Group Password for the GB community?

After much deliberation, we have decided the Giant Bomb group password should be GBOMBERS. Please add this to your list of group passwords to increase the chances of summoning a giant bomb player to your game!

Original Post:

Hey guys,Like many of you guys, i'll be starting Elden Ring tonight !

i saw, on twitter, VaatiVidya talk about a new option for Multiplayer called Group Password for communities.

i was wondering if one was already created for the GB community ?

If not, i suggest we all use GBOMBERS.

Once I stop getting the network error message, I’d be down for some shenanigans. I would also suggest “yumyum” without the quotes as a callback to Jan’s Bloodborne playthrough.

Wouldn't it be better for everyone who wants in on this to get it via a group PM so your group doesn't get trolled or something?

@justin258: Probably, but getting trolled is part and parcel with Soulsborne co-op/pvp. I play nice personally, but getting backstabbed by a purple shade who was acting cool for a while just makes me laugh.

i'm in. GLHB, Bombers, yumyum, whatever works

yooo I want in too, if this is a thing!

a bit sad it seems like you can't ride Torrent in co-op though :(

Going to go with potatomarshall. All lower case. The sort of person you'll see if this is public.

I would like a group password or DM me for a password

I've been using 6969 lol

I'll check back later to see if there is a better consensus though :)

Did we come up with anything concrete? What's most people using?

i've Been using GBOMBERS All caps, no need to complicated things anymore.

See you there guys
Praise The Ring

fair enough. added op's suggestion to my group password list

GBOMBERS

Question: have people playing co-op noticed a lot of invasions? I've been hearing that since invasions are now limited to people who have already summoned a helper, you end up really getting slammed with invaders nonstop. Which I think would kind of suck, really.

FWIW, I ask because now I'm in endgame and super-high level, but looking to play some co-op with my friend who's really more of a Dark Souls tourist... I use the term fairly literally, not pejoratively. He played through pretty much all of Dark Souls 3 with a friend who had dropped a bunch of consumable souls to level him a lot at the beginning and basically never played by himself... sort of the hidden easy mode of those games. He likes them but can't really handle the difficulty.

I suppose if the invasions are really frequent then possibly the same thing could be done again, drop soul items in order to get past the invaders' summon range, if that's still a thing in Elden Ring. Another thing I'm not sure about.

@atheistpreacher:I've played through the vast majority of the game in co-op and have been invaded a grand total of three times. Twice we killed the invader almost immediately because 2v1, and one time the invader fell down a lift shaft and died.

I don't think you need to stress about it too much.

I'm going to update the OP to reflect this. x

Curious how many people are plying on Xbox compared to PS5 and PC? Although I’ve recently started playing in offline mode because the player messages were way too overwhelming I might want to connect at some point for some co-op.

@humanity: i'm Playing on PS5, I've seen a couple of Giant Bomb players and was happy to praise your messages across the lands Between to maybe help you get some life back ;)

I'll definitely add this password to my settings. I'm playing on PC and had some difficulty finding a summoning sign for a co-op partner yesterday. Not sure if that's a common thing or if I just happened to be fighting a boss that no one wanted to help out with or what.

Anyone else experiencing this?

@constantk: I am too, and not from lack of signs, I get to hit the button, but then it immediately says cannot summon, and then all the signs disappear for a while, rinse and repeat. On one hand, it’s made me solo more bosses than I would have otherwise, but on the other it’s pretty frustrating.

Has playing in the GB password group helped that at all? I don’t want to cut myself off from invasions or blue ring summons either because the four or five of each I’ve had were good fun.

@tartyron: I only played a little while tonight and didn't attempt any co-op. The only boss I attempted was Margit and I wanted to see if I could solo it after failing initially and doing other things for about 15 hours. I got him first try this time!

I'll check back in after trying co-op the first time with the group password turned on. My issue wasn't failing to summon. I wasn't seeing signs at all. I was trying to summon for Dragonkin Soldier of Nokstella and didn't see any signs whatsoever after using my furlcalling finger remedy.

I did get a notice that someone in the group beat a shardbearer. Nice going, whoever you are!

I said I'd check back in after trying co-op again, post-password entry. I played for a bit last night and got to another boss that I wanted some help with. Used a furlcalling finger remedy and saw 0 summon signs. I was in Sellia Crystal Tunnel which has a site of grace quite a distance from the boss. I used the remedy at the site of grace and ran to the boss multiple times keeping an eye out for signs. Nothing.

