Halo 3 fans play early build,get banned for 7,992 years

It seems if you figure out how to download the Epsilon build of the Halo 3 Beta, and then play it with your Microsoft Live account, you can earn yourself a 7,000 year ban.

Some Xbox Live account holders figured out a way to download the latest build of the beta for Halo 3, code named “Epsilon”, and jumped online to try it out.  Well, it appears that may not have been the brightest idea as they are all now banned from Xbox Live until December 31st, 9999.

Yes, you read that right, 7,992 years from now.

One of the banned players, a 17-year old from Minnesota, who goes by the Gamertag “Scar”, spoke with GameSpot News about how his banning came about.

“A friend said he got the Epsilon from a friend and offered me to glitch it onto my account with what you call the two-controller exploit,” he told GameSpot. “I downloaded it from Marketplace and played it for maybe six hours or so all alone, in custom games and campaign. [Then] it would kick me offline every time i tried to play Epsilon. It wasn’t until the next day when i[sic] signed on that I found out i[sic] got banned.”

Microsoft had no comment on the bans, but Bungie, producers of the hit game series, just offered apologies to the banned players great, great, great, great, grandkids.

• Spoiler Alert: More Halo 3 footage
• XBox Halo 3 beta: three ways not to play!
• Gears of War 2:Street date broken or did pirates get a hold of a leaked build?
• Halo 2 takes advantage of Tray and Play on Vista
• Influx of 1.2 million Halo 3 players crashes Xbox live