The last thing you want when you’re literally fighting for your life during a session of Elden Ring is some bozo turning up to invade. Now imagine that very bozo in an infamous Souls hacker who is killing and soft-banning players messing up their game? Yeah, that's a bad day at the office.
The hacker in question is called Malcolm Reynolds and has quite the history of this sort of thing, according to a report from Kotaku. Malcolm, you see, has hacked weapons that are practically unbeatable, but his Elden Ring shenanigans are rather more nefarious than just killing people, and he’s practically begging developer FromSoftware to end his spree.
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When Malcolm invades your game and inevitably kills you, it adds “illegal” items to your inventory that were used in the development process, causing the game to think that it’s actually you who’s hacking. That… would be genius if it wasn’t so scummy.
What this then does, is forces you to only be able to play online with other hackers which, if you’re not actually hacking, is likely to feel pretty crappy. Reynolds does explain exactly how he’s achieving in the chat with Kotaku, but the TL;DR is by exploiting the game’s clearly sub-standard anti-cheating system. He even claims that he wants to get caught so FromSoftware can close the loop. As noted by IGN, though, it seems Reynolds has uploaded videos of him killing people and laughing about it so, yeah, not quite buying that one, chief.
The best way to negate the soft-banning if you see Malcolm Reynolds coming at you full-tilt during a gaming session is to immediately turn off the game, or kill yourself so he can’t kill you and leave those illegal items in your pockets. Hardly fun or fair but still, a foolproof way to keep the status quo within your game.
Topics: Elden Ring, Fromsoftware