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“This is rumour control. Here are the facts.”

The story has been going around that someone playing an illegal copy of Halo 3 was banned from Xbox Live until 12/31/9999. Granted, this is a hilarious story but I’ve noticed some inaccuracies that have been perpetrated along with this tale.

The Destructoid article reads as follows:

Imagine you just procured, quite illegally, a copy of Halo 3 before the release date. Now, considering this is the biggest franchise the Xbox 360 has, and Microsoft is a company that does not mess around when it comes to monitoring its customers and punishing all who betray it, what would be the first thing you do? Would you, say, take it online for everybody in the whole bloody world to see how illegal you’re being!? Apparently that’s what these utter morons did.

Well, actually that’s NOT what these morons did. The gamer in question goes by the gamertag “| SCAR |” and he posted a bit about his adventures on the Xboxic forums.

Now first of all, this wasn’t a retail version of Halo 3. Scar was playing the Halo 3 Epsilon. You may have heard of it. Thing is, the Epsilon is very similar to the Halo 3 Beta we all took part in. And as you’ll see in a minute, also very similar to the COD4 Beta.

So, it wasn’t a matter of the person being able to play with the 360 disconnected. The fact is that the Epsilon sends a constant stream of data back to Bungie HQ for processing. Also, it should be noted that this means the console did not need to be modded for this banning to happen. The Epsilon was not a backup or copy. It was legitimately downloaded. But how, you ask?

Scar explains, “I’m sure you read the story where a woman that works at MS got her son the epsilon then a couple guys stole his account and did the second profile glitch to get the beta off him, well they let some people do it then it blossomed into a good 100 people glitching into it, and i was one of them.”

Yes, that’s right. The same bug that allowed 23,000 people to download and play the Call Of Duty 4 Beta also allowed the spread of the Halo 3 Epsilon. Oopsies…

Now, this story is still hilarious but I would feel icky inside if I let this kind of misinformation cloud our intertron tubez.

Thanks to homicidal insomniac for the image and helping keep the facts straight.