I've always bought the 360 version of the Call of Duty games, the added social features on the Xbox makes playing with friends more entertaining and less annoying. Because of that, stories of day one launch issues, hacking and exploits tend to be just that, stories. But it doesn't change the fact that a huge amount of people just gave up playing Black Ops because of the minority who decided ignoring the rules was more entertaining than actually playing the game.
Annoying, huh?
Thankfully it's likely to be less of an issue in Modern Warfare 3, Robert Bowling explains why:
"There’s been a lot of work put into it. I can’t go into specifics. On a general high level area there’s so much more stuff that we’ve locked down and made less accessible than we had before. A lot of stuff that we stripped out, a lot more challenge response things that we’re doing… It’s about verifying what the code is supposed to be and what the code actually is on the client side, and making sure that those are aligned. It’s also about our ability to take action when stuff is wrong so we’ve done a lot of work in our ability to update the game more quickly and efficiently than we have before."
And Elite is going to be a key part of their future plans:
"A lot of that stuff can be done through Elite that we can review. Then we have tools to report player stuff in game that players can use, and we’ll have entire teams monitoring and taking actions on those. That’s new for us. A lot of that stuff, the monitoring stuff, a lot of that was introduced in Black Ops but with Elite that is launching with Modern Warfare 3, we’re taking that in an all new area, having full teams dedicated solely to that."