As a journalist, April Fool’s Day is always a tricky one. It’s not that you really have to keep your wits about you, it’s just that you spend all day being exposed to the most mundane, uninspired “pranks” from corporations. It’s always the same: some hee-larious japester in a marketing department or editorial team somewhere releases a fake news story that’s about as funny as a surprise colonoscopy. I hate it.

With that said, I do have to give it up for developer Infinity Ward for the prank it pulled off yesterday. After all, the studio went after man’s most dangerous game: Call Of Duty fans. Trying to poke fun at the Call Of Duty community is quite honestly like poking a bear with a sharp stick. Except the sharp stick is your finger and it’s wrapped in delicious salmon.

As you may or may not know, players have some very strong feelings about the game’s Piccadilly map. They hate it. They hate it so damn bad. They hate it more than Ghost would presumably hate Shepard after the betrayal in if it hadn’t ended with him being dead.

Infinity Ward are aware of Piccadilly’s sordid reputation, mind. Of course the team know everything the players love and hate – it’s their job. So what did the studio do to make fools of its players? It went and created a 24/7 playlist on Piccadilly. But there’s more to it than that. Infinity Ward no player in their right mind would willingly select the option of a Piccadilly playlist, so it it to make sure it fooled as many fans as possible.

Hovering over the playlist “I Have Trust Issues,” the description assured players that it was “totally Shipment, come on in”. Naturally, it was not “totally Shipment”. It was totally Piccadilly.

Amazingly, the majority of players seemed to take the joke well and respected that Infinity Ward was able to poke fun at flaws in its own game. That’s not to say everybody took it brilliantly, as some were convinced that the studio had simply made a sloppy error. But hey, we’ve all fallen for an April Fool’s Day prank at least once in our lives, haven’t we?

Elsewhere, Infinity Ward made a play on a classic meme with the “COD Players Only Want One Thing” playlist containing the unthinkable: 10v10 chaos on the cramped and claustrophobic Shipment map. Just thinking about that stresses me out.