'Stop talking s*** about us' - Half-Life 2 mod blacklists a handful of YouTubers as 'anticitizens' and blocks them from playing

There is some spiteful drama in the Half-Life modding scene this week. The developers of a heavily criticised mod for Half-Life 2 are intentionally blocking a small number of YouTubers from playing that mod, using Steam IDs to effectively blacklist and ban specific people from running it. Instead of launching the game as expected, these players will see the first-person shooter crash, alongside an error message that reads: "STOP talking SH1T about us". This is an act of revenge for previous criticism of the mod, say the affected videofolks, who are described in the mod's code as "anticitizens".

The mod is called Half-Life 2 Overcharged and it is described by its creators as an "overhaul modification" with "brand new gameplay and post-processing features". It adds new Combine and alien enemies, plus a bunch of weapons. It was originally released in 2022 and attracted some ridicule from Half-Life modding fans for being underbaked. The enemy AI was broken, crashes were frequent, the weapons were underwhelming or needless, and there were plenty of lighting and graphical issues.

A lot of these problems were meticulously pointed out in videos by YouTubers like "noclick" and "Radiation Hazard", who specialise in the Half-Life games and play a lot of mods for Valve's classic shooters. They didn't show any mercy in their judgement of this one, calling it "overhyped", for example, and cutting down the mod in what you might call a typical YouTuber style.

In the two years since that original release the mod saw some updates, and the YouTubers followed along, tracking changes and sometimes doing follow-up videos to address whether or not the bugs had been fixed. Some things did get fixed, yes, but many other problems persisted, and new issues even came up, such as strange ragdoll behaviour and vanishing enemies.

With the recent release of a 2.0 version, the video makers set out to cover the mod once again, only to discover that it would simply crash. An error message would appear, reading: "STOP talking SH1T about us". And any attempt to make the game run was unsuccessful.

"The developers used my Steam ID to somehow block me from playing the mod," said one of the affected players in a video calling out the modders. "There is a line of code somewhere that was specifically written to block my account from playing this mod."

Sure enough, the mod appears to have been hardcoded to include a list of four "anticitizens" who will be unable to play, according to this tweet that exposes the modder's code.

Of course, the Streisand effect is now in full swing and the mod's page on ModDB is inundated with dozens of comments saying "The sun is leaking" - a reference to one of the mod's most recurring lighting glitches. I probably wouldn't have even heard of this mod if the creators had not been this bitter about the poor reception.

This is a very niche example of the act of blacklisting, which occurs in traditional games criticism as well. Kotaku has been blacklisted by Bethesda in the past, for example, presumably for not writing positively enough about their games. We at RPS have never been told overtly by any publisher or developer that we're on a blacklist (why would they admit to that, after all?) but we can tell when it happens; a company becomes chronically uncommuncative, they are not forthcoming with review code, or refuse to answer our queries. Still, even the most bullish of developers have never actually programmed their games to boot out specific critical voices. That is wild behaviour and, as you can see, it also backfires. No, smart devs save their codey shennanigans to catch pirates in funny ways.