they need. They work with companies that build motherboards years in advance. This is what proper business planning does.

They are not buying components on a whim like a consumer. So again, considering the ram isn’t a singular module and is integrated into the motherboard I highly doubt they wouldn’t have a final schematic that they are supposed to be building around.

If they are delaying production another 3 years then it’s obvious again this is an after though project and is just trying to be responsive to their bad execution they had the last 14 years.

It also isn’t far fetched to use their failure to produce first party titles the last 7 years including the highly anticipated games I mentioned all being cancelled. That they would continue to you know… lie

Yeah with FSR 5 they should be able to offer a much cheaper version of Helix.

Series S is what has killed Xbox Series so... Will they dare?

The factors are largely external. Covid and Russia-Ukraine war causing inflation led to the first price increase in 2022.

Then we get Trump's tariffs increasing hardware prices, AI boom causing a RAM crisis, war on Iran causing a worldwide fuel crisis which impacts the cost of everything.

Gaming doesn't exist in a vacuum. The last few years have been a shitshow and lot of it was definitely avoidable.

LucasRuinedChildhood,

For sure. No disagreement on the external factors doing a lot of this. Where I have to gently push back however is on two fronts:

1. The pandemic definitely caused some issues: asynchronous development was a big issue and really complicated timelines and affected game quality. At the same time, when it comes to price hikes, it's really difficult to know what was genuine necessity and what was taking consumers for a ride. The pandemic brought about "stag-flation" which was increasing prices and stagnant wages, which was a problem caused by supply chain constraints. There was also "Greed-flation", where companies that were slightly affected or had no issues took advantage of the situation and squeezed everyone citing supply chain issues when there were none.

2. It's definitely true that the tariffs, AI boom, and RAM crisis were all things enabled by tech broligarchs throwing money at this caricature of a world leader, one of them being Satya Nadella. I don't think Sony and Nintendo have contributed much to this problem if at all, but Microsoft's Nadella I feel was instrumental in causing every one of those issues. Microsoft as a company contributed to both candidates (though they gave Harris 4x as much if I recall), but Nadella was all in on letting AI run wild. He paid for unregulated AI, and got a war that's not a war (even though Trump called it that at least five times on television) that screwed up helium access. So for me, I feel that one of the players in the gaming industry is a key architect of these issues, and for that reason I struggle a bit to think of it as "external".