I’m not gonna lie, watching my kid and his cousin play Splatoon 2 on said cousin’s shiny new Switch made me reaaaalllly want to get a Switch. But maybe Splatoon 2 could use a little rethink. That’s because, as Polygon reports, the game is becoming “increasingly overrun with hackers, who have figured out ways to not only claim an easy win, but also circumvent the game’s abuse report system.” The publication reports that the multiplayer modes are riddled with the equivalent of god-moding speed-hackers abusing hardware exploits, and Nintendo apparently prefers to take a reactive rather than proactive approach, asking players to report cheaters after the fact.
Last week, a greyhat hacker and game fan brought matters to a head by hacking the game’s leaderboards with a demand that Nintendo fix the exploits and get rid of the cheaters itself. Oh, and then that guy trying to raise awareness for the problem was summarily banned while the hackers he was complaining about continue on. How dare he impugn the good name of Splatoon 2! Reddit is calling him a martyr and a saint, as they should.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Someone hacked the Splatoon 2 X Rank Leaderboard in an effort to call out Nintendo's lack of response to cheaters.
"Please add anti cheat" pic.twitter.com/ehz4mmWL3c
— Nintendeal (@Nintendeal) July 12, 2018
Well, when you embarrass Ninty like that and point it out to the whole world, what would you expect would happen?
Nintendo continually drops the ball on issues like this. So clueless when it comes to online systems and online play. It’s mindboggling.
You can make posts with drawings and such that are visible in the game’s central hub for other players to see and upvote to make them start trending. Lately one of the trending topics I’ve seen is posts including the phrase #PleaseAddAntiCheat.
And I agree that hackers ruin the game.
Some few weeks back, a new map was added to the game files but not yet made public until the major update patch. However, in the meantime hackers were joining multiplayer lobbies and forcing the matchmaker to select that unreleased map. At that time, there was a lot of confusion about what would happen to the non-hacking players for playing there, or even how to proceed. Should you disconnect right away and possibly get punished for quitting mid-match, or should you play on this map and possibly get punished for seeing it before it’s ready?
I L-O-V-E Splatoon 2, and I’ve never felt so attached to an FPS game before, let alone a competitive one, but realistically Nintendo’s going to have to do something about cheaters or else everything but highly curated LAN and organized tournaments are going to go downhill fast. Coming off of E3’s tournament, it’s fairly clear that this game is something both the community and Nintendo should be proud of. Let’s keep it that way.
Yup. It is amazingly addictive in a good way. Love Splatoon. I hope Nintendo does provide some sort of solution soon. The hope is that this fall Nintendo will release a new online service which I hope is also another reason to solve the hacking problem asap.
If it weren’t for Nintendo Fanboys they would have died by now.
expected from Nintendo
Hmm… well, the grey hat knew that a ban was possible and even said so. I don’t have a problem with Nintendo doing it from that perspective. He clearly did the deed.
BUT, the real problem is what Nintendo will do beyond the incident itself. The systemic failure persists and historically Nintendo is slow to admit there are issues and even slower to deliver solutions.
Nintendo has always been incredibly slow at embracing things such as online play, so this doesn’t seem super surprising to me that they’re being reactive instead of proactive since they probably don’t have a whole lot of infrastructure for dealing with cheaters.
I don’t see how a guy admitting to hack their game who gets banned would expect otherwise.
I’m guessing he thought he’d be rewarded by saying “Hey, see this HUGE hole in your security that we’ve been telling you about?”
He was rewarded, just not in the way he thought…
edit from the same tweet:
Repeated pattern, people who point out exploits and security problems in general get punished, sometimes the punishment is more than just being banned from a game, it could be much worse.
No good deed goes unbanned.