Modern Warfare 2: Glitchers Paradise

Since the beginning of time man has looked for the easy option. We're like water, we look for the path of least resistance and then exploit it as best we can. When it comes down to it, it would seem that hundreds of thousands of years of refining our competitive edge means that when there is no-one there to keep order, our natural instinct is to cheat.
Imagine what a boxing match or a premiership football match would be like without a referee.... Welcome to the world of Online First Person Shooters!

I've just been playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. It's a fine game. The single player campaign is dramatic and exciting, but the meat of the game is in the multiplayer. Get online and fight with and against fellow gamers from around the globe in a test of skill, tactics and blind luck! A huge array of game types, more weapons than you could shake a stick at and the mother of all stat-tracking systems... rank up your character, level up your weapons, unlock new guns and equipment, adorn yourself with rare and collectible titles and emblems! All this over various and diverse maps, from the deserts of Afghanistan to the snowy wastes of Siberia, from close quarters house-to-house combat to the snipers realm of open farmland.

There's so much to do you'll never get bored! And if you aren't very good at it, don't worry, Infinity Ward have made the code so full of holes that you'll just be able to glitch your way to the top! First there was the Javelin glitch. This involved running around with the Javelin Missile rocket launcher equipped and performing some shenanigans with switching between it and the equipment slot, then, once you died the missile would explode in your hands taking out any nearby enemies, so what did a seemingly endless stream of people start doing? That's right, running around with the Javelin equipped, combined with the Lightweight (sprint faster) perk and just rushing into the middle of a group of enemies. Hey presto, get shot, blow up the entire enemy team.

Fair play to Microsoft who were whaling on people with the ban-stick during this whole episode, and to Infinity Ward who quickly implemented a patch to stop the glitch from happening. A patch that also fixed the less often seen glitch of getting inside a wall so you could shoot people without being seen.

But then, no sooner had that been fixed than some enterprising young scally realised that if you ran around with a care package grenade equipped instead of a gun you could actually move faster than the server could keep track of you, meaning you jerked from place to place on your opponents screen making it incredibly difficult for them to shoot you. Combine this with the Commando perk, which increases the range of your knife attack, and you need never carry a gun again! Again, IW were quick to get on top of this and a patch including a fix is winging it's way through the system as I write this.

Earlier this morning I was listening to the Vanhemlock News Show which included an article about how some people had found a way to hack the system resulting in anyone they killed losing experience points, which is a fairly sinister turn of events; a glitch that doesn't give the glitcher any benefit, but that exists solely to annoy and upset others.

Then, as dawn was breaking and my nightshift friends were getting home and online I decided to fire up MW2 myself, only to be confronted with a brand new and blatant glitch in the very first match I entered! Pissed off with this we left that lobby and joined another of a different game type and guess what, the same glitch was being exploited in there as well, only this time by someone on our side so I was able to watch what he was doing. It seems that repeatedly changing weapons while doing something else i won't mention here so as not to give anyone any ideas, will grant you with a free 'Emergency Airdrop' killstreak reward. You get killstreak rewards for getting a set number of consecutive kills, eg, 3 kills gives you a UAV, which highlights the enemies locations on your radar, 6 kills in a row grants you an airstrike to call in where and when you want, etc, etc. For 8 kills you get to call in an Emergency Airdrop, which consists of 4 crates dropped from a C130-Hercules plane which can contain any of the other killstreak rewards. So you can basically call in several high powered killstreak rewards without actually having to kill anyone, whenever you want, as often as you want. An 'Instant Win' button! Brilliant! My research done I promptly reported his ass to Microsoft, I just wish I'd taken note of his gamer tag so I could name and shame him here. Hopefully a ban will be finding him soon enough.

After quitting that lobby, joining yet another lobby and finding the same thing going on in there I quit out completely and booted up Forza. I'm not going to willingly pad the stats of some cheat. I just don't understand the mentality of people who feel the need to do stuff like that.

If you can't win on your own merits then either practice more, live with it, or quit!