StarCraft 2 hackers are reportedly exposing unsuspecting players to horrific footage of a real-life shooting as well as videos featuring bright flashing lights, seemingly designed to trigger seizures. While Blizzard is investigating, it seems this has been happening for nearly a year or more.
On April 20, a StarCraft 2 player shared a story about a hacker injecting a video of a mass shooting into the game while they were playing online. Reddit user Tad0422 explained that this happened while playing a map in StarCraft 2‘s Arcade, a feature of the sci-fi RTS that lets players upload custom-created maps and modes to play with others. While playing with some friends, the group encountered some “rando” players.
About 3 minutes [later] a video appeared on my screen,” claimed Tado422. “I have never seen this before but it took up the whole screen. It was a Russian pop video or something that played for 20 seconds or so. Most of us were talking in chat about what the heck was happening.”
Tado422 further explained that, shortly after the first video, a second video appeared. This one showed a man entering a store and shooting people in the head.
“At this moment I freaked out and hard closed out of StarCraft 2. My 5 year old daughter was in the room with me, half paying attention to me playing a video game. This is beyond unacceptable. I should never have to worry about seeing people murdered or porn while playing a SC2 game.”
Tad0422’s post blew up on Reddit and led to many other SC2 players sharing their stories about similar hackers injecting annoying or graphic videos while people are playing the game. I reached out to Tado422 and they shared with me a replay of the match that was hacked by someone. They also made it clear that this isn’t an issue with the Arcade map they were playing or the creator of that mode. It appears to be a larger exploit within StarCraft 2‘s Arcade Mode. You can find others reporting similar incidents with screenshots, too.
As reported by 404Media, some players shared stories of seeing swastikas while playing. Another user claimed they were hit with an “epileptic screamer” video designed to trigger seizures using flashing images and light. These types of problems with hackers hijacking maps and modes in Arcade have been reported by StarCraft 2 players for at least a year now.
Kotaku reached out to Blizzard. The company says it is aware of the situation and is currently working to “fix” the exploit. Here’s the company’s full statement:
“We are investigating a player claim that disturbing content that violates our policies appeared in a game. We take the safety of our players and our platform very seriously and are working to fix the exploit we believe might have been used to upload this content.
Update: April 22 – 8:30 p.m. EST: Blizzard sent over a new, updated statement.
Here it is in full:
We are working to fix the exploit we believe might have been used by certain players to upload content that violates our policies. We take the safety of our players and our platform very seriously. The inappropriate content is being removed, and the responsible parties have been banned. To prevent additional policy violations, we have temporarily disabled the ability for players to upload new maps and mods through the SC2 Map Editor while we work on a permanent fix.
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