Ugh, that's the most fun. Er, that is, the worst. :D Well, thanks to this thread I have mostly gotten off my irrational fear of invaders. I just move on now and see what happens. Tonight I had a gentleman in the depths who's clearly been to the Catacombs already drop by when I was pummeling the giant rat with soul arrows. I thought about it briefly and decided waiting for him was boring, so I moved on. Dropped into the area where giant rats are, saw him approaching, took a swipe at him, he took a swipe at me, then the rats were on me. He was pleasant enough to stand back and wait to see what would happen, but alas in the panic of 3 larger and more aggressive rats than I expected (am I imagining things or are there 4 different sizes of rats down there?) I died. Because DARK SOULS. But the difference is, *I* set the pace this time instead of just waiting for him to find me. Sure, this guy was nice and let me get myself killed whereas someone else might fire off soul arrows from out of reach while rats gnaw my face - but that really IS just Dark Souls, isn't it. You guys suck. You're making me DEAL WITH IT.
Some people do this to guarantee a successful invasion. Join somebody's game, black crystal out, invade - hey presto, it's your summoner, now killable. Some even do it to get successful Gravelord infections. Hang out at an NG+ appropriate level for a certain place, put down a summon sign, get summoned, hang around long enough to see the souls you get from enemies/how hard they are to ensure the host is in NG+, black crystal out, put down a basilisk eye, revel in the knowledge that your former host now has horrible glowing red monsters in his game.
Yes, that is exactly the turning point for invasions. When you decide to handle them on your terms, it becomes just another part of the game. Handling things on your terms if the ultimate form of success in Dark Souls. You can also do things like set up cheap traps. My favorite trick in Anor Londo is to hide behind a door with the camera angled so I can see them come through, and pop them with Great Combustion. They don't even know I'm there and then I roast the shit out of them. SUCKAS.
This is great advice. I mean terrible. Simply terrible. Also, I think when you summon a person and they leave it's at least a sign they don't want to be summoned by you, so I don't summon them again. It could also be they are trying to get summoned by a friend or something.
And really, if he joins and you get to see him, and then he invades, you have an edge in that you have seen what he's wearing/carrying and can adjust as soon as you get the invade message.
I think I was invaded for the first time last night. I decided to restart as I wasn't far in and I ran into a bug (feature?) wherein whatever I equipped with my right hand didn't show on my character. Anyway I restarted as a pyro and and had just kindled the bonfire in the Undead Burg. I was human at the time, though I don't recall seeing an invasion message, suddenly a tranclucent red ghost came at me from the stairs. Before I could even raise my shield, it chopped me into pieces. I'm not sure if that was an invasion or not, but if it was it takes a real tough guy to gank a noob character like that.
There's a spell that can hide your weapon but there's no feature where it will just happen. However, are you sure you didn't accidentally switch weapons to an empty hand?
It wasn't a spell as that character couldn't cast any. Now that I think about it, I may have switched to the secondary weapon slot accidentally. It wasn't until later that I figured out I could actually do that. Regardless, I like my new character better and I managed to get further in level and area explored last night than I did on my original character. It's almost like I've gotten better or something.
If you think an invasion is happening 1) listen (things will get real quiet, especially bonfires and ambient noises) 2) look (fog walls will go up on level boundaries, bonfires you've lit will be muted) 3) test (your summon sign will disappear immediately after being set, you won't be able to sit at a bonfire and will be kicked out of it if you already were in it). A lot of times the summon message will get run over as one invasion fails and another succeeds in high-traffic areas. You'll be better able to gauge degrees of translucence in invaders as you progress, but generally we are talking about fog ring use (you'll see these in the forest as AI enemies) or hidden body spell users (extremely unusual in low level PvP). It really only matters if you have trouble picking out their setup or if you were planning on casting spells that rely on targeting.
