Activision is investigating a wave of modding and hacking that has hit the newly released Call of Duty: Black Ops and Black Ops 2 ports on PS4 and PS5, and it has disabled select multiplayer playlists while it works on a fix. The ports arrived to a genuinely warm reception from PlayStation players who had waited years to play these games on Sony hardware. The goodwill did not survive the week.
What is actually going wrong in the Black Ops ports?
Exploiters began compromising public multiplayer lobbies within days of the ports going live, and the damage centres on progression. Modded lobbies manipulate XP: some players are rank-ranked up rapidly, rendering the entire progression system meaningless, while others are hit with negative XP that can drop an account below level 1 and lock it out of normal multiplayer progression. The result, as Kotaku reported, was public lobbies flooded with cheaters, with IGN noting some players calling the game “unplayable”.
Part of the frustration is that these are the same games in more ways than one. Coverage of the exploits pointed to the ports reusing existing file encryption, which made the games easier to pick apart. That is a pointed detail given the ports launched without significant technical improvements to begin with.
What has Activision done about it?
Activision moved quickly to remove certain playlists and contain the damage while investigating. VICE reported that Activision confirmed it was supporting the affected port and disabling select playlists during the investigation. The company then deployed a server-side fix as the first phase of addressing the XP problem, and follow-up coverage confirmed that players who had been dumped into negative XP were reset to Level 20 so they could progress again.
Calling this a first phase is the honest framing. Disabling playlists and resetting accounts stabilises the immediate mess, but it does not close the underlying hole that let modders manipulate progression in the first place. Until that is patched, matchmaking on these ports remains a gamble.
Should you play the Black Ops ports online right now?
The single most useful thing to know is that this is a multiplayer integrity issue, not a campaign-breaking bug, so anyone playing solo is unaffected. If you bought the ports specifically for online play, though, launch-period matchmaking has already been disrupted, and the safest immediate move if you drop into a suspicious lobby showing signs of modding is to leave the match rather than keep playing through it.
None of this is a reason to write off a nostalgic return that a lot of players genuinely wanted. But it is a reminder that a low-effort port carries real consequences: reuse the old foundations and you inherit the old vulnerabilities, at the exact moment thousands of new players are trying to log on. The fix is in motion. The buying advice, for now, is to keep your expectations for pristine online lobbies in check until Activision gets past that first phase.
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