Hmm, interesting. Honestly, for me Dark Souls is all about the world, the story, the atmosphere and the amazing combat or boss battles. It has never been about PvP and I tend to avoid it mostly. However a lot of players seem to think that Dark Souls 3 is purely a multiplayer game (like CS-GO or something) and they’re not even aware of the rich universe that surrounds that minor component.
I think the reason From Software are having so much trouble with their game is because it’s not designed to be an arena-style multiplayer game. Multiplayer is not the central focus of the game. I think the problems are unavoidable right now as millions of players rush across from the COD servers to hack into the game and play 30-person deathmatch. But, as with Dark Souls, once the hype dies down I think the hackers/cheaters will grow bored and will draw their attention elsewhere.
The game isn’t designed for multiplayer and no amount of patching with remedy that. At least the soft ban acts as a partial fix of sorts.
It’s funny, because I don’t think that’s what is going on. I think this is a representation of all multiplayer games, not just CoD. It definitely represents the mentality of a good number of MOBA players and players on some MMO servers. I think all games open to multiplayer aspects are open to this. Look at The Division, or Destiny, both of which have had plenty of griefing.
I do agree with this. Dark Souls was not intended to be played this way. But it has a multiplayer aspect so it is nearly guaranteed. I think From may not have taken this into consideration. Just like Ubisoft never expected players in The Division to block other player progress by standing in doorways. However, if the opportunity to exploit the system with the purpose of annoying other players exists, a small percentage of players will take advantage. I think it is something much larger than CoD and is deeply embedded in the current forms of multiplayer gaming. It is why I like PvE servers for MMOs or seek out servers that have a better reputation than the ones full of griefers and trolls.
Valve just added a cheating software for TF2 to their VAC detection list, apparently, even 160 ‘pro’ players were using it.
This explains a lot. I’ve tried getting into TF2 a few times and quit after realizing there was probably cheating going on.
Blizzard is mass banning people for cheating in Overwatch. Just another example to add to your pondering of the reasons why people cheat.
It’s good really, I support punishment for cheaters in online competitive games. Being banned from something like Overwatch is really intense, it’s like flushing $60 down the drain so it’s a good deterrent. From Software have actually introduced an anti-cheat system for Dark Souls 3 and it’s quite interesting. Basically, the game scans your game files to find anything unusual. If it does, you get one warning. If you don’t fix it, you get “soft-banned.” Apparently a soft-ban means that you are moved to an entirely different system of servers. So basically all the normal players will continue to play normally on the normal servers, the cheaters can still play online but they’re on cheater servers. So they can all hang out together and cheat happily. I was actually watching a streamer the other day who got soft-banned… he was cheating but not for competitive reasons, he was using it to do challenge runs (like playing the game with only 1% health or things like that).
In my opinion cheating is not an issue.
…until we start talking about pvp games.
I usually play games the way they were meant to be played, no cheats, hacks or cheeses.
And im annoyed by people who cheat in moba and fps style games, and often blame my friends
for using cheats to skip certain parts of games, but i have started to understand that in some games
cheating is used to expand the experience and not take it away.
I do use cheats every now and then with my friends and have fun with them but i still prefer first playing
my games as they were meant to be played.
And no i have not used cheats in any way that it would affect other players in online games
or take all the fun away from them.
That sounds like a metaphor for being sent to ‘cheater hell’ Which to me, sounds like the REAL Dark Souls experience/servers. What could be more authentic? XD clearly, the game is meant to be cheated so you can get sent to cheater hell and somehow claw your way back… but the secret is they dont let you back!
swap nukes with miniguns on top of a t rex or pterodactyl and that is ARK Survival in a nutshell. As the game was intended to be. No cheating. Really. 
Haha! A lot mentioned in this thread and it’s a complicated issue. That simple version of if it’s not hurting anyone do what you want is ok, but this issue goes deeper i feel. there are various standpoints and really it is somewhat title specific on a case by case basis i find, and depends on what you as a player are after.
I discussed cheating a bit and how i feel about it a bit in a thread:
Now I am an admitted cheater, Once in Half-Life (long ago) I discovered and taught fellow cheaters to do them (like blocking the ladders with the turrets in DM_Crossfire) however better exploits were since found and that particular one was fixed, Nevertheless our ranks have only increased at a rate faster than each wallhack fix found and my corruption has only grown since then and I could tell you my story before we swarm the DS3 servers with my undead army of cheater souls that thirsts for the righteous (i’m joking) but first I want to draw out some generalizations i think it boils down to three elements.
