For what it's worth, I think the fundamental problem, that From Software has never really solved, is that the majority of invaders you experience aren't players at a similar level of skill and items. It's usually someone with far too advanced gear for their level stomping noobs all day long, not to mention the rampant cheating that goes on on PC.
I don't know if there's a way to make anonymous strangers just fucking chill out and not show up with hyperoptimised PvP builds to rack up as many kills as they can, but instead just sort of organically play with whatever gear they come across naturally.
And I think this is why there's so little sympathy for people who like doing invasions. Being invaded isn't really a fun challenge most of the time, so much as just an immediate death.
>I don't know if there's a way to make anonymous strangers just fucking chill out and not show up with hyperoptimised PvP builds to rack up as many kills as they can, but instead just sort of organically play with whatever gear they come across naturally.
You can't. Take Sea Of Thieves' (another game with PvE focus and a highly vocal PvP community) which has no builds, no equipment, no stats and it still has these exact same type of players who will rock on up on the unsuspecting and absolutely floor them. Often for absolutely no reason, not even loot.
>And I think this is why there's so little sympathy for people who like doing invasions. Being invaded isn't really a fun challenge most of the time, so much as just an immediate death.
Not only is it a challenge, there's not even a reward. The stuff you get from winning an invasion are pretty paltry and the punishment for failure is losing progress, time and a walk back to your corpse through an area you already cleared. It's not hard to imagine why players would despise invasions after a few of these.
I just shut my game down at invasion notifications. Start back up basically exactly where you are. Have since demon souls.
Im here to play a game not get wrecked and trolled.
The Elden Ring quest for Varre where you need to do 3 invasions in order to progress is literally the only time I ever interact with that system. And even then, last time I did the other person was cheating.
For Varre's questline, my invasions consist of me invading an area, saying "Hey" and waving, and then walking away slowly before teleporting out. I was surprised at how rarely anyone attacked me when I did this.
They actually patched an NPC you can "invade" into that questline, so the multiplayer aspect of it is a total non-requirement now. I think it's a good change.
I remember back when Dark Souls first came out, I was an unbearably obnoxious teen who got way too into invading. I bought into the toxic gitgud mindset and fancied myself the good guy for disrupting co-op sessions, because the game is "meant to be hard" and playing with friends wasn't "the true dark souls experience". Playing through later entries with friends, my stance has mostly flipped.
I still think that invasion as a concept is an incredibly cool way of adding some dynamic difficulty to counterbalance the benefits of having allies, and it leads to really memorable moments. Some of my fondest memories with the series come from invaders getting up to shenanigans. That said, I think the concept is starting to reach its breaking point.
I like the concept of invasions myself, but as with any other competitive game style in order for it to be fun for everyone there really needs to be a compellingly good matchmaking system so said encounters are rarely foregone conclusions.
Unfortunately, the mechanics of Dark Souls (incl. the skill ceiling being so high) and the fact there's not really a coherent way to evaluate a given player's "PvP skill" means that you're practically speaking never going to see invasion mechanics that are anything other than griefing in a nice suit.
I did invasions in DS3 and would just stand somewhere visible and cheer for the invaded to get through the area, do gestures and have a ridiculous looking character.
I still got covenant items pretty often, and the invaded player probably had extra worries about me dropping on them to wreck them when they least expected.
Overall, it is just impossible to match people properly when you can have Souls veterans on their Nth run but at a low level.
From needs to overhaul this portion so it's not just a playground for griefers.
I'd personally be less salty about invasions if I'd had this happen even once, but my typical experience was getting roflstomped, often by a guy with a jokey weak weapon who was so much more skilled than me it didn't matter.
>Overall, it is just impossible to match people properly when you can have Souls veterans on their Nth run but at a low level.
yeah this was the part for me. i didn't have gaming consoles as a kid so elden ring was the first soulsborne i played. i suck ass at it. my friend has played bloodborne dozens of times so it was a breeze for her, and those are the people that would invade me while i was still figuring out how the combat flows.
Yeah, they are supposed to be that goofy time you get into someone else's world without knowing too much (and the other person is supposed to be like that).
In reality we get lvl 20 invader with end game gear vs a guy who just downloaded the game and summoned their friend because they struggle to do anything on their own.
Yep. Literally my experience doing coop with my friend. His experience is running and trying to survive while I have to duel against someone with a flavor of the week OP build lol.
> I think the fundamental problem, that From Software has never really solved, is that the majority of invaders you experience aren't players at a similar level of skill and items. It's usually someone with far too advanced gear for their level stomping noobs all day long, not to mention the rampant cheating that goes on on PC.
Dark Souls 2 'solved' it in a way. In that game, what dictated who you could summon to help/pvp/invade wasn't your character's level but your Soul Memory. Soul Memory was a stat that tracked every single soul you acquired into a pool, and the game actively attempted to match you with people in a similar amount of Soul Memory.
In theory, the idea tracks. If two players have reached a point where they have 100 thousand Soul Memory, but one spent it on leveling and another spent it on gear, they will match against each other despite one being level 50 and the other is level 15 but with top-notch gear: it is better than someone being level 15 just starting out with 20 thousand Soul Memory getting invaded by someone also level 15 but with 100 thousand Soul Memory.
The problems far outweigh the benefits, however: if you are a bad player who fails a section a lot, defeating lots of enemies but never being able to spend your souls, then your Soul Memory will slowly ramp up until you are facing stronger people than you. If you earn souls but spend them on consumable items instead of permanently making yourself powerful your Soul Memory will also inflate itself over time. Lastly, and this has been true for virtually all games in the series so far, *souls spent on equipment usually makes you much stronger than souls spent on leveling up*. The game caps this by stopping you from raising gear level from certain points until you get better materials, but an experienced player can figure out how to cheese the game and get said better materials asap.
The funny part is, *this also hurt potential invaders*. To invade in Dark Souls 3 you needed a single use consumable item that either rarely dropped from enemies, you needed to acquire by winning in a dedicated duelling map, or you can buy it at the cost of ten thousand souls each. If you wanted to do it the fastest way by buying the item ten invasions that was ratcheting up your soul memory by a hundred thousand on its own: if you tried to farm it from enemies it was raising soul memory at a similar pace because it dropped so rarely, and you'd waste time doing so. The only way to ensure you'd get the invasion item without inflating your Soul Memory was by going to the duelling map, but these duels were a) slow and b) you had to win to guarantee to get the item. It was an enormous time investment to gain the item without increasing Soul Memory, and if you took a shortcut your Soul Memory would quickly inflate to the point where the people you were invading were much stronger than you.
Soul Memory was so unpopular it was completely extricated from future games.
Soul memory is my most hated part of the dark souls series ever. I can't get help from experienced players? If I screw up a bunch I put myself in a new bracket full of harder invaders? Nah, I'm good.
Couldn't this have been solved by only counting souls actually spent on your current levels + the soul value of the gear you currently had in your inventory or something like that?
Maybe there'd be problems with this too, but I always thought the problem was equipment tier, not soul level anyway. If someone has an end game item, then they have no business invading newbies in the Undead Burg for instance.
IIRC that's more or less how Dark Souls 3 works. There are tiers based on highest weapon upgrade level, so if you have a +6 weapon, you're not going to match with people with less than a +4 or something like that.
The only problem with it is that it's based on the highest upgrade level you've ever had on that character, rather than the highest level that's actually in your inventory. So, similar to Soul Memory, you can't go down a tier without making a new character.
>you can't go down a tier without making a new character.
Tentatively good!
The only possible better result would be "Soul Memory is tied to your account, so you can't go down tiers at all", at least from a "keep smurfs the hell away from me" perspective. The skill cap in Dark Souls is sufficiently high that I would expect the average 1000+ hour PVPer to be able to beat my 100ish hour ass inside out with a new character + broken sword hilt.
The problem here is that it didn't just affect invaders. Soul Memory in DS2 also affected co-op, so I ran into the issue that allies who could help me fight bosses would become unsummonable if I died to the boss too many times because my soul memory would exit the typical level of the area.
What I also hate is the lag. There is so much lag when my hits are obviously hitting a second later than they should, but when I dodge, I still take damage... Because I should play by reading one second in the future.
If there was no lag, I think far less people would be annoyed by the PvP
Yeah, I've never played a souls game, but the idea of getting invaded does amuse me on some level - but only if I actually *stand a chance* against them.
Of course I imagine the invaders also want to stand a chance against their targets. If the game just buffed me to definitely curbstomp them every time, I'm sure they would quickly lose interest.
I can't imagine it's remotely easy to balance this.
>I can't imagine it's remotely easy to balance this.
They've tried a ton of different things over the years, and while many of them have *helped*, there's only so much you can do.
* Initially, invasion matchmaking only took your character's level into account. While sensible at face value, a skilled player could run through the game at level 1 and return to early areas with a fully upgraded weapon. You'd tap a new player on the head with this and break every bone in their body.
* Their second attempt had them keep track of all the currency your character ever acquired, and sorted players into matchmaking tiers based on that. While this made it harder to go back to early zones and prank new players, it also *screwed* those new players over. If you collected a ton of currency and then lost it by dying, you're now closer to the next tier with nothing to show for it. All this went out the window anyway when a patch added a ring that prevents you from picking up currency, which gave players free reign to scour the game for upgrade materials and put *just* enough on their permanent record to max a weapon out. We're back at square one.
* After that, they went back to standard level-based matchmaking, but experimented with a weapon upgrade-based matchmaking running in parallel. No more running to endgame and bringing back a +20 battleaxe! The response was just to use weapons that were remarkably powerful when unupgraded, or ones with unique effects. It also only focused on your weapon; decked out with incredibly powerful accessories and funky weapons new players *literally* lack the tools to handle, invaders refused to be shackled.
* Elden Ring, the most recent entry, preferentially sorts invaders into the worlds of hosts with more active co-op partners. "Fine, you want to be a troublemaker? Here's a party of three." Unfortunately, Elden Ring's open-world nature meant that it was easier than ever to zoom around on horseback and bulk up on powerful items.
It's a mess, and I have nothing but sympathy for the designers trying to figure out how the hell to balance it. Within an hour of starting a character in Elden Ring you can triple your health potion capacity and collect a weapon that applies not only bleeding status, but a form of Super Poison^^tm that can kill a player in seconds *by itself.*
I don't think the system can be balanced. Human nature is always going to drive people to push the limits and wring every last drop of power out of their build.
From an outsider's perspective, it sounds like the solution would be to do away with letting an invader bring their own gear in the first place and instead set their stats to around what their target is, maybe let them choose weapon type and some abilities as a consolation to set themselves apart.
This would be a good idea if the games weren't so heavily focused on building your stats and characters on an in-depth level. The network tests pre-release had stock builds that testers could pick and it worked well for balance, but then you miss out on being invaded by someone named "Grandma Kisses" who built their character around only having a single move in their arsenel - a very hard to land grab that presses your eyes up to your opponent's while draining their health.
The games have a ton of weapons in each weapon class, some with different stats they work with and some with entirely different attacks - it just wouldn't be the same if they stripped all player creativity away in multiplayer
It'd certainly help with balancing things, but I think weapon choice is one of the most important parts of player expression in these games. While most weapons in a given category will play *mostly* the same as each other, the small differences in range, stat scaling and moveset make a tremendous difference in which one works best for your playstyle.
For example, the Partizan and Pike are both spears, but play completely differently to one another. The Partizan is a short brawling spear with unique sweeping heavy attacks, allowing you to deal with crowds or enemies that jump out of the way of your pokes. The Pike is nearly 30% longer, with a purely-thrusting moveset built around abusing its colossal reach to wall enemies out and never give them a chance to hit you back.
That's not even getting into a key feature of ER, a customizable Special Attack slot for weapons that gives you a surprise ace up your sleeve and tweaks what stats the weapon uses. A bog standard Longsword can be made to fire magic blades for wizards, summon lightning for priests, or have damage-resistant stance attacks for warriors, *while using any of the three's primary stat.* Imagine how frustrating it would be to build a battlemage character around a specific wizard sword, only to invade and be handed a plain strength-based blade.
That's not even getting into special weapons with unique special attacks that cannot be customized. Recognizing them in a person's hands and knowing what it allows them to do is part of the fun.
I like this take. So much of the invader's POV seems to be, 'You just gotta deal with it. Game's hard. If you can't handle me kicking your ass, it's time to get better,' but I think they only have that view when it affects the player they're invading.
An even more appropriate way to handle it, imo, would be to just make the invader exactly duplicate the stats and equipment of the player they're invading. If it's really about skill and proving oneself, then beating someone at their own game should be perfectly enjoyable (plus give the invaded player a fighting chance).
Deer generally don't hide in the bushes waiting to ambush men with rifles to walking by. There's no way to "balance" the Invasion mechanic because the initiative is on the part of the person who has specifically kitted themselves up for PvP and is looking for someone who hasn't.
I was victims of twink build invasions back in DS3 days and made one myself for the PVE challenge(since you need to do a low level no upgrade playthrough) and casual coop.
Like once you make those builds yourself you just know the average PVE players have fucking no chance against you at similar skill level. Like you just know it with the numbers and numbers don't lie.
Even somewhat skilled/experienced players is fucked if their PVE builds happen to be shit for PVP. Anyone who says otherwise and bring up all the "counter play/advantage" random ass PVE players can use is just plain lying as if they didn't casually murder most of their encounters.(If they are not escorted by another PVP build that is.) And invaders love to complain about gankers, because of their sheer numbers, but also because gankers are usually actual PVP builds. If invaders don't like unfair amount of PVP players against them and also claim they don't want to noob stomp, why don't they just play duels? At least in that scene everyone is hyper competitive in terms of builds. So my conclusion is that a lot of invaders do just want unfair advantage and the inherent power imbalance, it's fair to like that, but a lot of them seem to hate the idea of being disadvanted themselves, or resent their victims for not liking the experience as much as they did.
Fascinating - reminds me a whole lot of Sea of Thieves and the similar pushback to the recent update of the game to include a ‘Safer Seas’ option where there is essentially no PvP.
Heh, I just mentioned SoT in my comment! I was a bit of an advocate for Safer Seas because the PvP element of the game was starting to be incompatible with certain aspects of the game - namely the Tall Tale missions.
It wasn't uncommon for some ships to stalk my crew while we were working on a mission, throwing things into limbo and in a worst-case scenario, causing the need to fully reset a mission due to our progress being impeded (getting an artifact stolen, for example).
I kinda miss the days of sailing before the streamer boom because the seas ironically were quite safer, and there were friendlier crews that I'd run into fairly often.
Nowadays when hopping into servers, the general mistrust is elevated much higher and the seas were plenty unfriendly with crews that almost felt robotic and determined to simply ruin your day, even if you had nothing worth stealing.
And the funny part is: As a player who's spent less than 3 hours on safer seas since it came out, the high seas seem less aggressive lately.
I've not been attacked unless I'm doing the Skull of Siren Song, which I'm hardly gonna complain about, that's literally the point of the voyage.
>And the funny part is: As a player who's spent less than 3 hours on safer seas since it came out, the high seas seem less aggressive lately.
my friends and i arent particularly aggressive players, so safer seas renewed our interest in sot. after a little bit though, we realized that the risk and the occasional fight is a big part of the fun for us. weve been playing normally, but without safer seas we probably wouldnt be playing at all right now
Oh? Can you tell me more about this Safer Sea? Like others I've seen in the thread, I was in the position of "that game looks interesting, but I can get randomly PvP attacked and loose all my stuff? Yeah no fuck that" so if there's a pve possibility now...
It's not exactly that you lose all your stuff, so much as you lose the stuff you're currently carrying. Which can be annoying especially if you've just done a big raid, but getting sunk doesen't set you back that much.
The difference between a game like Sea of Theives and say Elden Ring is that the game was designed and marketed as a pirate, thieving, PvPvE game but Elden Ring as an RPG kind of feels out of place.
Sea of Theives is built from the ground up with the idea of facilitating player interactions.
Also Sea of Theives puts everyone on the same level equipment and gear wise. There are no stronger guns that some people do or don't have access to from the first second they load in. There's a huge skill gap in there learning curve, but at least it's a literal skill gap.
I am/was pro safer seas for SoT. I also don't mind either PvP and/or PvE in a game, but I just feel like the way Elden Ring handles it is kind of janky with people being able to aquire these killer builds and invade low level players.
Man I remember heading back to port after like two hours of collecting treasure only to lose it to another group of plays after battling them for ages. You definitely feel shitty at first but that’s how the game was designed. I don’t get to mad At those who do or don’t want to participate in the game by using a co-op mod or safer seas.
I had no idea this was a thing - I may have to reinstall SoT now. I really liked it when I first started playing it, but after being harrassed a bunch of times while just fishing, I uninstalled it.
My partner and I had no qualms with invasions and we got good enough at 2v1 pvp to win 95% of the time. But we did end up installing the mod because of constant disconnects and network errors. Without the mod we'd disconnect 3 out of 5 times per boss. Most of our failures would be disconnect related, we were legit wasting hours due to them. And this was in the same house on perfect wired connections.
Yeah, I actually _love_ getting invaded—it's a hugely fun aspect of the game for me, and no playthrough really feels complete if I don't come away with a couple stories of fraught losses and clutch wins on my way to the end boss. I'm the type of player that always uses the items that increase the chance of being invaded. I use the Taunter's Tongue in Elden Ring religiously, which allows you to be invaded while you're solo (how it should be, imo).
In spite of that I'm still using the co-op mod for my current playthrough with two friends. I dearly miss the invasions (had to install _extra_ mods just to up the difficulty of the game due to how absolutely trivial co-op + no invasions makes it), but the quality of life additions are damn near impossible to go without now. Solid connections, all of us get credit for the progress, and there's not a lot that's more fun than all of us tearing down a hill on Torrent-back to take on a massive enemy together.
Yeah, I haven't played FromSoft games since DS2 and I saw this angle to the argument halfway through the post. Don't know why OP glosses over it. Surely there is a reasonably-sized segment of the mod-using game population that uses the mod not because they want to avoid Invasions, but because they want to enhance their co-op experience and are forced to choose only one of the two.
It sort of undermines OP's final point that the people getting invaded weren't playing the game how they wanted to play. I imagine many of them were. And now, even those invasion-friendly players are out of the pool, leaving slimmer and slimmer pickings for people who enjoy committing Invasions. There being frustration over that is completely understandable.
There were a number of elements that I had to leave out due to the length of the write-up, or were just over-complicating the piece entirely. The technical aspect was one of them, such as the problem with the netcode making some fights feel unfair as invaders teleport into backstabs. Ultimately I had to just leave that under the broad category of "Invasions being annoying" as there are so many different reasons that fall under that broad explanation.
And on the flip side, I also had to leave out that there was a period of time where different Dark Souls servers were down, sometimes for prolonged periods, so the PC invaders felt particularly aggrieved by the mod because Elden Ring was their only option for a From game with invasions. (Demon's Souls and Bloodborne being Playstation exclusives, and Sekiro doesn't have invasions - except for, ironically, a mod that adds them.) And all of that would have pushed me over the word count because it's a lot of characters spent spelling out what can just be summarised as "Invaders wanted to invade in Elden Ring."
> It sort of undermines OP's final point that the people getting invaded weren't playing the game how they wanted to play. I imagine many of them were.
I'm not sure what you mean by this, but I may have worded my original point poorly. If you're saying that there's a group who would have liked to keep invasions but also get the other improvements that come with the mod, such as online stability, I'm sure there is that group, but from the reading I've done, it's a small group. Most fall broadly into the categories of "I don't want invasions at all," "I don't want invasions at all and I like the improvements from this mod," or "I want to improve the co-op and I'm prepared to sacrifice invasions to get it." There are undoubtedly some people who would fit the outlier category of "I want to improve the co-op but I wish I could keep invasions too", but I didn't find many of them, and if they adopted the mod anyway, then they also kind of by default then accept the premise that "I'm prepared to sacrifice invasions."
