Elden Ring hacker says it’s ‘necessary’ for him to ruin other people’s games

metro.co.uk:

A cheating Elden Ring player is getting innocent players banned instead, although he says he wants FromSoftware to stop him.

It’s already annoying when you’re playing an online game and wind up being destroyed by someone who is clearly cheating. Now imagine that happening and, somehow, you end up being the one to get banned. Apparently, that’s been happening to a number of Elden Ring players.

In Elden Ring, other players can invade your game to either lend a helping hand or challenge you to a fight. A hacker by the name of Malcom Reynolds is exploiting this feature and jumping into other players’ games just to demolish them with a broken build.

In a short YouTube video, he offers a demonstration, showing off his Tarnished firing a never-ending and unnatural looking blast of fire at unsuspecting players. This isn’t even the worst thing about it, however, as he has also modified the source code to place illegal items in players’ inventories, resulting in them being softbanned while he gets away scot free.

Softbanning doesn’t prevent you from playing the game anymore, but it does mean you can only play with other softbanned players. In practice, it’s meant to punish cheaters, but Reynolds has effectively invalidated it.

He’s rather infamous within the FromSoftware community and was guilty of pulling the exact same stunt in previous games like Dark Souls 3 and Dark Souls Remastered. There’s even a 2016 Reddit thread detailing what to do if he invades your game.

Although he clearly finds his actions amusing, judging by the laughter in the video and ridiculous music, he believes what he’s doing is for the greater good as it’s exposing the faults in FromSoftware and Bandai Namco’s anti-cheat system.

‘I’m [a] necessary evil,’ he told