I have my British account on a Japanese Xbox in Japan. Do I stand to gain anything from changing my region? For example, I use Japanese Hulu while logged into that account because I set up a Japanese silver account to download the app...
This is open to abuse, no? What if I change to the US to get cheaper Microsoft Points? Points in proper denominations too (what good is 500/1500, as opposed to 400/800/1600 etc).Surely Microsoft will be pissed at me, given the fact that they can see my IP. Is there a disclaimer or anything to deter this kind of thing? I think I'll stick with an alt account, rather than risk it on my main.
To illustrate how the Xbox regions system works, there are multiple benefits on being able to have the account based on the country where you live in
Features limited by account country - your Xbox menu will have UK apps such as BBC, Sky, iPlayer, 40D, Lovefilm only if your account is based in the UK, regardless of your IP address. So if you'd have a Finnish LIVE account and UK IP, you would not be able to see these apps. Obviously this is a huge benefit in being finally able to get the UK account.
Purchases limited by IP address - some publishers (looking at you, Capcpom) lock their content to the same IP address as the account. So if you had a Finnish account but lived in UK, you could not download certain items from the Finnish Xbox Live store because they detect you are physically in the UK. If you have an UK account and UK IP address, you could download the same item without a problem.
Billing address and credit card - buying points and subscriptions becomes problematic if you have an account with a different country than your home address. So say I had a Finnish account and lived in UK. My UK credit card would be unusable because the address check would fail. So to use a UK credit card you need to have an UK account.
Assuming that region limitations are required by content providers, Microsofts way of doing it actually a pretty elegant now that you can change your account country.
