The servers in GW2 being destroyed has to be addressed.

As many people in the Garden Warfare community are probably aware, there has been a major rise in hacking in PC lobbies recently. Over the last two weeks, I’ve been swapping from region to region testing Turf Takeover and the Rainbow Portal, and the majority of my games have ended with everyone becoming invisible, low gravity being enabled, players having one health, or the match otherwise being completely ruined.

It has now escalated even further. In some matches, the second I spawn in, my character is launched into the skybox and the game becomes completely locked. I can’t click anything, open a menu, or leave normally. The only solution is to Alt-F4 the game. At that point, the multiplayer side of the game is basically unplayable.

What makes this so frustrating is that EA and PopCap still sell the game, including during sales, while many new players may have no idea how bad the hacking problem currently is. I’ve seen other players post about these issues too, including concerns about hackers affecting player levels, but there still doesn’t seem to be any clear response or solution.

That is a shame, because Garden Warfare 2 is genuinely an amazing game at its core. It has dozens of characters, fun story missions, Garden Ops, Turf Takeover, and a ton of replayability. The wacky Plants vs. Zombies style gives it a personality that very few shooters have. When the game works, it is still one of the most fun multiplayer shooters out there.

But in its current state on PC, I can’t recommend it for multiplayer. The hacking situation has made the game unreliable and frustrating, and it makes me more cautious about EA and PopCap products going forward. It also makes me concerned about the future health of the Plants vs. Zombies franchise, especially with PVZ3 on the way, if the existing community is being left in this state.