Beware of false pawns, Arisen! The save deletion bug explained.

[BooDaddy]

Heads up to the DDDA community. There are a few hacked and modded pawns floating about, especially the higher you go in levels.

Be extremely careful of the pawns you hire, many of these hacked pawns are indestinguishable from legit pawns when you look at their stats and gear , but have something like 10x the usual HP in combat or are capable of cleaving whole life bars off bosses with one hit.

Saves made with a hacked pawn in your party can result in save corruption and save deletion!

If you notice a pawn seems to be too good at combat, too durable, tends to shrug off status effect or anything similar, release them from your party immediately and make a number of saves with just your Arisen and main pawn as well as back up your saves before quitting. With luck you can avoid having hours of play erased through what is really no fault of your own.

[Revolucas]

Not really true. If a hacked pawn was to bypass the sanity checks and has weird values to overflow integers it is possible to corrupt your save. Not because their pawn data but because it overflown into other values in memory that are saved.

Then there is how would the player be able to make/load their own saves with a hacked pawn that breaks the game. But that depends on if the sanity is done server-side or on the client. Hopefully it's both.

[tcpl]

I don't know about DD, but in many games, hacked characters can sometimes crash other players' clients. If this happens whilst the game is writing to the save file, it could break it.

[legendaryhero]

Originally posted by PerfectLife:

Originally posted by Master Kaon:

When the same problem has been reported across every version of the game, is a known issue and is almost always attributed to the pawn system in some way, I doubt every single person who's had it has actually suffered some form of random hardware failure specific to the save file of DDDA unless it's a hiccup in the game structure it'self that's causing it.

It could be that... if the system that reads/writes save files has a bug in it. Except it has nothing to do with "hacked pawns" and if anything would have to do with ANY pawns or ANY gifts at all. IOW it's going to randomly happen and every time you load with online pawns present or get a gift you risk this and there's nothing at all you can do to stop it except make backups.

Now that's a proper spooky story, not some half-arsed technically invalid nonsense. :P

yeah, no. i mean if this were the case then why was it only that one guy from the OPSC and not everyone else who was playing the game at the time? Shouldn't there be more people with corrupt data if there was a bug and even worse if it was a server hiccup? It was a specific person who lost his data that day and not random people.

oh and let me ask perfectlife, since you seem well-informed, isn't it possible to make the game point to something on the server that would corrupt the save data? Say to something that doesnt exist or not meant to be read. Hacker makes a copy of the item, Server takes said item and reads it as valid, Player's game points to the server but the item in question isn't valid for them but checks out with the server?

[PerfectLife]

Originally posted by legendaryhero:

Originally posted by PerfectLife:

It could be that... if the system that reads/writes save files has a bug in it. Except it has nothing to do with "hacked pawns" and if anything would have to do with ANY pawns or ANY gifts at all. IOW it's going to randomly happen and every time you load with online pawns present or get a gift you risk this and there's nothing at all you can do to stop it except make backups.

Now that's a proper spooky story, not some half-arsed technically invalid nonsense. :P

yeah, no. i mean if this were the case then why was it only that one guy from the OPSC and not everyone else who was playing the game at the time? Shouldn't there be more people with corrupt data if there was a bug and even worse if it was a server hiccup? It was a specific person who lost his data that day and not random people.

oh and let me ask perfectlife, since you seem well-informed, isn't it possible to make the game point to something on the server that would corrupt the save data? Say to something that doesnt exist or not meant to be read. Hacker makes a copy of the item, Server takes said item and reads it as valid, Player's game points to the server but the item in question isn't valid for them but checks out with the server?

Because he was lying. Now please go do something productive with your time.

[Corlain]

Pawn data is included in your save, because you can keep online pawns in your team even if you switch the game to offline and save the game then. They don't disappear anywhere, and they are still there even if you quit the game and load it again, staying in offline mode the whole time... Besides lots of people have had their saves corrupted on both consoles years earlier, so it's pretty ridiculous to say it can't happen. There were notorious hacked "Lord of the Rings" pawns on the XBOX which did it to many people.

"Cleaving off whole life bars" is not proof of this, though. Pawns can do that with lots of moves, Great Gamble being the most obvious.

[BlowFish]

Originally posted by Master Kaon:

Originally posted by PerfectLife:

Hacked pawns do not corrupt your save game, this is just a scary spooky rumor people made up as a joke.

I had no problems wih my game until i started hiring high level pawns. One fighter pawn had so much HP it took nearly 20 vials of springwater to just get it to 3/4 health, even though it said it only had about 3k HP. I thought it was odd at the time. The next time i started the game after saving with the superman pawn in my party, my save had been wiped. Coincidence? I think not.

