Infinity Ward Blames Sony For Modern Warfare 2 PS3 Exploits

Modern Warfare 2 players complaining about hacks and exploits on the PS3 should blame Sony and not Infinity Ward, says Robert "fourzerotwo" Bowling from Infinity Ward. Bowling jumped on the official Infinity Ward forums recently to talk about the PS3's latest security issues, and how much power Infinity Ward really has in dealing with the problems that have cropped up on the platform related to the company's games.

"Sony has recently acknowledged a breach in security on the PS3 which resulted in games to become exposed to exploits and hacks," Bowling said. "Modern Warfare 2 is no exception to this security exploit and we understand that some of you have experienced problems with stats and other issues associated with this."

Problems with hacks that mess with statistics and game progress have cropped up, according to some player reports. One such player, "ktell," explained a problem he experienced while playing the game on the PS3:

"This issue is really out of hand. I can't log on without getting deranked, vulgar messages across the status bar on the bottom, etc. etc. Infinity Ward should be policing the lobbies looking for exploiters and banning them. It may be a Sony glitch (although the hacked files are related to MW2's game data), but Infinity Ward can at least patrol their own games.

I mean seriously - I spent 27 days playing that game, unlocking, ranking up etc. Now all my challenges, perks, guns and kill streaks are gone? And my KD is like 10 million to one now?

Un-f'ing real. You should at least be able to restore my account to where it was. What's up with that?

This is horrible, just horrible."

But Bowling says that IW is powerless to stop these kinds of hacks because it has to do with Sony’s platform:

"Games rely on the security of the encryption on the platforms they're played on, therefore; updates to the game through patches will not resolve this problem, unless the security exploit itself is resolved on the platform.

Regretfully, Call of Duty games are receiving the bulk of the hacker's attention, due to its high player counts and popularity. However, the number of legitimate players severely outweighs the bad apples."

At the end of the day, Bowling recommends that players get together with people they know to avoid exploits and hacks.

Looking ahead, Bowling says that the company will not rely on platform security layers to deal with hacks, cheats and exploits:

"Let me assure you, while we are very reliant on Sony updating their firmware and security to address the core problem of this issue, we are looking at every option available to us to help any user affected.

This only applies to legacy games such as Call of Duty 4 and Modern Warfare 2. In the future we plan to adjust our approach to not rely solely on platform security and reduce the ability for this to happen in our games, as has already been displayed by the work Treyarch has done on Call of Duty: Black Ops to prevent similar measures."

Source: Eurogamer