Invasions while hollowed.

So I just saw on Gamespot that Dark Souls 2 will allow you to be invaded while hollowed.

While I loved Dark Souls, the one thing I HATED was being invaded - turning human was always a very stressful experience for me because I was always in fear of being invaded, and being invaded pretty much equaled my death because I wasn't built for PvP, nor was I even interested in the PvP aspect of the game.

Unless if there's a way to somehow not be invaded, this is kind of a deal breaker for me. I know these games have a reputation of being hardcore and difficult, but I think this is crossing a line.

What are your thoughts on it?

They are working on balancing it so it is not just constant griefing:

Scared? Don’t be. Namco Bandai producer Takeshi Miyazoe explains that the game will be balanced in other ways to ensure that newcomers are not constantly griefed by professional invaders. “Before, the matchmaking was based upon player level,” he tells OPM. “That will remain, but we also want to focus on how much time you’ve played the game. Also, there will be penalties for players who invade, but still lose. There are risks. And there will be ‘policemen’ against invaders and a ransom system where if you constantly invade or kill NPCs there will be motivation for summoned players to go after you.”

They are also teasing a way to avoid invasions, but it will most likely come with some kind of penalty.

If the game is better about matchmaking you with someone you could realistically handle that's fine. I just don't see that happening. I think the stacking death penalty is worse.

It'll be fine I think with the new covenants. I think I read you can hire someone to protect and take out bounties on players. There's more covenants to be announced that I think will make it a bit less intimidating. I'm actually pretty excited even though in dark souls I got killed by 95% of invaders

What's the point in being hollow?

My thoughts on it is that this means that I'll probably play the entire game offline. It'll be a bummer to not have the notes, but the Souls series are single player games for me. In either Demon's Souls or Dark Souls I was basically never alive just to avoid dealing with it.

Same here. The PvP side of the Souls games are the only part I hate. Hearing about the invasions while hollow side of 2 has had me worried for a while. I hope there are ways around it, as mentioned above, because it's really a potential deal breaker in a series I fucking love. I'm kinda terrible at games, and balanced or not, I'll be decimated 9 out of 10 times against any other human...

The idea of playing offline just bums me out, too, the notes are such a cool part of the series. =/

@nev: Yeah, this is what bums me out too, I loved reading the notes people place around, and playing on offline mode and not having them available sounds like it would suck out a lot of the fun I had with the games.

Will you even be able to go offline in Dark Souls 2 on PC? I know you NEEDED an internet connection to play the first game, so that's the biggest reason this change concerns me. Unlike console players, I'll HAVE to play online, and that just sucks.

Edit: I hope it's true that it can be deactivated somehow. As long as the penalty isn't that bad, I think I can handle it.

I enjoyed PvP in the Souls games quite a lot (even in Demon's where CW + MC was all you ever played against at one point), but I don't know if this is a great move. Though that depends on the reliability of the new covenants that are meant to "protect" the players that don't want to deal with invasions and etc. but we won't know how those turn out in practice until well after game-day. In theory, that sounds like a covenant that a lot of people would use to get easier access to duels.

Then again, the PvP covenants may turn out to be "better" in practice. All speculation at this point.

@random45: First of all, there will probably be ways to avoid it through the game.

On the other hand, I think you should invest in learning how to at least SURVIVE pvp with your build, or have something you can trow on to increase your chances. I've been playing with someone recently, basically cooping through his first run. And he was extremely averse to the PVP, but once he had a few non-shitty PVP encounters, he started to really enjoy it. He just had to figure out how to survive.

I'll also say that that will completely change the dynamics of how PVP works and what considerations you'll have to keep in mind when invading. You'll have as much greater pool of peopel when you invade, and you'll have much higher chances of going up against someone who's more potent than you.

Assuming there's a really good anti-cheating system in place that prevents hackers from running amok and there's decent networking that will also make invading less obnoxious.

Personally I'm stoked about the change. Ultimately, it's a part of the game and I think they weren't super pleased with the previous system because 90% of players spend almost no time human. I don't dislike being invaded and even I never bothered because I never had any real reason to become human. If this exposes me to more PVP I'm okay with that.

Just learn how to handle yourself in a PVP encounter and you'll do much better. I kind of understand people not liking it, but at the same time I think a lot of people had a weird experience with it. Lots of min-maxing twinks with hacks because a huge amount of the people who've played Dark Souls played it far enough after the console version launched that there were a ton of people who knew how to cheese every system they could and how to make frankly overpowered PVP characters. But at the same time you can almost always counter their build with patient, careful, smart play. And it might make you a bit better at the PVE game as well. I think once people give PVP a chance and see the ways in which it's completely different from PVE and therefor figure out what they are doing wrong, they will enjoy it a lot more. Give the PVP a chance. I'm not a PVP kind of guy generally, but I never had any issues with Dark Souls PVP other than hackers and super laggy players, both of which will hopefully happen far less in the sequel.

So long as the equipment, stats, and invasion requirements are better balanced, I don't think it's going to be that big of a deal . They've already made the most important change for invasion, which is scaling elemental damage. The reason low level invasions were bullshit in Dark Souls was because Lighting and Chaos weapons allowed for outrageous damage output with ludicrously low stats. Now that it seems that is no longer the case. Combined with more stats controlling more factors, invaders ability to min/max for PvP seems lessened. Hopefully, they PvP will be more like Demon's Souls, where you pretty much always had a fighting chance (mostly because damage output in that game is much lower).

Not to mention, if the Blue Sentinels work as intended, then invasion shouldn't be that much of a bother.

@skooky said:

You loose a percentage of your available vitality every time you die, sort of like Demon's Souls, only it stacks. I don't recall if you still have to be human to summon.

If they can get rid of the horrible lag, I'll be ok with this. If it's as laggy as Dark Souls 1, then I may end up hitting Alt+F4 every time I get invaded.

Suddenly being backstabbed when your opponent was directly in front of you is frustrating.

You have to pay them a dollar for every life to not be invaded, if you are lucky you only have to pay $1.

QQ

This just forces me to be a dirty prick by quitting the game or pulling out my ethernet cable when someone wants to invade me. The reason why I stay hollow is because I don't want some random element coming in and fucking my shit up. Even more so if this guy is geared to kill human players.

Personally I don't see the big deal, yeah getting invaded and killed sucks, but to me, that's Dark Souls. Just another obstacle you have to overcome. If anything, it will for people to get better at the game. No complaints here about this.

My hope is once you get invaded, win or lose, you fall way down on the priority list for future invasions. I didn't mind getting invaded as it's just part of the game and was at times exciting. The lag made it rather pointless though, as I would just get randomly backstabbed even if the enemy player was somewhere in front of me from what I could tell. On the positive side, having full or reduced health now doesn't influence whether you can get invaded or not, so there's no drawback to be at full health in that regard (in DS2, you lose a percent of your health every time you die up to 50% to display the effect of hollowing.)

I really love that they are still prepared to rip up the rulebook. This is the game where they could have gotten too afraid to try anything new in fear that fans would get pissed

I'll be alright with it as long as they fix the horrible netcode. Demon's souls pvp was hot fucking garbage because of it, and dark souls only slightly improved that. I'll be playing on the PC, and if the netcode is bad, every motherfucker is getting alt+F4'd.

Can't say I'm that enthusiastic about it to be honest, balancing that stuff seems like plate spinning for the blind with a the combat timing and build elements that have been core to the series.

I can understand the reasoning that they felt it was a key part of their design vision but if a larger portion of players decided to spend it offline it would signal to me that they don't want to be invaded all the time; so forcing is easily be off putting. It's as if the new Call of Duty or Battlefield game required you to finish the single player campaign to play the multiplayer, the majority require to participate in a minority option.

I've largely enjoyed the games as I would a roguelike with the asynchronous multiplayer notes and blood pools as added tension and depth. I too hope they allow for offline without some major penalty, even if it's no NPC invasions again.

I assume we don't really have all the details of how this will work and a list of all the changes coming in this game. I noticed a lot of things in that PS3 network test a few months back, but I'm sure they've changed a lot of things since then. I'm not going to pass any judgment on invasions and all that until we really know what's going on and I see it in action.

I'm not too worried about it. While getting invaded and viciously murderized was always a bummer in Dark Souls, it was rarely anything more than a minor setback in the grand scheme of things. With the reassurances that they're trying to make the entire system more balanced and less prone to griefing, who knows, I might even enjoy the extra tension of knowing someone could invade me at any time.

I imagine you will have to sacrifice something to avoid invasions, Joining a covenant that blocks phantoms (possibly losing out on some other covenant benefit), or maybe having a ring that blocks invaders, making you sacrifice a ring slot.

This gives me heartburn.

As long as the lag is fixed then this shouldn't be a problem.

If you can still get maxed out elemental weapons at your starting soul level, possibly a problem. But that's probably not going to be a problem right at the games launch. Probably have a few weeks, or even months before people get that good at farming the materials and have they're build setup.

If there were restrictions on the Invasions, like some kind of equipment level restriction that could be put into the game to better balance out the PVP that might help. Perhaps every armor and weapon has a level, and that level along with the soul level of the player is used to determine the invasion. So the odd's of getting ambushed by players with elemental damage weapons that take off 400 to 500 health a swing would be unlikely at low levels, and at higher levels you would be able to deal with that damage.

Better example: Some guy gets a +10 fire sword at soul level 15. Decides to go mess up some new players for fun. He hits the invade button and gets matched with somebody who is soul level 60 with 50% fire resistance, fat armor and a tiny knife. ...that might be a bad example... but it's all I've got. Maybe add a defense vs elemental damage search in there as well. If the invader does tons of lightning damage, match him with someone who can resist half of it.

Or they could disable back stabs and parry's in PVP... or put a ring in the game that can be found early on that either protects you from getting invaded or summons phantoms to protect you. A covenant could do it as well, just make it easy to find.

I have been avoiding pretty much all of the Dark Souls 2 information that's come up. Going to go into it knowing as little as possible, when I decide too go into it. The other 2 souls games were fun and enjoyable, but Dark Souls invaders drove me insane unlike Demons Souls where it was a fun diversion whenever some body decided to pick a fight with me.

@random45: play offline bam

@giefcookie said:

Yup, those are the exact two things I thought of as well. A ring slot would be heinous, but if it avoids all invasions ever, it's better than 1/2 health from Demon's Souls (heck, that's kinda what the cling ring was).

If it's just a covenant, with some parts of the game (eg shortcuts and optional bosses with good loot) only available to other covenants, that's a pretty fair trade.

@chiablo: Yeah.. The teleport backstabbing is getting real old in Dark souls. I've had like 3 Good fights from 20.

Offline will have NPC invaders instead, apparently.

@strainedeyes: yeah but npcs are stupid

Well, at least NPC invaders use AI, which can be stupid and predictable. Humans are jerks. I'm waiting to hear more about being invaded while Hollow in Dark Souls 2 before I buy. I hate invasions - if I wanted to engage in PvP, I'd turn Human or play a PvP game.

I don't really see it as much of a problem, because even if you get griefed, so what? It won't happen constantly, there seem to be some pretty good countermeasures and it just really doesn't matter all that much. (What's one more death, really?)

I'm even thinking of doing a bunch of invading myself. Of course looking for fair fights as far as possible.

My good ole friend alt-f4 will never let me down.

I´ve never been invaded in Dark Souls and was only invaded a couple of times when I first started playing Demon's Souls. If I have to play Dark Souls 2 offline then so be it, I have no interest in playing PvP.

