Bid for Greatness

This is why we can’t have nice things. Sony’s clever Bid for Greatness campaign was accompanied by an appropriately positive response earlier this week. The endeavour – which transforms your earned Trophies into a digital currency – augments you with the ability to compete for various props and items from the platform holder’s recent Greatness Awaits commercial. Unfortunately, it has already been tainted by cheaters.

The first auction for a Killzone: Shadow Fall outfit ended overnight, and was claimed by Redsoxfan95, who stumped up 1,050 Gold Trophies for the garment. That all sounds fine on paper – until you look at the user’s PlayStation Network profile, and learn that he earned an inhumane 8,290 Trophies in January alone. In fact, YourGamerCards.net shows that the account logged over 7,500 Trophies in a single day. That’s not the handiwork of an honest hunter.

While it’s very much an underground scene, Trophy hacking is possible using a variety of illegitimate techniques. There are entire forums dedicated to sharing strategies, edited save files, and more. However, while it’s fairly simple to spot offenders on tracking sites such as PSN Profiles, the platform holder hasn’t really taken a particularly strong stance against Trophy cheating up until this point.

It’s going to be forced to now, though, as a select few threaten to blemish its latest promotional project. Community manager Morgan Haro Tweeted overnight that he will “look into [the issue] with the teams and we will examine”. Perhaps it’s time that the platform holder pulled out its ban hammer, and started wiping out some illicit accounts.

[source twitter.com, via playstationlifestyle.net, gametrailers.com, neogaf.com, twitter.com]