Yeah, the PvP in this is bullshit. Having just started, with stock gear I go to kindle a bonfire in the Undead town... and instantly am raided by someone in gear I haven't seen. He's a poor player so I sneak behind him and backstab him, them proceed to whack him for 6 hp or so a pop, whittling him down to about 10% of health. Eventually he kills me in one hit, after apparently having stolen my humanity? Not quite sure, but such a brilliant design. Guess I should have read spoilers first to work out what's going on. :-/ Next time I'm definitely just Alt-F4ing. Maybe there's something lurking there under dross, but the potential for griefing means I have zero interest in finding it.
Alright, not so pissed now. ;-) I like the idea in theory, but oh man such potential for griefing! Wouldn't be so bad if I hadn't just blown all my humanity items, or had any idea how to get more humanity.
Hrm. I'm considerably past the point where I got ganked, but still no luck. Certainly makes things more difficult having 5 flasks rather than 10! Do foes start dropping humanity after a while I take it? So far I've only gotten it from things I can't repeat.
You find it lying around, you get it from doing coop/killing invaders, and there are a few places in the game where you can farm it in short order.
Rats are the first early enemy that drops them as an item, but their drop rate is erratic compared to later enemies so it's not really worth digging in and spending a lot of time doing it. Beyond that, killing enemies like the undead parish humans adds up to one "soft" humanity so long as the boss is alive, and being summoned and killing the boss gets you one soft humanity per run. So sometimes hanging around after you've killed a boss and before you've leveled overmuch is a good idea, such as hanging around between the blacksmith and the gargoyles waiting to be summoned (which is also good because it lets you get your armor to +3 and your weapons to +5 with the easily purchased/dropped titanite shards. There's a chart for average coop ranges on the wikis under multiplayer. You're 23 now, which means you're well within range (23 +/- 13 or so) for the gargoyles and the later Capra Demon, and a bit high for the Taurus demon. Summoning eligibility depends on whether the summoner is at Summonee's soul level +/- (10 levels + (10%)(Summonee's soul level)).
And I do indeed have plenty of Humanity now. I no longer have any complaints about PvP invasions now that I have upgraded arms, have humanity items on hand, and know where to farm rats for more should I need to. It's fine outside of the corner case where I got ganked (unwittingly used Humanity items, had finished the local Boss so couldn't get easy soft humanity in familiar places, ganked just as I'm on my way to kindle by someone stealing humanity, and so stuck plowing forward with 5 flasks and no weapon upgrades. Hell I didn't even know where the shop or the smith were in Undead Burg). Hopefully Dark Souls 2 won't let you get invaded in what is essentially the tutorial. :-/
The problem here is he's defining the tutorial as the place where he's learning how combat works and how to fight back effectively. That's a reasonable definition for basically any other game I've ever played, but with Dark Souls I've killed the end boss and spent a metric fuckton of time playing the game and I'm still learning how to kill things. There's no way for DS to sort out invasions by experience without some intrusive (and probably exploitable) detection methods, so we cope, pull the plug or even enjoy a bit of randomness in our RPG.
Yeah. I'm just fine calling it a tutorial when you haven't found a ship to buy new things in, nor the smith to upgrade, and are using your starting gear - since upgrading is pretty much the core of the game. How many of you guys are still using unupgraded starting gear? And the "intrusion detection algorithm" would be simple -- don't match up players who've spent zero souls on their equipment with anyone else. I'm fine with the occasional oversight and wart in a game, but it is definitely a flaw.
Well, that's a pretty weird definition of the word "tutorial." I think most people would consider the tutorial to be the part of the game where you are given an introduction to the game's systems and controls and given pretty clear instructions on what to do to get through it, same as any other game that has one. Probably none. How many are using equipment at upgrade levels attainable in Undead Burg? When does the "tutorial" end, when you have max level everything? So simple! Short Sword +1 = Gold Tracer +5, no problems. New players getting ganked by experienced players is a problem but it's not easily solved. I've yet to see a proposed solution that would actual solve the problem without breaking PvP completely.
