While I usually don't like to spread panic by sending out warnings like this one, I've managed to encounter two cheaters in the last few days that have attempted to get me softbanned by either having me loot obscene amounts of hacked gear, or by simply 'donating' me a few million souls.

The issue seems to be fairly wide spread, as this Reddit post showcases the very same tricks I've already seen, but also a couple of different ones such as the cheaters having the ability to essentially make you 'use' a homeward bone just by touching you once. So what should you do to protect yourself against the couple of douchebags that seem to take pleasure in tormenting fellow players?

First of all, keep in mind that while there are clearly some cheaters out there, the vast majority of players you will meet are nice people that are simply there to stab you in the throat, so there's no need to go into a full-blown panic... unless you're not a fan of the throaty-stabby game.

The hobo with a katana is a particularly avid fan of it

But if you do encounter someone that's obviously invincible, or is acting even stranger than the majority of the playerbase, I would recommend you simply use the Black Separation Crystal to escape, or just ALT+F4 your way out of there. You don't want to do this against everyone as Dark Souls 3 will eventually punish you for it, but against the occasional cheater you will be perfectly fine to doing so.

However, even if you do end up with an extra few million souls your account is still not doomed, just make sure to ALT+F4 as soon as you realize what's happening. After that I would suggest going in to offline mode and checking your inventory/stats to see if anything is out of order, because you really don't want to have your character authenticate with the DS3 server while carrying around an obscene amount of souls that came out of nowhere.

If you end up in the unfortunate situation where your character has obviously been altered its best if you either use a backup save file, or simply delete it altogether, as anything else might end up with your multiplayer capability for DS3 getting locked away. Thankfully, the process of backing up your save file is fairly easy, all you need to do is make a copy of "%appdata%/DarkSoulsIII/" and you will be good to go. And don't worry about being banned for making a backup, Bandai Namco has already said they are completely fine with it.

Finally, if you're interested in learning more about all of this I'd suggest you head over the the same Reddit post I linked above as it has an excellent write-up on the whole issue.