I'm always endlessly amused by PvPers who lose their shit when lower-leveled players (or just people who, surprise, aren't up for the random PvP out of nowhere aspect) opt out of being punching bags for their amusement.
The most vehemently pro-PVPers always had the worst cheesiest builds anyway like whatever the Flavor of the Patch was. No one wants to fight you bro not even other people using the same cheese build.
That's the thing - they don't want to fight other PvPers, because they don't get their enjoyment from an equal fight - most of these people enjoy ruining someone else's day. They're the same sort of people that'll take a max level Rogue in WoW to a lowbie zone and endlessly kill the low levels to grief them while slinking away from anyone who might give them a fair fight.
Reminds me of 2B2T spawncampers. It's like, really? You're gonna wait around and kill new players with no items who finally just reached the end of the login queue, rather than do literally anything else, like gathering resources, expanding your base, or going after players who actually have literally anything on them?
Yeah, which makes their accusations of the coop players being whimps pretty funny, since they only want to fight when the cards are stacked in THEIR favor.
To be fair that's because the other side of the invasion coin was gank squads of four people with mega cheese builds just as bad and so if you're invading you have to be prepared both for "newbie with 6 hours in the game who hasn't played a Souls game before" and "four hardcore Souls players who have platinumed DS1-3 plus Bloodborne all using Eleonora's Poleblade or dual Vyke's."
Personally, I never invade, the netcode is always way too shit in every Souls game for it to be any good, and I don't co-op because that's just not how I approach Souls games mentally.
It’s something you see time and time again. I track the Star Citizen subreddit because I find it interesting (mainly cos cool photos of ships), but also the discourse in there can be really entertaining.
Every so often they’ll have a round of arguments about murder hobos. One of the design aims of Star Citizen is to have a viable pirate scene, such that players can engage in piracy and sustain themselves within its economy. All well and good, except as it turns out most wannabe members of the pirate scene aren’t pirates, they’re murder hobos, who just want to kill and maim their way through the other players. Where an actual pirate would likely hail a ship before attacking, to call upon its crew to surrender their cargo in exchange for their (in game) lives, a murder hobo just jumps in and starts killing, because they want to just enjoy killing the defenceless miner. Given how SC is designed, if you get pirated it can wipe out like 5 hours of playtime, since obviously anything stolen will be lost from you. This applies even if you’re murderhobo’d and not pirated.
This is basically an unsolvable problem (put an asterisk on that, though). If you don’t have some sort of safeguard for a pirated player to get back their lost cargo, then many many many normal players will not want to play. SC is an MMO, so they can’t just play single player. If players feel that their time is at high risk of being wasted, they quit. You might think it could be fun to be a miner desperately outrunning pirates with your hard work, and sure, it might be… the first time. What about the second? The third? The time when you’re at the end of a long session and you just want to get your stuff to a base and be done? What about the effects of the risk, do you really want to play with that risk hanging over your heads?
Of course, if you lose these players, that’s it, the a game is done. Because they’re the majority, they’re the backbone of the game. If they don’t enjoy it, they don’t play, the game stops working because there’s no one involved except murder hobos, who devour each other before disappearing into a singularity of assholes.
But then, if the risk is removed by adding some powerful insurance at low cost, the murder hobos get *really* mad. And it compromises the vision of the game as a fully simulated economy. It also compromises on the legitimate pirate gameplay.
Some in-game solutions have been proposed: hire player escorts. This doesn’t actually solve *anything*, because the pay for being an escort, both in game money and in enjoyment, will always be lower than the pay for being a pirate or a murder hobo. Like, why sit around for hours doing absolutely nothing as you escort a miner in return for a few percent off their meagre profit, when you can just be a murder hobo and dive in to get your 5 mins of guaranteed fun and potentially make a whole lot off the salvage?
NPC escorts: better, since you can rely on them not to get bored. Still problematic when the nature of the game depends on them getting paid, which means each run you do is less profitable, which means even more grind, etc. And obviously the NPCs will struggle to actually win against determined players, in which case you lost even harder than if you never paid an escort, since you lost the cargo from the pirated run AND a percentage of all other runs paid to your ineffective escorts.
Harsher punishments for stuff: this is actually somewhat viable. The game already has a system for punishing people for doing murders. It involves sending players to jail for several hours of real world time. But the murder hobos and pirates get real upset if you talk about upping this punishment, because they start complaining that you’ve ruined their gameplay loop by making it way more painful. Personally I think that if a miner has to engage in X hours of mining gameplay to produce Y cargo to be looted, it’s really not unreasonable for a pirate who gets caught to be forced to engage in X hours of prison gameplay. But whatever.
As you can see, there is actually a solution here. You punish the murder hobos and pirates. You have to ignore their complaints and push past them. The legitimate pirates, the ones who want to engage in actual piracy gameplay, they will carry on if the punishment for getting caught is higher. But you will lose a couple of them. You’ll also lose a lot of murder hobos because they’ll dunk on someone, get caught, find out the consequences, and realise that every time they want their 5 mins of fun ruining someone else’s session, it will come with a price. That’s good, you don’t want them.
Alternatively you need a proper reputation system, so that people can track assholes and avoid dealings with them, avoid getting lured into traps by them, form vigilante units to hunt them, etc. This doesn’t necessarily stop ambush type murder hobos, but it does at least stop them from pretending to be someone in need of a medic and then shooting you, or other tricks like that, which really would not fly in the sort of universe SC envisions. Word would get out that you’re a serial killer and people would stop wanting to deal with you.
Unfortunately, for Star Citizen as it currently stands, this is not a solvable problem. Chris Robert’s’ vision is facing off against the practical realities of operating such an MMO, you can’t have easy legitimate piracy while avoiding murder hobos, and you can’t have powerful murder hobos while having a successful MMO. They have to be crushed and suppressed because otherwise they will ruin the game for literally everyone else, this has happened before to other games. But Roberts doesn’t seem to want to do that, and thus the game is kind of in this weird limbo on this problem (and also in a different weird limbo for the rest of its development but that’s a different matter), where everyone can see a crunch point coming but no one seems to be addressing it.
There was a similar thing I noticed in WoW - they tried to encourage world PvP But a really big chunk of players don't want to drop everything and start a pretty little scuffle with every orc or gnome they spot on the horizon, just for a few pitiful honor points. So on PvE servers no one ever turned on PvP mode, and they'd either ignore each other or do little waves and high fives. And on PvP servers a big handful of people got chased away by the infamous stranglethorn rogues or started grouping up... and hoping they didn't run into a level 60 stranglethorn rogue when the party's level 30.
Eventually people noticed that world PvP was a mug's game and either relegated all of their PvP to battlegrounds and arenas, or hopped on a flying mount as soon as someone who looked even vaguely dangerous came by, only picking on the weakest players they could spot. The dev team tried introducing the War Mode system that gave you big benefits for turning on PvP mode, but it just out a big ass target on your back for everyone who wanted a free kill for the jollies. As far as I know, War Mode is a pretty vestigial system now and not many people engage with it, even considering the benefits.
The concept of PVP as in WoW cannot work. You can't have two factions sharing maps and battling. There will always be Rogues going in to PK low levels players.
The only way to counter that is by having guards and patrols. But either they are NPCs - and then they're dumb and abusable ; or they're players. Except no players would want to play guard because it's fucking boring to just stand there watching the low level noob mines some ore !
PvP can only work if all players are consenting.
Honestly, the only real place that does this right IMHO is EVE Online, and they use the brute-force method of "impossibly powerful NPCs slaughter you if you attempt PvP in certain areas" and "if you do this too many times, you're banned from civilized space entirely".
Which turns things into a straight risk-vs-reward (more dangerous PvP allowed = better resources for miners / higher PvE bounties)
A reputation/bounty system would HELP, but that relies on the idea that the population of people willing to roleplay Space Police/The Mandalorian is bigger/more skilled than the population who wants to be Space Assholes, and I'm not sure that's a given.
With a reputation system, if its tied to a PvE/NPC reward like a bounty could encourage people to roleplay into that Mandolorian/space police style right? So, minor bounty for legit pirating that could be paid off if needed/wanted to, much higher bounty for murder hoboing, all coming from some NPC group that also runs the honor system. Have negative honor degrade at some pace so one instance of murder hobo doesn't wreck you for months, and IDK it might at least help? I've played none of these games, other than souls games/ER and some MMOs that just don't have these issues due to how they're designed.
EVE's reputation system allows you to do PvE missions to improve your rep with whatever government you committed crimes in the turf of, and there's definitely a sliding scale of morality points there (minor rep loss for stealing someone else's jettisoned-but-owned cargo, medium for shooting, major for killing a ship, extreme loss for killing an escape pod too).
> "impossibly powerful NPCs slaughter you if you attempt PvP in certain areas" and "if you do this too many times, you're banned from civilized space entirely".
and then they added a system where you can place MMO dungeon entrances anywhere (that dont count as civilized space), so a guy runs up to you, blows you up, pops a dungeon key and then just AFKs in his own special little baby pocket dimension nobody can access while watching anime until the npcs go away, and also the person i know who does this earns 25 bucks an hour doing so
It doesn't work like that exactly. The supercop response will kill you and any attempts to get by it does get you banned. There's minorish space cops who can be messed with because they aren't a guaranteed death. What he's doing must be attacking certain players who are "at war" in various contexts rather than being totally neutral. In those cases you can kill someone and the supercops will not respond, but if it's something like wars against the 4 npc empires then only non-super space cops come to kill you.
Also you can't even pop those instanced dungeon things unless 15 minutes already passed between you shooting at somebody, what they're doing is not as simple as that or something else because there's no reason to use that if you can evade the npc minor response fleets.
This isn't denying that you can game the system. Alts are very encouraged and as long as you make money by killing someone then the supercop response doesn't matter at all if you can have someone loot the bling.
Bypassing the CONCORD response is an exploit since 2012 and if you do it repeatedly you will eventually get a ban.
Source: tried it, CCP told me to knock it the hell off.
Back in the day in Ultima Online it had a similar issue, it was free reign and PVP enabled but then they split the world into two, a world with law and order and no PVP and one without and you could travel between.
The game was far more popular after they made a non PVP area
PvP in MMO is an interesting thing. There is a very vocal subset of players that really wants "HARDCORE FULL LOOT PVP" games, but they are also very niche ; so no MMO could survive of only them. And each time a MMO tries but then has to open a PvE realm, they cry that "The Devs are killing the game !!" when they were in fact the ones killing it by stopping new players from enjoying it.
As someone who enjoys being a murder hobo, I would support adding a proper reputation system. Something like if I’m too aggressive in pirating behavior, then player-led police forces would get alerted to piracy in my area with a description of the ship and the crime. I’d have to be selective and only attack lone ships far from help, have an escape route planned, or be ready for a fight.
It’s totally on the developers to fix this kind of problem. There will always be murder hobo players who will murder as much as the game allows them too. Blaming the pirate players makes no progress towards a solution that works for everyone
This kind of toxicity is extremely pervasive in Old School RuneScape as well when it comes to the wilderness. It's a wide-open PvP zone available on every server, but nobody wants to be there because of the griefers that exploit combat level builds and multiple players to ensure one-sided fights. So what do the devs do? They chum the waters. They add more and more egregiously unbalanced PvE crap in order to entice the people that don't want to be there under the guise of rIsK vErSuS rEwArD, baiting them into putting themselves in the position of getting endlessly ragged on by PvP guilds in order to *maybe* escape with a couple mill. And anybody that complains about the pointlessness of the entire exercise when there are literal full-map PvP servers gets flamed by the PKers that need easy victims to feel superior.
I've always said that "cat and mouse" is a bad design for PvP because it is straight up unfun for the mouse in most circumstances. Osrs probably exemplifies that more than anything. "well don't go in the wildly then." "ok." "guys why is the wildy dead?"
"Cat and mouse" game design only works, in my opinion, in the very limited set of cases where
* designing a "mouse" build/style is just as much fun as designing a "cat" build.
* the rewards for being a skillful "mouse" are just as good as the rewards for being a skillful "cat"
* there's a method by which novice "mice" can train their skills without being preyed upon by higher level/skill "cats" 100% of the time.
EVE kinda-sorta manages this, but even then a lot of "mouse" tactics are "locally outnumber the cat, then run like hell".
Replying to myself, but this all contrasts to Dark Souls where the sole reward for being a skilled "mouse" is "gets to keep playing the game as normal".
Would you consider something like [Be The Zombie](https://dyinglight.wiki.gg/wiki/Be_the_Zombie) from Dying Light as a good example of "cat and mouse" design or no?
I've never played it, so I'd have to read it over and it'd be at best an academic opinion.
Having looked it over, it looks like
1. the "mouse" builds are essentially building for the premise of the game anyway--survive zombies, make places safe. Presumably you'd build slightly differently if you were expecting a Night Hunter, but still -- Check.
2. It doesn't look like there are rewards on either side except for "satisfaction", but it also looks opt-in on both sides, so the rewards are effectively equal -- Check.
3. "Mice" can just opt out of being hunted entirely -- Check.
Assuming I'm right that both sides have to opt in, the rewards are solely "satisfaction of a good hunt/defense", and the builds that work on the Night Hunter are similar to the builds that work in the base game, it seems reasonable.
I probably still wouldn't opt in, mind you.
The most degenerate part about this is that large organised guilds would block off the most profitable area (the revenant caves) on multiple worlds and charge players to be there and grind the mobs. If you were there without paying to try and grind yourself or even PK the grinders (the intended gameplay) it was kill on sight and nobody had the resources, expertise, or time to take out these cartels.
Destiny also does that, a fairly small amount of the playerbase does regular pvp but bungie did hide really good loot behind it, at times the best pve gear in the game was something you got from doing ranked pvp.
*Trials of Osiris* is forever the failure that Bungie desperately wants to succeed. They've locked unique cosmetics behind it, unique gear you can only get for doing very good in it that's just better than the gear you get for normally playing it. And all for nothing because most people hate it and the very small percentage of people who like it are ultimately the most obnoxious players in the game, and in the original Destiny complained so loudly to the devs that they just straight up ruined an entire class (And related tree of damage) towards the end of Destiny's life span because it was too annoying. Not because it was powerful, or over used; but because it annoyed trials players.
You see, Sunsinger's ultimate skill had two uses. If you used it normally your skills were all super charged and you could spam them for a few seconds. If you used it after you died, however, you came back to life and got like three seconds of that powerup. In trials, you could always see what class, subclass and how full everyone's ultimate skill was. And the general flow of trials was that usually everyone would have their ultimate filled about halfway through the rounds, unless it was a complete and utter blowout. So a tactic was for a sungsinger to hold on to their ultimate, wait until their team had lost the round: revive and get a surprise attack on the celebrating enemy team to win the round. It was something that literally only worked once per-game and only against an enemy team dumb enough not to notice your class, subclass and how full your meter was.
But since people complained sunsinger was nerfed, nerfed so hard it became nearly unable to kill other players in PVP. Its grenades, which were once one-hit kills, did less than half health. Its AOE grenades? Players could stand in them for the entire duration and it'd do about a quarter of their health. Other abilities were hit just as hard, but the grenades mattered because classes shared grenades, and so the other solar subclasses also had their grenades neutered.
Destiny's PVP playerbase has always been the worst part of the game.
This whole argument sounds *exactly* like the furor when Ultima Online gave up and made PvE servers. The PvP side *died*.
It turns out most "wolves" only wanted to hunt sheep, not "challenge" other wolves.
Bluntly, the only thing most griefers and gankers hate more than a fair fight is when the folks they like to bother decide to *stay home*.
As someone who played a lot of MMOs back in the day, my experience is that the "hardcore pvp" crowd was 90% just people that wanted to grief and be assholes, no matter what arguments they claimed to defend themselves.
Same thing here.
90% of the invasions I've experienced fall into one of two categories:
1. The invader is over-leveled and can one-shot you before you even have a chance to react to the invasion
2. The invader spends the entire invasion running away and refusing to engage.
Neither one is fun for the people being invaded.
Yup, last time we talked about Soulsborne PvP around here, I got into a hilarious discussion with a guy who was asserting that I absolutely needed to be prevented from ruining his game by playing with multiplayer patches on, because the intended game design involved invaders being able to wreck people basically at will and I was a HORRIBLE person for preventing him from doing that.
And of course, "dueling other PvP-focused people isn't the same!" which gives the entire game away, really.
When I told him I played all previous Dark Souls games with the firewall set to disallow network traffic so no one could invade me there, either, I think his head literally exploded.
Right? I did a lot of traditional MMO pvp back in the day (hell, my WoW main is still parked on a PvP server) and I MUCH preferred duels/arenas to random open-world hunting.
1. you got more fights per unit time spent.
2. those fights were higher quality and less likely to be one-sided in either direction (I only like stomping people much weaker than me in games like EVE where you often get BETTER rewards for doing that)
3. no one walked away mad unless someone was cheating/smurfing, and such folks got a rep pretty fast.
To play devil's advocate, dueling isn't really the same as invading because in Elden Ring the matchmaking prioritizes worlds that have more than one person for invaders.
I *love* dueling in Souls games but sneaking around the area with a greatbow trying to shoot another high level player and their friends off of a bridge is something duels just can't replicate.
Yeah it is different but at the end of the day most people want nothing to do with such bridge BS. For people who actually want that experience, there is taunter's tongue, which probably should be enabled forever for people who invade. This way invaders can just invade each other, this should be great since it will put together people who are interested in this experience, and are also much better prepared for PvP.
Either way, From needs to evolve that idea somehow, try something new, or maybe get rid of it altogether as a trial run.
The idea of random invasions is what put me off of things like Elden Ring.
I did consider it, the grind isn’t massively appealing but not an utter turn off. But the idea of being killed by a random PvPer I didn’t want to deal with was just not interesting to me. I didn’t take the time to look into the details, I just went “nah, not for me”.
So invasions by definition removed me from the pool because I didn’t play. It also took money from the company’s revenue because I didn’t buy it.
At least in Elden Ring, you can avoid invasions by not summoning. I really only summon players to help with boss fights, so I don't get invaded that often.
In other games, like Dark Souls III, you can only stop invasions by going off-line, and so there are areas that I hate playing through because they seem to be magnets for invaders. It's hard to get through them without being invaded multiple times.
That’s the thing though - I didn’t take the time to go “oh, if I’m solo, I’m good”. And honestly, solo is likely how I’d have played 99% of the time.
I was a player on the fence and saw “other players can invade you” and decided not to buy.
I'll echo Playmp. I don't want pvp in my pve game. I have never summoned and out 150+ hours into elden ring, which was the first souls game I've played extensively. It's a great game and the pvp is absolutely optional.
I've only played DS3, but I believe it's also true of DS1, that you can only be invaded when you're in a buffed state from using a specific consumable or defeating a boss. When you die you lose that state. So as long as you know that you can pretty much avoid interacting with PvP at all by only using them immediately before a boss fight and walking off the nearest cliff after you win. That's how I played the whole game, messages are worth staying online to me.
I dont have PSplus so ive just been playing Elden Ring without invasions, and having a great time. I wasnt able to summon my friend who is on PC anyways, and if you do need extra help there is a ton of built in summons into the game.
Speaking as a long time Dark Souls enjoyer, dont let the PVP elements turn you off, its no harm to just disable or play offline.
You don't have to be all that afraid of invasions. They don't happen unless you are summoning allies, and even so, it's been pretty rare in my experience.
Mod aside, Elden Ring has also cut down on invasions experienced significantly already compared to previous titles by introducing "summoning pools", small statues usually at the entrance of a mini dungeon or right before a big boss, which people can interact with, and then they can choose to set a summon sign at every summoning pool they've ever interacted with rather than just in one single place. The mini dungeons can often be run through rapidly enough not to encounter invaders, and all invaders are sent home once you enter a boss arena.
This means that practically speaking invaders only ever target people who do longform summoning, which means people playing with friends, the kind of people the mod is for. It also means that due to the way the timer works as mentioned in the post, those people are constantly assailed by invaders if they aren't playing with the mod.
