Invasions while hollowed.

As long as they've managed to snuff out twinking and eliminate the horrible latency, I have no issues with this. Matchmaking by "soul history" and dedicated servers are both intended to address this. Hopefully they work.

My theory is that where you stand on this issue has a lot to do with your opinions on social mobility in real life.

PvP in Dark Souls was laggy. I think I'll roll offline and play through the single player with a fun build and not worry about connection issues and stuff.

I have considered what would get me to accept invasions as 'balanced', but I doubt others would agree:

First, invaders should agro the mobs in the level.

Second, invaders should take 200% damage from all sources.

Third, invasions should have a set timer, somewhere between 2-5 minutes, if the invader does not kill the target in the time frame they die.

Fourth, you can only get invaded once every 24 real time hours without use of an item to reset the counter(the item should be reusable for people who actually want to engage in PvP).

Lastly, if you do invade another players world, when you get back to your own world everything has 200-300% health and damage output for 24 hours OR all NPCs automatically agro you(even shopkeepers and other "essential" NPCs)

This gives actual risk to the invader which at the moment have a HUGE advantage when they invade someone else's world. It also "forces" everyone to "deal with" the PvP aspect of the game, but not to the extent that it completely destroys your enjoyment(like invading currently does).

I do agree with this very interesting and smart observation.

@drxlecter allowing interaction of the invader with the mobs is a great idea if the invader could fight back, kill the mobs and not get souls from it himself but give them to the host. Unfortunately this would probably be used as an alternative to cooperation because the community is good at deriving the initial purpose of something as proven many times. For the rest of your prose...well you were obviously kidding...right?

@announakis: I honestly believe invaders need to be punished for their actions. Invading is litteraly the definition of being an asshole, and it should NOT be encouraged. Invaders should have their entire accounts flagged as "invaders" and all characters attached to the account should have SEVERE consequences for invading someone else's game. I would totally support invaders not having access to over 50% of the PvE experience.

@drxlecter: I'm relatively sure invasions have time limits now; but it could just be helpful summons. I'm sure there will be some labyrinthine zone in which I'll afk for 45 minutes just to fuck with the other guy either as an invader or as the one being invaded at some point if they don't; because that shit's hilarious.

@drxlecter: This is getting out of hand. As invading is a mechanic implemented as a feature of the game, why would you think the developers wouldn't want to encourage people to do it? Should we be discouraged from summoning help as well? Maybe From should punish us for leaving messages, too.

In Dark Souls it's pretty simple: if you want to be able to summon help, you have to deal with the possibility of being invaded. I'm not gonna assume you'll be able to summon while hollow in DS2, does anyone have any insight on that from the beta?

@rocketboot: If you kill the shopkeepers in Spelunky you have consequences, sure it is a feature but it is something isn't really 'encouraged' since the rest of your game is going to get significantly harder. The Souls series should really have something like this for invaders. In spelunky you are only hurting NPCs, but in the souls series you are actively making a choice to harm other players. It simply isn't a 'decent' thing to do.

So, new idea. Permadeath for invaders. I would rather that any character that invades is automatically flagged like a 'hardcore' character in Diablo, so any future death results in character deletion. But people would probably think that is overboard, so what about permadeath for dying while invading?

@drxlecter: I doubt that would help your cause, bud. That would discourage everyone except hackers and hardcore PVPers who are confident they won't lose. It would also completely destroy the entire PVP community.

I am not even sure whether I should laugh or cry now.

@drxlecter mate, I understand that you do not like having your painfully slow and clumsy progression spoiled by an invader (nobody does), but you seriously have to stop making arguments so disproportionate against PvP in general.

If, like you say, nobody enjoys invasions then why defend them?

I have hundreds of hours in dark souls, I have killed/been killed by 0 invaders. I self suicide the moment I turn human. Dark Souls gave me a very simple way to get out of PvP, and I gave up Co-op for it, which I would never use anyway.

Also note that I am NOT railing against PvP in general. Although I despise playing games with other people (Co-op or competitive) it does not mean I think it needs to be removed from every game. What I don't like is the idea of it not being "consensual." So, if you are going to allow others to get their jollies by being assholes, I'd love to have them face serious repercussions for doing it. I'm not suggesting these things for CoD, or Battlefield, or any other game where you can go in and choose "multiplayer" or "singleplayer".

What I am doing are steamrolling ideas that would get me to say "this seems fair." At the moment invaders risk jack shit and are nothing but fuckwads trolling others.

Simply put, the vast majority of humans are fucking horrible wretched pieces of shit especially online. I don't want to be spending my "down time" dealing with them, I do it all fucking day. These are games, and they are supposed to be what you do to have fun.

@drxlecter: Then play offline. Its a simple fix. And doesn't require a debate.

@sterling: isn't that the point of this thread? to discuss it? I've already mentioned I intend to play offline 2-3 pages ago...

