Microsoft has corrected the Xbox Live Gamertags of confirmed cheaters, citing violations of the company's terms of use, Xbox Live director of programming Larry "Major Nelson" Hyrb wrote on his blog today.

Accounts which Hyrb described as "the most serious offenders" were today stripped of their Gamerscore, resetting the total to zero. Moreover, those accounts will not be able to regain any previously obtained achievements—this does not, however, forbid the earning of future achievements in other games.

Violators have also been marked as cheaters on the Xbox.com community page, as evidenced in a sample provided by Hyrb. Infamous achievement hoarder StripClubDj, who was once lauded for being the first Xbox Live gamer to breach the 100,000 Gamerscore milestone, was among the marked accounts.

"Xbox Live remains committed to keeping the service free of cheating in order to maintain a fair and level playing field for everyone," Hyrb wrote.

The latest Steam news update mentions that Valve has recently banned 10,000 Steam accounts after new Valve Anti-Cheat technology found people cheating in Counter-Strike: Source and other games. 'We expect to see a surge of forum posts laying blame squarely at the feet of "my little brother."'.

Nothing ruins an online gaming session like a cheater entering the server. The fun factor quickly drops to zero and everyone exits, looking for another place to play. But why do these people do it? What kind of possible satisfaction can a cheater get from breaking all the rules? EGM recently talked with a few cheaters to answer these questions.

"It's frustrating," says Duncan Ariey, whose cheating ways date back to 16-bit Game Genie hacks. "To lose consistently to people who got better than you by playing six to eight hours a day while you're at school or work-some people cheat just to even the playing field." Latecomers are especially disadvantaged, says Ariey: "Nobody wants to turn on their new game and be killed 50 times in a row by people who have had the game longer. I know many people who cheat not to boost their win column, but to keep it from being ruined in their first few days of having a game."

Some cheaters are hardcore about their methods. Brian Soderberg, cofounder of Zipper (SOCOM series), said "There's a hardware cheat device built specifically for SOCOM II called the Warp Cord. This device provides the player with a foot pedal that causes opponents to freeze momentarily, providing an easy kill." Sadly, the only recourse for developers is to patch their titles, which can be a cumbersome process for console developers who never had to deal with this issue before.

Well you know it's hip and cool when Wired picks up on it (Thanks VE). Global banning people from playing online games is becoming all the rage. Most recently Blizzard banned close to 20,000 people for 2 weeks from playing Warcraft3 on Battle.net because of cheating, and not too long ago Valve announced that they were banning Counter-Strike players as well. This is good yes?

Few firms have been hit as hard as Blizzard, however. Cheats granting players near-infinite abilities essentially melted online play of Diablo, the company's 1997 Dungeons-&-Dragonsesque hit. Determined not to repeat the mistake, Blizzard banned 8,500 players of Diablo II earlier this year.

Yup, hacks ruined Diablo2's economy as well.. and when hackers are ruining games, they are probably hurting word of mouth sales at least a bit I'd think. Hackers are poo heads.

Well it's begun, cheaters in Counter-Strike and DoD are now getting globally banned from playing on all secured servers. (read: 99.9%). Here is a sample screenshot I was sent and a quote from Erik Johnson talking about the bans:

The ban list is now active, which means people that are detected cheating on a secure server will be banned from all secure servers for 24 hours. We'll be increasing the penalty for cheating dramatically over time as we become more comfortable with how the system is operating. We know of no false positives being generated currently, but we're going to be extremely careful we aren't banning legitimate players. [snip]

Yay? Yes.. YAY!

Here is something that may be changing the face of online cheating a bit. The new anti-cheat stuff that Valve has been updating every so often is now recording IDs of people detected cheating to a 'master ban list' for future banning. Here's a bit from CSNation:

Security module update *** This only affects Counter-Strike servers. ***
We've updated the public security modules again. Your Counter-Strike servers should update themselves automatically. If you find your servers are suddenly having problems, try restarting the servers. These modules should detect OGC's OpenGl Hack 1.8 and will start reporting detected cheaters to our master ban list server. We won't be banning anyone yet, but we'll be gathering information about detected cheaters.

What this would mean is that people caught cheating would no longer just be banned from single servers, but nearly all servers on the internet save for the few that dont run in secure mode. Think that's a bit more of a deterrent for cheaters? Of course you can always just go buy another CDKey...

Well we had the news of the cheats being released, the Busted guys posting their justification for them, and now here's some of the consequences. CS leagues are going invite only with sponsorship programs. Here's the concept:

All teams that are admitted into the two divisions (one standard, one with all custom maps) will have to be sponsored by two other clans, and if a player is caught cheating both the offending clan and its sponsors will be removed from the league.

Also, here's an interview with Tony Ray from PunkBuster. The most popular anti-cheat program for Counter-Strike. It's pretty lengthy stuff although it's curious that Tony mentions it takes him 10minutes to write a catch for the current hack out there but it's been a known issue for weeks.

The CAL sponsored by the CPL (Who works in cooperation with Valve) has posted word on Counter-Strike v1.2 that is due for release this month. We can probably expect changes as usual. The CAL page also has word on a new anti-cheat measure that is included in v1.2

Upon release of Counter-Strike 1.2 this month, the Cyberathlete Amateur League will require all match servers to be in the new "pure" mode during official matches. I wanted give everyone a nice advance notice so you can get used to playing with all the default player skins, weapon models and crosshairs.

Pure servers settings. That should cut down on at least some of the hacks. A pure server setting generally speaking will compare all the files on your drive to the server and if you're running any different models or skins it gives ya the boot. Keep in mind this doesnt have any impact on the wall-hack video drivers. (Unless of course the phrase 'pure server' also encompasses something other than how Q3 works)  Hopefully Valve has something in mind for the wall-hack too.

Speaking of cheats, CAL recently booted a team from their top league for cheating and banned a couple of the guilty player from ever playing in future events. Cheaters = suck.

In case you somehow thought that people playing games online via a console machine instead of a PC means you dont have to worry about cheating, well you're wrong. There are already tools out there for people possibly cheating on Dreamcast machines. Doh.

For all the people who hate cheating out there, Punkbuster.com is a pretty impressive looking website that sports the latest anti-cheating mods in an attempt to stifle those cheating punks.

This was suspected but now AdminCentral has gotten confirmation that when the Quake3 mission pack is released there will be an update released for vanilla Quake3 as well re-working the pure stuff which should make things difficult for cheaters.

It took about 3 months to code around it last time. And the new stuff will probably take a bit longer. It is not ( or should not ) just be a matter of sitting down for 15 minutes and coding around it. It is impossible to provide a perfect solution, but we can continually update the security measures as necessary.

Cheaters are about as low and scummy as they come.

Wanted to put out an alarm to server admins. Please put sv_pure back to 1. The Quake3 cheats have begun to surface and it's only a matter of weeks before it begins to get really nasty. From hacked models to this mod, a Quake3 radar that was sent to me. Check out this stuff that's possible on a sv_pure 0 server anywhere on the net: [shot1] [shot2] [shot3]. If you want to use custom mods on servers that you design, just make sure the exact same file is on the server and you're just fine with sv_pure 1. Hopefully id Software will address the issue in the near future, since sv_pure 1 is pretty painful to deal with right now. It's just the lesser of 2 evils.