Some prominent Guilty Gear Strive players have found themselves unable to play the game thanks to a recent exploit that allows hackers to crash matches remotely.

As reported by Vice (opens in new tab), the issue received a lot of attention during the holiday season, when hackers targeted professional players and streamers using R-codes (player unique player IDs). This allowed hackers to do things such as change a player's name during an online match and crash them out of the game. They could also push chat messages that appeared to come from the affected players, said pro player Hotashi, causing a fairly severe memory leak. According to him, the game slows down "to the point of being unplayable," even in training mode.

Despite streamers trying to hide their R-code to prevent exploits from taking place, the follow system means that if a hacker follows a streamer or pro, they can easily find someone online and ruin their fun. Streamer Squirrel147 said that after discovering someone repeatedly crashing his game in late December, he had to create an alt account and play offline to avoid trouble.

The exploit will come at the worst possible time for many big players who are probably sweating it out in the lab right now: the Arc System Works $200,000 grand for the DNF Duel and Guilty Gear Strive Tournament, the qualifying period for the ARC World Tour 2022 is coming to a close. The final qualifying tournament, Frosty Faustings, is only a month away. For players, this is their last chance to earn points and qualify for the main tournament in March, which is especially frustrating for hackers right now.

Arc System Work has yet to release a fix, but producer Zach Tan seemed to acknowledge that the team is aware of the problem. 'I'm back in the office. Looking over all the reports," he tweeted on August 5 (opens in new tab). It is unlikely that we will see a fix before the weekend, but with only four weeks to go until Frosty Fausting, a fix will have to be made sooner rather than later.