- Single and Multi
. Who is playing this and towards what ends? Minecraft and ARK are like horsehoes and hand grenades! both have the creative mode, and both have single and multi, both have a variety of players who play (or played) the game towards a variety of ends: PVE PVP Building, social, exploration, and RP (all in creative and surivval modes alike) so it’s complicated and what is cheating is open to context depending on where it is agreed to play rather than how you are playing. You have widely different objectives per server and to some extent there are different objectives of the players in those servers, and sadly they do not always agree and that does indeed lead to unfair experiences or otherwise unfun ones. It wasn’t until i played minecraft online a bit that i really began to wonder the extent of the kind of cheating that might be possible… as I was always mucking about my own personal MC worlds/saves. There are utilities to take a map and search it for ores, and there are to some extent safeguards in place to prevent that kind of datamining of a server, I hadn’t really tested it but i’d say it’s dubious since some of the server info/player info is copied… I can attest that there are safeguards in place to prevent you from item duping and stuff like that. let’s say a player succeeds in hacks like these and runs lots of GUI mods and other things which are against the rules (some are, and i think they can disable them if the server is tech saavy enough to set it up, though few are or bother… or at least did when i played it) Towards what end does such item duping actually ruin the game for another? For the most part, it matters not what I dupe or how much i cheat in a multi server, as it doesnt break equilibrium of a MC experience. In fact, my cheating out the wazoo in a game like minecraft is not going to harm a player nearly as much as serious design flaws in a game like ARK which absolutely hurt the player… WA game which asks an unreasonable amount of the players who wish to get ahead and player who simply do not work for anything, all on top of a basic buggy design in which it is far too simple to lose days or weeks of work. which brings me to the next point…
- Design and art.
Is the design actually good, balanced and sacred to begin with? Is it even functional? Is it in fact a grand masterpiece with a visionary statement? I often find this is a false assumption one might make about almost every game. Any bethesda game! Are we to presuppose the game wasn’t actually meant to be reworked with such bland and initial design? (especially when they themselves were selling us horse armor 10 years back!?). like Hearthfire DLC for Skyrim is a bit silly, but it offered so many excellent resources for modders to work with, and that imo justifies its cost as an add on product. IMO they know good and well that people mod the wazoo out of their games and that is the framework and ecosystem they assume will clean up after them as they make a game that can satisfy a more casual audience who dont care about modding it and will just play it out of the box as intended… Most people find that the jankiness of these games with their weird physics and goofball NPC speech FEATURES in that they are amusing! ‘I thought it was funny’ Be that as it may that is not the intended design and it definitely isnt good and sound design. This implies that the sacred story is in fact a ruse.
But even multi games like my minecraft example. The difference between duping items like mad in MC versus say playing with the rules in ARK or any other game and just ‘going along with it’… The minecraft cheater is a bad person but he who plays by the rules in ARk is good? Come on… ARK is a horrible unbalanced beast, and to playing by the rules in that game (or any other poorly designed system) feels like you are being cheated by that game, especially watching how ‘the big boys’ play it! The sacred story in most multi games is also a ruse
- Player Intent and personal experience.
Utlimately this is all that matters. a storyteller can have a message but if no one is listening its irrelevant rubbish. By the same token if everyone listens and always belives then all stories more or less lose meaning as all things become true. More specifically we are addressing What does the player want. Let’s mention Dark Souls. You are going to have disagreement here because there is going to be a mix of player intents and needs, and the player is only going to be willing to listen to what they wish to hear, and DS can offer an experience that is quite a bit substantial to different people who want different widely things from it. (I wanted presence and adventure and a nice dark tone) Now lets look at something like Serpent in the Staglands (Maybe I should not use it as example because i havent actually played it yet, and may never, but I will anyway because it’s new and seems to be exactly what i am thinking of, and those who buy it are going to straight up be in the same demographic) it’s a very old school story based game, that is no doubt a very rigorous and methodical experience where things must be done a certain way to progress through it, and the journey is it’s own rewward, etc. It’s the classic storytelling, story driven pure, righteous experience where the player simply has to figure things out on their own. If you sign up for a game like SiTSL The player intent is obviously to listen here, and obey the rules regardless of what they are or how hard it is… this is a blind obedience to the storyteller a player has on good faith that they will deliver and reward the player for their faith.
The games in which a story is the chief focus or we simply are going to listen to the game as it was made out of the box are going to be closer along the lines of ‘art pieces’ that reworking will cause some problem to intended experience, in my opinion most games arent really designed in this way these days. Most games arent even designed well or balanced or fully fleshed out. People are constantly disappointed by games and the experiences they offer. Good examples are maybe games like Dishonored 2 (havent played) or No Man’s Sky (havent played). Here the bulk of those who play it expect that divine story to be told right out of the box. And the player is punished for their faith in the storyteller or a lackluster design. sometimes this even happens in unexpected ways. Take World of Warcraft for example. Everyone paid tons of money to spend the long hard months to level up, then at some point they just decided to let new people start out at a very high level that would have taken forever to get to. Is that right? Its allowed. it’s in the rules. but anyone who did it on their own a week ahead of that? well they’d be toast and banned no doubt.