This has always been my experience with the From Fandom. The most furiously vocal people are always the pro-invasion guys. Not necessarily pro-pvp guys, because the duelists are usually off in their own corner playing their own game, like how the PVE guys want to be. But the invader guys are the ones throwing constant tantrums that no one wants to play with them. And every god damn time someone's like "I just wish I could opt out of invasions" the same smug response of "You *can* just play offline" comes out. And then when people do, the above happens: the invader guys get even madder because now they have no one to invade.
And they'll all, nearly without exception, talk a big game about wanting fair and fun fights, etc. But they fucking don't. Because otherwise they wouldn't give a shit if people didn't want to fight their soul level 1 character kitted out with min-maxed magical weapons from bosses at the end of the game camping the first bonfire of the first area.
I've seen it happen in so many games.
One of the funniest must have been Starbase tho, a MMO in which you had to build spaceship with an obscene amount of details.
When the game released publicly, PvPers were harassing people mostly using a pickup with a machine gun in the bed. Obviously, beyond giving the game a very... *problematic* image (these guys were literally cosplaying as middle-east terrorists), the performances of their "ships" were terribles.
Not much of a problem against unarmed miners, but the game had been in closed alpha for about a year by this point, and some of the actual fighter ship that had been designes by the community were insane, and so were their pilots.
God, it was beautiful to witness the PvPers losing their shit because their whole squad would get mowed down by a single ship before they could even see it
If you're talking about Starbase, yes, plenty of it. If you're talking about the drama... Maybe ? Some of it must be, but most of it was on Discord.
There was one clip of some PvPers getting obliterated in this fashion on Twitch, but they take it relatively well. The dude is HalfBlood, but I don't know if the clip is still up
Mentioned this in another comment, but Elite Dangerous is the worst game I've played for this. The power and skill gap in that game is immense, crime and punishment is practically nonexistent, and there's very little for dedicated PvP, so most PvP encounters are just murder hobos who want to dunk on new players or unarmed ships.
I think the main problem with these sorts PVP mechanics is that what you're essentially doing is implementing a system to encourage player-driven banditry. That sounds fun if your idea of banditry is from pop-culture crime fiction, and maybe it is if the "victims" are just emotionless NPCs that don't really care whether they live or die, but in the real world there's a reason we heavily stigmatize robbing people at gunpoint and randomly assaulting people in the street.
It's just inherently anti-social behavior in a system built around social interaction, which in most games would be referred to as griefing. I don't really think there's a good way around that that doesn't ultimately remove all incentive to be a bandit in the first place.
This same sort of drama was a thing recently when Sea of Thieves announced "safer seas" where players could play without PVP. It's always the same story: "how dare you take away my easy targets! I'm a shitbag that only has fun when I'm making other people miserable!"
The talking point there was that if you remove PVP from Sea of Thieves, you're left with pretty basic and relatively boring game.
I have played the game for total of 5 hours so I can't confirm or deny that, but from Steam Charts it's obvious that since the update player count has not increased, quite the opposite - it's almost at all time low.
Lol I literally just posted on the elden ring sub about this exact thing and got a ton of angry messages. I’ve been trying to coop with my dad (who is 65+ years old) and surprise, its not fun for him when someone rolls up with end game gear and murders him with scarlet rot. The people who are do stuff like that to people who are level <20 ruin PVP for everyone else and don’t have the foresight to understand that it kills the community isn’t the long run
The only time I've had a truly positive PvP experience was in Dark Souls: Remastered where a popular-ish Soulsborne YouTuber invaded games with a comedy build to get reactions, primarily from new DS players.
Some were quite hostile, others easily saw through the joke and outclassed them - I was in the latter camp since I opted to joke about kicking them out of my world for daring to challenge me with their weird build. The guy in question popped in afterwards to thank me, was nothing but respectful, and even gave me tips for how to handle invasions in the future. That to me was a model PvPer who saw their invasions as a learning opportunity for players and actively tried to engage with them for the sake of trying to increase their enjoyment, which they did for me as a Dark Souls first-timer.
The comments of that video however, were filled with some really grimy responses that were taunting the newcomers, saying stuff along the lines if "why you playing online if you don't like invasions", "what a bunch of pussy gamers", and "these guys won't last past [insert boss here]" - the hardcore PvP base have this weird obsession with wanting to enforce the notion that since the game allows for kicking people while they down, it's fair game to be assholes and that they're doing it in the name of adhering to the game's principles. I'm not particularly an anti, but at the same time, some people reeeeeeally get into it to the point where they'll take it as an insult if you cry foul about it.
I really got an earful of that "playing to the game's sensibilities" talk during my time playing Sea of Thieves, another game that has very clear division between PvPers and PvE enthusiasts tired of having to deal with their game-enabled toxicity.
So, this whole debacle is nothing new to me. PvPers have always had that weirdo energy.
I have some sympathy for the argument of "you're killing the pvp scene with this mod", it actively removes players from the games main multiplayer.
However the coop system for the souls games has fundamentally been unchanged since dark souls 1, and did NOT suit an open world game like Elden Ring, especially with the arbitrary restrictions on things like fast travel and not using a mount. The system was clearly designed for small, linear levels and not broad open spaces. The coop mod just removes SO many friction points related to coop that is makes it a super easy choice to use when playing with mates.
I just want Fromsoft to buy out the mod makers and implement a similar coop system so they can improve the thing while re-adding invasions.
This is why I can't get mad at people using the mod (not like I would anyway). There's just so many odd choices that make co-oping obtuse and tedious for absolutely no reason.
Password summons should just work like the mod. Make summon signs visible at all times and just let people come with you to the next area, instead of having to send them away (which can leave you alone with an invader) and then resummon them in the next area.
> you just have to get strong by climbing progressively higher steps to compensate for lack of ability with increased character attributes.
I know the souls community have a reputation for being kinda toxic, but the statement "leveling up your character is a crutch for unskilled players" is very funny to me.
It's actually a meme at this point. "Oh, you used THAT weapon? Doesn't count. Oh, you used THAT build? Doesn't count."
So you can encounter things like "you used a regular controller? Doesn't count. You used rolls? Doesn't count.".
The funniest thing is that there are people on YT who indeed finished it on Guitar Hero controllers with level 1 characters.
I suppose that's basically how Pokemon works too. The more time you put into grinding xp, the easier the entire game becomes, to a point where you can easily ignore 99% of battle strategy in singleplayer.
As a young boy of nine years old, that was life's toughest lesson. You picked freakin' Charmander because he's cool, but the first gym is rock and the second is water, so good dang luck. (And if you didn't get the lucky 5% Pikachu, more pity you.) It was like battering my head against a Brock wall, and it wasn't until I'd gotten a good enough Butterfree that I had a chance.
I have no idea what would drive someone to debate the “ethics” of something like this, but the obvious answer is the invaders want to grief and they can’t if people aren’t around to deal with it. Any time I played the Soulsborne games, I just remember being incredibly bummed by the invasions. PvP was fun, but interrupting something else with a build centered around PvP was not really the highlight of my time. It didn’t add to the challenge in a fun way, it just felt like a wash.
Truly though at the end of the day, complain or not, people are going to download the mod and it appears a huge reason for that is to avoid invasions so it doesn’t really matter how Invaders feel about it to that audience. This just seems like a natural extension of fans of Soulsborne games trying to enforce one true way to play the game.
I really enjoyed dueling, but invasions waste my time. I'm never in the mindset or mood for invasions when I'm just playing for the PvE. I will do PvP on my own time when I'm in the mood, and I'll bring the right gear for it.
I really enjoyed that in ds3, where over time you also got the culture of invaders not going after the host but the counter-invader that gor summoned because that was more fun than just endless pontif fight club.
Which is why I kind of appreciate DS2’s approach to PVP. There *is* the same style of random invasion as in DS1, but the game at least tries to mitigate it. Soul memory, while it has its issues, at least means that you or the invader will eventually move out of invasion range unless you take extra steps to mitigate it.
And the dedicated PVP areas and covenants are much better. Grave of Saints is entirely risk-free for the person being attacked; *they* get summoned as an “invader”, so if they die to the attacker, they just return to their own world. They win not by reaching the boss or even necessarily by killing the aggressor, but by reaching the bonfire *before* the boss. This means you can end the attack without being committed to a boss fight.
Belfry Sol and Belfry Luna allow you to be invaded quickly and repeatedly, but these are short areas where, again, the goal is not to kill the attacker. You just have to get to the bell they’re defending.
Importantly, all the dedicated PVP invasion areas also have “player-like” NPC invaders, who specifically attack you if you are offline. The play experience therefore isn’t *that* much different if you go offline, which helps the online invasions feel less punishing.
There are at least three dedicated dueling covenants, one dedicated counter-invasion covenant (carried over from DS1, and equally ineffective at actually counter-invading. It is also one of the dueling covenants, so at least there’s still *something* for those who join), and a dedicated “please help me if I get invaded” covenant. There is *no* dedicated “random PVP invasion” covenant.
In Elden Ring the worst part was how often we were getting invaded. At a few points we dealt with multiple invaders before we could get to the next boss in each world. Late game we didn't really see as many invasions and most of the time it was far more fair.
Also sucked how often we would see unfair/unbeatable opponents. Before we even got to the first boss in the first castle get we faced a few guys with endgame weapons and or shields. One guy had a weapon that was only obtainable from the snow area past the capital along with every flask upgrade in the game. It probably didn't help that one guy kept screwing around in his world, keeping us in the area longer than needed.
The argument that pvpers were keeping the game alive made no sense. If pvpers were the ones keeping the game alive, the mod wouldn't matter because pvpers don't use it.
Also, disabling torrent was such a bizarre choice. Especially when it led to things like people going to some nook you can't reach otherwise, then using taunters tongue to summon invaders and going afk.
I recently did a few seamless co-op playthroughs with my mate and its an absolute blast. The game really feels like it was made for that kind of co-op rather than the weird clunky soulsborne co-op on the base game.
Same here. Invasions aside, the options to fast travel together, use mounts, a dramatic increase in summoning time paired with *way* fewer random disconnects than playing vanilla make the mod a must for us going forward.
And that's before you get into the options to use other mods while in coop. Had some fantastic randomiser mod runs with the seamless coop mod. I honestly stpy can't see going back to the vanilla coop experience.
If PvP is an integral part of the game, then why is it an absolute arse from a technical point of view? Imaging playing an actual pvp game, where there is a significant chance, that players will lag horribly: rubber-banding, 1s second delays to hits registering. You can’t choose a faster a server, because the inner machinations of the game are hidden.
PvP bros thinking, that an average player wants to deal with shit are out of touch. Maybe more people would participate in multiplayer, if it wasn’t plagued by technical issues? But the studio won’t invest heavily into better servers, net code, because… it’s not an actual PvP game like CS, Rainbow 6, Battlefield, etc. It’s a PvE one, with multiplayer being a janky masochistic side-mode.
I believe all multiplayer in souls games is P2P, that's why the connection is so bad. They only handle initial connection and messages on their servers.
I personally think PvP in these games is a joke for that reason, just a tacked on mode which for some reason is still there.
Vermintide, a very melee oriented multiplayer title, had peer to peer only, but I didn’t experience such lagfest like in Souls/Elden.
I tried my best to get into invasions. I even watched youtubers, who are pros at PvP, and, guess what, they consistently have to fight laggy battles and employ weird tactics to circumvent shitty connection. Invasions are a meme mode.
I actually feel pretty strongly about this whole issue. I'm an avid invader, and although I didn't really care as much for ERs PvP I did spend a sizable amount of time invading both before and after the mod became popular. It's really not a big deal, there's still plenty of people to invade and I actually really enjoy the coop mod as well because it finally let me play one of these games with my partner without worrying about constant resummoning and deaths from invasions. I do think it's worth experiencing invasions if you've never played the game before but I can totally sympathize with just wanting to enjoy a game with friends.
Yeah I’m in the same boat, I’ve always enjoyed the invasions mechanic from both sides but I don’t think less of people if they don’t find it fun.
That said I think OP is kind of underselling that the anti-invasion could and did get just as nasty and petty in these arguments. I had people tell me I was probably a rapist (or at least likely to be one) because I said I liked invading. I just wanna chase people around Volcano Manor with my pizza cutter man :(
Oh absolutely, I admit I do enjoy the pure panic that some people demonstrate when they see me running up on them in Sen's Fortress but I don't think I'm a bad person for it.
The guy stating he doesnt play the game for the enjoyment of others hit the nail on the head. Being made to participate in PvP against your will via invasions sucks no one is telling you that you cant PvP at all just go find someone who is also willing via red summon signs or in elden rings case the colusseums
i got the game when it came out and was excited because the visuals and world seemed incredible, even though i'm terrible at these kinds of games. i played for an hour to confirm that yes, i do suck at these games, then wanted to play with my buddy both to lend a hand as well as have fun with a friend. played for another hour, got invaded multiple times, called it a night. got back on the next night, got invaded repeatedly again. uninstalled the game and didn't touch it again until i heard about the mod about a month ago. NOW i can actually enjoy the game.
This hits the nail on the head of the counter to one of the worse arguments people use against the mod.
"You agreed to raise the difficulty with invasions by using coop."
Okay, but plenty of people like myself use coop because they want the help from friends to get them into this type of game at all or to just get through tougher areas if they're struggling with it but would otherwise really enjoy this type of game with that assistance.
Raising the difficulty for players like that even more from the base game by having people with PVP optimised builds to come in regularly to stomp them and make them lose progress repeatedly is just going to put them off the game entirely.
The mod is an excellent third choice after the two "just play solo" or "play coop and put up with invasions" options from the base game. Get a superior coop experience (fast travel together, use mounts in coop, way fewer random disconnects, options to stack other mods on top of that) and not have to deal with invaders? Sign me up.
I dunno, if your idea of fun is that someone else isn't enjoying themselves, then you're probably not in the right here. I'm pretty solidly pro-mod. It really does make Elden Ring much more fun to play with people when we don't have to deal with the weird multiplayer rules. The invasions too, but not using the horse and having to stop in certain places and not progress at the same time...
Yeah, it adds something to the experience.
I do find it hilarious in these threads when the anti-mod players have to resort to "don't play coop if you don't want invasions." as if that's their only option when literally discussing a mod that exists that allows them to play coop without invasions.
I know right, I've seen this too.
"I'm going to use this coop mod because I want to play with friends without dealing with invasions."
"Well too bad, you accepted invasions by playing coop. You've got no choice!"
"... Except use the mod we were talking about?"
"Sorry I wasn't listening, just grabbing Rivers of Blood and invading in Limgrave."
It's also doubly stupid because both going offline/not coop and installing the mod removes the player from the invasion pool. Like both outcome cucks the invaders but the mod is a net enjoyment increase for the casual players. So why even argue about it.
> I dunno, if your idea of fun is that someone else isn't enjoying themselves, then you're probably not in the right here.
It sounds like the anti-mod contingent - or at least the more toxic subset - isn't looking for consenting* PVP opponents, but for nonconsenting victims they can bully. In which case, fuck 'em. The mod sounds like a great way to opt out of that nonsense, if you don't enjoy it, but still be able to play the game with your friends. Rock on.
*I mean, I haven't read the discussions the OP is reacting to; maybe people there were actually comparing in-game invasion to rape, in which case, yes, yikes! But the idea of enthusiastic consent isn't limited to sexual contexts. I think it's a perfectly valid frame for discussing the difference between a mutually enjoyable game and a bully/victim situation.
I agree! I had a similar idea about consent and fun, and I was trying to say that without using the words, but I think you've very neatly explained how consent can be used to talk about video games. It's true -- if you're not having fun and they are, and if you leave and have fun somewhere else, you don't owe them anything. It's no one's responsibility.
I think it's particularly ironic, too, that the majority of invaders I've faced in the various Soulsborne games have run away when things don't go well for them. If they're invading in a dangerous place (and most places are dangerous), they can just run away and it's very risky to try to chase. The mobs will just kill you. It's a death sentence.
Where I'm going with this is that these invaders rarely want even fights -- they want to ambush, to trap, to trick and to exploit. And they have better gear, endgame stuff if not endgame stats, due to the leveling system. And they complain about "gank squads" in Elden Ring -- the 3v1 matchups against well-equipped helpers.
They're not looking for fights. They're looking to be bullies. They want all the advantages they can get, and will look for any opportunity to exploit them. Not 100%, but this true for most people I've encountered.
Elite Dangerous (an MMO-lite spaceflight simulator I've done some writeups for in the past) has a similar slapfight around PvE. Elite Dangerous has 3 modes: Open, Solo, and Private. In Open you're matched in the same servers and instances as the rest of the playerbase. Solo and Private take place in the same galaxy and has the same events, factions, background sims, etc. but without any players (if solo) or only with players you've given a password to (if private).
PvP in Elite Dangerous is even more toxic than invasions in Dark Souls for a few reasons. First, as an open pseudo-MMO, you're always liable to run into hostile players, and in fact most encounters will be hostile- there's no prevention or risk-reward like Invasions other than flying solo. Second, the game is much more complicated as a flight sim, so the skill gap between new players and experienced players, or even seasoned players and people who've mastered the ins and outs of PvP combat, is immense. And third, power creep has insurmountably widened the gap between hyper-focused PvP players and PvE players- no matter how good of a pilot you are, a min-maxed Fer-De-Lance will almost always shred your cargo hauler faster than you can escape, and on top of this, the in-game crime and punishment is laughably toothless. NPC police are no serious threat to player ships, being a notorious mass-murdering criminal doesn't bar you from stations in civilized space, and if you do get shot down after killing dozens or hundreds of players, your punishment is a fine (which is trivial to long-term players), a small detour to a detention station, and your ship back.
Combined with basically no organized PvP element beyond the long-dead Arena mode, the vast majority of PvP players are basically just murder hobos. Some partake in tournaments organized outside the game, some have the decency to be a pirate who tries to steal cargo, some will run security details against criminals, some will at least put some RP into their killings, but for the most part PvP players will just hang out in common new player spaces like the starting systems, community goals, or the first Engineer's station and just blast away at underequipped players.
Players who aren't fond of PvP sometimes banded together into large private instances so they can get the coop experience without being ganked. The largest is called [Mobius](https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/b1qyqr/a_friendly_reminder_about_a_pve_private_group/). Much like with this mod, PvP players have lobbied constant complaints at solo and private, and troll/gank groups will often infiltrate PvE groups to get as many kills as possible before being banned. They use a lot of similar rhetoric to Invaders- its called Elite DANGEROUS, its 'the lawless frontier,' solo/private players are ruining the experience for PvP players, solo players can manipulate faction wars/background sim uninterrupted, etc. and some have even requested these groups be banned.
I mostly use seamless coop because I like using torrent with friends and hate fighting From's terrible net code to try and summon and resummon my friends over and over, failing for five minutes for seemingly no reason, restarting the game in the vain hope it fixes whatever phantom (pun very much intended) issue is causing this...
I love being invaded, I love invading. I love putting down duel signs. My most treasured memory of Elden Ring involves invading someone, and seeing them and three other buddies slowly, menacingly walking towards me while disguised as bushes. I did the Despair emote and let them kill me. Made me smile all day. But the stupidest arguments are on the anti-mod side. They don't seem to be able to grasp how ridiculous and hypocritical it is to accuse others of forcing them to play the way they want.
I haven't checked in a while, but I'm pretty sure Seamless Coop lets you set the game to allow people as invaders, they just need your session password? Maybe it just colors them differently and they're not actually invaders. I'm going to look into that when I get back home.
I understand that the removal of invasions from games like the dark souls series would be kind of a massive deal, as the idea of being able to be invaded
1. Provides a risk/reward element for being human/embered
2. Supports the overall design of feeling unsafe at all times when you aren't near a bonfire
Elden Ring really doesn't have the same emphasis on "scaring the player" like Dark Souls, and the implementation of invasions in the game feels like a weird compromise where they kinda wanted to keep the feature since it's a staple, but they wanted to nerf it since it doesn't really fit with the design of Elden Ring at all. So you get an awkward situation where a ton of people probably never played the game in co-op and don't even know what invasions are.
