Elden Ring players across the world continue to explore the world of The Lands Between, delving into dungeons, discovering rare treasures, and sharing their experiences with allies and invaders alike. However, some Elden Ring players appear to have discovered that they're no longer able to connect with other players as of Thursday. What was initially speculated to be a server issue impacting a minority of Elden Ring players may instead have been an unexplained ban wave targeting players for unknown behavior.
A wave of posts questioning whether Elden Ring's multiplayer servers were down hit social media on Thursday morning. However, the server outage appeared to only be hitting a few players. Most Elden Ring players were reporting no issue with the servers. With no answers forthcoming from FromSoftware or publisher Bandai Namco, Elden Ring players began to question whether something else was going on.
That's when some players noticed that a certain small number of Elden Ring players were sharing that not only was multiplayer not working for them anymore, but they'd been kicked out of the game before it happened. One screenshot shared online showed that an error message reading "Inappropriate activity detected. Returning to title menu," was shown prior to losing access to multiplayer. Suddenly, the server outage started to look more like an Elden Ring ban wave.
Again, there's been no official statement on the matter from FromSoftware or Bandai Namco on the issue. As such, there's no confirmation of the bans or what caused them. The dozen or so messages shared on Twitter regarding "Inappropriate Activity" imply that there's no consistent behavior being punished, so the bans appear to be retroactive for some unclear behavior done in the past. Of course, it's also possible that the bans were done completely accidentally.
It's obviously a distressing situation. Not only did a ban wave appear to go out without official confirmation, but Elden Ring players have to fear that they could be banned next without understanding why or how to avoid it. Of course, there's also the possibility that those banned genuinely did cheat or attempt to hack the game, though that seems unlikely considering the range of players banned so far.
One idea going through the Elden Ring community has to do with FromSoftware's security issues prelaunch. An issue with From Software's multiplayer code made its games incredibly vulnerable to exploitation, posing a security risk for players. Changes were made, but some fear FromSoftware's anti-cheat may not be tuned correctly and is catching false positives on cheaters. Without word from Bandai Namco and FromSoftware, however, it's all just a matter of speculation.
Elden Ring is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
