Half-Life 2 modders are petty and snide. They ban critics of their mods by targeting their Steam IDs. The proof is visible in the code: "Script kiddies vibes"

In a show of extreme pettiness, developers of a Half Life 2 mod that has been available since 2022 managed to ban a small group of YouTubers for playing the latest version. Half-Life 2 Overcharged is a "overhaul mod" that adds enemies and weapons, restores some cut content and promises new ways to play (thanks RPS).

It wasn't that great. Overcharged has received positive reviews from users, but they feel it could have used some more work and does not live up to the grandiose promises. So far, so standard: There are thousands of mods that fit this description.

Several YouTubers who specialize in discussing and playing Half-Life 2 mods have made videos about Overcharged since its release and weren't very complimentary. Again, this is pretty normal. Last month, the Overcharged developers released an update 2.0 for the mod. This promised fixes for many issues raised by the players. However, when certain YouTubers tried this, they received a nasty shock.

Loading the mod causes the game to crash and display an error message saying "STOP talking sh1t about us!"

NoClick, a YouTuber who is affected by this issue, initially thought that it was a problem he had with his mod or installs... but then realised that the error message may be a bit too specific. After checking with other Half-Life 2 fans, he discovered that Radiation Hazard, another YouTuber, also had the same issue. In fact, four YouTubers were targeted.

How? NoClick says, "There is proof that the Half-Life 2 Overcharged developers banned us from playing the Mod by using my SteamID, Scolcer’s SteamID and Keron’s SteamDB, as well as Radiation Hazard’s SteamID." He links to the code of the mod, which shows the mod running checks for the above Steam IDs and referring them to "antiicitizens."

NoClick says in his video that Overcharged 2.0 is a complete failure. "I gave you valid critique and you only took that as an insult." NoClick uses the next ten or so minutes of the video brilliantly to highlight various bugs and glitches within Overcharged 2.0. This does prove his point.

It's almost funny to see this. It is so utterly, absolutely petty. It's never a good thing to target your critics, and using Steam IDs of YouTubers to prevent them from playing your mod can lead to trouble.

Overcharged has a lot of people angry. ModDB is now flooded with negative reviews about the mod. Many of them include the phrase "the sun's leaking", referring to one of Overcharged’s most notable lighting glitches. Others are more concerned whether the mod falls under Steam’s definition of malware.

I couldn't say it better than Upreality, a redditor: "Script kiddies vibes out of this lmao. Did they think that nobody would reverse engineer the binary and load it in IDA to see where the string came from?"

Overcharged 2.0 became popular on ModDB temporarily, but only after people started roasting it. KoopaCL, a member of the Half-Life Subreddit, notes that "right now it is the second most popular mod in the entire site and it's literally just people shittalking them." "Most comments are 'the sun's leaking'. Tags to find it include 'virus'.'manchildren.''malware.' etc."

Let's finish with some of the user tags mentioned by KoopaCL. These are community-sourced labels which help users understand what a mod is about on ModDB. We now have the following tags for Half-Life 2 Overcharged:

• Literal man children
• Garbage
• Actual dogshit
• Malware
• Overcharged is more like undercooked

It's not a good thing to be the second most popular ModDB mod.