Now with some of these principles said lets go back to multi. When we connect on a server we’ve made a mutual agreemnt to more or less accept the sacred story in some form or another. the cheater simply says, ‘screw that!’ There is of course, no real infrastructure in most cases to support this rebel since it skews things and throws things out of balance. They must be banned and cast into cheater hell (lest the other angels be corrupted!) because there is simply no real way to deal with it. But, this happens for a reason, something brought the cheater to this point… I just dont see things in a clear and black and white context of the rules are good, the story is sacred and cheaters are bad, it’s a problem for sure, but really game design is bad. We have a problem and it’s not the cheaters but the designs which they exploit. the people who cheat arent just cheating because they are dirty cheaters racking up that bad karma for trolliejollies before admin catches them and tosses them into cheater hell. (well sometimes there are those but how do they get there?) Generally it seems that they are bored. they have either played the game and it’s boring, find no challenge, or find it stupid to begin with. So, they cope with this by going meta. and cheating, thats the game for them. With that said, why is the design boring? why is it so unbalanced or something that someone starts messing with it to find ways to cheat rather than just play it as is? If the design is really solid would there be incentives to cheat?
I think World of Warcraft is a good example a of a game in which someone is going to be tempted to cheat and look for shortcuts. The game is really quite boring, slow, takes time. especially the early part of the game. This is especially true if you’ve played it a lot and been through it before. Eventually blizzard themselves realized this and caved, opting to just let people start out higher level. After all that botting and various other forms of level increases that were against the rules and bannable Blizzard basically said ‘The cheater is right!’ This made so many people mad, lol. But rules are the rules. lol
Diablo 3 isn’t a bad example either. This is a game that was flawed by it’s own design and people exploited it in different ways. People were duping items and selling them on the Auction house. Blizzard opted to just close the auction house. People would pay for items with real money. My friend bought a sword for 80 bucks on it. Was the sword duped who knows? it doesnt matter. What does matter is what blizzard did next. They made all the items stronger to draw in new blood and get people playing again. therefore the old sword my friend bought for 80 bucks isnt even comparable to a low level item now. That’s balance. That’s the rules… can you really blame someone who wants to make their own items and trink them out the wazoo? (disclaimer, i havent cheated in Diablo 3 and i actually have only hardcore characters on it 
I do however have other accounts that they have banned long ago. but these days i’m laying low… well just biding time until diablo’s unholy power of cheaters grows strong enough to bust out)
I am a self admitted cheater. and writing about this stuff makes me want to look for exploits again. I know better than to assume that an out of the box experience is in fact a worthwhile one. My skepticism will grow the more time a game asks of me to do drudge work (gridning) or pay more to alleviate the responsibility of that drudge work (pay to win). These are of course easy to see red flags we all have and are trained to spot these days and likewise it raises my suspicion. IF that is what i am presented with i will make some amends to make things more easy, less time consuming or more interesting or whatnot if it’s not too much work or too risky.
Please note that this false 'sacred storytelling experience isnt just a problem with RPG or adventure games that have a narrative context… It’s just as bad in the classic arcade games, where the story isnt the focus. An arcade of vintage cabinets isn’t a sacred vintage art gallery where players with timeless skill meet together in some skating rink to become the champions of the universe and relive an ancient art that has been lost to the ages in some respectable pasttime. PLEASE Most action games were simply designed to steal your quarters with whatever gimmick the programmers could come up with lickety split! The programmers who were better at this sold the most cabinets! kill you fast enough to get more chump change out of you but not do it so roughly you storm off in frustration. LOL Is therefore, buying some horse armor really so wicked of bethesda? XD
So we have several issues and assumptions to be examined. Old games being more pure, cheaters ruining sacred systems (and themselves in the process) cheaters doing a terrible harm to other players in multi games, and assuming a flawed design is actually equally harmless.
Now, there is something i do struggle with as a cheater and that is choice and judgement on my part of how far to take things, because it is indeed a slippery slope and leads to a path of corrupted experience. It is hypoethical that situation might arise in which I, frustrated of the ghost in pacman delete them from the game, never realizing that i can at some point get a power pill which will enable me to eat them. So yes, sometimes there are in fact sacred experiences just lurking there undiscovered
Playing with this mindset has in a way corrupted me as well, since It also takes me out of the game naturally, not necessarily because i’m often in a meta state of looking for things to exploit but because it puts me in a state to mistrust the intent of the author who swears to me that their tale is true, worth my money and worth my time. And well, I’ve heard the claim so much I just simply don’t believe it any more. All I can hear is ‘give me another quarter and i’ll tell you some more’ in one form or another.
Over time I’ve more less drifted into an odd state where i’m not really in the experience as intended even if i do play a game out of the box. Boy am i grizzled. Sorry to write this post. I realize it’s long, but I hope to have raised some good points about the corruptive plague of dark souls cheaters. Anyway I encourage it and hope to see you all in cheater hell! The Abyss is lonely.
I never cheat in games. Also, I don’t like, when there are various difficulty levels to start with. By this point, I usually play at “normal”.
Here’s a new article on cheating in video games, this time regarding hacking and Overwatch, that might be of interest to some: