To all new players and everyone unaware: Backup your saves!

[Kotori Matsudo]

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=663774034

Think I linked that correctly. Got into a bit of a discussion on another thread. I know people have posted something of this nature before but I think it is pretty important to keep this information fresh for those who don't know about it. I myself didn't until a bit late in the game though thankfully nothing happened!


The game doesn't use steam cloud and due to how everything works it is left up to the player to protect their saves from corruption. FromSoft's anticheat isn't reliable and it's easy for innocent people to get punished whenever a cheater changes their stats or drops hacked items into their inventory (or souls for that matter). And steam isn't able to do anything to the cheaters themselves either, so the only real solution is for people to backup their save files.

It's perfectly safe to do (and even encouraged by the devs) and it's quick and easy once you know where to look for the file (the guide should help you with that). Basically make sure you backup your save data in case you run into a situation where someone who is using cheats alters your data in some way that flags you for a soft ban. So long as you have a clean save to restore to you can avoid the ban and having to delete your character to start over from fresh..

[Scaredy Cat]

Up you go.

[Watermelons]

Good idea

[CODA]

Picking up Souls can't get you banned, unless these are Boss Souls, and those cant be dropped.

[Sticky White Stuff]

Backups are a good idea. However almost nothing will get you banned. You can have 100 stacks of Large Champion Souls and nothing will happen. You can also use them at once (99). Same goes for armor, weapons, items, etc. Only Slabs are counted against you if you go over the limit, or any item that doesn't have a proper value. There are also some leftover items from Dark Souls 1 that made it into the game. (Hornet Ring, Sun Princess), and they have different values than the original items. That might flag you. Otherwise, you are safe for the most part.

[i dont use this profile anymore]

This shit needs to be stickied

[Kotori Matsudo]

Originally posted by GLUE:

Backups are a good idea. However almost nothing will get you banned. You can have 100 stacks of Large Champion Souls and nothing will happen. You can also use them at once (99). Same goes for armor, weapons, items, etc. Only Slabs are counted against you if you go over the limit, or any item that doesn't have a proper value. There are also some leftover items from Dark Souls 1 that made it into the game. (Hornet Ring, Sun Princess), and they have different values than the original items. That might flag you. Otherwise, you are safe for the most part.

People been flagged for actual souls (not consumables) as well. It's better to be safe.

And yeah.. it definitely should be stickied so more people are aware of this. May result in less threads from players complaining about it happening to them.

[CODA]

Originally posted by Umineko:

Originally posted by GLUE:

Backups are a good idea. However almost nothing will get you banned. You can have 100 stacks of Large Champion Souls and nothing will happen. You can also use them at once (99). Same goes for armor, weapons, items, etc. Only Slabs are counted against you if you go over the limit, or any item that doesn't have a proper value. There are also some leftover items from Dark Souls 1 that made it into the game. (Hornet Ring, Sun Princess), and they have different values than the original items. That might flag you. Otherwise, you are safe for the most part.

People been flagged for actual souls (not consumables) as well. It's better to be safe.

And yeah.. it definitely should be stickied so more people are aware of this. May result in less threads from players complaining about it happening to them.

Not sure anymore by this point though. The old rule always was, and probably still is:

The ONLY thing getting you banned are things that permanently stay on your account, and cannot be obtained normally in the game. Say, you are LvL 1 but got 99 Vigor.
Say you have 20 Titanite Slabs instead of the maximum 12 you can get per NG Cycle.

The Server simply cannot determine if you obtained the 99x Souls of a Great Champion through a friend who dropped and grinded them, or a hacker. The server simply cannot know.

What it can know is, if you are in NG1 and you have 2x a Boss Soul. Thats ''invalid data''.
I dropped so many 99x Soul of a Great Champion back then after Arena fights, nobody got banned, the server simply cannot know if they were hacked or not.

The server doesnt think like a human. 2 Billion Souls at Level 1? Who knows? Might have grinded it. Not invalid data.

[Seferofe]

Originally posted by RAY:

Originally posted by Umineko:

People been flagged for actual souls (not consumables) as well. It's better to be safe.

And yeah.. it definitely should be stickied so more people are aware of this. May result in less threads from players complaining about it happening to them.

