Much has been made in the recent weeks about the recent hacking of the PS3 console and it’s possible ramifications for using pirated games. Now it seems the firmware is good for another use, passing the blame.
It’s no secret that Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is a popular game, it’s immense sales and online user base is astronomical, this popularity also has a downside, hacking. Personally I did find this beginning to occur quite a while ago, but nothing to an extreme nature, occasionally I would find other players that seemed to have abilities that were quite over the top compared to the majority of player considering there level.
Now, I haven’t played the online portion of the game in quite a while now once I hit level 70, the thrill as they say, had gone and it was getting repetitive to the point of being grating to me, so I moved onto other games. In the last few days reports have been floating around various news and gaming sites mentioning that this hacking appears to have taken an extreme turn for the worst and the online portion of the game is apparently almost unplayable due to the amount of people who have managed to hack their character classes and in many cases servers which in some cases can result in people losing their stats.
This is not the first time hacks have been found in a Call Of Duty game. In fact the first Modern Warfare game was plagued with player hacks and was patched numerous times, but player hacks still exist on that game also.
The reaction though to the current state of the online portion of Modern Warfare 2 by Infinity Ward is to these eyes, lame and a cop out to say the least. Infinity Ward have stated that “Unless the security exploit itself is resolved on the platform … updates to the game through patches will not resolve this problem.” which appears to squarely put the blame at Sony’s feet.
Something smells fishy to me with this statement. For some silly reason when Infinity Ward were developing both Modern Warfare 1 & 2, they did not think about implementing their own internal security system for the game independent to the console’s security. Modern Warfare 2 has received numerous patches since release, and all of them before this PS3 hack that is getting all the headlines. Many of these patches also included functionalities to disable hacks within the game that people managed to exploit before the notorious PS3 hack on top of standard game fixes. So why the handballing now? Well like any company, Activision is out there to make a buck or two, and they have done that handily with Modern Warfare 2, so It leads me to believe that one of two situations could be occurring with regards to this;
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Activision figure that the game is too far along in it’s life cycle to worry about investing the dollars into the title required now to fix it considering that Black Ops is now their main focus.
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The brains at Infinity Ward who designed the multiplayer system have left with company founders in order to create a new company and what remains of the once great company are struggling to come to terms with the issue.
Or is it a sinister third option??? Regardless of what the problem really is (and I doubt we will really know the truth) I believe 2 things need to occur (but won’t);
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Activision need to come clean that the reason alone isn’t caused by Sony and the PS3’s hacking, if this was truly the case, many other games on the platform would be affected also, which hasn’t happened so far, and
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Activision need to make sure that suitable security is employed on each title separate from each platform’s security, like developers Treyarch have utilised in Black Ops.
Call me a conspiracist, but I can see this becoming an issue not of console security, but an excuse for a company to grab more money off players. Activision could use this as leverage in the future to initiate a pay to play Call Of Duty platform to play on which has been rumoured but always shot down in flames by Activision heads. After all monetising the online portion of the most played multiplayer game ever will be a huge cash cow.