Okay, so, I have upgraded a bunch of equipment, but I'm not wearing it because I want an honest fight. Do I get matched? Second question, I have upgraded a bunch of equipment, but I'm not wearing it, and I intend to switch to it to kick your ass. Do I get matched? Third question: I'm an SL1, I have boss weapons, unupgraded. Do I get matched? Fourth question: I'm wearing higher-end armor that can't be upgraded. Do I get matched? Fifth question: How can so many fans of the game be oh so wrong? Sixth question: Why the fuck am I still posting replies to this kind of shit?
Alright you're being silly. Obviously the calculation would be a total amount spent, not the value of what you're wearing at the time of the matchup. Also, the stupidest reason for his system is one that he doesn't realize quite yet... which is that you can get great gear from drops without spending a single soul. Also, the game weighs very heavily towards your weapon, since so many attacks are able to be completely dodged. It seems more important to do tons of damage with the attacks you land as opposed to spending souls on armor for minor effect.
You could probably have the game calculate a total value (base stats value + upgrades) for all the gear you currently own; but more useful for such a metric might be to identify the 'best in slot' items in your possession - give them some kind of value that is in the same scale as your soul level, add the two together and thereby produce some kind of of overall player rating. Or alternately I guess you could just forbid invaders from accessing their inventory and then base their match up range on what they currently have equipped. Of course as we discussed before all of these methods also restrict some other fun weird paths, such as a high level player invading in the burg and then subverting their invadees expectations by gifting them some high level item before saluting and leaving. There are a bunch of ways they could tweak the system to try and stop the edge cases where a griefer dedicates himself to murdering new players but I'm not sure how much effort it is worth putting in when there are so many ways already for the players to mitigate or stop that griefing (advancing through the until skill rather than gear is the primary factor in PvP, playing mostly hollow, pulling out the cable when the opponent is clearly a time wasting idiot or hacker rather than someone looking for a fight etc).
I do think that the game "tutorial" phase extends at least through the Burg, if not the Parish as well. Most people blast through the asylum and it's not until they get to those areas that they have to sit down and think about what they are doing. Invaders are part of that, in my opinion, but it wouldn't hurt to think through how they want that to happen in the future. "no upgrades" synched with "no upgrades" is one idea that I think has some potential, but it would be hard to envision the whole thing without a more robust networking system as a base.
Yeah, that's the other big problem, at least if you assuming a future Dark Souls has similarly shitty networking and the same rough number of concurrent players. It's already tough to get a PvP match-up that actually works and anything you change to make matching more fine grained is going to make that worse.
Yes, but it wouldn't have been a problem with the original Demon's Souls, for instance. The problem is that the willingness exists to make the system more fine grained in terms of thematic reasons like covenants (and most experienced players will happily understand that the limitations there are net-code primarily and design per se secondarily) and it might also benefit from a more gentle landing for new players, code permitting (which we tend to react to allergically as a community for cultural reasons and because the suggestions are often framed as THIS GAME IS BROKEN). The designers claim they have both the networking and new player concerns foremost in their minds for DS2, so we'll see what they do with it.
This is bad too. It punishes players for not sticking with one set of gear. ...and this also has the above effect, albeit to a lesser extent. But the bigger problem is that upgrades just don't tell the tale. If you implemented any kind of system like this you would simply see griefers switch to un-upgraded unique weapons, and boom, the trolling is right back on track. There's just no way to accurately numerically compare two players based on a combination of their stats/gear/spells/whatever, because the game mechanics are too complicated for that. What about this idea: instead of pairing people up based on their stats and gear, why not do what online fighting games (and some other genres too, I'm sure) do and pair them based on their PvP history? It could keep track of a rating that goes up and down according to your wins and losses, and you can only invade/be invaded by players of a similar rating, and you could have a safeguard in place for new players that prevented a harsh landing by saying something like players with less than five PvP matches total can only be invaded by players who've had less than ten PvP matches total. Something like that, so brand new players get paired with only-slightly-less-new players, and once they have a little experience they're paired based on their apparent skill level as measured by their actual PvP performance, not some prediction of how they should perform given their stats and gear.