People worried about this BS invasions from Dark Souls 1 shouldn't be. They are adding Stat requirements to armors. That alone cuts down on 90% of the non-hacker invasions that are "unfair". Seeing an invader with Havel's as a new player is total bullshit and should never have been allowed. Being invaded has always been part of the game (even in Demon's Souls), and has never made me cut the cord.

There is the returning mechanic that prevents "chain invasions" by disallowing invaders for a period after you have been invaded once, and add to all of that there is always the chance that you can kill the invader when things are more equal. I think it will be fine. Plus they are claiming there will be more Covenants built around protecting people from invaders. Think like Dark Souls police who are automatically summoned to assist invaded players.

Considering how meticulously the original Dark Souls was balanced, I can't imagine From Software neglecting to balance a system like this. Especially with this newly-increased emphasis.

Understanding the potential for failure here, I'm still not particularly concerned. Even as someone who deliberately played Hollow to avoid Invasions last time around.

I'm not overly concerned about.

Think of it like this. In dark souls 1 most people are playing as a hollow because they recently died, or just haven't bothered turning human. The only real reason to turn human was to kindle bonfires and multiplayer stuff. So i'd say a massive percentage of players just stay hollow.

If theres all the PvPers trying to invade, then they're all trying to invade the few who turned human. So instead of all the PvPers trying to invade the fraction of players who are human, now all of that will be spread out to the entire playerbase.

I am fully prepared to play offline if it goes bad, I've been playing Dark Souls and Demon's Souls offline lately too and I don't really miss any of the online stuff. With all the changes they've been making though I'm still a bit curious to see what the game'll be like online. My main problem is that every time I'm faced with sudden PvP in a game I get so stressed out and I can feel my heart start beating fast, it's not something I'm very up for putting myself through if I can avoid it.

So there's going to be a live discussion about dark souls 2 tomorrow on the site. Wonder what its going to entail.

The problem with Dark Souls PvP is the hacking and netcode.

If Dark Souls II improves it then its fine. We'll see, though, if that actually happens or not. If not I'll just play offline.

No point. Of course if you don't want to be you'll have to not die. Good luck with that.

This seems kind of ridiculous. I was playing Dark Souls earlier and for some strange fucking reason I was invaded by a guy from Brazil, now this guy must have had a ping of easily 450+ and as a result he'd be swinging nowhere near me, and still hit me, and I'd be hitting what I believed was him and doing nothing. Not sure why there's no host advantage in that sense, but whatever.

I don't understand why people are so stressed about being invaded.

Matchmaking is being changed beyond just a soul level difference. Stat requirements are being placed on gear to prevent excessive twinking. There are covenants specifically designed to protect you when you are invaded.

There is way too much doom and gloom over this.

The first time I played through DS I hated invasions. I thought the game was hard enough as it was. Now that I have the entire game compartmentalized, invasions are awesome since they give life to the random factor. Surprises still happen, basically.

Don't worry, I'll join the police to help you goombastomp those griefers.

Being summoned as a savior / policing force sounds cool.

"I fight for the users" and whatnot.

Once I learned that they left your souls I cared much less about it. Watching some dick head gloat while I faded out was the worst. I enjoyed killing the few invaders I could. Humanity was the main hassle, generally being interrupted between restore and kindle . I would like it clarified that if you popped 2 consecutive humanities, would it pull you up for invasion before you rekindled? For some reason I would pop humanity separately, for each function. Perhaps that was dumb.

hmmmmm don't know think it's kinda cool interactive aspect.

But I do hope at least they Bow emote before attacking

I think the increased emphasis on invasion and PvP along with Covenant functionality will make the game better. If you don't want that at all, there will probably be menu options to shut it off, or in-game items.

It's a dangerous game; I'd be okay with forcing people to dedicate a ring socket to blocking invasion if that's how they want to operate.

It just adds flexibility and value... If you want the solo experience, just log out of PSN- no worries.