A few days ago, SplatHeX was released. For the uninitiated, SplatHeX is a save editor for Splatoon 2 that was created by LeanYoshi. In its current incarnation, it’s still quite limited, only letting the user edit gear and single player attributes. However, over the past couple of days, there has been discussion on whether this constitutes cheating in a tournament setting. This was sparked by a statement from InkTV that states that SplatHeX is a form of cheating and is therefore banned from BnS tournaments if discovered. The reason why this statement is so controversial requires some context from Splatoon 1.

In Splatoon, the clothing the player chooses for their Inkling gives certain abilities. This is dictated by its permanent main ability (the larger icon). and its three sub abilities. Main abilities (except for main-only gear abilities such as Ninja Squid or Tenacity) are worth just over 3 sub abilities in terms of effectiveness. Having the right combinations of main and sub abilities is crucial for optimal performance during a match.

Back in Splatoon 1, however, building gearsets was a nightmare. While the main ability was easy to get (simply buy the gear with the ability), the sub abilities are randomly selected as the gear is levelled up (biased towards certain abilities due to the gear’s brand, but that’s not important). To make things worse, the only way to change these abilities was to reroll them by talking to Spyke, and this either costs 30,000 coins (only if you’re level 20), or one Super Sea Snail. This is the biggest problem with building gearsets in Splatoon 1–the only way to get the abilities you want is to keep rerolling gear until the stars align, and you get the sub abilities you want. Since this is random, and there is such a high cost per reroll, it can get extremely tedious to reroll until you get the gear that you want. Early on, save scumming was used to ameliorate the cost of rerolls, but this meant that people were spending hours rerolling gear that they could be using to play the game, and improve.

In comes Splathax. Since a public kernel exploit was released for the Wii U during the lifetime of Splatoon, people have developed ways to mod the game by attaching a debugger. This allows for changing or disabling the background music without affecting the sound effects (MusicRandomizer), rapid fire, god mode, or instant painting hacks. The hack that enabled gear editing was Splathax. This meant that people no longer needed to endlessly reroll gear, but instead could build all the combinations of gear they could ever want, with only a short one-time time investment. This was extremely helpful since the only alternative at the time was to leave it up to chance, and waste tons of time rerolling gear.

With Splatoon 2, Nintendo addressed this problem by introducing Gear Chunks. When gear is levelled up, the sub abilities are still determined randomly (again, with a bias towards certain abilities due to brands), except that now, Murch will allow you to “scrub” your gear for 20,000 coins. This allows these sub abilities to become Gear Chunks, which can be used later to manually install the abilities. It takes 10 chunks to install an ability alone, 20 if there’s already one of the same ability on the gear, and 30 if there are already two. This takes enough of the randomness out of the process that people are not spending hours rerolling, instead encouraging people to play the game more to get the chunks that they want. Rerolling still exists, but each time a gear item is rerolled, the old abilities are returned to the player as chunks. Furthermore, instead of relying on favourable brands, Drink Tickets were introduced, which allows the gear to have a higher chance of rolling that ability.

This new system solves the problem of rerolling, since the main problem with rerolling and save scumming was that people weren’t playing the game. Now, to gain chunks, players must go online and level up their gear. There’s still the option to reroll gear, but that still yields chunks, and since save scumming hasn’t been possible, no one just wastes time rerolling. In any case, it’s more fun to jump into a game to level up gear than to spend time rerolling. Ultimately, the player has more control over what sub abilities exist on their gear, and the process actively encourages players to play the game.

And this brings us to why people have argued that hacking is unnecessary and should be banned outright. Since the game already allows a relatively painless way to create the desired gear, compared to the previous game, the reason that made hacking a necessary evil no longer exists. One could argue that instead of trying to figure out how to bend a wire to boot the Switch into RCM mode, people should just play the game and improve themselves. The advent of gear hacking also takes away the only reason some people play Salmon Run, since the rewards from Salmon Run mostly contribute to building better gear. Furthemore, coming back to BnS’s response to SplatHeX, this is still a form of hacking, and adding exceptions of dubious value (or morals) isn’t in InkTV’s best interests, since that could lead to both slippery slope arguments, and earn the ire from Nintendo.

There are also valid counterarguments to this. People still argue that being able to edit gear at will allow them to practice with their gear more. My friend Ice brings up a good point during a discussion about the legality of SplatHeX in InkTV-sanctioned tournaments: save files can be volatile, and sometimes experienced people need a quick way to regain their preferred gear after a bricking (or in his example, returning the game after selling their console). People who don’t get to play the game, except during scrims or with friends in Private Battles, also have trouble building gear, since Private Battles don’t give experience.

Personally, I’m not opposed to the existence or the use of SplatHeX. One of my long-time hobbies has been to mess around with video game consoles and other locked-down systems (e.g. iPhone jailbreaking), so I really enjoy stuff like this. However, Splatoon and Splatoon 2 are the first games where I actually care about a fair multiplayer experience and being able to hack the game to give an unfair advantage really ruins the experience. Now, I’m not talking about gear hacking; rather I’m talking about the more nefarious forms of hacking that are enabled by an exploit as powerful as Fusée Gelée (the most recent exploit used to enable dumping and restoring saves). Fusée Gelée exploits the system at the bootrom at the earliest possible level, and this allows for anything to be patched out. This means that people are free to do whatever they want when it comes to hacking games, like modifying stats of weapons, or invulnerability hacks. The Wii U wasn’t publicly hacked to this degree, and yet we still had debuggers like TCPGecko that allowed for in-memory edits of video games. It is not a stretch to expect the same to happen to the Switch, especially since we have the capability to completely replace TrustZone (see Atmosphère). Early on, we might only see save edits, but later we will see more dangerous hacks. Once these come to light, Nintendo will hand out bans, but I’d rather not have to deal with Nintendo’s policing if possible. What third-party tournaments such as BnS choose to do is their own choice, especially since properly-done gear editing is no different from legitimately-obtained gear.

In closing, hacking has always been a controversial topic in the Splatoon community. However, improvements to the way gear perks work in Splatoon 2 have led to more people coming out against gear hacking, despite it being widespread in Splatoon 1. What people are missing by focusing on the aspect of gear hacking is the wider ramifications of having this much access to the system–namely, that more dangerous hacks will be developed, potentially ruining the online multiplayer experience for others. Having Nintendo police this issue with bans is also not the ideal solution, since people who do homebrew development may be caught up in the same net. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens next, and hope that people don’t abuse this new power granted to them.

EDIT 2018-05-28 before publishing: Since I took so long to finish writing this blog post, people have since posted evidence of weapon stat hacking. In the posted clip, someone edited the fire rate of their Rapid Blaster Deco to fire as fast as a Clash Blaster. No other stats were likely edited, since ink consumption was as high as one would expect, but the weapon was still overpowered as heck. Since there’s no on-device debugger (that I’m aware of), the person likely modified the RomFS of the game to change the weapon stats (other RomFS hacks have been shown to be possible, such as modifying Single Player levels). Seems my original reservations of this level of Switch hacking were not unfounded.