Full Work-Around to the Custom Mode Client Freezes

blizard now just let those sh1t on their head, they are not give a sh1t cuz this game is dead

Parsing the the Asia region, I saw the “A Korean Flag” lobby.

Looking at it, it doesn’t appear to have any of the characteristics of the recent exploit. The map name doesn’t use html to spam net requests. In fact, I don’t see html anywhere on the map or in the lobby that would cause freezes.

It is possible that what’s happening is somehow related to the recent exploit, but it may also be a different issue altogether. The fact that it only affects the Chinese language makes me wonder if it’s something different.

I’m not an expert in html in other languages, but it would seem that the game client would read html the same no matter which language it’s set to. And since there isn’t any html, it doesn’t seem related to the current exploit.

did you realize that SC2 has localization support, which a map could have different names, shown to players from different regions, which A Korean Flag that name was in english, also in kr, but there are ‘html’ text in CN localization.

If that’s the case, then I can understand the issue.

When looking at the map in https://sc2arcade.com/ in Chinese, is html visible there? If so, can you link a screenshot of it here?

Either way, I’ll pass this on the Bliz.

https:// postimg.cc / KKLgVVMM

This is the name of the map that the Chinese client can see

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Wow!

Thank you!

I have passed this along to Blizzard.

It does support different localizations, but only through the use of API. However in this specific case sc2arcade.com can no longer be relied on, as people who abuse these exploits put like 12k character long strings as a map name, filled with img spam.

This is something that I didn’t take into consideration when building the website, as a result it exceeds the column limits, and such maps are not being indexed. I don’t think I’m going to address this problem, as it’s not possible to upload such malformed maps using standard SC2Editor workflow.

Anyhow here is the example of s2ml (starcraft 2 map localization) table:

https://kr-s2-depot.classic.blizzard.com/ead0b04a1e97336873a39e979675526586a1443baeb5f609ac9f98a476ecf255.s2ml

or

https://web.archive.org/web/20240322230330/https://kr-s2-depot.classic.blizzard.com/ead0b04a1e97336873a39e979675526586a1443baeb5f609ac9f98a476ecf255.s2ml

It’s an XML file - can be opened with any text editor.

Every published map has a distinct string table for each available locale, the one I linked is for zhCN.

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Yeah, I just recently learned about that (above).

SC2Arcade was just showing what I assume is the English locale’s map title, thus I wasn’t seeing what the players above were talking about. But once I saw the screenshot of the Chinese locale (linked above), yep. That helped a ton when I reported it to Bliz. Bliz was able to change locale and see it for themselves.

Can we just ask Blizzard for the time being to completely disable arcade section or these custom maps made by users ? Yesterday i played campaign and i had no issues - game was working absolutely fine, however i am using custom melee section to play vs a.i. (for practice purpose) i am afraid to enter custom section. Can Blizzard “turn off” all that content/tab which is malicious - just for the time being until proper fix is applied ?

Never hurts to ask. However Bliz is likely to act based more off their analysis of the exploit. If the analysts see a credible threat, disabling the mode could be a temporary solution. If they don’t see anything threatening, they’d likely leave the mode open.

Since the 19th, it’s been working smoothly. Reports dropped sharply off since then as well. Could it happen again? Probably. SC2 is f2p so until the client is patched, new accounts could be made and maps published. But in the meantime if Bliz stays on top of it, the disruptions should be shorter lived. If that’s the case, and Bliz doesn’t find any real threats, then they will likely leave the mode open.

Imo, based off the game having no dev team and Bliz’s (lack of) communication culture, completely closing it until the client is patched would leave the playerbase in the dark with no indication of when it would back up.

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Its back in NA servers

Yep. They are at it again.

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If you look at it objectively - it is a DISGRACE. Multi million dollar company cannot prevent some script kiddies from throwing tantrum because they got banned in a arcade map. If these people were super hackers i would understand that. But SC2 is still one of the largest competitive games out there and such product should never be abandoned. There should always be a handful of experienced programmers/security experts monitoring all events going around the game. But activision/microsoft finds no profit in managing SC2 so they will let it die and rot eventually.

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Can’t prevent? Anyone with common sense can grasp that the game’s code can be changed, just like any other bug or exploit fix.

Again, common sense (and a little observation) reveals that its not “abandoned”. If it truly was, it would never be touched again, however that’s clearly not been the case since 2020.

To what end? Sitting idle the majority of the time when skies are clear? Not everyone is corporation savvy, which there’s nothing wrong with, however those who aren’t often don’t understand many of the underlying tenets of business.

Don’t try to make this into a MS/ATVI/Bliz thing. Ending games is something all games will experience no matter who makes them. It’s a reality of the video game industry as a whole.

I don’t see anything objective here. It was all subjective opinions based on exaggeration, lack of understanding, cherry picking aurguments, etc.

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If you click on CAMPAIGN you can auto join under BOOKMARKS if you have any games there. Worked for me.

Nicely dissected. abs is being extremely simple minded. I bet he would also not be happy if they started charging to offer support/dev for the product. It’s easy to cast expectations on others :upside_down_face:

Looks like the hack is back and crashing lobbies in NA again

Ok. Perhaps you didn’t understand the meaning of the whole comment. I get that you are Blizzard representative and it is your job to promote healthy customer relations but my point was that SC2 is still big product on the market, still attracts dozens of thousands of viewers on their biggest tournaments, pool prizes are still high, yet developer struggles to deal with some script kiddies. and the game is being maintained/patched by literally few people (you said yourself old crew who developed the game left long time ago). If SC2 was some mediocre game with little to no interest from community i would understand that. Those attackeres probably aren’t even real hackers. Just script kiddies who use some program written by others and Blizzard is a giant company who employs best developers, designers, artists etc. Fixing this exploit for them should take few days in worst case.

And i am not the only one who shares above opinion.

LOL who are you ? You came to this forum for the first time, because you saw this exploit ?

That’s just it though. Through market analysis, businesses determine if a product is worth continuing. SC2 could still be the flagship RTS and still the most popular and still most played, but if it’s not passing a cost-benefit analysis it faces retirement. SC2 is free to play now. And based off the decision to retire it, it’s not profitable enough anymore.

From “cannot prevent” to “struggles”. Again, it’s not a problem of how difficult the fix is. It’s business decisions on how to administer a retired game.

I’m not meaning to say you are. SC2 was my first foray into the Bliz universe. It’s one of my top favs. But like every game before and after, it’s reaching the end of it’s life simply because business is business. It’s the cycle of video game life. I’m not saying people have to like it, just saying what it is.

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