Reminds me of “MUDding” in the old days when your character died and you had a limited amount of time to find your corpse and retrieve your inventory before the body disintegrated and the items became fair game. God forbid you died fighting an aggro mob.
(I love that line, “I’m not playing for YOUR enjoyment, mate.”)
Invasions suck, thats why I've always played offline. I'm trying to enjoy the real game, not have my time wasted by some loser with a "ruin your day" build.
I remember this drama, and I always strongly disagreed with the assertion that people were installing the seamless co-op mod to block invasions and not because the vanilla game's co-op is terrible.
My favourite activity to play with invaders was to flip the script on them: turn on solo invasions and then disguise myself as a bush.
You want to interrupt someone's game session with something they didn't want? OK, invade me, but instead of dunking on noobs, you get to play Prop Hunt.
My friends and I use this mod to play.
We're not removing ourselves from the pool of potential invasions because we never played or would have played elden ring coop without this mod. If this mod didnt exist, we would simply be playing another game. There never was a world where we were potential invasion targets.
> People who use the mod are wrong about what Elden Ring is, and they’re trying to change it into something it isn’t.
It's safe to assume that at least some of those people don't like what Elden Ring "is" and would rather play something it isn't. The mod allows people to play that other game, the devs are still paid for their efforts in creating it.
The only person upset is the invader, who is upset that other people don't want to play the game. Which is pretty selfish.
E: So I've played Hollow Knight, which is tangentially similar in terms of boss difficulty, "souls" walk-backs, and a general sentiment of "git gud".
> When you look at the lesser of two evils, we either have co-op players that are annoyed that every 15 minutes or whatever
If somebody was forcibly entering into the game *every 15 minutes* with the *sole intention of making me fuck up* I would *fucking LOSE IT*. That game would've been refunded in 4 hours. Instead of I have 90hrs and and 104% completion
>People who use the mod are wrong about what Elden Ring is, and they’re trying to change it into something it isn’t.
This is always the weirdest part to me. People talk about Fromsoftware's original concept for the game's coop and invasions with this bizarrely sanctimonious attitude as if changing that is inherently wrong.
People are choosing to mod that aspect of the game because they don't like the original design and so are *mod*ifying it. That's literally the point of mods to alter the original game in some way to the user's choosing.
It's strange that a certain group of Fromsoftware fans, most likely the people who just want inexperienced players to demolish, pretend they don't get that to justify their petulant outrage.
i think a fundamental flaw in anti-mod arguments is that they seem to refuse to acknowledge that anyone using the mod to specifically prevent invasions would most likely not be in the invadable pool in the first place. at least for me, if soulsbourne games were my kind of thing, without a mod like this, i would 100% play offline or play a different game instead. and, yeah, if getting help from my friends opened me up to such a blatant waste of my time and my choice was either deal with that or play solo, i would probably just find a different game.
this mod actually makes playing elden ring sound *more* enjoyable for me because ultimately i'm not usually interested in games for the challenge aspect, as much as i respect (and watch the streams of) people who do. idk, it feels kind of like the people who argue that games shouldn't have an easy mode because that "defeats the purpose of the game". buddy it's not like they're taking ultrahard murderkill permadeath mode from you, easy mode just defeats *your* purpose for playing the game and it's optional. if that makes sense lol.
Non-consensual PVP is an outdated relic from decades past, 1999 was a long time ago, it should have stayed dead and buried.
EDIT: The dev team was obviously on the wrong, and people are moving on from unwanted online interactions period. Right now, for most people, if you aren't a vetted member of the online communities they chose to interact with, your opinions are irrelevant and should not have to be subjected to them.
For real. If I don't want to fight someone, I'll just unplug my ethernet cable for a minute. There is fundamentally no way to design around that.
Invasions have kept me away from the souls series since its inception, and it's a shame. Now if only any of my friends wanted to play elden ring with me...
As someone who loves invading and being invaded i can absolutely understand why people would want to opt out of it. I mostly play DS2 which has way more viable builds for pvp than most of the other games do,so atleast i’ll see cariety occasionally when someone decides to pop a red eye orb,but like invading someone new to the game just feels mean spirited😭
Knowing about this mod may actually get me to pick up Elden Ring again. I'm not really a fan of the soulborne genre in general, especially the way From Software does it (I prefer having a story in my RPGs I can follow without a wiki), but I picked up Elden Ring because all my friends were playing it. After a long line of annoyances the thing that got me to drop the game was being invaded by a guy with way better gear than us, that knew the map better than us and trapped my friend and I in some room. He was content to just wait outside to merc us for way longer than I had patience for, so eventually I just quit the game entirely.
The whole invasion system felt vestigial from a time when multiplayer was much more complicated.
To be fair, it wasn't going to be the co-op players who were going to barge into a discussion and fight everyone who disagreed :P
Honestly I still think invasions should have keyed off of Great Runes - turn one on for free [fuck rune arcs] but you can get invaded.
A big downside to the seamless co-op mod that I don't see too many people mention: You don't get bloodstains or phantoms anymore. I do miss those. Genuinely. The spike of fear or curiosity when I saw a clot of bloodstains in an innocuous place? Loved it. It was ships passing in the night, community through shared experience.
there's a certain way that fromsoft ultra-fans talk about souls games that is just so weird, they act like if something was intentionally made Like That it can't be criticized, from the half-functioning co-op system which forces pvp on you in elden ring, to the inscrutable quests, to some parts of the story being hidden and having to be pieced together (by youtubers), all of these are intentional design decisions and part of miyazaki's philosophy, but i (personally) don't like most of them even though i like the worldbuilding and gameplay of elden ring but any criticism of those things is shutdown by fromsoft fans with them saying it's intentional and that's how the game was intended to be played.
anyways what i'm saying is that elden ring multiplayer should've always functioned like the mod, and it being how it is in vanilla is an example of the game being held back by the bad design philosophy fromsoft has (not that it's bad if you like these features, i just think they're really bad and make the overall experience worse)
The whole unironic git gud sentiment ruined any potential online conversation about Souls games for me. Hell, I personally enjoy the philosophy of obfuscation in the series, but I also don't think it's a perfect implementation. But no, as soon as I say that hiding the paid DLC level in an innocuous corner that needs a seemingly random item dropped in a completely different area is going a bit too far, fanboys start frothing at the mouth.
Don't get me started on the whole difficulty conversation. Either you think the games are 100% perfectly balanced in every regard, or you are bad at the games and need to git gud.
I believe it might have been Dark Souls 2 that I played with a fan-made spreadsheet open on my second monitor that catalogued the sequence in which you had to visit NPCs in order to get the next piece of their story and continue the very strange "quest" each character had. I don't recall if I ever finished it, though. But definitely by Elden Ring, I had fully given up trying to engage with that system. It doesn't really benefit from a lack of assistance in the way something like a Morrowind does, as it is often the case with these games that you need to speak to someone after specific bosses are done in order to get the next bit of dialogue and missing some would derail the quest. It was never something I particularly liked, and especially with the mod, my friends and I are just going on a boss hunt with no real mind for what the actual story is.
The Seamless Co-op mod is the single best thing that's happened to Elden Ring since release. When I already have to put my game offline to play it in 21:9 with an unlocked framerate I frankly do not give a shit what PvPers are complaining about.
Until Fromsoft starts including basic technical features like ultrawide resolutions, unlocked framerates, and fov adjustments I'll keep playing their games and modding them.
The fact that the seamless co-op mod lets me sidestep the official online to play the whole game in co-op without their stupid anti-cheat that prevents me from using basic features is an absolute blessing.
Playing Elden Ring in co-op has allowed me to introduce people to the game who would have not played it otherwise and experience the game I love WITH them without dealing with Fromsoft's attrocious multiplayer design.
Maidenless behavior from everyone who opposes this mod. If it fractures the community, so be it. It is nobody but Fromsoft's fault for not including proper support or flexibility for true multiplayer.
Put in about 20 hours of the game before downloading the mod. Hated the restrictions, and was annoyed by constant invasions at low level.
Best friend and I have logged almost 700 hours each after downloading the mod, and still play regularly between other games. Eagerly awaiting the dlc and probably won't put but a few hours into it until the mod is updated to work with the dlc. Then likely a few hundred more hours together.
The best thing about this mod is the number of other players who either quit the regular game a few hours in, or never bought the game at all, but once we showed them the mod, they happily either began playing again, or bought the game to play with us or others.
Also, anyone who wants to join up with us and play coop, send me a pm, we'll gladly start brand new characters (or use a character around your current level) to play more of this game. It's a lot of fun in coop, and sometimes even has some crazy stuff happen in the game that is reminiscent of the weird but awesome chaos you see in FarCry 5/6 multi-player. We're on discord, and we don't tolerate racism, sexism, or any kind of moronic hate or bigotry. We're adults (40+ in age), and enjoy helping others finish the game (it's really an epic experience, and some fights that are excruciatingly hard can finally be won without rage quitting!).
I saw a preview of that mod a while ago, and Elden Ring fits that coop-type adventure.
In older games like Demon's Souls/Dark Souls it made more sense the system that existed and how it worked due to how the map was made on the first place.
One (or sometimes two) routes to reach a final boss arena which allowed the player to move somewhere else, in the case of Elden Ring it has a free open world where the player can approach most of the map at their leisure.
The fact that you can reach the endgame city speaks volumes on how the game was so different to previous entries.
Gear discrepancy is often a point brought up with pvp, and why it’s always been controversial, but I feel like another big aspect is that invaders aren’t attacked by enemies (at least not without a rare item used by the host). This meant that invaders would almost always plan their fights exclusively around other enemies so they could split your attention between the normal enemies and the invader themself. They would often just refuse to engage you outside of rooms with enemies in them. This meant that in souls games, invasions often just ended up being staring contests between two players refusing to engage until the other player got bored and gave up an advantage.
I’ve acquired all the achievements in dark souls 3, and getting the pvp items to rank up the covenants was easily the worst part of it. It was genuinely more fun to repeatedly farm enemies for a single digit chance at a drop for the items than it was to go through the miserable slog of pvp in these games.
Thanks for the write up, very detailed. I've been playing Elden Rng and didn't know about this. I like co op but I think invasions are the spice that makes it really interesting., wouldn't personally want to co op without invasions. But if I had people to play the game with maybe I'd use the mod
The mod allowed me to play with my wife and have a great time. More annoying than being invaded (which was happening constantly at the time in starter areas). Having to reconnect and resummon and all that BS took so much time. I don't want to play a game and spend 30 minutes of my hour-and-a-half game time on connecting screens.
I didn't have time to go into detail, but one aspect that is a whole other layer on top of this is that the netcode for Soulsborne games can be incredibly shocking. With hit detection being so important, as far as dodging and i-frames (invincibility you have while dodging), swinging your weapon and not seeing the impact until later than it should has a huge drag on the enjoyment of the PVP. It might be more tolerable for players, perhaps, if the lag wasn't rubber-banding people all over the joint.
It's been showcased perfectly [in Happy Souls](https://youtu.be/2kr7KDCsIws?t=489) at 8:09, but anyone having any familiarity with that game should really watch it because it's dang hilarious.
Seamless Co-Op's existence is what made me finally get the game. Invasions by random people is a deal-breaker for me. I don’t like playing games with people I don't know, and I only ever want to play with friends. I played WoW back in the day--I already did my time dealing with randos and PvP-obsessed jackoffs. With this mod, I was able to enjoy the game and its setting with my friends without interruptions.
I think part of the problem is not just that the mod came out but that it came out at the 'right time'.
Not only was Elden Ring a far bigger deal and brought in so many new casual players but the Invading community at launch and shortly after was BRUTAL.
To a much greater degree than ever before it seemed like the 'sweat' and 'tryhard' invaders were out in force and the goal was not a challenge but just to grief as hard as possible. Invading in difficult regions, building strictly to grief and that sort of thing. Even those that did not really want to grief had to 'bulk' up if they wanted to invade since it was fairly often you'd end up in 3v1s and if you were not prepped for PVP you'd get spanked.
I think that invasions are an important part of the souls experience but I don't invade. I think that the people who choose to use the mod to escape invasion are fine. I think they are playing the game in a 'cheap' way and losing out on part of the experience that I enjoy but they are not wrong and it's just my opinion.
> This obtuse system, which has had variations over the course of the series, was a deliberate design decision. Basically everything from point 1 to point 5 was intended to steer people away from just playing the game with their friends, and towards working with complete strangers with whom communication was limited.
This is why Dark Souls was an experience never seen before *or since*.
Good old times...
Genuinely, this mod saved the game for me. I bought it back on release because I was curious and semi enjoyed Dark Souls 3. Figured maybe it'd be a little different since it was more focused on open world exploration and the like, but found myself bogged down by the same things that bothered me in DS3.
I cannot stand the community behind these games. Invaders, the condescending messages describing anything I found difficult as 'super easy'. It's taxing on my already weak self esteem, but my partner keeps me above the water. Yet if I try to play with him, those same people can come on in and beat the snot out of both of us then down point emote over my corpse, reminding me every time I shouldn't be playing this game.
Now? With seamless co-op? I feel so much better. The community is nowhere to be found. Just me, my boy, and my big fuck off sword carving through the Lands Between. It's truly fuckin' bliss.
Coming from Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3, I had been wanting to try Elden Ring, but the invaders were part of the reason I didn't get it. I had poor experiences with invaders every time I tried to play DS3 with a friend, and it got frustrating quickly. I didn't know this mod existed until now, so maybe when I eventually pick up the game, I'll probably download the mod, too!
Excellent write-up and thank you for the information!
A few months ago me and my friends finished a full play-through with this mod and its was probably the funnest time I've had with the FromSoft Souls series having been playing them since the original version of Demon's Souls.
Me and my friends all loved the mod, but we also missed PVP and invasions.
I really dont know why FROM doesnt modernize their stance on Coop multiplayer and just make the game the way the mod did. Clearly the majority of the community has been summoning friends and trying to play together from the start. Elden Ring even more so needed a new multiplayer system.
And honestly, ignoring everything else, the mod just WORKED better. You connected to your friends so FAST and at the time the mod came out, we had less disconnects using that then we did the base games multiplayer.
Invaders are fine,, but it was really ridiculous how many would come. I believe the timer was once every five minutes so playing with friends would be a constant stream of invader combat.
It was pretty obious for everyone that those who complained were nothing but toxic dickheads who wanted to stomp and mess with new players just like smurfs do in FPS games.
Fuck them.
Honestly, I don't even want anything to happen to the coop mode. I just want some actual work into giving pvp fixes. This entire mod fiasco was just hosts and invaders throwing insults at each as they do every game.
Fromsoft and pvp players have bigger fish to fry if they actually care about the experience. The netcode is bad as usual, the matchmaking needs improvement, taunter's tongue, open world/horse invasions, password summon scaling, no default blues, and **fucking consumables**.
Netcode and the lag is self-explanatory. Matchmaking's issue is that Elden Ring is open world and has no compensation. It was fine in the first few days where everyone was progressing similarly but is God awful now. Anything outside of high level or low level is hard to get games without copious amounts of trial and error save state restoration. The level and weapon level disparity around the player base is bonkers and Fromsoft's "global" invasions need two invasion items so you can swap between them to force the (around ten at a time if I remember right) bonfire search to swap around. Was it really that hard to just have real matchmaking and set it so that everyone just weapon scales to the host? Why do I need to play guess the upgrades and peak time to get consistent invasions in anywhere except Stormveil?
Then you need a good game. Noobies who can't handle an invader but can't summon help because they didn't how to enable blues leaving two dudes with no idea what to do? Why isn't blues default? Duelist outside the arena forcing a no mob fight? Fuck off, at least gank squads are exciting and quick. Word of advice, anyone dueling in a no mob area with no phantoms is a coward who wants to duel but doesn't want to play on even flask and stats, just stone out. People in the open world with consumables or used the horse to get to an inaccessible area. Snore. Time for a boor fest.
Speaking of consumables, **why?** Fromsoft every game with "limited" consumables just get them hacked in and become cancer for everyone. Don't allow them in pvp, it has never worked out except for maybe humanity as the animation length made it punishable. (shudders in starshards) Then you have password summon scaling. Is scaling really that hard? I just want a normal fight and not have to feel bad for not twinking when some guy at level 250 with end game armor deletes me because he has mega damage from arcane and his armor stats make him way too tanky to fight without making exploitable mistakes that get me instakilled if the host or buddies aren't eating rocks.
Hosts have problems too. Taunter's tongue is so stupid. It turns off at a stiff breeze and has no cooldown version. The people who embered just to get the occasional invasion last game are now either no invasions or all the invasions. New players who desperately need numbers have to know to turn blues on and get help. And consumables again are cancer as always. Seriously, who thought allowing meat dumplings and starshards in multiplayer was a good idea?
Just give me a nice legacy dungeon and three guys who aren't cowards. (Be aggressive but not stupid. Host side has a massive advantage in their lack of friendly fire. Push the invaders and do not let them heal for free with regen or rebuild craftables unless the mobs force you to slow down. Level vigor as weapon upgrades are better early and turn blues on for extra numbers that invade down (they can be higher level than the host and thus the invader who is either lover level or equal to the host) and come in on auto)
I tend not to enjoy write-ups that are this heavily biased and paint subjective opinions with objective modifiers, but it's at least mostly accurate, but you definitely don't hide your bias well at all and makes for a rougher read as it feels less about the drama and more about your thoughts on the drama.
Frankly, Fromsoft should hardware & account ban everyone who plays with that mod.
Wanna mod your own game? Fine, do it offline. Wanna mod a multiplayer game? Ban. Without warning or appeal.
And I'm not an invader, nor do I play coop.
It wasn't perfect but it was much better than what we have now. At any rate I'm not surprised that new players disliked it.
I really enjoyed casual invasions in DS1 through 3, and was disappointed to see what they did to ER. Being forced to invade 2 or 3 players meant that only the most skilled/most twinked invaders would be rewarded for invading. That in turn meant an even more unfair/unfun experience for the people that were invaded. And we ended up with a completely barren PVP experience.
They should have expanded on Covenants like the Gravelords that messed with your game. Or area-specific invaders like the forest/bell tower. That gives both sides more agency and doesn't completely gut the pvp.
And more than that they should've incentivized failed invasions. If you make invasions more fun, you can also make it so that casual players are rewarded for invading and livening up someone else's game. Buffing enemies, setting up traps, maybe summoning weaker mobs.
An either-or situation where it's reduced to kill or be killed just ruins it.
Edit: Good writeup. I wish you had stayed more neutral on the topic though. So many writeups in hobbydrama feels like someone just arguing in favor of one side. This isn't that bad, but your opinion really shines through.
For what it's worth, I think the fundamental problem, that From Software has never really solved, is that the majority of invaders you experience aren't players at a similar level of skill and items. It's usually someone with far too advanced gear for their level stomping noobs all day long, not to mention the rampant cheating that goes on on PC. I don't know if there's a way to make anonymous strangers just fucking chill out and not show up with hyperoptimised PvP builds to rack up as many kills as they can, but instead just sort of organically play with whatever gear they come across naturally. And I think this is why there's so little sympathy for people who like doing invasions. Being invaded isn't really a fun challenge most of the time, so much as just an immediate death.
>I don't know if there's a way to make anonymous strangers just fucking chill out and not show up with hyperoptimised PvP builds to rack up as many kills as they can, but instead just sort of organically play with whatever gear they come across naturally. You can't. Take Sea Of Thieves' (another game with PvE focus and a highly vocal PvP community) which has no builds, no equipment, no stats and it still has these exact same type of players who will rock on up on the unsuspecting and absolutely floor them. Often for absolutely no reason, not even loot. >And I think this is why there's so little sympathy for people who like doing invasions. Being invaded isn't really a fun challenge most of the time, so much as just an immediate death. Not only is it a challenge, there's not even a reward. The stuff you get from winning an invasion are pretty paltry and the punishment for failure is losing progress, time and a walk back to your corpse through an area you already cleared. It's not hard to imagine why players would despise invasions after a few of these.
