15-year-old Black Ops XP exploit resurfaces in Activision's new PS4/PS5 port

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Despite having 15 years between them, Call of Duty: Black Ops' PS4 and PS5 port is seemingly suffering from the same exploits that its PS3 version has also been a victim of.

Activision released both Call of Duty: Black Ops and Black Ops 2 for the PS4 and PS5 last week in the form of straightforward ports, not remasters – both games are also on Xbox Series X|S via backward compatibility. While making two fan-favorite games available to more people should've been a slam dunk win for Activision, XP exploits quickly made multiplayer lobbies nearly unplayable for large waves of Black Ops 1's online population.

As spotted by IGN , YouTuber Tdawgsmitty recently chatted with a modder who explained that the problem might actually be a leftover exploit from the original game's PS3 and Xbox 360 days. Right now, there aren't any aimbots and such flooding the game, but people are modding save files to farm more XP than is usually possible by spamming themselves with grenades, say, which is ruining competitive games for regular players.

"Essentially, what you're doing is that it's like PS3 where you copy [a save file] to your USB, and there's a website that lets you unencrypt it," the modder says. "The site lets you use a jailbroken PS4/PS5, and it will decrypt it for you. The save data is the exact same as PS3. What sucks about this port is that Iron Galaxy [and] Activision didn't bother changing the encryption on the files, which is the whole reason why this is available right now. That's the only reason why."

Activision disabled "select playlists" a few days ago while it investigates reported issues. It then updated some playlists with "a server-wide fix," though the modder suggests other game modes are still exploitable.

For now, reminisce with the best Call of Duty games of all time.