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Modern Warfare 2 mutiplayer: X-ray vision in effect
As much as I'd like to think of Modern Warfare 2 as a mouse-and-keyboard shooter best played on the PC - which it is - it's pretty discouraging to find out that Infinity Ward's refusal to provide dedicated servers as a way to prevent hacking has come to naught. Above is a screenshot of an online hack that highlights the position of enemy players no matter where they are on the map. It's called a wallhack, and it's fairly common in online shooters for the PC.
Activision had a video pulled that was posted to YouTube showing the hack in action and advertising the URL to download it. I'm not going to post the link, as you can find it yourself on Google if you're interested in that sort of thing. It's available for a monthly subscription fee. The site seems to do good business, selling a wide range of hacking options for the most popular online games. Since their products only works on the PC, I'll continue playing Modern Warfare 2 on the Xbox 360 where I know that every time I died it was because the other guy shot me fair and square.
Of course, maybe if there were some dedicated servers I could trust to monitor that sort of thing, I might be inclined to take up the mouse-and-keyboard...
Up next: with a little help from my friend
(Click here for the previous Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer game diary.)
By bob at 9:36 PM ON 11/12/09
activision fails. period. i dont like them either but it seems that every game has its cheaters. so why would they assume by not making dedicated servers on pc it would stop? rediculous
By TH4T6UY at 9:51 PM ON 11/12/09
Heh, I'd seen this earlier. That would've been something that an admin would've been able to catch, but, oops, there are no admins!
By Finn at 11:06 PM ON 11/12/09
That's exactly what's so annoying about their weird justifications for dropping dedicated servers. Playing on a 'rusted server where you know the players, where the mods are active, cheaters and trolls are banned -- that's heaven baby. That's the whole reason to support dedicated servers.
If they dropped it because there just wasn't enough money in the budget to justify extra work on the PC, ok, but don't give us this BS justifications.
By Mitchrapp at 10:08 AM ON 11/13/09
failure.
this is why I like Valve games ... multiplayer, customizable, etc....
Sure there are plenty of cheats, but that's why mods are there, to record, ban and then send the demo to valve for a bigger ban :)
By roshinobi at 11:11 AM ON 11/13/09
That's why I only play fps multiplayers on console
By TH4T6UY at 7:12 PM ON 11/13/09
@roshinobi
It's not that bad on a *proper* PC game. I remember once I was playing BF2 and someone started up a hack and, because this was on a dedicated server run by a clan and had admins, the dude had his IP banned within SECONDS of it, perma-banned too. He wasn't coming back to that server anytime soon.
By MoonDevil at 11:13 AM ON 11/15/09
I play on the PS3, but remember hearing that they were dropping the dedicated servers for PC users. Think it pretty much is giving PC users the shaft by doing this. And as far as explanations being "not in the budget"??? You gotta be kidding me. The game sold assloads of money the first day on ALL platforms... and Christmas has not even hit yet. A big greedy copout on IW part with the PC for sure.
By TH4T6UY at 2:28 PM ON 11/15/09
@MoonDevil
It's not even a budget deal. IWNet is literally a carbon copy of Xbox LIVE in functionality. Also, some people figured out how to unlock the dev console for the game and found many, many references to Xbox LIVE and the Xbox in there. And then there was the guy who used a hex editor on the MP .exe and found ~100 more references to the Xbox and Xbox LIVE and pretty much proved that the game is a straight port that only semi-runs under Windows (I've been trolling around IW's forums and LOTS of people are gettting crashes and BSODs from this horribly sloppy port). It's really sad and enraging to see them forget who built up the CoD franchise from the beginning, but I guess that's the price you pay when consoles sell more games, despite the fact that they aren't able to support as many features as their PC brethren.
By Fobok at 5:16 AM ON 11/17/09
This game was on my must-buy list until I heard about this. I'm a poor player, so I was looking forward to seeing the death streak bonuses, and just in general migrating from CoD4.
The lack of dedicated servers, and the 9v9 max battle size, was just too much though. There's no way I want to play this game on PC. And I refuse to play shooters on console even if I had a modern-generation system.
I'll stick with CoD 4, until/unless they patch in dedicated servers.
Fobok:
This game was on my must-buy list until I heard about this. I'm a poor player, so I was looking forward to seeing t...More »