Voice Chat Spamming Bug May Crash Overwatch
Overwatch players are reporting a bug that forcibly shuts down PCs of their teammates. All it takes is extreme abuse of voice commands.
Bugs and glitches have been part and parcel of video games since the dawn of time, though that's not always something to complain about. Unfortunately, the latest vulnerability in Overwatch is definitely a reason to worry. Players have been complaining about a bug on PC causing teammates to experience extreme performance drops, all the way to freezing that could lead to crashing their game.
Unfortunately for Overwatch fans the exploit is trivially easy to reproduce. All you need to do is mass send ready-made voice messages in a specific way. The problem was reported by, among others, streamer Metro, who had the dubious pleasure of seeing the power of this bug in one of his sessions (although his claims that it could lead to hardware damage seem unfounded). Similar experiences were shared by other Twitch users, including Stevo, which you can see in this clip. Kephrii was more fortunate, as he managed to squelch the spamming teammate in time.
In theory, blocking a player's voice chat is enough to prevent the game from crashing. However, even if we disregard the question of whether it's possible to do it in time every time during what is de facto a slide session, this kind of bug can be a real disincentive to play. It's also fair to note that, in theory, it shouldn't appear at all. Overwatch enables you to send only four voice commands one after another before activating the temporary lock (albeit for a very short time). Apparently, some have seen fit to bypass this restriction. Unfortunately, as of yet, there has been no news of a fix (or plans to fix) this glitch.