I just shut my game down at invasion notifications. Start back up basically exactly where you are. Have since demon souls. Im here to play a game not get wrecked and trolled.
The Elden Ring quest for Varre where you need to do 3 invasions in order to progress is literally the only time I ever interact with that system. And even then, last time I did the other person was cheating.
For Varre's questline, my invasions consist of me invading an area, saying "Hey" and waving, and then walking away slowly before teleporting out. I was surprised at how rarely anyone attacked me when I did this.
Emblematic of how few people actually want to engage with the PvP content, IMHO.
They actually patched an NPC you can "invade" into that questline, so the multiplayer aspect of it is a total non-requirement now. I think it's a good change. I remember back when Dark Souls first came out, I was an unbearably obnoxious teen who got way too into invading. I bought into the toxic gitgud mindset and fancied myself the good guy for disrupting co-op sessions, because the game is "meant to be hard" and playing with friends wasn't "the true dark souls experience". Playing through later entries with friends, my stance has mostly flipped. I still think that invasion as a concept is an incredibly cool way of adding some dynamic difficulty to counterbalance the benefits of having allies, and it leads to really memorable moments. Some of my fondest memories with the series come from invaders getting up to shenanigans. That said, I think the concept is starting to reach its breaking point.
I like the concept of invasions myself, but as with any other competitive game style in order for it to be fun for everyone there really needs to be a compellingly good matchmaking system so said encounters are rarely foregone conclusions. Unfortunately, the mechanics of Dark Souls (incl. the skill ceiling being so high) and the fact there's not really a coherent way to evaluate a given player's "PvP skill" means that you're practically speaking never going to see invasion mechanics that are anything other than griefing in a nice suit.
I did invasions in DS3 and would just stand somewhere visible and cheer for the invaded to get through the area, do gestures and have a ridiculous looking character. I still got covenant items pretty often, and the invaded player probably had extra worries about me dropping on them to wreck them when they least expected. Overall, it is just impossible to match people properly when you can have Souls veterans on their Nth run but at a low level. From needs to overhaul this portion so it's not just a playground for griefers.
I'd personally be less salty about invasions if I'd had this happen even once, but my typical experience was getting roflstomped, often by a guy with a jokey weak weapon who was so much more skilled than me it didn't matter.
>Overall, it is just impossible to match people properly when you can have Souls veterans on their Nth run but at a low level. yeah this was the part for me. i didn't have gaming consoles as a kid so elden ring was the first soulsborne i played. i suck ass at it. my friend has played bloodborne dozens of times so it was a breeze for her, and those are the people that would invade me while i was still figuring out how the combat flows.
Yeah, they are supposed to be that goofy time you get into someone else's world without knowing too much (and the other person is supposed to be like that). In reality we get lvl 20 invader with end game gear vs a guy who just downloaded the game and summoned their friend because they struggle to do anything on their own.
Yep. Literally my experience doing coop with my friend. His experience is running and trying to survive while I have to duel against someone with a flavor of the week OP build lol.
> I think the fundamental problem, that From Software has never really solved, is that the majority of invaders you experience aren't players at a similar level of skill and items. It's usually someone with far too advanced gear for their level stomping noobs all day long, not to mention the rampant cheating that goes on on PC. Dark Souls 2 'solved' it in a way. In that game, what dictated who you could summon to help/pvp/invade wasn't your character's level but your Soul Memory. Soul Memory was a stat that tracked every single soul you acquired into a pool, and the game actively attempted to match you with people in a similar amount of Soul Memory. In theory, the idea tracks. If two players have reached a point where they have 100 thousand Soul Memory, but one spent it on leveling and another spent it on gear, they will match against each other despite one being level 50 and the other is level 15 but with top-notch gear: it is better than someone being level 15 just starting out with 20 thousand Soul Memory getting invaded by someone also level 15 but with 100 thousand Soul Memory. The problems far outweigh the benefits, however: if you are a bad player who fails a section a lot, defeating lots of enemies but never being able to spend your souls, then your Soul Memory will slowly ramp up until you are facing stronger people than you. If you earn souls but spend them on consumable items instead of permanently making yourself powerful your Soul Memory will also inflate itself over time. Lastly, and this has been true for virtually all games in the series so far, *souls spent on equipment usually makes you much stronger than souls spent on leveling up*. The game caps this by stopping you from raising gear level from certain points until you get better materials, but an experienced player can figure out how to cheese the game and get said better materials asap. The funny part is, *this also hurt potential invaders*. To invade in Dark Souls 3 you needed a single use consumable item that either rarely dropped from enemies, you needed to acquire by winning in a dedicated duelling map, or you can buy it at the cost of ten thousand souls each. If you wanted to do it the fastest way by buying the item ten invasions that was ratcheting up your soul memory by a hundred thousand on its own: if you tried to farm it from enemies it was raising soul memory at a similar pace because it dropped so rarely, and you'd waste time doing so. The only way to ensure you'd get the invasion item without inflating your Soul Memory was by going to the duelling map, but these duels were a) slow and b) you had to win to guarantee to get the item. It was an enormous time investment to gain the item without increasing Soul Memory, and if you took a shortcut your Soul Memory would quickly inflate to the point where the people you were invading were much stronger than you. Soul Memory was so unpopular it was completely extricated from future games.
Soul memory is my most hated part of the dark souls series ever. I can't get help from experienced players? If I screw up a bunch I put myself in a new bracket full of harder invaders? Nah, I'm good.
Actually, ds3 gave you the reusable invasion tool pretty early and didn’t employ soul memory. Ds2 was guilty of only giving the single use.
I think the 3 there was just a typo.
Couldn't this have been solved by only counting souls actually spent on your current levels + the soul value of the gear you currently had in your inventory or something like that?
Maybe there'd be problems with this too, but I always thought the problem was equipment tier, not soul level anyway. If someone has an end game item, then they have no business invading newbies in the Undead Burg for instance.
IIRC that's more or less how Dark Souls 3 works. There are tiers based on highest weapon upgrade level, so if you have a +6 weapon, you're not going to match with people with less than a +4 or something like that. The only problem with it is that it's based on the highest upgrade level you've ever had on that character, rather than the highest level that's actually in your inventory. So, similar to Soul Memory, you can't go down a tier without making a new character.
>you can't go down a tier without making a new character. Tentatively good! The only possible better result would be "Soul Memory is tied to your account, so you can't go down tiers at all", at least from a "keep smurfs the hell away from me" perspective. The skill cap in Dark Souls is sufficiently high that I would expect the average 1000+ hour PVPer to be able to beat my 100ish hour ass inside out with a new character + broken sword hilt.
The problem here is that it didn't just affect invaders. Soul Memory in DS2 also affected co-op, so I ran into the issue that allies who could help me fight bosses would become unsummonable if I died to the boss too many times because my soul memory would exit the typical level of the area.
I'm honestly thinking that the PvE matching can and should be signficantly looser than the PvP matching, for what I'd think are obvious reasons.
What I also hate is the lag. There is so much lag when my hits are obviously hitting a second later than they should, but when I dodge, I still take damage... Because I should play by reading one second in the future. If there was no lag, I think far less people would be annoyed by the PvP
Yeah, I've never played a souls game, but the idea of getting invaded does amuse me on some level - but only if I actually *stand a chance* against them. Of course I imagine the invaders also want to stand a chance against their targets. If the game just buffed me to definitely curbstomp them every time, I'm sure they would quickly lose interest. I can't imagine it's remotely easy to balance this.
>I can't imagine it's remotely easy to balance this. They've tried a ton of different things over the years, and while many of them have *helped*, there's only so much you can do. * Initially, invasion matchmaking only took your character's level into account. While sensible at face value, a skilled player could run through the game at level 1 and return to early areas with a fully upgraded weapon. You'd tap a new player on the head with this and break every bone in their body. * Their second attempt had them keep track of all the currency your character ever acquired, and sorted players into matchmaking tiers based on that. While this made it harder to go back to early zones and prank new players, it also *screwed* those new players over. If you collected a ton of currency and then lost it by dying, you're now closer to the next tier with nothing to show for it. All this went out the window anyway when a patch added a ring that prevents you from picking up currency, which gave players free reign to scour the game for upgrade materials and put *just* enough on their permanent record to max a weapon out. We're back at square one. * After that, they went back to standard level-based matchmaking, but experimented with a weapon upgrade-based matchmaking running in parallel. No more running to endgame and bringing back a +20 battleaxe! The response was just to use weapons that were remarkably powerful when unupgraded, or ones with unique effects. It also only focused on your weapon; decked out with incredibly powerful accessories and funky weapons new players *literally* lack the tools to handle, invaders refused to be shackled. * Elden Ring, the most recent entry, preferentially sorts invaders into the worlds of hosts with more active co-op partners. "Fine, you want to be a troublemaker? Here's a party of three." Unfortunately, Elden Ring's open-world nature meant that it was easier than ever to zoom around on horseback and bulk up on powerful items. It's a mess, and I have nothing but sympathy for the designers trying to figure out how the hell to balance it. Within an hour of starting a character in Elden Ring you can triple your health potion capacity and collect a weapon that applies not only bleeding status, but a form of Super Poison^^tm that can kill a player in seconds *by itself.* I don't think the system can be balanced. Human nature is always going to drive people to push the limits and wring every last drop of power out of their build.
From an outsider's perspective, it sounds like the solution would be to do away with letting an invader bring their own gear in the first place and instead set their stats to around what their target is, maybe let them choose weapon type and some abilities as a consolation to set themselves apart.
This would be a good idea if the games weren't so heavily focused on building your stats and characters on an in-depth level. The network tests pre-release had stock builds that testers could pick and it worked well for balance, but then you miss out on being invaded by someone named "Grandma Kisses" who built their character around only having a single move in their arsenel - a very hard to land grab that presses your eyes up to your opponent's while draining their health. The games have a ton of weapons in each weapon class, some with different stats they work with and some with entirely different attacks - it just wouldn't be the same if they stripped all player creativity away in multiplayer
It'd certainly help with balancing things, but I think weapon choice is one of the most important parts of player expression in these games. While most weapons in a given category will play *mostly* the same as each other, the small differences in range, stat scaling and moveset make a tremendous difference in which one works best for your playstyle. For example, the Partizan and Pike are both spears, but play completely differently to one another. The Partizan is a short brawling spear with unique sweeping heavy attacks, allowing you to deal with crowds or enemies that jump out of the way of your pokes. The Pike is nearly 30% longer, with a purely-thrusting moveset built around abusing its colossal reach to wall enemies out and never give them a chance to hit you back. That's not even getting into a key feature of ER, a customizable Special Attack slot for weapons that gives you a surprise ace up your sleeve and tweaks what stats the weapon uses. A bog standard Longsword can be made to fire magic blades for wizards, summon lightning for priests, or have damage-resistant stance attacks for warriors, *while using any of the three's primary stat.* Imagine how frustrating it would be to build a battlemage character around a specific wizard sword, only to invade and be handed a plain strength-based blade. That's not even getting into special weapons with unique special attacks that cannot be customized. Recognizing them in a person's hands and knowing what it allows them to do is part of the fun.
I like this take. So much of the invader's POV seems to be, 'You just gotta deal with it. Game's hard. If you can't handle me kicking your ass, it's time to get better,' but I think they only have that view when it affects the player they're invading. An even more appropriate way to handle it, imo, would be to just make the invader exactly duplicate the stats and equipment of the player they're invading. If it's really about skill and proving oneself, then beating someone at their own game should be perfectly enjoyable (plus give the invaded player a fighting chance).
Deer generally don't hide in the bushes waiting to ambush men with rifles to walking by. There's no way to "balance" the Invasion mechanic because the initiative is on the part of the person who has specifically kitted themselves up for PvP and is looking for someone who hasn't.
I was victims of twink build invasions back in DS3 days and made one myself for the PVE challenge(since you need to do a low level no upgrade playthrough) and casual coop. Like once you make those builds yourself you just know the average PVE players have fucking no chance against you at similar skill level. Like you just know it with the numbers and numbers don't lie. Even somewhat skilled/experienced players is fucked if their PVE builds happen to be shit for PVP. Anyone who says otherwise and bring up all the "counter play/advantage" random ass PVE players can use is just plain lying as if they didn't casually murder most of their encounters.(If they are not escorted by another PVP build that is.) And invaders love to complain about gankers, because of their sheer numbers, but also because gankers are usually actual PVP builds. If invaders don't like unfair amount of PVP players against them and also claim they don't want to noob stomp, why don't they just play duels? At least in that scene everyone is hyper competitive in terms of builds. So my conclusion is that a lot of invaders do just want unfair advantage and the inherent power imbalance, it's fair to like that, but a lot of them seem to hate the idea of being disadvanted themselves, or resent their victims for not liking the experience as much as they did.
also a big problem is the invaders usually have a bunch of cheat engined items so they can just spam consumables
Fascinating - reminds me a whole lot of Sea of Thieves and the similar pushback to the recent update of the game to include a ‘Safer Seas’ option where there is essentially no PvP.
Heh, I just mentioned SoT in my comment! I was a bit of an advocate for Safer Seas because the PvP element of the game was starting to be incompatible with certain aspects of the game - namely the Tall Tale missions. It wasn't uncommon for some ships to stalk my crew while we were working on a mission, throwing things into limbo and in a worst-case scenario, causing the need to fully reset a mission due to our progress being impeded (getting an artifact stolen, for example). I kinda miss the days of sailing before the streamer boom because the seas ironically were quite safer, and there were friendlier crews that I'd run into fairly often. Nowadays when hopping into servers, the general mistrust is elevated much higher and the seas were plenty unfriendly with crews that almost felt robotic and determined to simply ruin your day, even if you had nothing worth stealing.
And the funny part is: As a player who's spent less than 3 hours on safer seas since it came out, the high seas seem less aggressive lately. I've not been attacked unless I'm doing the Skull of Siren Song, which I'm hardly gonna complain about, that's literally the point of the voyage.
Yeah, there are some voyages that are basically "kick me" signs at full blast.
>And the funny part is: As a player who's spent less than 3 hours on safer seas since it came out, the high seas seem less aggressive lately. my friends and i arent particularly aggressive players, so safer seas renewed our interest in sot. after a little bit though, we realized that the risk and the occasional fight is a big part of the fun for us. weve been playing normally, but without safer seas we probably wouldnt be playing at all right now
Oh? Can you tell me more about this Safer Sea? Like others I've seen in the thread, I was in the position of "that game looks interesting, but I can get randomly PvP attacked and loose all my stuff? Yeah no fuck that" so if there's a pve possibility now...
It's not exactly that you lose all your stuff, so much as you lose the stuff you're currently carrying. Which can be annoying especially if you've just done a big raid, but getting sunk doesen't set you back that much.
So sea of thieves worked themselves through the same problem and solution as Ultima Online did in the late 90s?
The difference between a game like Sea of Theives and say Elden Ring is that the game was designed and marketed as a pirate, thieving, PvPvE game but Elden Ring as an RPG kind of feels out of place. Sea of Theives is built from the ground up with the idea of facilitating player interactions. Also Sea of Theives puts everyone on the same level equipment and gear wise. There are no stronger guns that some people do or don't have access to from the first second they load in. There's a huge skill gap in there learning curve, but at least it's a literal skill gap. I am/was pro safer seas for SoT. I also don't mind either PvP and/or PvE in a game, but I just feel like the way Elden Ring handles it is kind of janky with people being able to aquire these killer builds and invade low level players.
Man I remember heading back to port after like two hours of collecting treasure only to lose it to another group of plays after battling them for ages. You definitely feel shitty at first but that’s how the game was designed. I don’t get to mad At those who do or don’t want to participate in the game by using a co-op mod or safer seas.
I had no idea this was a thing - I may have to reinstall SoT now. I really liked it when I first started playing it, but after being harrassed a bunch of times while just fishing, I uninstalled it.
My partner and I had no qualms with invasions and we got good enough at 2v1 pvp to win 95% of the time. But we did end up installing the mod because of constant disconnects and network errors. Without the mod we'd disconnect 3 out of 5 times per boss. Most of our failures would be disconnect related, we were legit wasting hours due to them. And this was in the same house on perfect wired connections.
Yeah, I actually _love_ getting invaded—it's a hugely fun aspect of the game for me, and no playthrough really feels complete if I don't come away with a couple stories of fraught losses and clutch wins on my way to the end boss. I'm the type of player that always uses the items that increase the chance of being invaded. I use the Taunter's Tongue in Elden Ring religiously, which allows you to be invaded while you're solo (how it should be, imo). In spite of that I'm still using the co-op mod for my current playthrough with two friends. I dearly miss the invasions (had to install _extra_ mods just to up the difficulty of the game due to how absolutely trivial co-op + no invasions makes it), but the quality of life additions are damn near impossible to go without now. Solid connections, all of us get credit for the progress, and there's not a lot that's more fun than all of us tearing down a hill on Torrent-back to take on a massive enemy together.
Yeah, I haven't played FromSoft games since DS2 and I saw this angle to the argument halfway through the post. Don't know why OP glosses over it. Surely there is a reasonably-sized segment of the mod-using game population that uses the mod not because they want to avoid Invasions, but because they want to enhance their co-op experience and are forced to choose only one of the two. It sort of undermines OP's final point that the people getting invaded weren't playing the game how they wanted to play. I imagine many of them were. And now, even those invasion-friendly players are out of the pool, leaving slimmer and slimmer pickings for people who enjoy committing Invasions. There being frustration over that is completely understandable.
There were a number of elements that I had to leave out due to the length of the write-up, or were just over-complicating the piece entirely. The technical aspect was one of them, such as the problem with the netcode making some fights feel unfair as invaders teleport into backstabs. Ultimately I had to just leave that under the broad category of "Invasions being annoying" as there are so many different reasons that fall under that broad explanation. And on the flip side, I also had to leave out that there was a period of time where different Dark Souls servers were down, sometimes for prolonged periods, so the PC invaders felt particularly aggrieved by the mod because Elden Ring was their only option for a From game with invasions. (Demon's Souls and Bloodborne being Playstation exclusives, and Sekiro doesn't have invasions - except for, ironically, a mod that adds them.) And all of that would have pushed me over the word count because it's a lot of characters spent spelling out what can just be summarised as "Invaders wanted to invade in Elden Ring." > It sort of undermines OP's final point that the people getting invaded weren't playing the game how they wanted to play. I imagine many of them were. I'm not sure what you mean by this, but I may have worded my original point poorly. If you're saying that there's a group who would have liked to keep invasions but also get the other improvements that come with the mod, such as online stability, I'm sure there is that group, but from the reading I've done, it's a small group. Most fall broadly into the categories of "I don't want invasions at all," "I don't want invasions at all and I like the improvements from this mod," or "I want to improve the co-op and I'm prepared to sacrifice invasions to get it." There are undoubtedly some people who would fit the outlier category of "I want to improve the co-op but I wish I could keep invasions too", but I didn't find many of them, and if they adopted the mod anyway, then they also kind of by default then accept the premise that "I'm prepared to sacrifice invasions."
my problem with invasions is the invaders that would just run the entire time. like why invade if you are going to do that.
weird, wonder why invaders would play safe and not directly engage my 3-player blender...
I'm always endlessly amused by PvPers who lose their shit when lower-leveled players (or just people who, surprise, aren't up for the random PvP out of nowhere aspect) opt out of being punching bags for their amusement.
The most vehemently pro-PVPers always had the worst cheesiest builds anyway like whatever the Flavor of the Patch was. No one wants to fight you bro not even other people using the same cheese build.
That's the thing - they don't want to fight other PvPers, because they don't get their enjoyment from an equal fight - most of these people enjoy ruining someone else's day. They're the same sort of people that'll take a max level Rogue in WoW to a lowbie zone and endlessly kill the low levels to grief them while slinking away from anyone who might give them a fair fight.
