Denied Ops

Today, this is going to be short and range a bit into the technical, but for all of those who play Call of Duty: Black Ops– and I know there is a lot of you out there–I have to convey my disappoint to someone in the Activision, Treyarch, or PS3 camps, if not all three.

They discovered there was some hacking going on by some folks and they wanted to eliminate cheating. I’m down with that. It’s hard enough to play kids with cybernetic reflexes hopped up on sugar water, so I give them props for addressing such a problem. However, it’s even LESS FUN, when you get denied access into a game you got mainly for the multi-player action.

Case in point: I had issues with my system getting bounced off the PSN yesterday, so I updated it to the latest patch (3.56) at the time of this writing. I experienced SOME BOUNCING, but it was nothing like it was today which made it impossible to play and took an hour to sort out.

I read where folks said to hardwire your connection or port forward or create a DMZ. I’ve had mine hardwired and port forwarded and in a DMZ for years, so here is what I’ve determined the best fix to be: simply uninstall the game completely along with all saved data. Your info is stored server side and I assure you it should come back fine–mine did without a hitch. After this, I reinstalled it and it took about 10 minutes before the CoD disc would get the latest patch, but after this fix it worked fine all day, until this evening where we had one hiccup for a few minutes.

It’s possible it could just be extreme server traffic, but I’ve played it on the weekends before, and you can’t convince me there is really more server load on them than there was after Christmas.

If you have any tips or hints for clearing this out, please post them here. I found scant information and it was a true drag to spend over an hour to come up dry and have to sort things out on my lonesome.

Until next time, I bid you, dear reader, adieu!