With the sales and concurrent user numbers on this game, it's really surprising to me how often I'm failing to see any summon signs at all.

@tartyron: I was able to summon tonight to fight a boss. I had maybe 4 or 5 failed summon attempts before I got someone to come in. Since I was only getting 1 or 2 summon signs each life, I had to use the remedy, attempt a summon, when it failed attempt the boss, die, repeat. I don't know if it was someone from the GB group or not (is there a way to tell for sure?). Overall, it still felt good to beat the boss finally, but it feels like multiplayer shouldn't be this difficult. For people who are fine playing co-op, just let them matchmake into a party and go for it.

Thought I'd throw in a bit of my experience with multiplayer since this seems like the place for it, maybe someone will find it interesting.

I've never liked the multiplayer systems in these games, really... I typically play them solo and offline. But as I said above, after beating the game myself and reaching a ridiculously high level (in the 300s), I'm now co-oping with my friend a few days a week. He's just not all that interested in playing by himself.

It can definitely be a bit frustrating at times since we're playing together while over voice chat for hours on end, and that's just not how From designed this game to be played. You run into ridiculous crap like finding a cave dungeon in the open world and not being able to enter it until he unsummons me, only to summon me back when inside the cave. But oh well, I guess. The silver lining is that on PS5 he can stream his screen to me, so that when I'm not actively co-oping with him I can still see what he's up to, and occasionally direct him somewhere.

I have to sort of intentionally hold back from just murdering everything super-hard and let him be the hero. For bosses I'll draw aggro when he's in trouble but otherwise try to let him do most of the work, and I always leave him the last few hits, because it sucks to feel like your summons are doing all the work for you. But all that's fine by me. I'm content to be supporting cast even though my maxed weapons mean I'm able to do something like double his damage. It's sort of fun basically being his tour guide through the Lands Between, giving him as much or as little direction and help as he'd like.

We've been invaded quite a bit recently. At one point tonight, he summoned me and we were invaded within about thirty seconds. We got invaded again about five minutes later, even though neither of us had died in that time... seems like there is little to no internal cooldown timer for these things.

On the one hand, both of us find invasions annoying and we'd turn them off if we could, though I know that's an impossibility for co-op. But there is a silver lining in our case: the fact that I'm so much higher-level than him--only possible because we're using a private password--means that my rate of dispatching invaders has been... quite good. I literally one-shotted three different invaders tonight with my Bolt of Gransax weapon skill (a speedy long-range lightning bolt). My absurdly over-leveled character seems like a fitting retort to the sort of people who intentionally stay at a low level in order to invade and grief poor helpless noobs. So that's something!

@atheistpreacher: See, that sounds like a good time! The problem I'm running into is that none of my friends, somehow, are currently playing Elden Ring so I'm stuck waiting for the rando matchmaking to work. I can deal with convoluted-but-eventually-works when I'm playing with a friend. When I'm unsure if it's ever going to work because I don't know who's on the other end of the summons, it's more frustrating.

I will say, when it did work I was matched with a similarly-leveled tarnished and we took down the boss in a way that seemed genuinely cooperative. No one was wildly over-leveled and we each took turns doing damage/drawing aggro and it was great. I also only summoned them for the boss and they left immediately after so no invasion. When it works, it's great.

@constantk: Yeah, it can definitely be frustrating when you just can't find a summon when you want one. I'd expect that it's probably not too bad trying to get someone for a boss in a legacy dungeon, but the odds that there are people with their signs down in a random cave seem a bit remote even with a large playerbase. It would be nice if prospective cooperators could somehow just volunteer to help with any zone of the game and be pulled in from wherever people wanted--you know, like other sane co-op systems do it--but From is stuck on this weird system of theirs. It makes even less sense in an open world structure than it did in the Dark Souls games.

I'm in there, bring me in.

@afro_stevens: I'll take you up on it when I see your sign!

I've been having a bit better luck summoning recently. Not sure if the patches have helped with that or what. I have also unfortunately had co-op folks drop fairly regularly in the middle of battles. I'm used to death and failure at this point but it stings a bit more when it's due to a technical issue. Still, I'm having a great time with the game, warts and all.