I believe they can do it completely passively, so you’re kinda screwed if it happens to you :( This is sadly the nature of trusting what clients send you: a hacked client can send whatever it wants and the “anti cheat” in Dark Souls sadly seems to simply just check if an item should be possible, meaning a cheater can trick the game into punishing non-cheaters. Luckily this hasn’t been a problem for me on console, but it certainly does suck on PC :(
There's no winning against cheaters as long as you trust the client. (And it's possible to do it on consoles too, just more rare as the tools are readily available on PC.)
Indeed.
> And it’s possible to do it on consoles too
Sure, but the barrier to entry is higher, so its not done as often. I’ve never noticed someone who was obviously cheating (which doesn’t mean I’ve never encountered any, but if I have, they’ve never been so severe as to do the things mentioned here or for me to notice it)
If a cheater can make items appear out of nowhere, that's not an automation cheat, that's a security vulnerability in the server that should be fixed.
Other games that use (IMHO) broken protocols by trusting the client can't reliably use hellbanning, and I don't think they can reliably do anything.
So everyone's getting hellbanned, at which point no one is hellbanned...
League of Legends has a server in the middle, thus isn't broken, players can't give each other fake items, and hellbanning will work.
The item that marks you as a cheater might have been a drop in another invasion, I don't remember. The point remains, once the cheaters realize you have a separate cheaters' matchmaking system, they will weaponize that too.