Octolings In The Wild (This Is Bad)

It's not anticipated for this to be an incredibly widespread issue, but one or two Squidboards users have already encountered this problem, and we wanted to make sure to alert everyone.

A kernel exploit for the Wii U has now been made public for Wii U's on an older firmware version. The simple and relevant explanation of what this means is that it is now much easier for unscrupulous folks to modify their Splatoon save files.

The very negative side effect of this, is it means a person could potentially modify their save file to change their character ID from 0 or 1 (Inkling Boy and Inkling Girl respectively) to 2, which represents Octolings.

Playing as Octolings would be super cool! ...but only when the game is made for it to happen...
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If you encounter a player that has done this, you need to make sure to stay in the lobby until they leave it, and then play one more match. This should ensure the game doesn't put their hacked Octoling character into your Inkopolis Plaza. The Plaza is not programmed to handle Octolings, and so if one is placed into it, your game will crash whenever it tries to load them. This includes the title screen, which means your save file is effectively 'soft-locked' and cannot be used until either Nintendo patches this issue, or your plaza is cleared by the beginning of a Splatfest.

It is possible to back up any of your Wii U save files to a flash drive, and we'd recommend doing so if you wish to be absolutely safe.

 

Sorry to interrupt the serious chat guys, but the inkling plaza is hilarious right now. It's full of wanted posters, inkling propaganda, and many other drawings/comments that feel like these inklings are out for blood in the game narrative. As horrible as this is, I can't help but smile when the community gathers like this, At least a few positives came from peoples' data scrambling.

We must unite against the Octoling threat! #StopTheOctolings2K15

 

I was wondering what the actual problem until I read the softlock thing. Hope this doesnt stay an issue for too long. But honestly this sounds to be a pretty rare thing right now and the person/people doing it may not have even been aware that actually happens when you go back to the plaza

 

Sorry to interrupt the serious chat guys, but the inkling plaza is hilarious right now. It's full of wanted posters, inkling propaganda, and many other drawings/comments that feel like these inklings are out for blood in the game narrative. As horrible as this is, I can't help but smile when the community gathers like this, At least a few positives came from peoples' data scrambling.

I agree, the best way to get through tragedy is through humor. We should also make sure the said community is prepared and actually constructively fighting it and not avoiding it.

 

This is some really scary stuff. Good thing I made another Nintendo ID do I don't have to play ok my main inkling!

 

THis sucks

 

This just sucks.
I'm currently spreading the word through Miiverse. The more people know about this, the better.

and if I ever find this guy, through Splatoon or elsewhere....he'll get what's coming to him.

 

I hope Nintendo take cares of this fast!

 

I just plain don't care.

I'll keep playing online, if it ends up effecting me, I'll just hack my save file.

For the sake of others, I'm very glad this was posted here.

 

I just plain don't care.

I'll keep playing online, if it ends up effecting me, I'll just hack my save file.

For the sake of others, I'm very glad this was posted here.

I'm not going to touch the game until this hacking has been resolved.
For the mean time, i'm going to play Happy Home Designer for the time being.

 

please god let me cross paths with this guy so i can have my life back

 

i'll believe it once i see solid image/video proof, a story of an octoling online is very easy to fake/spread to social media
from what i have read, no japanese players on twitter have experienced this, and there are many, many japanese players
inb4 the octolings really never escaped into the wild and this will forever be an urban legend

 

TBH I'm kinda skeptical about this. We have no videos/screenshots/pictures/actual evidence of this happening, only word of mouth from two people, from what I know. That's not to say that there's no way it happened though, I'm taking the safe route on this and going to go with it probably happened. Also, we need to take into account that the person could've reversed it after all this blew up (assuming this was unintentional - as in, they just wanted to show off but didn't mean harm by it). On the flip side, they could be doing this intentionally to get Nintendo to release Octolings early. Then we run into a whole other issue of - there are probably multiple people doing this, and now that this particular bug has been made public, people may be going out of their way to exploit it intentionally.

 

in any case, let nintendo handle it now. I do believe there were isolated incidents of escaped octolings, but now, it's in nintendo's court. we're just running around like pree-nklings, trying to find a responsible party, when they've probably used bogus info to begin with. nintendo has all the hard data, and they will act accordingly. All we can wait for, is a patch.

...and hopefully, playable octolings.

 

Redacted, this isn't the correct person, as it was the NNID that had the details.l, not their name.

 

That's a whole lot of assumptions. We have no other information on this person other than someone saying they played with them online and now their save is corrupted. We don't know for sure if this person is doing it on purpose or not, and so far, no one else has reported this happening to them, so we don't even know if this is a widespread thing or just an isolated case.

Take proper precautions, but don't jump to conclusions. There's more than enough FUD going around.

I'm also going off of previous encounters with hackers.... not just in gaming, but in a variety of situations, and I mean *many* of them, and not one.... not even ONE.... has ever had any good come of it. Lots of STUPID has come of it, but no good ever did. Not once. This is just one of (many) reasons why I have less than zero respect for them. If they want to hack something on JUST their own machine, then... whatever. But something like this? No. Bad, and stupid. Even if their intentions are just to show off (which is dumb enough to begin with) rather than purposely damage anything; it usually leads to damage ANYWAY. As it very clearly has in this case.

And I guarantee, if two people from just this rather slow-moving board (okay, VERY slow-moving) have already both had it happen, plenty of others in the game's overall population have as well. Hell, I'm betting that multiple people FROM THE SAME MATCHES WHERE THOSE HAPPENED were hit by it at the very same time. The Octoling players likely then stuck around for awhile as people shifted in and out; it's rare that anyone plays just a couple of matches in this game at a time, after all. A single player doing that could do damage to a pretty big number of players with but a single hour of constant matches. Until Nintendo does something (fortunately, they're probably working on it rather quickly, they've been good about this sort of thing in recent times), it's likely to slowly become a bit more widespread.

Even if the chance right now of encountering it is fairly low, it's not worth the risk. I aint touching it till something's done. Which is annoying, but that's how this sort of thing always goes.

 

That, and the various errors Splatoon pumps out, along with anyone (Like myself) with a bad internet makes it extremely inevitable.

I'm not touching Splatoon for a while, because I find this and other factors very fustrating. I might not even pick it back up even when this gets fixed.

 

All I know is; if me or my husband find this person, we will do our best to stalk them and get down their name/some sort of proof.

It's highly likely though that they're watching the forums/twitter/ect. and making sure to change their names; that is if they're smart enough.

I don't wanna stop playing cause of this, I will just be careful and let the person cycle out if I happen to find them. Stay safe out there everyone till this issue calms down.

 

All I know is; if me or my husband find this person, we will do our best to stalk them and get down their name/some sort of proof

Well, keep looking but my best friend claims he already found one.


He said his name starts with K then a bunch of random numbers after that. He never really did get a screenshot, but he said he was certain he came across one. Although I was surprised at this, my friend never lies and if he is he would laugh and joke about it

 

I haven't encountered one of the hackers yet, but I'm not too sure what to do now. Since I've been hearing multiple ways about how to handle the hacker from staying in the lobby until they leave (heard from here) to immediately turning off my Wii U. I don't want a corrupt file :(

 

Now that we know it was all just a "boy who cried octopus" situation, to avoid adding to the mass hysteria and hopefully defuse the situation, I think this article could be edited or a new one made.