It has come to our attention that if you encounter a hacker in an online match who is using unreleased content (such as playing as an Octoling, or using certain guns), it is possible that they will appear in your Inkopolis Plaza, which could corrupt your Splatoon save data.

To decrease the likelihood of this happening, if you encounter someone using content which you believe may be hacked, continue to play online for several games after they have left, and do not back out to the plaza.

This glitch happens because the game displays around twenty Inklings in your plaza at any given time, which are the avatars of people you have recently played with and the authors of the current top-rated Miiverse posts. To show these avatars, the game combines two sets of data: information on the players temporarily stored in your Wii U’s memory, downloaded from Nintendo’s servers, and files stored locally, such as the models for clothing and the icons for weapons and abilities.

While the unreleased content is already stored on your Wii U or storage device, it’s hidden until the date that Nintendo has chosen for it to be released. This means that, if the game tries to access the files, it won’t find them where it expects to… and will basically lock up.

It is currently unknown how widespread this issue is, and you’re unlikely to encounter it, but as a precaution pay careful attention to the guns and character models shown on the results screen at the end of each match.