The single biggest problem with your idea is simply that it drastically limits the pool of potential matches. Which would be problematic in the extreme in a game with population issues to begin with. Also, it doesn't allow for multiple people having different characters on the same account, or if it does, then it also also allows for griefers to make new characters and abuse others with their lower stats. Which is exactly what happens in most of the systems you describe. Even if the system did work, you then remove the epic showdowns where you beat someone who seemingly has a lot more edge than you do. The reality here is that people are largely attempting to solve an edge case problem that isn't representative of a significant percentage of encounters. If I could salvage anything from your post, it would be some kind of limit which only applied for the first few times you were invaded, but then at that point, why bother? People keep using the term 'gank' but it's not even particularly accurate. Someone invading in the burg has no idea if they are going to hit a new player, since it is actually far more likely they will hit up a veteran character on an alt. Mostly new players are just collateral damage from a multiplayer system that has trouble matching at the best of times. The solution is most definitely not to limit the potential matching pool.
For me the problem solved itself, really: I was dead so fucking often that running around in human form for any length of time was nigh impossible. I don't think I even knew why I'd want to be human other than the brief utility it offered at a newly discovered bonfire. I do like the idea of limiting an accounts first handful of pvp encounters to folks who have not invaded a thousand times already. It seems like the most sensible solution short of a robust matchmaking system that I can't imagine they'd want to devote resources to implementing.
This. My first playthrough I was barely human. Not because I was trying to hide from pvp, but because I died way too often to really get invaded. My second playthrough I stay alive longer in my human state and have been invaded a few times and love it. Sure the one crazy over powered guy but the others have been fun matches.
You guys are really over thinking this. Simply not allowing people to invade in the Undead Burg and Parish would be enough, easy to implement, and not mess with PvP at all since you can find PvP elsewhere. Alternately, don't allow invasions until you've been invaded by an NPC at least once. Or simply remove the Humanity theft since that has no particular impact on PvP, established characters simply don't care about it, and it only serves to hose new players. The current system is crappy game design, and better can easily be done. Which apparently even the developers understand.
You're assuming that griefing is the essense of Dark Souls PvP, and that people just go "welp, beat the game three times, time to start invading for the first time ever." The reason you can invade in Undead Burg is that that's where new players are supposed to start getting a feel for PvP from both sides. You know those Cracked Red Eye Orbs that are lying around in Firelink Shrine? They're not for decoration. Why? What does this have to do with anything? Humanity theft? You mean the Dark Hand? If so that's an extremely small deal, because it only comes into play if you're carrying around extra soft humanity. There are reasons to do that but all of those reasons mean you're experienced enough to be fair game for PvP. Cite plz. I've seen the devs say they wanted to improve it, not that it was crappy as-is. I don't think anyone here would say it couldn't be improved.
I don't think it's crappy as-is. I think it's amazing that even the shrinking violets can make it in the game as-is, and a testament to how flexible and rewarding that it can also appeal to players that actually want to, you know, play the game as designed. It's got problems, but they are difficult to talk about constructively across the divide present in this thread.
Huh? It would be tied to account, not character, and of course you could make new characters. It's a significant enough percentage of encounters that people get turned off of the entire game because of it. When someone stops playing Dark Souls for any reason it's a tragedy, and the kind of asshole who gets their kicks beating up on new players can honestly fuck right off as far as I'm concerned. But since no community yet has managed to just ban all the assholes, yeah, I'm open to ideas to separate those assholes from their victims. Yeah, because the game is a year and a half old at this point and there aren't that many new players. But if you're trying to prevent new players from having a game-ruining PvP experience, I don't think "just wait until the game is so old that everyone playing it has already had it for awhile" is any kind of good solution.
