12 Jan, 2011
Regular players of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare franchise on Sony’s Playstation 3 could find themselves suddenly up to their eyes in hacked lobbies. The news comes hot on the heals of the announcement that hackers have finally broken through the supposedly ‘bullet-proof’ measures put in place by Sony to protect their systems against running unauthorised code.
You can image my surprise when my sister calls during my lunch hour, totally baffled, to tell me that she has suddenly earned every conceivable unlockable item and blitzed through all MW2 challenges in a matter of seconds. How, I hear you ask? She was simply entered into a match (a public lobby, and entirely at random I hasten to add) that happened to be targeted by hackers, and as such allowed them access and use all killstreaks, emblems, weapons plus attachments and call signs. Posters have also reported the use of Auto aim and God Mode hacks, as well as manipulation of weapons to fire ammo like that from attack choppers.
Several threads have already begun to spring up on the Playstation Community, with several players reporting that malicious hackers have wiped clean their stats and prestige progression, while icing the cake by leaving unpleasant messages and adverts for hacking software on the news feed on the main menu. Many gamers have reported that they will be avoiding playing the best selling Modern Warfare franchise until Sony and Activision respond to the problem out of fear of potential violations of their Playstation Network accounts. Posters over at the Playstation Community are also placing blame on Activision for neglecting the franchise since the release of Treyarch’s 2010 smash hit ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops’, and hope that they will be forthcoming with a solution to the problem, but without the dissolved Infinity Ward it throws the game into a grey area.
Videos have also appeared on YouTube, providing tutorials on how to the run the hack codes on your PS3 and apply it to such games as MW2, but have been met thankfully with a swift take down and banning of accounts on behalf of YouTube.
So dumbass hackers are again out to spoil the gaming experiences of thousands of honest Call of Duty players. Are any of you our readers PS3 COD players, and have been affected by this issue? Let us know your thoughts and experiences in the comments section, or join us over in the Community Forum!
I got thrown into one of these about a month ago, before the hacks.
I was baffled for a while, thinking it was a weird lag problem which was making me move 10x faster than normal, but then I saw someone flying across the sky, so I jumped and realised this was more than just connection problems as I took off a mile into the air.
At the time it seemed it was only one player with the advantage of all the killstreaks and auto-aim etc. he seemed quite sombre I figured he was just doing it to get all the unlocks.
The rest of the players were enjoying the super-speed and the mega-jumps but had no other difference to the gameplay.
I played maybe 5 games but then I got bored of it and left, and joined a new lobby.
I don’t like the idea of hackers effecting other peoples games, it was fine in my case because I could leave and join another lobby, but if the servers are overrun with hacked lobbies it could seriously ruin the game.
But then I have thought for a while that it’s strange that MW2 doesnt have custom lobbies like in most other Online Fps, where you have ranked matches and then custom matches where the game creator can choose certain things they want or dont want in the match, like weapons and maps. This would be a good way to allow hackers to have their fun away from the people that want to play the way the game was intended.
The whole hacking situation has opened a lot of questions about game and console design practise, not just from the technical side
I wondered if it was an isolated incident, but my poor sister has ended up in one of the hacked servers 3 times today. She’s running about fretting, thinking her PSN account is going to be banned and what not because of all the stuff she has accidentally unlocked. Bless her.
I personally don’t have any time for hackers, especially the malicious bastards who are going out of their way to try and breaking into peoples PSN accounts.