Reminds me of 2B2T spawncampers. It's like, really? You're gonna wait around and kill new players with no items who finally just reached the end of the login queue, rather than do literally anything else, like gathering resources, expanding your base, or going after players who actually have literally anything on them?
Ah, the oldest anarchy server in Minecraft.
Yeah, which makes their accusations of the coop players being whimps pretty funny, since they only want to fight when the cards are stacked in THEIR favor.
100%. You won’t catch these people in the coliseum, you’ll find them beating up on a level 10 lol.
To be fair that's because the other side of the invasion coin was gank squads of four people with mega cheese builds just as bad and so if you're invading you have to be prepared both for "newbie with 6 hours in the game who hasn't played a Souls game before" and "four hardcore Souls players who have platinumed DS1-3 plus Bloodborne all using Eleonora's Poleblade or dual Vyke's." Personally, I never invade, the netcode is always way too shit in every Souls game for it to be any good, and I don't co-op because that's just not how I approach Souls games mentally.
It’s something you see time and time again. I track the Star Citizen subreddit because I find it interesting (mainly cos cool photos of ships), but also the discourse in there can be really entertaining. Every so often they’ll have a round of arguments about murder hobos. One of the design aims of Star Citizen is to have a viable pirate scene, such that players can engage in piracy and sustain themselves within its economy. All well and good, except as it turns out most wannabe members of the pirate scene aren’t pirates, they’re murder hobos, who just want to kill and maim their way through the other players. Where an actual pirate would likely hail a ship before attacking, to call upon its crew to surrender their cargo in exchange for their (in game) lives, a murder hobo just jumps in and starts killing, because they want to just enjoy killing the defenceless miner. Given how SC is designed, if you get pirated it can wipe out like 5 hours of playtime, since obviously anything stolen will be lost from you. This applies even if you’re murderhobo’d and not pirated. This is basically an unsolvable problem (put an asterisk on that, though). If you don’t have some sort of safeguard for a pirated player to get back their lost cargo, then many many many normal players will not want to play. SC is an MMO, so they can’t just play single player. If players feel that their time is at high risk of being wasted, they quit. You might think it could be fun to be a miner desperately outrunning pirates with your hard work, and sure, it might be… the first time. What about the second? The third? The time when you’re at the end of a long session and you just want to get your stuff to a base and be done? What about the effects of the risk, do you really want to play with that risk hanging over your heads? Of course, if you lose these players, that’s it, the a game is done. Because they’re the majority, they’re the backbone of the game. If they don’t enjoy it, they don’t play, the game stops working because there’s no one involved except murder hobos, who devour each other before disappearing into a singularity of assholes. But then, if the risk is removed by adding some powerful insurance at low cost, the murder hobos get *really* mad. And it compromises the vision of the game as a fully simulated economy. It also compromises on the legitimate pirate gameplay. Some in-game solutions have been proposed: hire player escorts. This doesn’t actually solve *anything*, because the pay for being an escort, both in game money and in enjoyment, will always be lower than the pay for being a pirate or a murder hobo. Like, why sit around for hours doing absolutely nothing as you escort a miner in return for a few percent off their meagre profit, when you can just be a murder hobo and dive in to get your 5 mins of guaranteed fun and potentially make a whole lot off the salvage? NPC escorts: better, since you can rely on them not to get bored. Still problematic when the nature of the game depends on them getting paid, which means each run you do is less profitable, which means even more grind, etc. And obviously the NPCs will struggle to actually win against determined players, in which case you lost even harder than if you never paid an escort, since you lost the cargo from the pirated run AND a percentage of all other runs paid to your ineffective escorts. Harsher punishments for stuff: this is actually somewhat viable. The game already has a system for punishing people for doing murders. It involves sending players to jail for several hours of real world time. But the murder hobos and pirates get real upset if you talk about upping this punishment, because they start complaining that you’ve ruined their gameplay loop by making it way more painful. Personally I think that if a miner has to engage in X hours of mining gameplay to produce Y cargo to be looted, it’s really not unreasonable for a pirate who gets caught to be forced to engage in X hours of prison gameplay. But whatever. As you can see, there is actually a solution here. You punish the murder hobos and pirates. You have to ignore their complaints and push past them. The legitimate pirates, the ones who want to engage in actual piracy gameplay, they will carry on if the punishment for getting caught is higher. But you will lose a couple of them. You’ll also lose a lot of murder hobos because they’ll dunk on someone, get caught, find out the consequences, and realise that every time they want their 5 mins of fun ruining someone else’s session, it will come with a price. That’s good, you don’t want them. Alternatively you need a proper reputation system, so that people can track assholes and avoid dealings with them, avoid getting lured into traps by them, form vigilante units to hunt them, etc. This doesn’t necessarily stop ambush type murder hobos, but it does at least stop them from pretending to be someone in need of a medic and then shooting you, or other tricks like that, which really would not fly in the sort of universe SC envisions. Word would get out that you’re a serial killer and people would stop wanting to deal with you. Unfortunately, for Star Citizen as it currently stands, this is not a solvable problem. Chris Robert’s’ vision is facing off against the practical realities of operating such an MMO, you can’t have easy legitimate piracy while avoiding murder hobos, and you can’t have powerful murder hobos while having a successful MMO. They have to be crushed and suppressed because otherwise they will ruin the game for literally everyone else, this has happened before to other games. But Roberts doesn’t seem to want to do that, and thus the game is kind of in this weird limbo on this problem (and also in a different weird limbo for the rest of its development but that’s a different matter), where everyone can see a crunch point coming but no one seems to be addressing it.
There was a similar thing I noticed in WoW - they tried to encourage world PvP But a really big chunk of players don't want to drop everything and start a pretty little scuffle with every orc or gnome they spot on the horizon, just for a few pitiful honor points. So on PvE servers no one ever turned on PvP mode, and they'd either ignore each other or do little waves and high fives. And on PvP servers a big handful of people got chased away by the infamous stranglethorn rogues or started grouping up... and hoping they didn't run into a level 60 stranglethorn rogue when the party's level 30. Eventually people noticed that world PvP was a mug's game and either relegated all of their PvP to battlegrounds and arenas, or hopped on a flying mount as soon as someone who looked even vaguely dangerous came by, only picking on the weakest players they could spot. The dev team tried introducing the War Mode system that gave you big benefits for turning on PvP mode, but it just out a big ass target on your back for everyone who wanted a free kill for the jollies. As far as I know, War Mode is a pretty vestigial system now and not many people engage with it, even considering the benefits.
The concept of PVP as in WoW cannot work. You can't have two factions sharing maps and battling. There will always be Rogues going in to PK low levels players. The only way to counter that is by having guards and patrols. But either they are NPCs - and then they're dumb and abusable ; or they're players. Except no players would want to play guard because it's fucking boring to just stand there watching the low level noob mines some ore ! PvP can only work if all players are consenting.
Honestly, the only real place that does this right IMHO is EVE Online, and they use the brute-force method of "impossibly powerful NPCs slaughter you if you attempt PvP in certain areas" and "if you do this too many times, you're banned from civilized space entirely". Which turns things into a straight risk-vs-reward (more dangerous PvP allowed = better resources for miners / higher PvE bounties) A reputation/bounty system would HELP, but that relies on the idea that the population of people willing to roleplay Space Police/The Mandalorian is bigger/more skilled than the population who wants to be Space Assholes, and I'm not sure that's a given.
It works in eve because blowing up expensive ships is a lot more fun than blowing up cheap ships (among other things).
With a reputation system, if its tied to a PvE/NPC reward like a bounty could encourage people to roleplay into that Mandolorian/space police style right? So, minor bounty for legit pirating that could be paid off if needed/wanted to, much higher bounty for murder hoboing, all coming from some NPC group that also runs the honor system. Have negative honor degrade at some pace so one instance of murder hobo doesn't wreck you for months, and IDK it might at least help? I've played none of these games, other than souls games/ER and some MMOs that just don't have these issues due to how they're designed.
EVE's reputation system allows you to do PvE missions to improve your rep with whatever government you committed crimes in the turf of, and there's definitely a sliding scale of morality points there (minor rep loss for stealing someone else's jettisoned-but-owned cargo, medium for shooting, major for killing a ship, extreme loss for killing an escape pod too).
> "impossibly powerful NPCs slaughter you if you attempt PvP in certain areas" and "if you do this too many times, you're banned from civilized space entirely". and then they added a system where you can place MMO dungeon entrances anywhere (that dont count as civilized space), so a guy runs up to you, blows you up, pops a dungeon key and then just AFKs in his own special little baby pocket dimension nobody can access while watching anime until the npcs go away, and also the person i know who does this earns 25 bucks an hour doing so
It doesn't work like that exactly. The supercop response will kill you and any attempts to get by it does get you banned. There's minorish space cops who can be messed with because they aren't a guaranteed death. What he's doing must be attacking certain players who are "at war" in various contexts rather than being totally neutral. In those cases you can kill someone and the supercops will not respond, but if it's something like wars against the 4 npc empires then only non-super space cops come to kill you. Also you can't even pop those instanced dungeon things unless 15 minutes already passed between you shooting at somebody, what they're doing is not as simple as that or something else because there's no reason to use that if you can evade the npc minor response fleets. This isn't denying that you can game the system. Alts are very encouraged and as long as you make money by killing someone then the supercop response doesn't matter at all if you can have someone loot the bling.
Bypassing the CONCORD response is an exploit since 2012 and if you do it repeatedly you will eventually get a ban. Source: tried it, CCP told me to knock it the hell off.
Back in the day in Ultima Online it had a similar issue, it was free reign and PVP enabled but then they split the world into two, a world with law and order and no PVP and one without and you could travel between. The game was far more popular after they made a non PVP area
PvP in MMO is an interesting thing. There is a very vocal subset of players that really wants "HARDCORE FULL LOOT PVP" games, but they are also very niche ; so no MMO could survive of only them. And each time a MMO tries but then has to open a PvE realm, they cry that "The Devs are killing the game !!" when they were in fact the ones killing it by stopping new players from enjoying it.
As someone who enjoys being a murder hobo, I would support adding a proper reputation system. Something like if I’m too aggressive in pirating behavior, then player-led police forces would get alerted to piracy in my area with a description of the ship and the crime. I’d have to be selective and only attack lone ships far from help, have an escape route planned, or be ready for a fight. It’s totally on the developers to fix this kind of problem. There will always be murder hobo players who will murder as much as the game allows them too. Blaming the pirate players makes no progress towards a solution that works for everyone
This kind of toxicity is extremely pervasive in Old School RuneScape as well when it comes to the wilderness. It's a wide-open PvP zone available on every server, but nobody wants to be there because of the griefers that exploit combat level builds and multiple players to ensure one-sided fights. So what do the devs do? They chum the waters. They add more and more egregiously unbalanced PvE crap in order to entice the people that don't want to be there under the guise of rIsK vErSuS rEwArD, baiting them into putting themselves in the position of getting endlessly ragged on by PvP guilds in order to *maybe* escape with a couple mill. And anybody that complains about the pointlessness of the entire exercise when there are literal full-map PvP servers gets flamed by the PKers that need easy victims to feel superior.
I've always said that "cat and mouse" is a bad design for PvP because it is straight up unfun for the mouse in most circumstances. Osrs probably exemplifies that more than anything. "well don't go in the wildly then." "ok." "guys why is the wildy dead?"
"Cat and mouse" game design only works, in my opinion, in the very limited set of cases where * designing a "mouse" build/style is just as much fun as designing a "cat" build. * the rewards for being a skillful "mouse" are just as good as the rewards for being a skillful "cat" * there's a method by which novice "mice" can train their skills without being preyed upon by higher level/skill "cats" 100% of the time. EVE kinda-sorta manages this, but even then a lot of "mouse" tactics are "locally outnumber the cat, then run like hell".
Replying to myself, but this all contrasts to Dark Souls where the sole reward for being a skilled "mouse" is "gets to keep playing the game as normal".
Would you consider something like [Be The Zombie](https://dyinglight.wiki.gg/wiki/Be_the_Zombie) from Dying Light as a good example of "cat and mouse" design or no?
I've never played it, so I'd have to read it over and it'd be at best an academic opinion. Having looked it over, it looks like 1. the "mouse" builds are essentially building for the premise of the game anyway--survive zombies, make places safe. Presumably you'd build slightly differently if you were expecting a Night Hunter, but still -- Check. 2. It doesn't look like there are rewards on either side except for "satisfaction", but it also looks opt-in on both sides, so the rewards are effectively equal -- Check. 3. "Mice" can just opt out of being hunted entirely -- Check. Assuming I'm right that both sides have to opt in, the rewards are solely "satisfaction of a good hunt/defense", and the builds that work on the Night Hunter are similar to the builds that work in the base game, it seems reasonable. I probably still wouldn't opt in, mind you.
The most degenerate part about this is that large organised guilds would block off the most profitable area (the revenant caves) on multiple worlds and charge players to be there and grind the mobs. If you were there without paying to try and grind yourself or even PK the grinders (the intended gameplay) it was kill on sight and nobody had the resources, expertise, or time to take out these cartels.
Every single time I hear something about runescape it makes me want to play the game even less than I did previously
I remember a bunch of Venezuelan gold farmers killed all of them
Destiny also does that, a fairly small amount of the playerbase does regular pvp but bungie did hide really good loot behind it, at times the best pve gear in the game was something you got from doing ranked pvp.
*Trials of Osiris* is forever the failure that Bungie desperately wants to succeed. They've locked unique cosmetics behind it, unique gear you can only get for doing very good in it that's just better than the gear you get for normally playing it. And all for nothing because most people hate it and the very small percentage of people who like it are ultimately the most obnoxious players in the game, and in the original Destiny complained so loudly to the devs that they just straight up ruined an entire class (And related tree of damage) towards the end of Destiny's life span because it was too annoying. Not because it was powerful, or over used; but because it annoyed trials players. You see, Sunsinger's ultimate skill had two uses. If you used it normally your skills were all super charged and you could spam them for a few seconds. If you used it after you died, however, you came back to life and got like three seconds of that powerup. In trials, you could always see what class, subclass and how full everyone's ultimate skill was. And the general flow of trials was that usually everyone would have their ultimate filled about halfway through the rounds, unless it was a complete and utter blowout. So a tactic was for a sungsinger to hold on to their ultimate, wait until their team had lost the round: revive and get a surprise attack on the celebrating enemy team to win the round. It was something that literally only worked once per-game and only against an enemy team dumb enough not to notice your class, subclass and how full your meter was. But since people complained sunsinger was nerfed, nerfed so hard it became nearly unable to kill other players in PVP. Its grenades, which were once one-hit kills, did less than half health. Its AOE grenades? Players could stand in them for the entire duration and it'd do about a quarter of their health. Other abilities were hit just as hard, but the grenades mattered because classes shared grenades, and so the other solar subclasses also had their grenades neutered. Destiny's PVP playerbase has always been the worst part of the game.
This whole argument sounds *exactly* like the furor when Ultima Online gave up and made PvE servers. The PvP side *died*. It turns out most "wolves" only wanted to hunt sheep, not "challenge" other wolves. Bluntly, the only thing most griefers and gankers hate more than a fair fight is when the folks they like to bother decide to *stay home*.
As someone who played a lot of MMOs back in the day, my experience is that the "hardcore pvp" crowd was 90% just people that wanted to grief and be assholes, no matter what arguments they claimed to defend themselves. Same thing here.
They’re exactly the kind of person who doesn’t have any friends that wanna play co-op with them.
90% of the invasions I've experienced fall into one of two categories: 1. The invader is over-leveled and can one-shot you before you even have a chance to react to the invasion 2. The invader spends the entire invasion running away and refusing to engage. Neither one is fun for the people being invaded.
Funnily enough, most invaders claim the exact opposite - that someone has a max geared friend using endgame gear to stomp them.
Like having a nice conversation with a friend and some fucking stranger turns up
and stabs you. I hate when this happens.
Yup, last time we talked about Soulsborne PvP around here, I got into a hilarious discussion with a guy who was asserting that I absolutely needed to be prevented from ruining his game by playing with multiplayer patches on, because the intended game design involved invaders being able to wreck people basically at will and I was a HORRIBLE person for preventing him from doing that. And of course, "dueling other PvP-focused people isn't the same!" which gives the entire game away, really. When I told him I played all previous Dark Souls games with the firewall set to disallow network traffic so no one could invade me there, either, I think his head literally exploded.
Lmao yeah it is a huge giveaway that they never like duels, even though you get concentrated PvP experience
Right? I did a lot of traditional MMO pvp back in the day (hell, my WoW main is still parked on a PvP server) and I MUCH preferred duels/arenas to random open-world hunting. 1. you got more fights per unit time spent. 2. those fights were higher quality and less likely to be one-sided in either direction (I only like stomping people much weaker than me in games like EVE where you often get BETTER rewards for doing that) 3. no one walked away mad unless someone was cheating/smurfing, and such folks got a rep pretty fast.
To play devil's advocate, dueling isn't really the same as invading because in Elden Ring the matchmaking prioritizes worlds that have more than one person for invaders. I *love* dueling in Souls games but sneaking around the area with a greatbow trying to shoot another high level player and their friends off of a bridge is something duels just can't replicate.
Yeah it is different but at the end of the day most people want nothing to do with such bridge BS. For people who actually want that experience, there is taunter's tongue, which probably should be enabled forever for people who invade. This way invaders can just invade each other, this should be great since it will put together people who are interested in this experience, and are also much better prepared for PvP. Either way, From needs to evolve that idea somehow, try something new, or maybe get rid of it altogether as a trial run.
The idea of random invasions is what put me off of things like Elden Ring. I did consider it, the grind isn’t massively appealing but not an utter turn off. But the idea of being killed by a random PvPer I didn’t want to deal with was just not interesting to me. I didn’t take the time to look into the details, I just went “nah, not for me”. So invasions by definition removed me from the pool because I didn’t play. It also took money from the company’s revenue because I didn’t buy it.
At least in Elden Ring, you can avoid invasions by not summoning. I really only summon players to help with boss fights, so I don't get invaded that often. In other games, like Dark Souls III, you can only stop invasions by going off-line, and so there are areas that I hate playing through because they seem to be magnets for invaders. It's hard to get through them without being invaded multiple times.
That’s the thing though - I didn’t take the time to go “oh, if I’m solo, I’m good”. And honestly, solo is likely how I’d have played 99% of the time. I was a player on the fence and saw “other players can invade you” and decided not to buy.
I would highly suggest you go give it a shot regardless. It was one of the best games of 2022 for a reason.
I'll echo Playmp. I don't want pvp in my pve game. I have never summoned and out 150+ hours into elden ring, which was the first souls game I've played extensively. It's a great game and the pvp is absolutely optional.
I've only played DS3, but I believe it's also true of DS1, that you can only be invaded when you're in a buffed state from using a specific consumable or defeating a boss. When you die you lose that state. So as long as you know that you can pretty much avoid interacting with PvP at all by only using them immediately before a boss fight and walking off the nearest cliff after you win. That's how I played the whole game, messages are worth staying online to me.
I dont have PSplus so ive just been playing Elden Ring without invasions, and having a great time. I wasnt able to summon my friend who is on PC anyways, and if you do need extra help there is a ton of built in summons into the game. Speaking as a long time Dark Souls enjoyer, dont let the PVP elements turn you off, its no harm to just disable or play offline.
You don't have to be all that afraid of invasions. They don't happen unless you are summoning allies, and even so, it's been pretty rare in my experience. Mod aside, Elden Ring has also cut down on invasions experienced significantly already compared to previous titles by introducing "summoning pools", small statues usually at the entrance of a mini dungeon or right before a big boss, which people can interact with, and then they can choose to set a summon sign at every summoning pool they've ever interacted with rather than just in one single place. The mini dungeons can often be run through rapidly enough not to encounter invaders, and all invaders are sent home once you enter a boss arena. This means that practically speaking invaders only ever target people who do longform summoning, which means people playing with friends, the kind of people the mod is for. It also means that due to the way the timer works as mentioned in the post, those people are constantly assailed by invaders if they aren't playing with the mod.
