Hackers Ruin CoD: Black Ops Matches Also

I was excited to see that Call of Duty: Black Ops is having a free (multiplayer) weekend on Steam. That is, until I encountered one or more game hackers in a match. If you've never played a recent CoD game, one of the handy features is a "kill cam" showing who killed you, from where. After getting killed immediately upon spawning (multiple times), I watched the kill cam for as long as it displayed. The camera of the player in question was moving in an unnaturally jerking manner, racking up kills through multiple layers of walls. It was quite obvious that this wasn't the behavior of a normal player, and 'his' 77-0 kill/death ratio seemed a bit odd as well. Teammates agreed that it just wasn't fun anymore, and we all left the match.

This is why I don't mind paying $50-60/year for Xbox Live. It may be a walled garden, but Microsoft at least tries to keep an even playing field by punishing cheaters. Only time will tell if CoD: World at War settles down from an online Wild West, but between that and Black Ops on PC, I won't be taking for granted a fair (fire)fight any time soon.

Playing with Imaginary Friends

In CoD: Black Ops, you can play "Combat Training" bot matches. It surprised me to find that the PC version names the bots after people on your Steam buddylist. It was nifty at first, until I thought about how few of them would actually play a FPS online, let alone B.O. *le sigh*

CoD: WaW Hackers

Looking through my pile of clearance games to play, I decided to try out the multiplayer in Call of Duty: World at War. (Don't know why, but I recently heard the siren-song of ranking up in CoD again.) The first thing I noticed while waiting for the match to start was all sorts of colorful player names, some cycling through multiple hues. No biggie, that might just be a bonus at some insanely high level. Once I got into the match, however, things went downhill. The entire upper-left quadrant of the screen quickly filled up with automated messages from a couple players hawking a YouTube channel apparently about game modding (a bannable offence on XBL). I reported them, but soldiered on through the match since leaving early shows up as a loss on your record. It didn't help that occasionally I would see a player levitate across the level in mid-air. I can't prove this, but I think some of my opponents may have been invulnerable as well, unless there's a perk that allows you to survive melee attacks to the back of your head.

Normally I wouldn't care about what others are doing for fun, but the spamming messages obscure my vision, and I'm paranoid about getting suspended/banned from XBL because the automated matchmaking throws me into games that may be hosted on modified consoles.

My question is this: why is there so much blatant game modding in World at War? I play MW 1 and 2 also, but have never noticed such a flagrant disregard to the TOS. Is it simply because the game is older and not policed as strictly as the 'big guns' of XBL, MW2/BlackOps? Or is there something about WaW that makes it easier to hack?