#softban

A streamer, and player, by the name of ‘Malcom Reynolds’ is using Cheat Engine/hacks to alter the game in his favour by soft banning innocent players.

Basically, what’s happening is if you get hit by him, you’ll get a bunch of souls added to your soul count. The system will detect that you’re cheating by getting souls in an unofficial manner, and soft ban you, meaning you cannot play online with that character anymore. This also means that if you want to keep playing online, you will NEED to delete that character, lest you won’t be playing online anymore. As far as I know, this softban is account wide, and any other character you make will not be able to play online. On top of getting soft banned, you will be hollowed, and in a lizard state (from the in game dragon Covenant), unable to change equipment, and stats are reset to 1.

“Dark Souls 3” players blew up yesterday with accusations they were unable to access the title through Steam. Reddit user HunterKurza documented his issue in a megathread, which appeared in the form of an error message stating that “invalid game data has been detected,” which is against the game’s license agreement. Users who don’t fix the source of the invalid data were slated for bans to their accounts, which is obviously problematic for legitimate users who aren’t cheating and don’t know how to correct the issue.

The Steam and Reddit Dark Souls communities are attempting to suss out the possible triggers for the error message in the absence of any official word from the game’s developers, From Software. The workarounds seem to blame third-party applications, whether or not they would actually count as “cheat engines” including graphics mods and controller fixes/dual-shock support. Redditor R3TR1X has suggested a scorched earth approach to modified systems and recommended that players use anything that has the capacity to alter the game’s files:

“If your files are somehow corrupted (hardware failure, etc.) and your game can still run, you risk getting softbanned. Verify integrity ASAP

Graphic mods WILL get you banned (they did in SotFS as well): SweetAssX, DSFix, MakeMyGameLookGood.dll, DynamicShadows.dll, ANYTHING that messes with the engine, executable or dlls

Borderless fullscreen or internal resolution mods, if they touch your .exe you're a goner

Controller fixes or dual-shock support only if they inject themselves into the .exe or modify game's input dll files

Obiviously cheats that modify game files or give impossible items/stats INCLUDING” savemule

Members of the Steam community have complained about losing game data and needing to start their games over, as well. However, even that solution doesn’t work for all users – some of whom have wiped their setup, started over fresh, and found they still run into the ominous error from From Software.

The strongest lead appears to be from a post on Bamco forms in which one user tested their setup to see if server issues may be involved:

“i tested if the error is indeed server related. i movedstuff from inventory to box on my offline data. quit and saved. loged into online and obviously got the error. the items i moved were back in my inventory as if what i did offline did not happen. it's a server error not cheats or your save data. they fucked up” skannerz22