Not sure anymore by this point though. The old rule always was, and probably still is:

The ONLY thing getting you banned are things that permanently stay on your account, and cannot be obtained normally in the game. Say, you are LvL 1 but got 99 Vigor.
Say you have 20 Titanite Slabs instead of the maximum 12 you can get per NG Cycle.

The Server simply cannot determine if you obtained the 99x Souls of a Great Champion through a friend who dropped and grinded them, or a hacker. The server simply cannot know.

What it can know is, if you are in NG1 and you have 2x a Boss Soul. Thats ''invalid data''.
I dropped so many 99x Soul of a Great Champion back then after Arena fights, nobody got banned, the server simply cannot know if they were hacked or not.

The server doesnt think like a human. 2 Billion Souls at Level 1? Who knows? Might have grinded it. Not invalid data.

They don't mean souls as in fading soul, soul of a proud knight or soul or a great champion, but the number of souls you're carrying (the one displayed at the bottom right number). Like when a enemy dies, the number goes up, but a hacker can increase it as well. I'm assuming that will get you banned, unlike picking up 99 soul of a great champion.

[CODA]

Originally posted by Seferofe:

Originally posted by RAY:

Not sure anymore by this point though. The old rule always was, and probably still is:

The ONLY thing getting you banned are things that permanently stay on your account, and cannot be obtained normally in the game. Say, you are LvL 1 but got 99 Vigor.
Say you have 20 Titanite Slabs instead of the maximum 12 you can get per NG Cycle.

The Server simply cannot determine if you obtained the 99x Souls of a Great Champion through a friend who dropped and grinded them, or a hacker. The server simply cannot know.

What it can know is, if you are in NG1 and you have 2x a Boss Soul. Thats ''invalid data''.
I dropped so many 99x Soul of a Great Champion back then after Arena fights, nobody got banned, the server simply cannot know if they were hacked or not.

The server doesnt think like a human. 2 Billion Souls at Level 1? Who knows? Might have grinded it. Not invalid data.

They don't mean souls as in fading soul, soul of a proud knight or soul or a great champion, but the number of souls you're carrying (the one displayed at the bottom right number). Like when a enemy dies, the number goes up, but a hacker can increase it as well. I'm assuming that will get you banned, unlike picking up 99 soul of a great champion.

Highly doubted. The Server isnt as smart as to scan every single Enemy you killed, and calculate the exact amount of souls you owned.

You could also just sit around at the Abyss Watchers, and farm billions of souls by the Darkwraiths killing the Swamp NPCs.

Futhermore, back then ''The friendly ogre'' (rest in piece best Hacker EU) had a stunlock party going on in Pontiff, and everytime you invaded him he spammed millions of souls, ''humanity at risk'' and covenant items into your inventory. Had reached the max. 600 of Proof of a Concord Kept, and i never got a ban from that.

I might add, that cheating them yourself into your own inventory gets you banned. Which furthermore shows, that things you pick up / forcing items into your inv. isnt getting you banned.

[Kotori Matsudo]

Bump.

[Sticky White Stuff]

There was some testing done to this. But this was prior to DLC and obtaining items from the DLC where it was not yet launched. However, that was done manually. I didn't test it myself, like changing my Character name, or their appearance value (No reason for that tho, Unlimited Rosaria Glitch is still in the game). I just know that getting more slabs that the maximum amount (including DLC) will flag you. But you can spawn slabs yourself and pick them up, but then you should ignore the other slabs in the game.

It is always good to backup your save before testing. You can't actually get banned, just flagged with the invalid data message. So removing the test save and replacing it with your backup should make it go away in a week or so.

The game server ONLY uploads your save information in the main menu, during the launch, and after you exit the game. This is also when it checks for anything abnormal, such as mismatches.

[Kotori Matsudo]

Bump!

[Kotori Matsudo]

Bumping.

[Vinyltavia]

Despite our "disagreements" on several things, we both can at least agree that save backups are rather important in all aspects of the game.

[Kotori Matsudo]

Originally posted by Vinyltavia:

Despite our "disagreements" on several things, we both can at least agree that save backups are rather important in all aspects of the game.

Yush. I actually sent in an email request for them to consider making this a sticky and locking it so that it will always be on the front page for newer players and those unaware of it. x3 Not sure if anything will come of it though.. I'll keep it bumped if it gets pushed too far back.