A cheating Elden Ring player is getting innocent players banned instead, although he says he wants FromSoftware to stop him.
It’s already annoying when you’re playing an online game and wind up being destroyed by someone who is clearly cheating. Now imagine that happening and, somehow, you end up being the one to get banned. Apparently, that’s been happening to a number of Elden Ring players.
In Elden Ring, other players can invade your game to either lend a helping hand or challenge you to a fight. A hacker by the name of Malcom Reynolds is exploiting this feature and jumping into other players’ games just to demolish them with a broken build.
In a short YouTube video, he offers a demonstration, showing off his Tarnished firing a never-ending and unnatural looking blast of fire at unsuspecting players. This isn’t even the worst thing about it, however, as he has also modified the source code to place illegal items in players’ inventories, resulting in them being softbanned while he gets away scot free.
Softbanning doesn’t prevent you from playing the game anymore, but it does mean you can only play with other softbanned players. In practice, it’s meant to punish cheaters, but Reynolds has effectively invalidated it.
He’s rather infamous within the FromSoftware community and was guilty of pulling the exact same stunt in previous games like Dark Souls 3 and Dark Souls Remastered. There’s even a 2016 Reddit thread detailing what to do if he invades your game.
Although he clearly finds his actions amusing, judging by the laughter in the video and ridiculous music, he believes what he’s doing is for the greater good as it’s exposing the faults in FromSoftware and Bandai Namco’s anti-cheat system.
‘I’m [a] necessary evil,’ he told Kotaku. ‘You might be asking if getting caught is part of the plan, and yes it is. If I pull it off will the game die? I don’t think so, but maybe Bandai [Namco] will fix it.’
A look through the comments for his video show most people don’t think he’s justified at all, with one reading ‘You are no hero. You protest for better anti-cheat but you screw players that aren’t cheating.’
‘I appreciate that this is to raise awareness of a broken system, but this seems less like trying to teach someone about a problem, and more like an excuse to ruin people’s experience with a game they want to play,’ says another.
The rest are even less understanding, calling Reynolds a ‘narcissist’ and ‘pleb’ who’s only ruining the game and making it less appealing for people.
Reynolds may think he’s Heath Ledger’s Joker in proving a point, but he’s more akin to Jared Leto’s, in that he’s just annoying and everyone wishes he’d just go away.
Elden Ring is available on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and PC.
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