Alright, somebody's gotta help me...a little back story:

A friend of mine used to be on XBL and then spent the past year gaming offline. Then last week he got a new Gold Membership and plugged the box back into the magical internet cord and NONE of the achievements he got while playing offline for the past year were there.

Example, he beat Mass Effect (offline) last year, but according to his Gamertag, he's never played Mass Effect and doesn't have any of his achievements.

There were a few things that happened over the course of that offline year that might be relevant, but I'm not sure:

1. RRoD. He kept his hard drive and they sent him a different console.

2. He recovered his Gamertag on my Xbox once.

3. He used his hard drive on our roommate's Xbox while his own was being fixed.

Any idea if any of these things could have caused this?

Has anyone heard of anything like this before?

All his save game data is still there. Example, he has all the cards he unlocked in Culdcept, but none of the achievements. His created character in Madden is still there, but none of the achievements.

I've heard rumors about having to "authorize" your XBL Marketplace purchases when switching consoles, but does that apply to achievements somehow?

Any ideas?

- DanceDance

I think one of my friends told me that when you play games offline and then get XBL, it does not count them.

Granted, my friend is not exactly the smartest guy so he may be completely wrong.

Recovering a gamertag saves the recovered (last saved on XBL) gamertag OVER the GT of the same name on the HDD. Sorry, but he's screwed =/

Recovering a gamertag saves the recovered (last saved on XBL) gamertag OVER the GT of the same name on the HDD. Sorry, but he's screwed =/Yeah because he was never on live, when he recovered the account on a different hard drive he lost all his achievements.

Is that really how it works? I gotta say, that's incredibly lame. Can anyone point me to a website that says this? So I got some proof to point him to?

Its lame but that's how they keep people from hacking the achievements.

oh god it hurts... all those achievements

That's strange. I played under a totally different screen name for about a year before I even connected to Live. When I connected, it told me that the screen name was taken. I selected a new one and ALL of my achievements carried over. I lost nothing.

It was becouse you recovered the account......

Hard to explain.....

Similar thing happened to me, when he recovered it, he recovered it to before he had played all his games and stuff....

something like that anyway....

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I guess it makes sense that it'd work like that because of the whole "overwriting" gamertag when you recover it. That still sucks, though.

Also, the SG forum is world's better than getting help from Xbox. I wrote them an email detailing the problem and the one I got back explained step by step how to get back downloaded content after swapping hard drives. Real helpful.

Also, the SG forum is world's better than getting help from Xbox. I wrote them an email detailing the problem and the one I got back explained step by step how to get back downloaded content after swapping hard drives. Real helpful.

If only you spoke Chinese...

that kind of sucks, but i cant help you.
*Evil Grin*

its because he cudnt get online to save the achievments if he had just plugged in the harddrive it shudve been fine