“Long story short: This nutjob called HighVoltage has found ways to (mess with) with starcraft by putting lines of codes in the names and descriptions of arcade maps. This has apparently been going on for a few months but now hes taken it up a notch and basically rendered custom games completely unplayable on NA, by making your game freeze whenever you open the custom tab.” – JJDoes1TAll
You don’t have to place a file in the hosts document, you just have to copy and paste the text into the hosts file. Make a backup first, if you want to try. I think that this hosts workaround was defeated, though.
This isn’t working for me. I initially saw [a-z].de in my firewall logs. After changing my hosts file, i no longer see them in my firewall logs but it’s still not working. I’ve also tried rebooting, re-installing SC2, I even tried a cellular network and nothing has worked.
Load the game, go to Campaign, look at the top left area, you’ll see a button that says “custom” - that will take you to the custom campaign tab of the Custom part of the game, you can now go to Arcade or Melee without it freezing just DO NOT click the Lobbies tab, that will still freeze your game - Unfortunately when your Custom game ends your game will freeze because it stupidly tries to load the Lobbies tab again.
This isn’t a real fix to the problem. If this doesn’t get fixed then it looks like Starcraft is done.
This mentally stunted idiot is obviously not going to stop. This is just going to keep happening every few days for the foreseeable future. If Blizzard doesn’t want to, or is unable to properly fix this problem, then the game is finished.
SC2 is primarily coop and Versus. (In 2018, I saw a stat that put Coop as the most played game mode, even above Versus.) Additionally, SC2 still the epicenter of multiplayer esports. Thus, even if the Arcade continues to have issues, in no way is the entire game done.