Call of Duty: Modern Warfare fixes one of its most annoying exploits
But simultaneously introduces a new clan tag bug.
Friend or foe? That was the dilemma facing Modern Warfare players last week thanks to an exploit which allowed players to change the colour of clan tags to a barely-visible black, enemy red, or even "friendly" blue colour. This meant a supposed teammate could turn around to shoot you mid-match, which was a little game-breaking, to say the least. Just take a peep at the video evidence below.
In a reply to the Reddit post highlighting the issue, Infinity Ward production director Paul Haile explained that "colorised names is not intended to be something players can do", and promised Infinity Ward would fix the problem. In yesterday's patch, a fix for regiment tags was rolled out, and by all accounts it's now impossible to change your clan tag's colour.
Using a Cyan colour code in the regiment clan tag changes your whole name to blue same as a friendly as seen above the enemy and in the killfeed in the video from r/modernwarfare
But we're not quite out of the woods yet, as some players have reported the number three is now appearing before their tag names, with some having their entire tag replaced by "3 3". Whoops.
It's hard to say how many have been affected by this bug, and when we tried to replicate it on PS4 we had no issues creating a clan tag free of... threes. We did, however, spot one "3 3" tag in a lobby, but it seems the problem is still fairly rare - and there's currently no explanation as to why it's happening to only some players.
According to accounts of how players were changing their tags, the colour change exploit required the use of special character codes at the start of a tag, such as ^5 for light blue and ^3 for... yellow. It seems likely the rogue threes stem from this colour code slipping into the actual tag name, somehow.
Hopefully this should be a fairly easy fix for Infinity Ward, and at least the game-breaking problem with the tags has been solved. Perhaps adding the threes in the tag is just Modern Warfare's way of letting you know you're a tri-hard.