What can we do?
The way cheats are dealt with at the moment just isn’t good enough. The Xbox live team say that they use a variety of tools and reports to ban and suspend cheats from the Xbox live service, but unless we, the community, know exactly how it works how can we be confident that anything is actually happening?The feedback system is useless. We use it to report racists, cheats, quitters and so on, we’ve been on Xbox live since the beta phase yet we have no idea whether any one of those people we’ve reported have ever received warnings or bans.
We’re assured people are being banned, but how do we really know? The situation with Xbox live cheats doesn't seem to have got better, it’s got worse.
Rather than ban the Xbox live accounts of these people, they should ban or suspend them from the specific games they cheat in and each game should have an individual feedback system that relates to exploits within that game, for example, in UEFA 2008, the main issue is quitting. So, set up a system within that game that ensures that if someone quits ‘X’ amount of times from an online match, they can’t get back into a multiplayer match for a couple of weeks. Put these losers’ gamertags on a website for all to see. Name and shame these sad individuals. Just do something more than is being done at the moment!
Sadly, in reality, there’s actually no solution. Glitches in games are never going to be completely ironed out by developers so they’ll always be found the cheat brigade. Quitters will continue to quit and probably spend most of their lives giving up. Companies will continue to produce save file transfer software, such as the Datel XSATA and gamers will continue to exploit them. Microsoft will continue to tell us that it’s clamping down on cheats, but whether it is or not we’ll never really know.
All we do know for definite, is that cheats are here to stay, they'll continue to prosper on Xbox live and there’s bugger all you and me can do about it.
