For years on PS3 and Xbox 360, hackers have been ruining it for everyone in several ways – all of which appear to have made the jump to PS4 and PS5. Using certain exploits, hackers are able to reach max level instantly, demote other players in the lobby to a sub-one level, give themselves the advanced versions of Perks known as ‘Pro’ Perks, and do things no normal player should be able to (like see through walls).
The Call of Duty subreddit and elsewhere on social media are full of players sharing their experiences of ending up in one lobby after another where some sort of hack has been activated. Some of the most commonly hacked playlists have been Ground War, and Domination. Activision eventually responded to players’ pleas and disabled the playlists on Monday.
The two playlists were re-enabled on Tuesday in what Activision called “the first phase of a fix”. The developer issued a server-side fix to address the negative XP problem specifically, boosting all affected players to level 20, and promising more fixes to come.
If you’ve had the misfortune of playing Black Ops 1 & 2 on PS3 or Xbox 360 later in their lives, much of that should be very familiar to you. The most common has been the players who use a glitch to reach Max Prestige, the highest level in the game. Though it might seem harmless to speed up the levelling process, the way they do it ruins the experience for others.
Players are able to achieve this by joining Domination games and… constantly blowing themselves up. Under normal circumstances, killing yourself repeatedly won’t boost your rank, but those players have already modified their games’ save files. You can’t directly do this on PS5, since the console doesn’t allow save file transfer to USB drives, but that can certainly be a done on PS4.
As explained by one Reddit user, hackers take their PS4 save file, upload it to a dodgy website for modification, download the modded version and upload that back to PSN, which can later be downloaded on PS5 or kept on PS4. The hacker can then matchmake into games running on PS4 as well as PS5, now that Activision has confirmed that both generations can play together, ruining it for players across two generations.
Of course, the more players keep killing themselves and leaving, the more often matches get interrupted as the game tries to find a new suitable host. The Black Ops ports do not support dedicated servers, and instead keep the classic listen-server (peer-to-peer) model where each match is hosted on one player’s internet connection and console. The lack of an authoritative server is part of why replicating the cheats on PS4 and PS5 has been so easy.
Then there’s the far more aggravating issue of getting demoted simply by killing a hacker. Once again, this has been a problem for years on PS3 and Xbox 360, and it’s now arrived on PS4 and PS5. If you’re unlucky enough to kill a hacker, you automatically earn negative XP, which drops your character level to below one.
Multiplayer matchmaking is available to players at level one and above, and since that’s where everyone starts, getting demoted to sub-one locks you out of matchmaking entirely.
Some have called on Activision to reset the progress of every player and create a fresh start, while others are content to see Activision respond to the issue at all, as many feared the ports would bring back all the legacy problems that have existed for years.
