With multiplayer games especially, developers do their best to squash all the bugs and stamp out the exploits, but some always manage to sneak through. Over the course of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare’s holiday event, a seemingly innocuous little bug crept into the Supply Drop system, letting players redeem rare crates many times over, racking up thousands of keys in a matter of minutes.
That wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t then come to affect both the game’s multiplayer progression and its microtransactions, but Supply Drops go beyond mere cosmetic unlocks and can include rare versions of guns that have particular sets of perks and attachments. These will ordinarily take a hell of a lot of time to grind your way to earning enough Salvage to unlock them, or require a lucky drop in a crate. This glitch allowed players to brute force their way to unlocking them all.
Earlier this week, Infinity Ward released patch 1.07 that fixed the glitch and took action against those that made use of this exploit. However, while they have been given out 48 hour bans and reset those players’ in game key and salvage counts, they’re allowed to keep all of the weapons and loot they unlocked in the two weeks that the exploit was active.
Understandably, people are pretty miffed at this decision, not least those that put money into the game’s microtransactions and bought COD Points, but I can see why IW have decided to take a more lenient route, when it was a minor bug in their system that doesn’t affect the balance of the game in a malicious way.
Either way, there was almost certainly a better solution to this than the one that Infinity Ward decided upon.
via Ars Technica
Tony Cawley
Oh dear, what a mess! I really don’t see a place for microtransactions in competitive multiplayer games beyond simple cosmetic stuff.
beeje13
Yep this has come back to haunt them.