Namco Starts Punishing Cheaters in Dark Souls 3, Advises Fans to Back Up Save Game Data!

Dark Souls 3 is an action role-playing game that has been developed by FromSoftware. The game was published by Bandai Namco Entertainment in March 2016 in Japan. A worldwide release of the game was made a month later in April 2016. Dark Souls 3 is playable on the platforms of PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

Since the release of the game, a number of gamers have been complaining that many players are cheating in it. Bandai Namco has taken note of the problem and since then a crackdown on the cheaters have started.

While this is definitely good news for fans who play the game in the proper way without cheating, there is a catch. While tracking down the cheaters and banning them, the developers banned some innocent players too. This has led to a lot of frustration among fans of the game and many have been reporting that they are unable to log in to the game.

Bandai Namco has admitted that the previous system was flawed and it resulted in the ban of the innocent players along with the cheaters. However, it was also stated that a new system of tracking the cheaters have been developed and such errors won’t repeat itself in the future.

A cheater can cheat in many different ways in the game. He or she can alter the save game data of his or her profile. External files can also be modified as per choice to cheat. Making use of exploits and cheats within the game will also be dubbed as cheating.

If a player is indulging in any of these activities, it will be detected by the Dark Souls 3 server and it will be flagged for investigation. The gamer will not be able to log into that particular profile at that point of time and whenever he or she tries to do so, an Invalid Game Data message will be displayed.

During the investigation period, the developers will try to figure out whether the player was actually cheating or not.

Namco made the following statement related to the investigation period- “During the time that the warning message is displayed the end user will have a chance to completely remove any such external files, mods, cheats/hacks or delete their game save (if alterations were performed to it or hacked items/equipment were obtained either as a direct cheat/hack or via unknown “gift” from an online player).”

Namco also advises players to back up their save game data either within their PC itself or with the help of a cloud based service. An automated backup program could also be used by the player to back up the save game data automatically. The save game data can be found at- ‘Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\DarkSoulsIII\[folder with string of letters and numbers]’. The ‘DS30000.sl2’ fileis the one which needs to be backed up.

It is often seen that a player leaves a gift for another fellow player within the game. Now this gift itself could be a hacked item and in that case whoever picks it up will be instantly flagged for investigation.

The player who is picking it up might not have any idea that the item is hacked and if he is found not guilty after investigation, he can easily restore his game from the backed up save game data.

In other news, a particular player and some of his friends have been turning some heads by playing the PVP mode of the game as Shrek! The character is accompanied by Donkey and Puss in Boots.

Other players are left amused by their funny antics and they often stop playing to just stand there and look at these hilarious characters. Of course, using this opportunity, the Shrek player and his friends easily take down their enemies.