@gamefreak9: no, the online is not anywhere near as important as you make it out to be.

@drxlecter:

You are a trip. From this whole thing concerning invasions in a video game, we have gotten your base philosophy of your regard for the state of Humanity. I do kind of agree but hey, relax. We may will have our apocalypsis, and perhaps a more worthier life-form such as cats will gain the critical self awareness and strive for the Stars or Anor Londo without PvP aggression.. My prejudices would be I'd like to at least keep it within the mammals, but I'm not calling the shots.

I feel that all this "sky is falling" reaction from the new PVP is coming from people that try to place the actions of a few invaders looking out to troll new players onto the entire Dark Souls PVP community. I've fought for hundreds of hours and the one thing that people look for is a good fight. We don't need your souls and we don't need your humanity. We don't want you to run off and kill yourself. We want an interesting fight.

Over the last few months I've noticed a shift on the 360 version and I'm seeing more variety in the builds. My guess is that people are preparing themselves for Dark Souls 2 and are getting themselves accustomed to other build types because their build probably wont exist in Dark Souls 2. I've experimented with several more weapons in case I need to deal with some new combination of attack animations on my weapon.

I was invaded only a small amount of times in Demon's Souls before I started playing offline. None of those invasions were bad experiences so people that invade just to grief had no bearing on why I never got invaded in Dark Souls. I'm sure some people did have bad experiences with griefers and honestly there will still probably be a way to grief low level players in Dark Souls 2. I bet there are many people like me that just have no interest in ever playing with or against another player but don't want to be forced to play offline and that's why I think the Dark Souls system was perfect since there was virtually no penalty to being hollow. I can why they wanted to increase the advantage of being human but invasions at all times is a horrible idea. Also now that there are penalties for being hollow and you can be invaded why would anyone be hollow now? They've taken away the only advantage and then added some penalties that's just going to make it easier for invaders.

If you've seen the changes the you should know that they've made everything harder for invaders and added penalties to them on top of that. Saying that From is, "just going to make it easier for invaders" shows that you haven't read the changes at all.

@golguin: I was specifically talking about if you get invaded when you're hollow which from my understanding your health can go as low as fifty percent of your max.

EDIT: What I'm getting at is that you are being punished for being hollow without the sole advantage and only reason to be hollow in the first place. Unless the item to become human is incredibly rare why would anybody be hollow? I'd rather they just get rid of the whole hollow/human system if this is how they are going to treat it.

Being hollow is a punishment. It's not meant to be a reward. Why would the game award you for dying multiple times? The developers want you to be human and they award you without reducing your health.

You should know that invaders can have their max health reduced by 90%. They can potentially try to fight you with only 10% of their total health available to them while you get to fight them with 100% of your health and possibly a phantom buddy to protect you every time you get invaded.

Dark Souls' worst feature is invasions. They are a waste of time and counter to every other design choice in the game - a chaos to the game's order. It feels tacked-on and unnecessary.

There's no reason for me to buy Dark Souls 2 if it's going to be a step backwards from Dark Souls.

I should also bring this up again, but people who are hollowed have the lowest chance of getting invaded. The priority list goes people with high sin, someone who has summoned phantoms, if you are human, and then hollow players at the very end of the list.

It's also going to be open to EVERYONE so why people think that invasions are squarely going to be focused only on them and not spread among every other player is beyond my understanding.

Honestly, while I played the majority of Dark Souls as a Hollow, I'm not that opposed to invasions.

As long as it's reasonably balanced and the netcode isn't crap, I'll accept it as a part of the game.

I love my cat, he chills on my lap while I play. I would totally play games with him.

@golguin: Have you ever heard of the "knock-out game"? Wherein someone random goes up an punches a person they don't know and think it is the highest form of entertainment. Invaders follow the same exact principle. Why would you want to play a game with someone like that?

I haven't seen anyone in this thread complain about the frequency of invasions, just the majority saying they don't want to get invaded at all. Even once is one times too many. I just don't understand why they have to throw away the systems from the last two games just so there will be more invasions. The reason there weren't as many invasions before were because it was too hard to become human in Demon's Souls and there was hardly any point in being a human in Dark Souls. I'm sure if it's not hard to revert to human in Dark Souls 2 then there would be more invasions due to people wanting to avoid the penalties of being a hollow. I'm fine with them encouraging invasions but not like this and I think From hugely overreacted in this whole situation.

@drxlecter: My god, man. You're a step away from comparing invaders to Hitler. People who invade, even the ones who do it to grief people, aren't actually hurting anyone! All they're doing is taking your souls and humanity and possibly stalling your progress. You can easily get all that stuff back! Not to mention that whole "knock out game" was a few isolated incidents sensationalized by the media. Like, 2 years ago. Not everyone is a dick, get that chip off your shoulder.

