I'm stealing this from r/darksouls on reddit, but I think it is important people see it because it sheds a lot of light on the issues people have been having.
I'm not sure if many have figured this out yet, but I haven't really seen it posted here.
I was watching a stream of some dude playing Dark Souls the other day and he was constantly summoning his friend into his boss fights/areas. I asked him how he did it and he happily told me. Apparently, whenever you drop your White Soapstone, it's placed on a random server. If you drop it again, it's placed on a server different than the one it was before. So a buddy of mine thought we'd try out this guy's method of summoning his friend. My friend would drop his soapstone, and wait about 20 second, and drop it again until I told him I seen it, which I did eventually, every time. Sometimes it took five minutes, one time it took around 11 minutes, but that's because the first two times I seen his stone, he dropped another one before I told him I seen it, so the summon would fail.
TL;DR: Drop Soapstone near buddy every 20-30 seconds. Buddy should see it eventually when it lands on his server. Summon him up.
I want to thank twitch.tv/brandon505 for this.
Edit: All other summoning rules still apply. Covenants don't matter according to Brandon(stream bro), the person summoning has to be human, area boss of host must be alive, and be within 10% of each other's level.
I find this interesting not because of the fact that we can now party with specific people, but because it sheds light on why so many people have had problems with this game's online.
You can set down a summon sign and possibly be sitting for hours in an empty lobby without even knowing it, as I'm sure plenty here have. This also explains why the eye stones haven't been working. Each time you activate them it is trying to find a match in one server, it isn't actually seeking individuals at all but rather scanning a lobby to see if there are any individuals that meet the criteria in that lobby.
This means that if you aren't getting any summons you just need to plant another sign, and if you aren't getting to invade you just need to keep trying (I guess.)
There a few problems with this though, and those are people who are trying to summon and people who have covenant rings. If you are trying to summon a friendly phantom to assist you and your lobby is empty, you are pretty much fucked. it is completely random whether or not a soul sign will show up in your world so you could be sitting in front of Capra Demon forever and never see a single sign. This also doesn't sound good for covenants at all, because rings are not activated. Does it just wait for people to meet the criteria in your lobby? Is it continually scanning all lobbies one after the other? I have to believe the former is the most likely becuase I've had the Cat's Ring on for hours upon hours with no response whatsoever.
This is very good news for those who wanted to co-op with friends, however the situation still seems quite dire for those looking into other multiplayer features.
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