Well… just met a hacker on my new level 10 Cleric in early Lothric. Character was invulnerable, couldn’t be targeted and eventually killed me for free. Deleted the save and started a new Cleric just to be sure I didn’t have anything messed up.
sigh This is frustrating.
Press X to dunk head in wax
Well, hackers appear to be rampant in early Lothric now. I’ve had to create 3 new characters because within five minutes of starting Lothric on PC, a new hacker has invaded and killed me shortly thereafter. Not going to risk getting banned by keeping the character since I don’t know what they might have done to my character.
What? Why do you have to delete files if you run across hackers.
^Anything I might’ve missed that’s not about the mechanics?
I’m also curious how people were interpreting how the bonfires would work.
Because if they hit you they can add hacked items to your inventory. And you may not be able to see said items either, because they can add debug items. So it’s better to either use a save backup or delete your old save (though Namco has also said using a save backup too often will result in a softban).
I’m lucky i’ve been feeling super antisocial and have gone offline whenever I’m embered up.
As usual, i have barely any time to play this, so i’m only just now poking around the Cathedral of the Deep, which feels extremely Castlevania to me.
this hacking thing sounds like a real mess, my sympathies. i’m kind of glad i’m playing on a lowly PS4 for once. both surprised and not surprised that the official response is to make everybody back up their saves vs. identifying and banning the offenders.
but if they’re the ones manipulating game data, how come their accounts aren’t getting flagged?
A Japanese Company’s poor understanding of complicated online interaction?
Being a fool I imagined for a moment employees at From’s communicating exclusively via DS emotes/ messages and very briefly chuckled
They are being flagged, but slowly. Since you can currently use Steam’s Family Share as a workaround for any bans that may occur (the bans are tied to Steam account data), whenever an account is banned, all they need to do is create a new Family Share account and they’re back in business. This takes maybe 15 minutes of time and it can be weeks before the detection algorithm actually hits an account (apparently many, if not most of the bans are automated, according to Namco - so far no one who has been banned has been unbanned due to a false positive, from what I can tell - in spite of it being ridiculously apparent that the algorithm has resulted in huge numbers of false positives).
So, it works like this:
Buy 1 copy of game,
Family share DS3 to a newly created account (the account will not be blocked by Namco’s servers).
Start hacking on Family share account.
Family share account gets banned? Make new account and family share DS3 to it.
Thus the real account stays clean and the family share accounts continue to be exploited.
This has been going on for weeks now and seems to be somewhat rampant at this point (Namco has not done a good job with damage control, considering they’re spending a lot of time blaming non-hackers for hacker exploits, rather than fixing the holes being created). As you can imagine, this has resulted in a pretty huge backlash from the non-hackers and is also inspiring some hackers who are doing it “self-righteously” as a response to the poor treatment. Namco has not given a timeframe for when, or if, they will fix these problems.
Something else that was brought to my attention is also that stuff like lag-switches and save editing is not currently being detected on the PS4 version of the game (not detected as hacks, I guess?), for whatever reason.
Japanese game development companies usually offload online/hacker/etc. protection over to companies like Sony and Microsoft. Or they just don’t deal with it at all.
From is in an awkward place where they were OK with the hackeriness of their games when it was a thing for Japanese game development, but now that their game is an INTERNATIONAL SUCCESS they’re like, “what”
This is where we figure out Souls’ unconventional multiplayer isn’t by design, From’s just managed to spin our perspective of it.
That is a very Westernized worldview.
The Souls multiplayer made perfect sense & had just the right scale in Demon’s Souls and the necessity of maintaining + expanding it in subsequent games introduced natural complications.
is this when select button finally turns on dark souls
Selectbutton, the Disillusioned Celebrant
Crestfallen Selectbutton
Betrayed Herald Selectbutton
couldn’t award crestfallen guy’s charming personality and adorable voiceacting on select button. more like selectbutton, the guy that will kick you into a hole
Are you some sort of cleric?
I still like this game even if it doesn’t make half the impression Bloodborne did, but my god is the soundtrack a pile. Even the stuff that’s not by Sakuraba is cacophonous nonsense. You only know that the first boss’ theme isn’t the final boss’ theme because it doesn’t have Gwyn piano halfway in. Wonder if I should do a thing about what a botched operation this series’ music was while I’m thinking about the sorry state of videogame soundtracks.
When I think of Souls series music, my mind doesn’t recall any part of Dark Souls 1 that wasn’t Firelink, Gwyn, Ornsmough, or, oddly, Taurus Demon for being unnecessarily bombastic. None of DS2’s stuck with me. Meanwhile I can recall more than half of Demon’s Souls soundtrack.
I am pretty burned out on the series at this point; I feel like I’ve gotten all that I can out of it and anything more is just going to be Same But More. And that’s okay, better to admit it’s time for me to bail out rather than continue to get increasingly grumpier with each progressive game.