That's gotta be what it is then...as soon as you DO go in online mode though, prepare for corruption my friend. It's weird because I have a save file just before heading in to the Darkwood Garden and as soon as I kill the giant butterfly there and go to quit and save...it corrupts the file upon load. Maybe I'll try doing it in offline mode or something....that means you have to always be in party chat even if it's by yourself.
But yeah, mine is corrupting every time I save and quit...meaning I have to complete the rest of the game in a single sitting, which is like 20-30 more hours of game play all at once...it's not gonna happen unless someone finds a way around it. Also, I still don't understand how that one guy is keeping his file size at 8.5. As soon as you tamper with the file (meaning injecting ANYTHING in to it) the size decreases from 8.5 to 4.5 megs...right now mine is at 4.99 megs but I can tell when it gets corrupted because it will go down to 4.6...that means it's no good...mine has to be at 4.99 to load.
What I've been doing is just injecting the USER_DATA and USER_DATA0a in to a fresh 8.5 meg file and it lowers it to 4.99 when rehashing with Horizon. It will load, it just won't save properly afterwards. If I use that quick STFS thing or whatever, it corrupts the file and changes it to 4.60 megs.
I really can't understand how people are making this work except for the whole offline thing. I've been playing online, I just modded my souls so I can buy crap without having to grind and I edited my crafting materials so I can upgrade whatever I want and it's still corrupting. I'm not even doing anything crazy with it...just trying to save time on grinding out souls / crafting items.
Any way, whatever, maybe ill try playing in offline mode and perhaps just trying to inject USER_DATA instead of the USER_DATA0a file along with it... I edited this shit before but only injected the USER_DATA file and I was able to play for a VERY long time in online mode ...after I tried to edit it again, it worked, but this shit started happening now...meh. I dunno, it's gay.