Has this even been acknowledged by Blizzard yet?
It would be best to avoid the arcade completely until Blizzard fixes the exploit used to cause the freezes, someone might eventually figure out how to do something worse than freezing sc2 with it.
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A user called Averis has been lag crashing all the StarBattle arcade games for about a year on the NA server and uses like hundreds of fake accounts to flood games. Heās also been harassing users in DMs. Tried opening a ticket with Blizzard and they told me theyād suspend my account if I did not drop the matter. Not sure they care that much.
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I saw an image on reddit. Somebody had managed to see the lobby names. They suggest that our computers are now infected.
Blizzard needs to investigate this quickly, or they could be in a lot of hot water
Edit: Hereās the post with the attached image. Word of warning, the psycho used a lot of offensive language
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft2/s/3C73vCPOhz
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Heās at it again. The arcade is down again.
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Many of these busted lobbies are being hosted by notorious trolls of the arcade map PARASITE.
Theyāve been on a crusade to derail the version of the map they dislike in any way shape or form, so now theyāve resorted to a childish act of taking the entire arcade down in a way of saying āLOL FK Uā
There is currently 8 broken lobbies being hosted in the NA Server.
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My computer got hit with a virus from this, be careful.
Iām also experiencing this problem now. Yesterday I could load into any custom game to practice. (Iām very new so I havenāt even played on the ladder yet.) I rely on these custom games to practice the game against AI lol.
Thatāsā¦completely incorrect.
Stay off the knockoff adult sites and you wonāt get a virus. Or just donāt use McAffee or Norton, etc.
The ābestā fix is to add the urls attempting to be loaded into your hosts file. These urls were easy to find if you follow the links in the aforementioned via reddit.
Chill out guys. Itāll all be over, soon.
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If you try to open the map info on SC2 using the links to the hacked maps, it also crashes the game.
battlenet:://starcraft/map/1/357543
battlenet:://starcraft/map/1/357544
battlenet:://starcraft/map/1/357545
battlenet:://starcraft/map/1/357546
battlenet:://starcraft/map/1/357547
battlenet:://starcraft/map/1/357548
Even if you ban the accounts and get rid of these maps, the hacker can upload new maps. Long term solutions would have to be either:
- Kick spamming bots out of lobbies, that way they canāt use bots to bypass autokick timeout for inactive users
- Prevent the html code from being allowed or run through the map description in the first place
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Not if blizzardās head stays up its six
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I havenāt had the crash happen to me once in Linux. Game just keeps on trucking and I see the spammy game lobbies. I click on them and nothing. Maybe make the switch, the game actually runs better in Linux than in Windows both with this exploit and in terms of frame rate.
The lobbies probably dont do anything because HV made them one player maps. It makes it easier to remove doubt that they are clearly for malicious use, because why else would you wait?
They are fanboys of Dimentio. Even if he isnt part of it, Iād stay clear of him.
I tried to enter his discord, and the server expects me to enter my arcade bank ID. Gee, thats not sketchy af
Yeah, is what it is. Just wild theyāve stayed dedicated to this for 7 years.
Got fix instructions up at Reddit under thread title āSC2 going āNot Respondingā for anyone else?ā - would post here but canāt use links.
Is blizzard working on fixing this?
Thinking that it was a new game of some kind i went into this damn thing in the lobby and it was all funky to my user interface for sc2, deleted everything relating to sc2 from pc and reinstalled it but still crashing any time i go into the lobby.
the temporary fix posted further down did not work to fix this issue either.
Sad 
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Blizzard should be able to track this guys IP Address and issue a warrant out for his arrest for online hacking.
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Thereās no hacking, heās just malforming a map title to include hundreds of invalid DNS lookups.
While itās irritating, itās pretty basic from a tech skillset perspective. Your average level 1 call centre person couild be shown how do it within 5 minutes.
Technically speaking, they could easily nail him under disruption of service, and they really should. Heās clearly acting maliciously and disrupting peopleās ability to access a service (Blizzard Arcade Servers) with the intent of causing what will end up translating to severe damage to the playerbase and its longevity.
Statistically speaking, based on RTS game steam achievements, only 20% of people play a ranked match, while based on GiantGrantGamesā survey of over 1000 people, roughly 5% have interest in ladder, 20% have interest in Melee multiplayer (which mostly includes unranked and probably Vs AI), most people are very likely only playing Co-op and Arcade in anything from a 40/40 split between either respective one, or 20/60.
From my own experience, for every melee match I play, probably about 60% of them are custom games like Viroslaught 4 (which no longer works thanks to the custom game issue), another 35% are Versus AI, and 5% is ladder, and thereās easily 50 more games played that are non-melee custom games for every melee I play of any kind, and I probably play the entire WoL campaign once or twice in some from, especially in Co-op custom campaigns. Every week I come back and play Direct Strikeās Commander Brawl roughly 7-8 times in a row on that one day with my friend.
Itās possible that the collection still sells even today, so Blizzard definitely can make the argument and likely back it up that heās causing financial damage in addition. The less people playing SC2, the less chance they make money from the collection tab simply existing.
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