Some of Guilty Gear Strive’s most prominent players have found themselves unable to play the game thanks to a recent exploit that allows hackers to crash their matches remotely.
As reported by Shame (opens in new tab), the issue gained notoriety over the holiday season, with the hackers using R-Codes – a player’s unique player ID – to attack pro players and streamers. Hackers can do things like change a player’s name while they’re online mid-game, crashing them out of the game. They can also forward chat messages that look like they come from the affected players, which causes some pretty serious memory leaks, according to pro player Hotashi. He says it slows the game down to “an unplayable crawl” even in training mode.
Despite streamers trying to hide their R code to prevent the exploit from happening, a tracking system means that if a hacker has been tracking a streamer or pro, they can easily see when someone is online and ruin the fun. pennant Squirrel147 says she had to create an alt account and play offline to avoid the trouble after discovering someone was repeatedly crashing her game in late December.
whoever uses this r-code exploit can now use this vulnerability to cause the GGST client to have some kind of flaw, slowing the game down to an unplayable crawl. This happens even in training mode and does not happen with steam in offline modeJanuary 2, 2023
The exploit comes at a bad time for many major players, who will now be toiling in the lab. The qualifying period for ARC World Tour 2022 – Arc System Works’ $200,000 major tournament for DNF Duel and Guilty Gear Strive – is coming to an end. The last qualifier, Frosty Faustings, is in a month. It’s the last chance for players to collect points and enter the main event in March, making the hackers extra annoying now.
Arc Systems Work has yet to release a fix, but producer Zack Tan seems to have acknowledged that the team is aware of the issue. ‘Back at the office. Go through all the reports,” he said tweeted (opens in new tab) on January 5. It’s unlikely we’ll see a fix before the weekend, but with Frosty Faustings just four weeks away, the fix would be appreciated sooner rather than later.