Some fans that play on external sites have noticed that a time bomb we’ve setup within the game has gone off, displaying a message on top of the game telling players to play on McLeodGaming only. This mechanism is in place so that sites don’t profit off of Super Smash Flash 2, and so that players are always playing the newest, untampered, version of the game.
SSF2 is designed to be free, and sites that rip our protection mechanisms out of it to host it behind forced video ads (you know the ones – where you have to wait for the video to end before the game will load) and other scumbaggy/shady revenue streams put the future of the game at risk and cause slews of other problems.
These sites have managed to steal 66% of the traffic that plays SSF2 in the browser with mostly old versions of the game that do not have functional online mode and/or current balance changes/bug fixes, have ripped the legal disclaimer and the credits out, and these sites make money in the process. With the original SSF2 Beta update, we tried to be nice with a logo on startup saying to only play on McLeodGaming.com but it was just removed when uploaded to these sites. We’ve also found a few instances where the game had code added to it that was malicious that ran in the background. Not cool.
Bottom line, these sites cannot continue to have such high traffic. It’s unsafe for us and unsafe for you. Thus, we have programmed a message to superimpose on all sites hosting the current version.
Unfortunately, this being said, with yesterday’s hotfix, a pretty large issue has come up for those who play SSF2 at school, as many schools have our site blocked. We hear you!
As a fix, in the coming days (very near future – we’re talkin’ like within 72 hours) the downloads page will be updated with a portable version of SSF2 Beta and instructions to load it to a flash drive. This will give you guys a solution to meet halfway, allowing you to play SSF2 straight from these flash drives on school computers. We hope that those who haven’t visited here before will stick around, lots of updates are on the way!
