Ever since the battle royale genre took the gaming world by storm, it has popularized a number of game mechanics that steadily seeped into other games as well. The pinging system, allowing team members to quickly mark objects, loot, locations or enemies for all their allies to see is one such mechanic. Originating from shooters made it easy enough to transplant into Modern Warfare 2. Unfortunately something broke in translation, and Call of Duty’s latest title shipped with a spectacular flaw in its own ping system - if players pinged an enemy player while on their respawn screen, that ping would persist throughout the whole match, following them everywhere and constantly showing the opposing team their location. It functioned, essentially, as wallhacks do and gave players unfair advantages in multiplayer matches. Constantly knowing where an enemy player is makes them an easy target, and players would be pre-firing around corners and over cover thanks to the bug. Word first spread of the issue on the Modern Warfare 2 subreddit, with the report post gaining thousands of upvotes and many comments confirming the issue. Players were lamenting that cases of perceived wallhacking was probably just this bug, as opposed to cheating using outside software.
While Infinity Ward and Activision have yet to officially address the issue, they did step in and disable the ping mechanic for the time being. The mechanic isn’t likely to return until developers have investigated the issue and fixed the bug. Meanwhile, the lack of what has become a key communication feature is negatively impacting the multiplayer experience for many fans. Modern Warfare 2’s launch is hardly proving unpopular, but it is definitely embattled. Pings aren’t the only feature that have been disabled due to causing issues, with Attachment Tunings also gutted for the time being as they caused inexplicable crashes for many players. The AAA title is also contending with lukewarm reviews, and some controversies surrounding its storyline, particularly regarding a section where players must point weapons at unarmed civilians to “deescalate the situation”. But hey, we’ve all seen that flashy video about the graphics in the Amsterdam level, right? Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is now live on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.
