You aren't making sense. If Black Ops had the single lowest number of pre-orders since COD2, how does it have more than MW2 which was released well after COD2?
Second, I think Max is in on the whole HL thing too. He supposedly recieved a hard drive, even though he never did anything with it. If HL was fake, where did he get the money to send everyone these packages. I think that all the people that claimed to receive packages were in on it, or duplicate accounts of the original pranksters. That's just speculation though. Max also keeps praising the guys behing the HL hoax, possibly fishing for compliments on the hoax?