This thread should be locked because it s full of mis information. This is a prime example. Even if you had edited your pawns health (or hired one with edited health) the client does not display it truncated to 'about 3k'.

[BooDaddy]

Originally posted by BlowFish:

Originally posted by Master Kaon:

I had no problems wih my game until i started hiring high level pawns. One fighter pawn had so much HP it took nearly 20 vials of springwater to just get it to 3/4 health, even though it said it only had about 3k HP. I thought it was odd at the time. The next time i started the game after saving with the superman pawn in my party, my save had been wiped. Coincidence? I think not.

This thread should be locked because it s full of mis information. This is a prime example. Even if you had edited your pawns health (or hired one with edited health) the client does not display it truncated to 'about 3k'.

No, that's not what was displayed. I referenced it as about 3k as I remember it was at 3k health, but had a bit more, I couldn't remember the exact number, hence, 'about 3k'.

And even though not everything in the thread is correct, it WAS established that there's some sort of bug associated with the pawn system that screws saves up even if it's not related to hacks and manual back up saves are an extremely good idea.

[Corlain]

The LotR pawns had so much health it was almost impossible to get their health bar to move with anything, but I don't remember how it was shown when you looked at them.

[Archmortal]

Hacked pawns can and do corrupt save files. It's not as common as the EVERY TIME YOU GIFT A MODIFIED ITEM IT WILL CORRUPT THE SAVE OF SOMEONE YOU GIFT IT TO, but it can happen. The reason is because the game's Sanity Checks as PerfectLife is so fond of using as the basis of his ignorant disagreement are terrible. If a pawn has modified stats or items to send their damage above what's possible when using normal leveling up and item/Enhancement the game's calculations on consoles would just die. On PC our computers can keep the game running because lol PS3 and 360 were weak as hell. But that's not indicative of a lack of a problem. The sanity check breaks if you go outside the bounds of what's normally possible and that's what can corrupt the save. This clearly has not changed with the port because there are reports of people's saves being corrupted from using hacked pawns (TC here is not the first person to talk about it or report it).

Now, to enlighten PerfectLife a little further, whenever you send a modified item to another person it's the equivalent of Skyrim trying to load a mod that you haven't installed. Unlike Skyrim it will always corrupt the save instead of being luck-based.

This happened a lot on 360, very very infrequently on PS3, and clearly it's happening now on PC. You can say it's silly to agree with TC here all you want, but that doesn't change that it happening now with the information available is consistent with how it happened on consoles. If you'd like to delude yourself into thinking the save corruption that happened on 360 and PS3 for these same reasons was all a lie, well, at least you're happy in your own little dream world.

[Zenbe]

Sooo uhm how can you tell if an item you received is corrupted or not?

[Aahzmandias]

Originally posted by ᵏᶤᵚᶤ‰:

\Steam\userdata\<steam user id>\367500

[Corrodias]

Backup your saves manually or get the save backup mod on Nexus. Then you don't have to care. Learn to stop worrying and love the pawn.

[Aahzmandias]

Originally posted by Moon Punisher:

Actual fan fact , there are already mods to create multiple backup saves , so really , if someone is so worried about this , there is already a way out.

And just like the DS version , you can actually use this for other stuff also , like going back in time to avoid breaking quests and so on.

Yes, make ALWAYS a backup, after each gaming session. And for deleting savegame... there is no way in hell, that any hacked pawn can delete your save game. Only the developers can do that. Or YOU manually.

[Angela™]

Just to debunk a few wild theories and stop people from doing all kinds of harm with bad info.

- Powerleveling is a thing. You can cap 200 in <5 hours if you put effort into it. I've seen it happen on livestream personally.

- You can't send modified items through gifting. Here's why. Every item has an item ID associated with it for the base model and stats and subsequent upgrade levels. If you receive a gift from someone, you essentially receive an item ID. that item ID is generated as an item upon accepting it, thus meaning item X with ID Y is added to your storage. Modifying an item in such a way has no effect on other people, just the person modifying it.

That is all. No more mumbo jumbo being all paranoid. Backing up saves is a good thing regardless. Blatantly claiming people cheat because they know their ♥♥♥♥ is just plain bad.

Oh and before you go "But cyriel i've had items hacked and now i have bugs etc etc" No. If it worked like that, then you would have your main pawn hacked and turned into all kinds of random OP nonsense. This doesn't and won't happen.

[Chop]

Welp. I've just been blindly hiring pawns lol Haven't come across anything too suspicious though.