A catastrophic Overwatch exploit that lets players ruin games and potentially even crash their teammates’ computers has been discovered.
Overwatch bugs, glitches and exploits are all relatively common, but this one may take the cake as the most extreme and malicious of them all.
Basically, by spamming voice lines in a certain way, players can make their teammates’s games lag so hard that they get kicked from the server and even mess with a computer’s settings.
Twitch streamer Metro experienced this firsthand when a Winston player in his match caused the game to crash.
“This guy crashed the game on our PCs,” he said. “It’s not a server thing. It’s literally your PC dying.”
After this, he took to Twitter to explain what happened and warn his fellow streamers about this new problem.
“Overwatch now has a bug in the game that lets a player spam voice lines to break the PC of the entire team,” he wrote. “This is not a connection bug, it breaks your game and your PC and might cause hardware damage.”
For fellow streamers be careful who you team up with, I'm feeling uneasy even queueing now cuz I'm scared my pc is gonna explode, the -50 for the entire team is not even the main issue.
— Metro (@Metro_OW) May 19, 2021
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He went on to add that he felt nervous to even queue up for another ranked game, adding he was scared his PC “would explode.”
Metro isn’t the only streamer to encounter this issue, either; Fellow streamer Stevo had a game on Havana end completely because a Junkrat player spammed “understood” to a Sigma teammate.
Elsewhere, Widowmaker main Kephrii nearly had his game crash too, but got lucky – after being spammed with voice lines, he managed to stop the connection issue by hovering over the teammate and selecting “squelch chat” to mute the voice line spam.
Kephrii called this “drop hacking,” which is a term used to describe a player making their teammates lose connection. In some games, this can wipe a match from history.
Basically, a player on a losing team may drop hack their teammates to get a match canceled and avoid a loss – definitely a tactic only used by shady individuals who lack competitive integrity.
Considering the seriousness of this exploit, the devs should definitely prioritize get this fixed as soon as possible.