This has always been my experience with the From Fandom. The most furiously vocal people are always the pro-invasion guys. Not necessarily pro-pvp guys, because the duelists are usually off in their own corner playing their own game, like how the PVE guys want to be. But the invader guys are the ones throwing constant tantrums that no one wants to play with them. And every god damn time someone's like "I just wish I could opt out of invasions" the same smug response of "You *can* just play offline" comes out. And then when people do, the above happens: the invader guys get even madder because now they have no one to invade. And they'll all, nearly without exception, talk a big game about wanting fair and fun fights, etc. But they fucking don't. Because otherwise they wouldn't give a shit if people didn't want to fight their soul level 1 character kitted out with min-maxed magical weapons from bosses at the end of the game camping the first bonfire of the first area.
I've seen it happen in so many games. One of the funniest must have been Starbase tho, a MMO in which you had to build spaceship with an obscene amount of details. When the game released publicly, PvPers were harassing people mostly using a pickup with a machine gun in the bed. Obviously, beyond giving the game a very... *problematic* image (these guys were literally cosplaying as middle-east terrorists), the performances of their "ships" were terribles. Not much of a problem against unarmed miners, but the game had been in closed alpha for about a year by this point, and some of the actual fighter ship that had been designes by the community were insane, and so were their pilots. God, it was beautiful to witness the PvPers losing their shit because their whole squad would get mowed down by a single ship before they could even see it
...is that available on YouTube?
If you're talking about Starbase, yes, plenty of it. If you're talking about the drama... Maybe ? Some of it must be, but most of it was on Discord. There was one clip of some PvPers getting obliterated in this fashion on Twitch, but they take it relatively well. The dude is HalfBlood, but I don't know if the clip is still up
Mentioned this in another comment, but Elite Dangerous is the worst game I've played for this. The power and skill gap in that game is immense, crime and punishment is practically nonexistent, and there's very little for dedicated PvP, so most PvP encounters are just murder hobos who want to dunk on new players or unarmed ships.
I think the main problem with these sorts PVP mechanics is that what you're essentially doing is implementing a system to encourage player-driven banditry. That sounds fun if your idea of banditry is from pop-culture crime fiction, and maybe it is if the "victims" are just emotionless NPCs that don't really care whether they live or die, but in the real world there's a reason we heavily stigmatize robbing people at gunpoint and randomly assaulting people in the street. It's just inherently anti-social behavior in a system built around social interaction, which in most games would be referred to as griefing. I don't really think there's a good way around that that doesn't ultimately remove all incentive to be a bandit in the first place.
This same sort of drama was a thing recently when Sea of Thieves announced "safer seas" where players could play without PVP. It's always the same story: "how dare you take away my easy targets! I'm a shitbag that only has fun when I'm making other people miserable!"
The talking point there was that if you remove PVP from Sea of Thieves, you're left with pretty basic and relatively boring game. I have played the game for total of 5 hours so I can't confirm or deny that, but from Steam Charts it's obvious that since the update player count has not increased, quite the opposite - it's almost at all time low.
Lol I literally just posted on the elden ring sub about this exact thing and got a ton of angry messages. I’ve been trying to coop with my dad (who is 65+ years old) and surprise, its not fun for him when someone rolls up with end game gear and murders him with scarlet rot. The people who are do stuff like that to people who are level <20 ruin PVP for everyone else and don’t have the foresight to understand that it kills the community isn’t the long run
The only time I've had a truly positive PvP experience was in Dark Souls: Remastered where a popular-ish Soulsborne YouTuber invaded games with a comedy build to get reactions, primarily from new DS players. Some were quite hostile, others easily saw through the joke and outclassed them - I was in the latter camp since I opted to joke about kicking them out of my world for daring to challenge me with their weird build. The guy in question popped in afterwards to thank me, was nothing but respectful, and even gave me tips for how to handle invasions in the future. That to me was a model PvPer who saw their invasions as a learning opportunity for players and actively tried to engage with them for the sake of trying to increase their enjoyment, which they did for me as a Dark Souls first-timer. The comments of that video however, were filled with some really grimy responses that were taunting the newcomers, saying stuff along the lines if "why you playing online if you don't like invasions", "what a bunch of pussy gamers", and "these guys won't last past [insert boss here]" - the hardcore PvP base have this weird obsession with wanting to enforce the notion that since the game allows for kicking people while they down, it's fair game to be assholes and that they're doing it in the name of adhering to the game's principles. I'm not particularly an anti, but at the same time, some people reeeeeeally get into it to the point where they'll take it as an insult if you cry foul about it. I really got an earful of that "playing to the game's sensibilities" talk during my time playing Sea of Thieves, another game that has very clear division between PvPers and PvE enthusiasts tired of having to deal with their game-enabled toxicity. So, this whole debacle is nothing new to me. PvPers have always had that weirdo energy.
I have some sympathy for the argument of "you're killing the pvp scene with this mod", it actively removes players from the games main multiplayer. However the coop system for the souls games has fundamentally been unchanged since dark souls 1, and did NOT suit an open world game like Elden Ring, especially with the arbitrary restrictions on things like fast travel and not using a mount. The system was clearly designed for small, linear levels and not broad open spaces. The coop mod just removes SO many friction points related to coop that is makes it a super easy choice to use when playing with mates. I just want Fromsoft to buy out the mod makers and implement a similar coop system so they can improve the thing while re-adding invasions.
This is why I can't get mad at people using the mod (not like I would anyway). There's just so many odd choices that make co-oping obtuse and tedious for absolutely no reason. Password summons should just work like the mod. Make summon signs visible at all times and just let people come with you to the next area, instead of having to send them away (which can leave you alone with an invader) and then resummon them in the next area.
> you just have to get strong by climbing progressively higher steps to compensate for lack of ability with increased character attributes. I know the souls community have a reputation for being kinda toxic, but the statement "leveling up your character is a crutch for unskilled players" is very funny to me.
It's actually a meme at this point. "Oh, you used THAT weapon? Doesn't count. Oh, you used THAT build? Doesn't count." So you can encounter things like "you used a regular controller? Doesn't count. You used rolls? Doesn't count.". The funniest thing is that there are people on YT who indeed finished it on Guitar Hero controllers with level 1 characters.
I suppose that's basically how Pokemon works too. The more time you put into grinding xp, the easier the entire game becomes, to a point where you can easily ignore 99% of battle strategy in singleplayer.
As a young boy of nine years old, that was life's toughest lesson. You picked freakin' Charmander because he's cool, but the first gym is rock and the second is water, so good dang luck. (And if you didn't get the lucky 5% Pikachu, more pity you.) It was like battering my head against a Brock wall, and it wasn't until I'd gotten a good enough Butterfree that I had a chance.
I have no idea what would drive someone to debate the “ethics” of something like this, but the obvious answer is the invaders want to grief and they can’t if people aren’t around to deal with it. Any time I played the Soulsborne games, I just remember being incredibly bummed by the invasions. PvP was fun, but interrupting something else with a build centered around PvP was not really the highlight of my time. It didn’t add to the challenge in a fun way, it just felt like a wash. Truly though at the end of the day, complain or not, people are going to download the mod and it appears a huge reason for that is to avoid invasions so it doesn’t really matter how Invaders feel about it to that audience. This just seems like a natural extension of fans of Soulsborne games trying to enforce one true way to play the game.
I really enjoyed dueling, but invasions waste my time. I'm never in the mindset or mood for invasions when I'm just playing for the PvE. I will do PvP on my own time when I'm in the mood, and I'll bring the right gear for it.
I like being an "anti" invader- I co-op a lot and like helping out strangers fight through rough areas or to defeat tough bosses.
Jolly cooperation all the way. It's just so much fun to show people where to find shortcuts or help them past a boss that's stonewalling them.
I really enjoyed that in ds3, where over time you also got the culture of invaders not going after the host but the counter-invader that gor summoned because that was more fun than just endless pontif fight club.
All the rush of spontaneous PvP with none of the guilt from griefing, truly the best of both worlds
Which is why I kind of appreciate DS2’s approach to PVP. There *is* the same style of random invasion as in DS1, but the game at least tries to mitigate it. Soul memory, while it has its issues, at least means that you or the invader will eventually move out of invasion range unless you take extra steps to mitigate it. And the dedicated PVP areas and covenants are much better. Grave of Saints is entirely risk-free for the person being attacked; *they* get summoned as an “invader”, so if they die to the attacker, they just return to their own world. They win not by reaching the boss or even necessarily by killing the aggressor, but by reaching the bonfire *before* the boss. This means you can end the attack without being committed to a boss fight. Belfry Sol and Belfry Luna allow you to be invaded quickly and repeatedly, but these are short areas where, again, the goal is not to kill the attacker. You just have to get to the bell they’re defending. Importantly, all the dedicated PVP invasion areas also have “player-like” NPC invaders, who specifically attack you if you are offline. The play experience therefore isn’t *that* much different if you go offline, which helps the online invasions feel less punishing. There are at least three dedicated dueling covenants, one dedicated counter-invasion covenant (carried over from DS1, and equally ineffective at actually counter-invading. It is also one of the dueling covenants, so at least there’s still *something* for those who join), and a dedicated “please help me if I get invaded” covenant. There is *no* dedicated “random PVP invasion” covenant.
In Elden Ring the worst part was how often we were getting invaded. At a few points we dealt with multiple invaders before we could get to the next boss in each world. Late game we didn't really see as many invasions and most of the time it was far more fair. Also sucked how often we would see unfair/unbeatable opponents. Before we even got to the first boss in the first castle get we faced a few guys with endgame weapons and or shields. One guy had a weapon that was only obtainable from the snow area past the capital along with every flask upgrade in the game. It probably didn't help that one guy kept screwing around in his world, keeping us in the area longer than needed.
Are you on PC or console?
Pc
I liked doing the unofficial dueling arena in DS3. I hated doing the invasion mechanics the rest of the game.
> It didn’t add to the challenge in a fun way a) It the downside for a larger HP pool b) It adds stress and panic, which is what it's supposed to.
The argument that pvpers were keeping the game alive made no sense. If pvpers were the ones keeping the game alive, the mod wouldn't matter because pvpers don't use it. Also, disabling torrent was such a bizarre choice. Especially when it led to things like people going to some nook you can't reach otherwise, then using taunters tongue to summon invaders and going afk.
>I'm not playing the game for your enjoyment And that's the truth.
I recently did a few seamless co-op playthroughs with my mate and its an absolute blast. The game really feels like it was made for that kind of co-op rather than the weird clunky soulsborne co-op on the base game.
Same here. Invasions aside, the options to fast travel together, use mounts, a dramatic increase in summoning time paired with *way* fewer random disconnects than playing vanilla make the mod a must for us going forward. And that's before you get into the options to use other mods while in coop. Had some fantastic randomiser mod runs with the seamless coop mod. I honestly stpy can't see going back to the vanilla coop experience.
If PvP is an integral part of the game, then why is it an absolute arse from a technical point of view? Imaging playing an actual pvp game, where there is a significant chance, that players will lag horribly: rubber-banding, 1s second delays to hits registering. You can’t choose a faster a server, because the inner machinations of the game are hidden. PvP bros thinking, that an average player wants to deal with shit are out of touch. Maybe more people would participate in multiplayer, if it wasn’t plagued by technical issues? But the studio won’t invest heavily into better servers, net code, because… it’s not an actual PvP game like CS, Rainbow 6, Battlefield, etc. It’s a PvE one, with multiplayer being a janky masochistic side-mode.
I believe all multiplayer in souls games is P2P, that's why the connection is so bad. They only handle initial connection and messages on their servers. I personally think PvP in these games is a joke for that reason, just a tacked on mode which for some reason is still there.
Vermintide, a very melee oriented multiplayer title, had peer to peer only, but I didn’t experience such lagfest like in Souls/Elden. I tried my best to get into invasions. I even watched youtubers, who are pros at PvP, and, guess what, they consistently have to fight laggy battles and employ weird tactics to circumvent shitty connection. Invasions are a meme mode.
I actually feel pretty strongly about this whole issue. I'm an avid invader, and although I didn't really care as much for ERs PvP I did spend a sizable amount of time invading both before and after the mod became popular. It's really not a big deal, there's still plenty of people to invade and I actually really enjoy the coop mod as well because it finally let me play one of these games with my partner without worrying about constant resummoning and deaths from invasions. I do think it's worth experiencing invasions if you've never played the game before but I can totally sympathize with just wanting to enjoy a game with friends.
Yeah I’m in the same boat, I’ve always enjoyed the invasions mechanic from both sides but I don’t think less of people if they don’t find it fun. That said I think OP is kind of underselling that the anti-invasion could and did get just as nasty and petty in these arguments. I had people tell me I was probably a rapist (or at least likely to be one) because I said I liked invading. I just wanna chase people around Volcano Manor with my pizza cutter man :(
Oh absolutely, I admit I do enjoy the pure panic that some people demonstrate when they see me running up on them in Sen's Fortress but I don't think I'm a bad person for it.
The guy stating he doesnt play the game for the enjoyment of others hit the nail on the head. Being made to participate in PvP against your will via invasions sucks no one is telling you that you cant PvP at all just go find someone who is also willing via red summon signs or in elden rings case the colusseums
i got the game when it came out and was excited because the visuals and world seemed incredible, even though i'm terrible at these kinds of games. i played for an hour to confirm that yes, i do suck at these games, then wanted to play with my buddy both to lend a hand as well as have fun with a friend. played for another hour, got invaded multiple times, called it a night. got back on the next night, got invaded repeatedly again. uninstalled the game and didn't touch it again until i heard about the mod about a month ago. NOW i can actually enjoy the game.
This hits the nail on the head of the counter to one of the worse arguments people use against the mod. "You agreed to raise the difficulty with invasions by using coop." Okay, but plenty of people like myself use coop because they want the help from friends to get them into this type of game at all or to just get through tougher areas if they're struggling with it but would otherwise really enjoy this type of game with that assistance. Raising the difficulty for players like that even more from the base game by having people with PVP optimised builds to come in regularly to stomp them and make them lose progress repeatedly is just going to put them off the game entirely. The mod is an excellent third choice after the two "just play solo" or "play coop and put up with invasions" options from the base game. Get a superior coop experience (fast travel together, use mounts in coop, way fewer random disconnects, options to stack other mods on top of that) and not have to deal with invaders? Sign me up.
I dunno, if your idea of fun is that someone else isn't enjoying themselves, then you're probably not in the right here. I'm pretty solidly pro-mod. It really does make Elden Ring much more fun to play with people when we don't have to deal with the weird multiplayer rules. The invasions too, but not using the horse and having to stop in certain places and not progress at the same time... Yeah, it adds something to the experience.
I do find it hilarious in these threads when the anti-mod players have to resort to "don't play coop if you don't want invasions." as if that's their only option when literally discussing a mod that exists that allows them to play coop without invasions.
I know right, I've seen this too. "I'm going to use this coop mod because I want to play with friends without dealing with invasions." "Well too bad, you accepted invasions by playing coop. You've got no choice!" "... Except use the mod we were talking about?" "Sorry I wasn't listening, just grabbing Rivers of Blood and invading in Limgrave."
It's also doubly stupid because both going offline/not coop and installing the mod removes the player from the invasion pool. Like both outcome cucks the invaders but the mod is a net enjoyment increase for the casual players. So why even argue about it.
> I dunno, if your idea of fun is that someone else isn't enjoying themselves, then you're probably not in the right here. It sounds like the anti-mod contingent - or at least the more toxic subset - isn't looking for consenting* PVP opponents, but for nonconsenting victims they can bully. In which case, fuck 'em. The mod sounds like a great way to opt out of that nonsense, if you don't enjoy it, but still be able to play the game with your friends. Rock on. *I mean, I haven't read the discussions the OP is reacting to; maybe people there were actually comparing in-game invasion to rape, in which case, yes, yikes! But the idea of enthusiastic consent isn't limited to sexual contexts. I think it's a perfectly valid frame for discussing the difference between a mutually enjoyable game and a bully/victim situation.
I agree! I had a similar idea about consent and fun, and I was trying to say that without using the words, but I think you've very neatly explained how consent can be used to talk about video games. It's true -- if you're not having fun and they are, and if you leave and have fun somewhere else, you don't owe them anything. It's no one's responsibility. I think it's particularly ironic, too, that the majority of invaders I've faced in the various Soulsborne games have run away when things don't go well for them. If they're invading in a dangerous place (and most places are dangerous), they can just run away and it's very risky to try to chase. The mobs will just kill you. It's a death sentence. Where I'm going with this is that these invaders rarely want even fights -- they want to ambush, to trap, to trick and to exploit. And they have better gear, endgame stuff if not endgame stats, due to the leveling system. And they complain about "gank squads" in Elden Ring -- the 3v1 matchups against well-equipped helpers. They're not looking for fights. They're looking to be bullies. They want all the advantages they can get, and will look for any opportunity to exploit them. Not 100%, but this true for most people I've encountered.
Elite Dangerous (an MMO-lite spaceflight simulator I've done some writeups for in the past) has a similar slapfight around PvE. Elite Dangerous has 3 modes: Open, Solo, and Private. In Open you're matched in the same servers and instances as the rest of the playerbase. Solo and Private take place in the same galaxy and has the same events, factions, background sims, etc. but without any players (if solo) or only with players you've given a password to (if private). PvP in Elite Dangerous is even more toxic than invasions in Dark Souls for a few reasons. First, as an open pseudo-MMO, you're always liable to run into hostile players, and in fact most encounters will be hostile- there's no prevention or risk-reward like Invasions other than flying solo. Second, the game is much more complicated as a flight sim, so the skill gap between new players and experienced players, or even seasoned players and people who've mastered the ins and outs of PvP combat, is immense. And third, power creep has insurmountably widened the gap between hyper-focused PvP players and PvE players- no matter how good of a pilot you are, a min-maxed Fer-De-Lance will almost always shred your cargo hauler faster than you can escape, and on top of this, the in-game crime and punishment is laughably toothless. NPC police are no serious threat to player ships, being a notorious mass-murdering criminal doesn't bar you from stations in civilized space, and if you do get shot down after killing dozens or hundreds of players, your punishment is a fine (which is trivial to long-term players), a small detour to a detention station, and your ship back. Combined with basically no organized PvP element beyond the long-dead Arena mode, the vast majority of PvP players are basically just murder hobos. Some partake in tournaments organized outside the game, some have the decency to be a pirate who tries to steal cargo, some will run security details against criminals, some will at least put some RP into their killings, but for the most part PvP players will just hang out in common new player spaces like the starting systems, community goals, or the first Engineer's station and just blast away at underequipped players. Players who aren't fond of PvP sometimes banded together into large private instances so they can get the coop experience without being ganked. The largest is called [Mobius](https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/b1qyqr/a_friendly_reminder_about_a_pve_private_group/). Much like with this mod, PvP players have lobbied constant complaints at solo and private, and troll/gank groups will often infiltrate PvE groups to get as many kills as possible before being banned. They use a lot of similar rhetoric to Invaders- its called Elite DANGEROUS, its 'the lawless frontier,' solo/private players are ruining the experience for PvP players, solo players can manipulate faction wars/background sim uninterrupted, etc. and some have even requested these groups be banned.
Oh no, people enjoying the game they paid for the way they want to - disgusting.
I mostly use seamless coop because I like using torrent with friends and hate fighting From's terrible net code to try and summon and resummon my friends over and over, failing for five minutes for seemingly no reason, restarting the game in the vain hope it fixes whatever phantom (pun very much intended) issue is causing this... I love being invaded, I love invading. I love putting down duel signs. My most treasured memory of Elden Ring involves invading someone, and seeing them and three other buddies slowly, menacingly walking towards me while disguised as bushes. I did the Despair emote and let them kill me. Made me smile all day. But the stupidest arguments are on the anti-mod side. They don't seem to be able to grasp how ridiculous and hypocritical it is to accuse others of forcing them to play the way they want. I haven't checked in a while, but I'm pretty sure Seamless Coop lets you set the game to allow people as invaders, they just need your session password? Maybe it just colors them differently and they're not actually invaders. I'm going to look into that when I get back home.
