In Elden Ring, hackers have taken a new approach by causing players’ games to crash and inflicting them with challenging-to-remove debuffs. This has led to considerable frustration and raised doubts about the effectiveness of the game’s anti-cheat system. Although the crashing issue in Elden Ring has existed for some time, hackers have recently intensified their efforts to disrupt players’ experiences.
Elden Ring, FromSoftware’s venture into the realm of open-world Soulslike RPGs, has encountered instances of hacking, although they have been relatively infrequent. Gamers may recall an earlier incident in which hackers exploited a vulnerability in Elden Ring to corrupt the save files of the players they invaded. When the affected players opened the game, they would experience repeated character deaths from falling off the map, coupled with game crashes. More recently, a player reported a hacker who entered their world, transformed into a strange “smoke” form, and disintegrated into a dazzling display of light effects, causing a drastic drop in frame rate.
A similar occurrence recently happened to another Elden Ring player. According to a post by Reddit user Self_Reflexive on the r/Eldenring subreddit, a hacker crashed their game using what appeared to be an exploit. In the video shared by the affected player, two hackers invaded their world, with one incapacitating them while the other cast a spell that emitted a blinding flash of light and applied a sleep debuff. Unlike the previous Elden Ring hacker who turned into a burst of light, leading to a frame rate drop to 1, the flash of light used by these hackers was limited to a mere flash.
While the blinding light did not cause the victim player’s frame rate to plummet, it did force the game to crash. The player was uncertain if the game froze or “softlocked” itself, but they were ultimately compelled to close the game. However, the sleep debuffs imposed by the hackers persisted in the player’s world when they resumed playing Elden Ring in single-player mode. It was later discovered that the only way to remove these debuffs was to use a bolus at the right time between sleep procs.
As of now, there does not appear to be a solution for the crash caused by these hackers. Elden Ring players on PC are advised to locate their save files and create backups in case they encounter malicious hackers during their gameplay. However, this situation has cast doubt on the effectiveness of Elden Ring’s anti-cheat software, Easy Anti-Cheat, with some players sarcastically referring to it as “easy (to circumvent) Anti-Cheat.” Easy Anti-Cheat is owned by Epic Games, which acquired its creator in 2018 and now employs it in games like Fortnite and Fall Guys.