Rumor Killer: Achievements Did Not Disappear, says Major Nelson

*According to recent rumors, gamers have been booting up their Xbox 360 only to find that the Achievements they worked so hard to get were gone. The rumor went on to claim that the Xbox Live outages over the holiday break were the cause of the missing achievements.

TGR had an opportunity to speak with Major Nelson at CES 2008 this past week. Major Nelson has stated that no Xbox 360 achievements were lost. He confirmed this with the Xbox Live Database staff who stated that there was no missing data from the database.

Also, TGR was able to get a little insight into the Xbox Live outages. According to Major Nelson, the outages were caused due to going beyond capacity, not a DDOS attack as other sources have rumored. This basically translates to: too many people on Xbox Live at one time. This makes sense considering there were undoubtedly thousands of new Xbox 360 owners who wanted to jump into Live and get started.

Major Nelson went on to say that they are working on fixing the issues which caused the Xbox Live outages and that they are making additions to ensure that it never happens again.

“We are creating solutions so it does not happen again. It was a small blip and they are learning from it. We always plan for capacity; however, over the holidays it was well above capacity on live.”

More information to come as it is released.

*Source

Major Nelson warns Xbox Live Cheaters

Larry Hryb, Director of Programming for Xbox Live and better known to gamers as Major Nelson, warned gamers about sharing account information and tampering with one's Gamerscore or Achievements.

In a blog post, Major Nelson warned that, aside from being a violation of the terms of service, sharing account information could result in a loss of that account.

He added that if players “employ some nefarious techniques to artificially increase [their] Gamerscore or obtain achievements by manipulating the Xbox software without playing the game,” their Gamerscore could be removed or their account and/or console might be banned from Xbox Live.