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Learn These Tricks to Fight Players

“Your skills in dueling Dark Souls many champions doesn’t necessarily extend to other players.”

Facing the most deadliest bosses in the embittered locales of Dark Souls is a monumental feat in itself, but players facing other players is a whole other beast. Dark Souls’s balances itself on a tight precipice, with every element having a risk and reward factor. In exchange for the ability to summon help and higher health, they must also contend with the possibility of invaders at every turn. Your skills in dueling Dark Souls many champions doesn’t necessarily extend to other players.

We’ll be analyzing one of the best Dark Souls 3 PvP streamers, JeeNine for these qualities into action. The fundamentals of PvP are in three important aspects,

Resource management

Spacing.

Unpredictability

Resource Management

JeeNine not only conserves his resources but also utilizes them when necessary. Calculate risks to see if they’re worth the healing items, allow yourself stamina enough to quickly exit if a situation becomes hairy. Save your biggest offensive resources a combined push.

Hosts will always win long term conflicts with their innate advantage of having more healing items regardless of skill, let alone taking into account their allies. Both invaders and hosts must utilize every advantage, and as a host your extended resources allow you to slowly take time to scour the area. Conversely as a invader, quickly finishing a host is your optimal route. JeeNine quickly uses resources under pressure as shown in this trimmed clip with him invading.

His lower health, both maximum and current health allow the host and their allies to finish him off quickly if not careful. higher health allows offensive advantages with risky bigger plays that may quickly turn the tide of the battle, and even kill the honest in one swift action.

Spacing

All attacks have a maximum range. Some are obvious such as daggers having some of the shortest reach, with spears at the top. Dodging consumes unnecessary stamina contrast to simply moving. JeeNine demonstrates this concept as he invades in this trimmed clip.

In most cases, it’s better to react to your opponent, as dodging not only consumes precious stamina but also time in which you can instead counterattack WHILE avoiding the opponents attack.

Unpredictability

In PvP, being predictable makes you easy to read, and eventually increases the odds for your untimely demise—whether it be from their reactions to a swift counterattack. Most weapon attacks have a guaranteed two-hit chain where one the initial hit opens your opponent for your second. Instead, forgo that second hit and delay your attack, as most opponents will try to dodge preemptively. Your attack will ‘catch’ that roll—even seasoned players will panic-roll if pressured enough. Charge your strong attacks to throw off timing rather then attacking immediately. Don’t stay locked on, as it makes your overall movement too predictable—try playing without target lock on.

Overall, your resource management is your most fundamental of fundamentals. You cannot play into the other two if you don’t know how to conserve your health, while spacing and unpredictability are tied equally. Rigorously practice these concepts as you defend your precious humanity, or try to steal others and you will survive in this post-apocalyptic world.

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Glitches: Skillful or Cheating?

Glitches are irregular malfunctions, unintended mechanics in a video game context. Think of them most like a mirage in the distance when traversing a desert.

Except these glitches in Dark Souls 3 can have game breaking consequences in both player versus environment and against other players (PvE and PVP). The most game breaking below are:

Bow glitching

Item cancelling

Both these mechanics are still not fixed to this day, coming from Dark Souls 3 and with item cancelling persisting even in the Elden Ring closed network test, as reported to us by popular Dark Souls 3 PVP streamer JeeNine.

Bow Glitching.

Essentially, the steps for bow glitching follows specifically for ‘machine gunning’ follows below, prior to this you must meet statistical requirements, as well as having great bow arrow ammunition. This also works with any spell by replacing the great bow.

Two hand Gaels Crossbow.

Wield any bow in the offhand.

Initiate and hold Gaels Crossbow weapon art

Release, and as it fires do a backstep.

Without moving, swap Crossbow to a great bow.

Backstep, and initiate the now glitched weapon art.

This completely trivializes the game as all great-bow arrows have immense knock and damage in spades compared to regular arrows, combined with the fast fire rate of Gaels Crossbow weapon art along with ranged weapons safe distance—completely going against our core design principles of Dark Souls as whole. This is shown by Dark Souls 3 YouTuber Chris Wood annihilating bosses near instantaneously.

It’s unanimously agreed upon by both community and developers that such an easy glitch that destroys the entire game. We’re telling you the steps so that the community is aware of how to combat this as we work internally to permanently erase this glitch in a final title update to Dark Souls 3.

“We’re telling you the steps so that the community is aware of how to combat this as we work internally to permanently erase this glitch in a final title update to Dark Souls 3.”

Item Cancelling

Item cancelling however, is hotly debated. It’s lesser steps in comparison to the prior but requires far more finesse to successfully execute, requiring only the item being used allows all directional movement during its animation.

Lock onto a targ

Use your item.

In quick succession unlock,

Turn around,

Lock on,

And move forward.

This glitch works ‘best’ with items that share the Estus animation, such as Siegbraus. While this gives an edge to players invading worlds with numerical odds, if the host has the skill to also consistently do this then the fight becomes a mere arms race in glitches. Most players have an honor-code in which ‘skill-based’ glitches such as this the most allowed, but it allows a slippery slope of subjectivity attached to skill—let alone these techniques never properly explained by our intended systems, as well as looking extremely out of place within the world. As such, we will remove ALL these glitches in preparation for Elden Ring. Players must rely on their own techniques rather then exploiting the engine.

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Your Computer May Be Compromised.

How would you feel if these things happened to your life by merely playing a video game? Things such as,

bank account hacked

sensitive information stolen

computer system bricked

All by simply connecting to another player, let alone interacting with them? This is possible by Remote Code Execution exploit found in our Dark Souls series network code for the PC on January 22. How it basically works is that as network packets are sent as connections are initiated, malicious code may be sneaked in—shown in Figure 1: RCE Process below. Essentially, the worst case scenario allows total control over one’s computer, as show cased here in Dark Souls 3 a recorded live Twitch stream segment from streamer The__Grim__Sleeper as he played with others in Dark Souls 3.

Blue Sentinel.

There’s only one option beyond simply going offline in Dark Souls 3, and it’s by this tool. It’s an online anti-cheat tool created by LukeYui that defends against such various exploits such as players who use glitches (unintended mechanics) and cheating their stats beyond the RCE exploit by,

flagging offenders and blacklisting offenders.

blocking invalid, cheated in items.

automatically booting out them from your session.

or disconnecting yourself automatically, and blacklisting said offenders.

among a host of other anti-exploit related features.

We must give them immense props as not only did they disclose this vulnerability to us privately but that LukeYui and a host of other volunteers of the community lead this effort to defend against bad actors. We HIGHLY recommend playing offline until further notice, or if you decide to play online install Blue Sentinel. It is free and easy. There is only three easy steps, as explained below.

Registering for Nexus mods.

Downloading the file.

Dropping the file into ones game directory (usually “C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\DARK SOULS III\Game"

Network Server Shutdown. 

“We pride ourselves on Dark Soul’s challenging  and brutal yet fair gameplay that rewards players who adapt and preserve to factors that entirely within their control,”

We will be shutting down the network servers with prior notice in the near future, until this vulnerability is fixed for ALL Dark Souls games, except Dark Souls: Prepare to Die edition.  We apologize profusely for any and all inconveniences this may of caused as we will ensure Elden Ring doesn’t encounter this same issue. We pride ourselves on Dark Soul’s challenging  and brutal yet fair gameplay that rewards players who adapt and preserve to factors that entirely within their control, and will NOT tolerate further exploits.

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About us.

This weekly posted blog series is headed by officially approved FromSoftware developer Cody Vo; focused on current and upcoming development of our series to FromSoftware enthusiasts, covering everything from game development to maintenance.