I played Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare with friends for a while and loved it. We are a clan of casual players called Valley Combat and Tactical named after the guy who runs the clans real life paint ball shop in Canada. Then Modern Warfare 2 came along and we moved over, dropping our paid-for server since Modern Warfare 2 is designed to run without dedicated servers. They called it IWNet - Infinity Ward Net. It's a system that under the covers figures out who the best host is for a particular set of players its matched up and they become the host.

And that's where the joy ends. Match making is slow and shoddy at best, there is no support for clans - so if our group of friends wants to play together, we have to pre-lobby up together, with a maximum of 6 for hard core games - never mind that there are probably 20 members or so in the clan. Many times we've filled a lobby of 6 on 6 to ourselves and sometimes with people still left out.

Then the hackers came - wall hackers, who can see through walls - aimbots who can target a headshot perfectly, no-recoil hackers who can shoot any gun without the recoil animation or the need to re-aim. Lag hackers who, when you approach them - inexplicably they move much faster than any one else.

For the most part, I'd say one in every three games has one hacker in there. One in every ten games the hacker will be blatantly wall hacking, not even attempting to hide it. The hacks are something people can -subscribe- to.. yes, you heard me - it's a business now. People pay a monthly fee for this stuff. As soon as any of their subscribers gets banned for hacking, they disable the hacks, recode them and start them all over again.

For a short moment, we had a respite - the DLC maps seemed to be completely hacker free. I don't know what it was, may be the hack programmers needed to rework their code or something, but you could play the new maps without a single hacker ever appearing. Sure, there are good players, but you can respect that. Good players can even take on a hacker - on a good day I'll go 1:1 kill:death ratio with a hacker, so long as i'm not the only target.

But, that all changed a few days ago - the hackers are back and in force. Worse than that, whatever Infinity Ward did with their latest update, they broke the client so that it constantly believes there is an "Updated playlist" to be downloaded. At the end of almost every round you'll become disconnected from the lobby with a dialog telling you that it's downloading the update. Now you have to re-lobby all over again.

As if that weren't bad enough, there is also a console-hack going around that is free (as in, you don't pay a monthly subscription for it). If you end up being the host of the lobby after IWNet has chosen who is going to host, then you can change anything you want - the map, the settings.. you can even auto-level every one to level 70 with all achievements unlocked. Do it 10 times and you've complete level 10 prestige to level 70. These are a new breed of level hackers, they don't even have to play the game to get perfect stats. I hear the stats hacking is even worse on PS3, but I'm only talking about PC here.

The console has a few other surprises in stall to ruin your day playing Modern Warfare 2.. if you just so happen to be playing on one of these hacker console servers and you just so happen to be doing well - as I was just doing, I had a kill/death ratio of 8:1... then the guy with the console can kick you out of the game. You see a quaint little message saying "Steam Disconnected" .. don't be fooled, steam didn't disconnect you, the console did.

The game, in a nut shell, is ruined. The regular matches are now swamped with hackers, so are the DLC maps and every second or third game you connect to is running with someones hacked console. I love playing with my friends online but this is beyond a joke - Infinity Ward made a ton of money off of this game and the players haven't seen a dime of it go back in to fixing up the hacks. Then they rolled out their DLC and took in another load of cash and still absolutely none of it has gone in to fixing up the hacks.

Exasperated is the word I'd use to describe how I feel about it. Almost along the lines of "I want my money back" - I've paid for a game that I can't play.