Star Wars Battlefront 2 is currently undergoing its own Jedi purge—and Sith purge, and wookiee purge. Really, it's a purge of any animate being in the galaxy, droid or otherwise. For the last few days, players have been reporting that Battlefront 2 has been left almost completely unplayable as hackers have managed to prevent any matches from starting in any of its game modes (via IGN).
Reports of hackers wielding ill-gotten admin powers in official Battlefront 2 servers date back months, but the issue has intensified within the last two weeks. Hackers are seemingly able to disable player spawns entirely, rendering lobbies completely nonfunctional as the game can never properly begin.
As of four days ago, players on the Battlefront 2 subreddit were describing servers for the game's 40-player modes like Galactic Assault and Supremacy as being "permanently hacked," leaving only co-op and smaller lobby gametypes playable. While players are held hostage, hackers have been spamming affected lobbies with abusive chat.
Within the last 24 hours, even less popular gametypes like Heroes vs Villains and Starfighter Assault are suffering from permanently stalled lobby spawns. "Every single gamemode is completely broken," redditor AltiDute said.
At time of writing, the ongoing hack is the subject of all but two threads on the front page of EA's official Battlefront 2 forums. On Steam, Battlefront 2 has seen a steady increase in negative reviews in the last week as the lobbies have gotten progressively more busted.
"The cheating situation is insane," one reviewer wrote. "It's impossible to play the game due to anti-spawn cheating."
To assess the damage personally, I subjected myself to the pain of the EA app and reinstalled Battlefront 2 to try and hop into a game. Unfortunately, after lengthy lobby searches, it didn't seem like any game I was sorted into was capable of finding enough players to attempt to start a match. Considering there are apparently less than a thousand people in-game, it's unclear whether that's related to the current hacking issue or not.
This isn't the first time Battlefront 2 has had issues with prolonged hacking campaigns. As IGN previously reported, Battlefront 2 saw a widespread issue in 2021 where entire lobbies of players couldn't be reduced below 1HP, meaning no player could ever be killed and no game could end without a timeout or players voluntarily quitting. That hack persisted for months before it was eventually fixed.
PC Gamer has reached out to EA for comment, and we'll update if we hear back.