Anyway I want to raise this question again for people who participated in the beta (or have knowledge otherwise): Can you summon while hollow? I would guess you can summon blues at least.

It's terrifying and I love it!

@rocketboot: Invaders are literally Hitler. There ya go, I godwin'd it for ya.

Good lord, those are all TERRIBLE ideas.

Look back at the original Dark Souls. If you go Hollow, you isolate yourself from all online aspects except messages because you can't handle a bit of challenge with a player. But you could easily avoid it, as I said, going Hollow.

From Software took a notice of people doing this very often, and now there's a very clear reason as to WHY you can be invaded while Hollow. They don't want players avoiding one of the core aspects of the Souls series with no punishment. Do you really want to avoid one of the core mechanics of the Souls games? Go offline, there you go. Same experience as being Hollow in Dark Souls.

Why would they have created the invasion system if they thought players who used it were just assholes? There'd be no point into having made it in the first place if they didn't want those types of people playing. Invading is balanced to being an asshole on purpose, it's part of the game and From Software very much wants to expand on that. It's already too late to try and get out of the invasion system. From Soft is going full on with the Online aspect this time around, and I very much like it.

Edit: Also forgot to mention, with more people being susceptible to invasions, each person has a smaller chance of being invaded whereas in Dark Souls, only the players in human form could be giving a much higher chance to be the one chosen to be invaded.

@drxlecter: For the record, I'm not condoning or openingly supporting your suggestions on rebalancing invasions, but I hope I get to watch you continue deep, so very far deep, into this merciless anti-invasion rabbithole. It's a genuine pleasure watching your posts stir so much of the pot.

My sentiments exactly. My only grief with the whole thing is the people who hack. I don't mind a fair fight, or losing a fight where I was clearly out-skilled, but people who have seemingly infinite life and can kill me in 1 hit, that kills the fun for me.

I never really understood why people have such an aversion to being invaded in the first place (unless that person is hacking).

For some background, I am only on my first play through of Dark Souls (just reached the giant blacksmith in Anor Londo) and have no particular interest in invading myself, although this may change after I have finished it at least once. I have been playing human fairly regularly and have only been invaded four times despite having a play time of about 65 hours (I like to wander around and explore a lot). I was killed three of those times and I don't see how that is any different than being killed by one of the AI enemies.

As far as I am concerned, as long as being killed by an invader doesn't punish the player any more severely than being killed by an AI enemy then it doesn't make any difference at all. Whether a random enemy kills you from ambush, you die to a boss the first time you fight it or another player invading kills you, you lose your souls, humanity, become hollow and are kicked back to the last bonfire so why get anymore upset due to one of those deaths than the others?

Personally, I think that the online/multiplayer aspect of the Souls games are one of the most fascinating parts of their design and will be very interested to see how that develops in Dark Souls 2 as it sounds like it will be very expanded. From everything that I have heard about this aspect of the game, it sounds like From is putting a lot of effort into balancing invasions/summoning help and being invaded but it won't be until the game is released and people are actually playing that we will truly be able to judge just how well they have done so.

Good, the more people like you that don't buy the game the better. In fact, I hope everyone who complains about it doesn't buy it. Because its apparently not for you. And not every game has to be custom tailored to your wants. Get over yourself. The systems are fine. Millions of people love them. They are in building on them and making them fresh again. If you don't like it that is fine. And you don't need to play the game. Complaining about it is a waste of time.

I don't know about all this other stuff you guys are talking about, but I'd really like at least one way to safely go to the bathroom, or let my dog out, or answer an important phone call when I'm playing Dark Souls 2. Maybe it will be a rare occurrence, but I don't look forward to potentially having to just stand there and die, losing all my stuff, because I got invaded while I was pooping. Having to quit the game every time to avoid that seems very inconvenient.

In Dark Souls I knew I was taking a risk when I was human, but I knew I could stay at a bonfire or a cleared out corner away from enemies when I was hollow if I needed to step away for a few moments.

@cmpltnoob: Most people seem to be unaware of just how often the Souls games save. Check your inventory or stats, pick up an item, recover souls, so much as blink and the game saves. When you leave to the main menu it also saves. In other words, if you want to go and let the dog out or just go to the bathroom, go to "quit" which takes you back to the main menu (rather than quitting the game entirely), and when you're ready to continue simply load your character again; loading your character takes only a second or two which is really nothing. You'll start off exactly where you were before, the enemies that were dead stay dead, your health is what it was, etc.

during the beta, you could not see the soapstone signs when hollow, meaning you could not summon actively other players to your world..at least for the white signs. That does not mean that you cannot see the red soap stones (I did not have the occasion to check) nor that you cannot be invaded and if you are taking part in the way of the blue, suppose that the blue phantom invade your world to "protect" you, that is to have a good fight with a red phantom (the truth being they are not totally here for your protection but just for the fight against the red really)

because as golguin accurately says: