Guilty Gear Strive streamers are being hammered by hackers
The game's final qualifying tournament is a month away and many are unable to play.
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 Vice, the issue gained prominence over the holiday period, with the hackers using R-Codes—a player's unique player ID—to target pro players and streamers. It's allowed hackers to do things like change a player's name while they're mid-match online, crashing them out of the game. They can also push through chat messages that look like they're coming from the affected players, which pro player Hotashi says is causing some pretty serious memory leaks. 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 taking place, a follow system means that if a hacker has followed a streamer or professional then they're easily able to spot when someone is online and ruin the fun. Streamer Squirrel147 says she had to make an alt account and play offline to avoid the trouble after finding that someone was repeatedly crashing her game in late December.
whoever is using this r-code exploit can now use this vulnerability to cause the GGST client to have some sort of leak, slowing the game to an unplayable crawlthis occurs even in training mode, and doesnt happen with steam in offline modeJanuary 2, 2023
The exploit will be coming at a bad time for many big players, who will be toiling away in the lab right now. The qualifying period for ARC World Tour 2022—Arc System Works' $200,000 grand tournament for DNF Duel and Guilty Gear Strive—is coming to an end. The final qualifying tournament, Frosty Faustings, is a month away. It's the last chance for players to scoop up points and have a chance of making the main event in March, making the hackers especially irritating right now.
Arc Systems Work has yet to push out a fix, but producer Zack Tan appears to have acknowledged that the team is aware of the issue. "Back in office. Looking through all the reports," he tweeted on January 5. It's unlikely we'll see a fix before the weekend, but with Frosty Faustings a mere four weeks away the fix would be appreciated sooner rather than later.