Infamous Elden Ring Hacker Gets Other Players Banned, Calls Himself A "Necessary Evil"

thegamer.com:

Infamous Dark Souls hacker Malcolm Reynolds has moved onto Elden Ring and is killing players with overpowered weapons and banning them from the game.

Malcolm Reynolds is a name that Dark Souls fans will surely recognise, as he at one time plagued the community by modding the game's code to softban players by giving them invalid items and status effects. He was a particularly big issue for Dark Souls 3 and Demon's Souls Remastered.

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As reported by Kotaku, he's now moved onto Elden Ring to cause similar issues, although he argues that he's a "necessary evil" in getting Bandai to fix its anti-cheat. Reynolds uploaded a video called "SOFTBANNING IN ELDEN RING", which shows him running around and killing players with incredibly powerful modded magic and causing them to be banned from the game.

Reynolds manages to ban players by using a debug item called pavel, which was left in the game's code from dev testing but isn't actually in the game. He then uses the spells to put the item in other player's inventories, which the game will then recognise as an invalid item once the player has died, triggering the anti-cheat and often soft-banning the player altogether through no fault of their own.

When asked about why he's hacking the game like this, Reynolds said, "I’m necessary evil (sic). You might be asking if getting caught is part of the plan, and yes it is. If I pull it off will the game die? I don’t think so, but maybe Bandai will fix it. Time to go mobile.”

As you'd expect, Reynolds' actions have caused again amongst the community once more, with one popular comment underneath the video saying, "I appreciate that this is to raise awareness of a broken system, but