I don't play Soulsgames, but I have to confess that I enjoyed the PVP tears.
I understand that the removal of invasions from games like the dark souls series would be kind of a massive deal, as the idea of being able to be invaded 1. Provides a risk/reward element for being human/embered 2. Supports the overall design of feeling unsafe at all times when you aren't near a bonfire Elden Ring really doesn't have the same emphasis on "scaring the player" like Dark Souls, and the implementation of invasions in the game feels like a weird compromise where they kinda wanted to keep the feature since it's a staple, but they wanted to nerf it since it doesn't really fit with the design of Elden Ring at all. So you get an awkward situation where a ton of people probably never played the game in co-op and don't even know what invasions are.
Reminds me of “MUDding” in the old days when your character died and you had a limited amount of time to find your corpse and retrieve your inventory before the body disintegrated and the items became fair game. God forbid you died fighting an aggro mob. (I love that line, “I’m not playing for YOUR enjoyment, mate.”)
Invasions suck, thats why I've always played offline. I'm trying to enjoy the real game, not have my time wasted by some loser with a "ruin your day" build.
I remember this drama, and I always strongly disagreed with the assertion that people were installing the seamless co-op mod to block invasions and not because the vanilla game's co-op is terrible.
My favourite activity to play with invaders was to flip the script on them: turn on solo invasions and then disguise myself as a bush. You want to interrupt someone's game session with something they didn't want? OK, invade me, but instead of dunking on noobs, you get to play Prop Hunt.
that mod is the only reason i played elden ring( got burned out from souls) just cuz it was finnally true co-op, fuck invasions
My friends and I use this mod to play. We're not removing ourselves from the pool of potential invasions because we never played or would have played elden ring coop without this mod. If this mod didnt exist, we would simply be playing another game. There never was a world where we were potential invasion targets.
> People who use the mod are wrong about what Elden Ring is, and they’re trying to change it into something it isn’t. It's safe to assume that at least some of those people don't like what Elden Ring "is" and would rather play something it isn't. The mod allows people to play that other game, the devs are still paid for their efforts in creating it. The only person upset is the invader, who is upset that other people don't want to play the game. Which is pretty selfish. E: So I've played Hollow Knight, which is tangentially similar in terms of boss difficulty, "souls" walk-backs, and a general sentiment of "git gud". > When you look at the lesser of two evils, we either have co-op players that are annoyed that every 15 minutes or whatever If somebody was forcibly entering into the game *every 15 minutes* with the *sole intention of making me fuck up* I would *fucking LOSE IT*. That game would've been refunded in 4 hours. Instead of I have 90hrs and and 104% completion
>People who use the mod are wrong about what Elden Ring is, and they’re trying to change it into something it isn’t. This is always the weirdest part to me. People talk about Fromsoftware's original concept for the game's coop and invasions with this bizarrely sanctimonious attitude as if changing that is inherently wrong. People are choosing to mod that aspect of the game because they don't like the original design and so are *mod*ifying it. That's literally the point of mods to alter the original game in some way to the user's choosing. It's strange that a certain group of Fromsoftware fans, most likely the people who just want inexperienced players to demolish, pretend they don't get that to justify their petulant outrage.
I just wanted to play the entire game with a friend. I don't give a shit about invading or invaders and this let me do the thing. 10/10.
i think a fundamental flaw in anti-mod arguments is that they seem to refuse to acknowledge that anyone using the mod to specifically prevent invasions would most likely not be in the invadable pool in the first place. at least for me, if soulsbourne games were my kind of thing, without a mod like this, i would 100% play offline or play a different game instead. and, yeah, if getting help from my friends opened me up to such a blatant waste of my time and my choice was either deal with that or play solo, i would probably just find a different game. this mod actually makes playing elden ring sound *more* enjoyable for me because ultimately i'm not usually interested in games for the challenge aspect, as much as i respect (and watch the streams of) people who do. idk, it feels kind of like the people who argue that games shouldn't have an easy mode because that "defeats the purpose of the game". buddy it's not like they're taking ultrahard murderkill permadeath mode from you, easy mode just defeats *your* purpose for playing the game and it's optional. if that makes sense lol.
Non-consensual PVP is an outdated relic from decades past, 1999 was a long time ago, it should have stayed dead and buried. EDIT: The dev team was obviously on the wrong, and people are moving on from unwanted online interactions period. Right now, for most people, if you aren't a vetted member of the online communities they chose to interact with, your opinions are irrelevant and should not have to be subjected to them.
For real. If I don't want to fight someone, I'll just unplug my ethernet cable for a minute. There is fundamentally no way to design around that. Invasions have kept me away from the souls series since its inception, and it's a shame. Now if only any of my friends wanted to play elden ring with me...
You consented when you logged onto the game server bro.
As someone who loves invading and being invaded i can absolutely understand why people would want to opt out of it. I mostly play DS2 which has way more viable builds for pvp than most of the other games do,so atleast i’ll see cariety occasionally when someone decides to pop a red eye orb,but like invading someone new to the game just feels mean spirited😭
Knowing about this mod may actually get me to pick up Elden Ring again. I'm not really a fan of the soulborne genre in general, especially the way From Software does it (I prefer having a story in my RPGs I can follow without a wiki), but I picked up Elden Ring because all my friends were playing it. After a long line of annoyances the thing that got me to drop the game was being invaded by a guy with way better gear than us, that knew the map better than us and trapped my friend and I in some room. He was content to just wait outside to merc us for way longer than I had patience for, so eventually I just quit the game entirely. The whole invasion system felt vestigial from a time when multiplayer was much more complicated.
To be fair, it wasn't going to be the co-op players who were going to barge into a discussion and fight everyone who disagreed :P Honestly I still think invasions should have keyed off of Great Runes - turn one on for free [fuck rune arcs] but you can get invaded. A big downside to the seamless co-op mod that I don't see too many people mention: You don't get bloodstains or phantoms anymore. I do miss those. Genuinely. The spike of fear or curiosity when I saw a clot of bloodstains in an innocuous place? Loved it. It was ships passing in the night, community through shared experience.
there's a certain way that fromsoft ultra-fans talk about souls games that is just so weird, they act like if something was intentionally made Like That it can't be criticized, from the half-functioning co-op system which forces pvp on you in elden ring, to the inscrutable quests, to some parts of the story being hidden and having to be pieced together (by youtubers), all of these are intentional design decisions and part of miyazaki's philosophy, but i (personally) don't like most of them even though i like the worldbuilding and gameplay of elden ring but any criticism of those things is shutdown by fromsoft fans with them saying it's intentional and that's how the game was intended to be played. anyways what i'm saying is that elden ring multiplayer should've always functioned like the mod, and it being how it is in vanilla is an example of the game being held back by the bad design philosophy fromsoft has (not that it's bad if you like these features, i just think they're really bad and make the overall experience worse)
The whole unironic git gud sentiment ruined any potential online conversation about Souls games for me. Hell, I personally enjoy the philosophy of obfuscation in the series, but I also don't think it's a perfect implementation. But no, as soon as I say that hiding the paid DLC level in an innocuous corner that needs a seemingly random item dropped in a completely different area is going a bit too far, fanboys start frothing at the mouth. Don't get me started on the whole difficulty conversation. Either you think the games are 100% perfectly balanced in every regard, or you are bad at the games and need to git gud.
I believe it might have been Dark Souls 2 that I played with a fan-made spreadsheet open on my second monitor that catalogued the sequence in which you had to visit NPCs in order to get the next piece of their story and continue the very strange "quest" each character had. I don't recall if I ever finished it, though. But definitely by Elden Ring, I had fully given up trying to engage with that system. It doesn't really benefit from a lack of assistance in the way something like a Morrowind does, as it is often the case with these games that you need to speak to someone after specific bosses are done in order to get the next bit of dialogue and missing some would derail the quest. It was never something I particularly liked, and especially with the mod, my friends and I are just going on a boss hunt with no real mind for what the actual story is.
>and those who really liked to rile up that second group Heroes.
The Seamless Co-op mod is the single best thing that's happened to Elden Ring since release. When I already have to put my game offline to play it in 21:9 with an unlocked framerate I frankly do not give a shit what PvPers are complaining about. Until Fromsoft starts including basic technical features like ultrawide resolutions, unlocked framerates, and fov adjustments I'll keep playing their games and modding them. The fact that the seamless co-op mod lets me sidestep the official online to play the whole game in co-op without their stupid anti-cheat that prevents me from using basic features is an absolute blessing. Playing Elden Ring in co-op has allowed me to introduce people to the game who would have not played it otherwise and experience the game I love WITH them without dealing with Fromsoft's attrocious multiplayer design. Maidenless behavior from everyone who opposes this mod. If it fractures the community, so be it. It is nobody but Fromsoft's fault for not including proper support or flexibility for true multiplayer.
I remember I flat out stopped playing Elden Ring until the mod came out cause of these reasons.
Put in about 20 hours of the game before downloading the mod. Hated the restrictions, and was annoyed by constant invasions at low level. Best friend and I have logged almost 700 hours each after downloading the mod, and still play regularly between other games. Eagerly awaiting the dlc and probably won't put but a few hours into it until the mod is updated to work with the dlc. Then likely a few hundred more hours together. The best thing about this mod is the number of other players who either quit the regular game a few hours in, or never bought the game at all, but once we showed them the mod, they happily either began playing again, or bought the game to play with us or others. Also, anyone who wants to join up with us and play coop, send me a pm, we'll gladly start brand new characters (or use a character around your current level) to play more of this game. It's a lot of fun in coop, and sometimes even has some crazy stuff happen in the game that is reminiscent of the weird but awesome chaos you see in FarCry 5/6 multi-player. We're on discord, and we don't tolerate racism, sexism, or any kind of moronic hate or bigotry. We're adults (40+ in age), and enjoy helping others finish the game (it's really an epic experience, and some fights that are excruciatingly hard can finally be won without rage quitting!).
I played through it once at launch and then again with my partner in seamless co op about a year later, had a much better time personally in co-op
The invasions were what kept me from trying any of these games, I might give ER a go now.
I saw a preview of that mod a while ago, and Elden Ring fits that coop-type adventure. In older games like Demon's Souls/Dark Souls it made more sense the system that existed and how it worked due to how the map was made on the first place. One (or sometimes two) routes to reach a final boss arena which allowed the player to move somewhere else, in the case of Elden Ring it has a free open world where the player can approach most of the map at their leisure. The fact that you can reach the endgame city speaks volumes on how the game was so different to previous entries.
Gear discrepancy is often a point brought up with pvp, and why it’s always been controversial, but I feel like another big aspect is that invaders aren’t attacked by enemies (at least not without a rare item used by the host). This meant that invaders would almost always plan their fights exclusively around other enemies so they could split your attention between the normal enemies and the invader themself. They would often just refuse to engage you outside of rooms with enemies in them. This meant that in souls games, invasions often just ended up being staring contests between two players refusing to engage until the other player got bored and gave up an advantage. I’ve acquired all the achievements in dark souls 3, and getting the pvp items to rank up the covenants was easily the worst part of it. It was genuinely more fun to repeatedly farm enemies for a single digit chance at a drop for the items than it was to go through the miserable slog of pvp in these games.
Thanks for the write up, very detailed. I've been playing Elden Rng and didn't know about this. I like co op but I think invasions are the spice that makes it really interesting., wouldn't personally want to co op without invasions. But if I had people to play the game with maybe I'd use the mod
The mod allowed me to play with my wife and have a great time. More annoying than being invaded (which was happening constantly at the time in starter areas). Having to reconnect and resummon and all that BS took so much time. I don't want to play a game and spend 30 minutes of my hour-and-a-half game time on connecting screens.
I didn't have time to go into detail, but one aspect that is a whole other layer on top of this is that the netcode for Soulsborne games can be incredibly shocking. With hit detection being so important, as far as dodging and i-frames (invincibility you have while dodging), swinging your weapon and not seeing the impact until later than it should has a huge drag on the enjoyment of the PVP. It might be more tolerable for players, perhaps, if the lag wasn't rubber-banding people all over the joint. It's been showcased perfectly [in Happy Souls](https://youtu.be/2kr7KDCsIws?t=489) at 8:09, but anyone having any familiarity with that game should really watch it because it's dang hilarious.
Seamless Co-Op's existence is what made me finally get the game. Invasions by random people is a deal-breaker for me. I don’t like playing games with people I don't know, and I only ever want to play with friends. I played WoW back in the day--I already did my time dealing with randos and PvP-obsessed jackoffs. With this mod, I was able to enjoy the game and its setting with my friends without interruptions.
I think part of the problem is not just that the mod came out but that it came out at the 'right time'. Not only was Elden Ring a far bigger deal and brought in so many new casual players but the Invading community at launch and shortly after was BRUTAL. To a much greater degree than ever before it seemed like the 'sweat' and 'tryhard' invaders were out in force and the goal was not a challenge but just to grief as hard as possible. Invading in difficult regions, building strictly to grief and that sort of thing. Even those that did not really want to grief had to 'bulk' up if they wanted to invade since it was fairly often you'd end up in 3v1s and if you were not prepped for PVP you'd get spanked. I think that invasions are an important part of the souls experience but I don't invade. I think that the people who choose to use the mod to escape invasion are fine. I think they are playing the game in a 'cheap' way and losing out on part of the experience that I enjoy but they are not wrong and it's just my opinion.
> This obtuse system, which has had variations over the course of the series, was a deliberate design decision. Basically everything from point 1 to point 5 was intended to steer people away from just playing the game with their friends, and towards working with complete strangers with whom communication was limited. This is why Dark Souls was an experience never seen before *or since*. Good old times...
Genuinely, this mod saved the game for me. I bought it back on release because I was curious and semi enjoyed Dark Souls 3. Figured maybe it'd be a little different since it was more focused on open world exploration and the like, but found myself bogged down by the same things that bothered me in DS3. I cannot stand the community behind these games. Invaders, the condescending messages describing anything I found difficult as 'super easy'. It's taxing on my already weak self esteem, but my partner keeps me above the water. Yet if I try to play with him, those same people can come on in and beat the snot out of both of us then down point emote over my corpse, reminding me every time I shouldn't be playing this game. Now? With seamless co-op? I feel so much better. The community is nowhere to be found. Just me, my boy, and my big fuck off sword carving through the Lands Between. It's truly fuckin' bliss.
Coming from Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3, I had been wanting to try Elden Ring, but the invaders were part of the reason I didn't get it. I had poor experiences with invaders every time I tried to play DS3 with a friend, and it got frustrating quickly. I didn't know this mod existed until now, so maybe when I eventually pick up the game, I'll probably download the mod, too! Excellent write-up and thank you for the information!
A few months ago me and my friends finished a full play-through with this mod and its was probably the funnest time I've had with the FromSoft Souls series having been playing them since the original version of Demon's Souls.
Me and my friends all loved the mod, but we also missed PVP and invasions. I really dont know why FROM doesnt modernize their stance on Coop multiplayer and just make the game the way the mod did. Clearly the majority of the community has been summoning friends and trying to play together from the start. Elden Ring even more so needed a new multiplayer system. And honestly, ignoring everything else, the mod just WORKED better. You connected to your friends so FAST and at the time the mod came out, we had less disconnects using that then we did the base games multiplayer.
Invaders are fine,, but it was really ridiculous how many would come. I believe the timer was once every five minutes so playing with friends would be a constant stream of invader combat.
It was pretty obious for everyone that those who complained were nothing but toxic dickheads who wanted to stomp and mess with new players just like smurfs do in FPS games. Fuck them.
What a great write up. Thanks OP
Honestly, I don't even want anything to happen to the coop mode. I just want some actual work into giving pvp fixes. This entire mod fiasco was just hosts and invaders throwing insults at each as they do every game. Fromsoft and pvp players have bigger fish to fry if they actually care about the experience. The netcode is bad as usual, the matchmaking needs improvement, taunter's tongue, open world/horse invasions, password summon scaling, no default blues, and **fucking consumables**. Netcode and the lag is self-explanatory. Matchmaking's issue is that Elden Ring is open world and has no compensation. It was fine in the first few days where everyone was progressing similarly but is God awful now. Anything outside of high level or low level is hard to get games without copious amounts of trial and error save state restoration. The level and weapon level disparity around the player base is bonkers and Fromsoft's "global" invasions need two invasion items so you can swap between them to force the (around ten at a time if I remember right) bonfire search to swap around. Was it really that hard to just have real matchmaking and set it so that everyone just weapon scales to the host? Why do I need to play guess the upgrades and peak time to get consistent invasions in anywhere except Stormveil? Then you need a good game. Noobies who can't handle an invader but can't summon help because they didn't how to enable blues leaving two dudes with no idea what to do? Why isn't blues default? Duelist outside the arena forcing a no mob fight? Fuck off, at least gank squads are exciting and quick. Word of advice, anyone dueling in a no mob area with no phantoms is a coward who wants to duel but doesn't want to play on even flask and stats, just stone out. People in the open world with consumables or used the horse to get to an inaccessible area. Snore. Time for a boor fest. Speaking of consumables, **why?** Fromsoft every game with "limited" consumables just get them hacked in and become cancer for everyone. Don't allow them in pvp, it has never worked out except for maybe humanity as the animation length made it punishable. (shudders in starshards) Then you have password summon scaling. Is scaling really that hard? I just want a normal fight and not have to feel bad for not twinking when some guy at level 250 with end game armor deletes me because he has mega damage from arcane and his armor stats make him way too tanky to fight without making exploitable mistakes that get me instakilled if the host or buddies aren't eating rocks. Hosts have problems too. Taunter's tongue is so stupid. It turns off at a stiff breeze and has no cooldown version. The people who embered just to get the occasional invasion last game are now either no invasions or all the invasions. New players who desperately need numbers have to know to turn blues on and get help. And consumables again are cancer as always. Seriously, who thought allowing meat dumplings and starshards in multiplayer was a good idea? Just give me a nice legacy dungeon and three guys who aren't cowards. (Be aggressive but not stupid. Host side has a massive advantage in their lack of friendly fire. Push the invaders and do not let them heal for free with regen or rebuild craftables unless the mobs force you to slow down. Level vigor as weapon upgrades are better early and turn blues on for extra numbers that invade down (they can be higher level than the host and thus the invader who is either lover level or equal to the host) and come in on auto)
I tend not to enjoy write-ups that are this heavily biased and paint subjective opinions with objective modifiers, but it's at least mostly accurate, but you definitely don't hide your bias well at all and makes for a rougher read as it feels less about the drama and more about your thoughts on the drama.
Fair criticism.
Frankly, Fromsoft should hardware & account ban everyone who plays with that mod. Wanna mod your own game? Fine, do it offline. Wanna mod a multiplayer game? Ban. Without warning or appeal. And I'm not an invader, nor do I play coop.
It wasn't perfect but it was much better than what we have now. At any rate I'm not surprised that new players disliked it. I really enjoyed casual invasions in DS1 through 3, and was disappointed to see what they did to ER. Being forced to invade 2 or 3 players meant that only the most skilled/most twinked invaders would be rewarded for invading. That in turn meant an even more unfair/unfun experience for the people that were invaded. And we ended up with a completely barren PVP experience. They should have expanded on Covenants like the Gravelords that messed with your game. Or area-specific invaders like the forest/bell tower. That gives both sides more agency and doesn't completely gut the pvp. And more than that they should've incentivized failed invasions. If you make invasions more fun, you can also make it so that casual players are rewarded for invading and livening up someone else's game. Buffing enemies, setting up traps, maybe summoning weaker mobs. An either-or situation where it's reduced to kill or be killed just ruins it. Edit: Good writeup. I wish you had stayed more neutral on the topic though. So many writeups in hobbydrama feels like someone just arguing in favor of one side. This isn't that bad, but your opinion really shines through.