The current state of invasions is unacceptably poor

[ressenmacher]

edit 1: added a section covering ganking as a balance issue. I cannot believe I forgot about it when writing this.

edit 2: fixed the section on cheaters; dropping bannable items was fixed in a previous patch.

edit 3: added the downscaling removal bug to "bug" section

Section 1/3: Introduction and Balance Issues

Introduction:

This post introduces and supports the argument that invasions as implemented in Elden Ring are in a very poor state because they are largely poorly balanced, haphazardly and thoughtlessly designed, and unstable from a technical and mechanical perspective. Due to the length needed to do this topic justice and provide adequate evidence for my claims, this post exceeds Steam’s character limit and is continued in the first two comments of this thread.

It is not a condemnation of invasions as a concept, of players who invade, or of enjoying the mechanic. I did not make this to ♥♥♥♥ on invaders. I did not make this to ♥♥♥♥ on coopers. I made this to ♥♥♥♥ on FROM, if anybody, and to try and have a discussion about invasions that doesn’t immediately get sucked into the toilet swirl of hatred, repeated arguments, and snide sniping that inevitably swallows up posts on the subject. With that said, let’s move on to the first of the three major factors that contributes to the poor state of Elden Ring’s invasions.

Balance Issues:

Elden Ring’s invasions are, for a mix of reasons, not well balanced. That is to say, differences in the strength of certain weapons, builds, characters, and other elements create scenarios where one or more players can obtain, intentionally or unintentionally, a major statistical advantage over their opponents. Such issues undermine the skill-based gameplay of Elden Ring and the Souls series in general, hamstring effective build diversity, and erode the fairness necessary to have meaningful competition between players. These balance issues can be grouped into several major categories.

Twinking and Overleveled Phantoms:
This is and since Demon’s Souls (and DS3, for overleveled phantoms) always has been one of the most serious and certainly the most visible issues with the Souls series’s PvP. For those unfamiliar with the term, a twink is generally considered to be a low level character using equipment from the lategame, often with the negative connotation of doing it to achieve a mechanical advantage over those they play with. Overleveled (OL) phantoms present similar issues; players summoned from beyond the standard matchmaking brackets via a password are subjected to downscaling in an attempt to reduce their strength to that of a level appropriate player with inconsistent results.

To begin with, both twinks and OL phantoms are incredibly prevalent. In the past I did some sampling on the topic and found ~70% of low level invaders to be twinked and ~50% of low level host teams to include one or more twinks or OL phantoms. If these numbers are accurate, proportionally few fully level appropriate invasions (i.e ~1/5th of low level invasions) occur.

This is problematic because both OL phantoms and twinks represent a significant balance issue. OL phantoms can produce the most extreme results; here we can see 761 damage dealt with Giantsflame Take Thee (an increase of about 40% over even what a twink can accomplish), there more than 800 damage from Transient Moonlight, and in one of the most egregious examples I’ve personally seen another OL phantom dealt 423 damage with a single powerstanced L1. This inconsistent downscaling, most evident in the damage they deal, extends to their HP, defenses, stamina, and FP as well to result in what is overall a highly inconsistent strength compared to level appropriate players. Twinks share certain problems with OL phantoms, notably their broad access to equipment and the incredibly potent advantage of having more healing than many three person host team groups at that level have put together. These advantages are enough to seriously impact the balance of the fights; in the sampling linked above, winrates against twinked invaders were half that of untwinked ones, while winrates against host groups with a twink or OL phantom were two thirds that of their level appropriate counterparts. Even in the cases where it is twink against twink, the balance still suffers because the level does not scale with the players and thus the host winds up at an advantage even beyond the standard typically host-favored imbalance.

Weapon, Armor, and Item Balance:
Weapon balance has been significantly improved from DS3. Whips are now much more viable and spellcasters are no longer relegated to one or two viable builds relying on a single gimmick or tiny subset of spells to compete. But there remain a few areas to be mopped up. Intra-class balance is still highly variable; as an example, for katanas the Dragonscale Blade is significantly weaker in every major respect (second shortest range, worst AR in class with mediocre scaling, no innate status, stuck with an underwhelming WA) compared to others in its class and thus is often passed over, encouraging players to stick with a smaller subset of the available weapons and lowering build diversity. Beyond this relatively minor issue, curved greatswords and everything larger than them suffers from being rendered nonviable against strong players by the age old issue of simply being too slow and highly telegraphed (with the sole exception of the unintuitive and one-dimensional crouch-poke UGS playstyle). Daggers, hammers, axes, and now twinblades are still overshadowed in almost all circumstances by other weapon classes, though none are so unplayable as the colossals. And of course, there are as always a few setups which are either generally overtuned (dual Greatspears, heavy thrusting swords, halberd + offstoc) or become problematic situationally (such as self-buffing split damage weapons (the Dragon Halberd especially) being overtuned at low levels due to how that interacts with the low flat defenses there).

Bracket Balance:
This section covers a number of issues caused by how the game decides which players can match with one another. If you are unfamiliar with matchmaking brackets or matchmaking in general, refer to the wiki’s excellent page[eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com] on the subject. In essence, the issues fall into two categories: the brackets are wide enough to allow imbalance, and the brackets don’t or can’t consider other differences between characters that can have major effects on said balance.

In the case of the former, the issue is simple: you can match with people who out of simple luck are significantly stronger or significantly weaker than you. Even at low levels, where damage isn’t affected so strongly because scaling is weak, players can face a 15+% damage difference just between themselves and the host. Level gaps often compound the problem, and because players are compared only to the host players on upper and lower ends of the host’s bracket can be pulled in when their strength differences are large enough that neither would be allowed to connect to the other directly. Such gaps can result in disparities between phantoms and invaders of six weapon upgrade levels (which, if it scales linearly from the previous example, would constitute a 40% damage advantage) and sometimes a rune level gap larger than the lower party’s entire rune level (ex: a level 20 player can invade up to a level 42 host, who can summon a level 56 phantom).

This imbalance is compounded by potential variance in several other sources of strength which are not considered at all. Most notably, the level and amount of a player’s flasks are not considered, but neither are their talisman slots, the available contents (or even presence!) of their Flask of Wondrous Physic, and in the case of a host the presence or absence of a Great Rune. In combination, these two factors mean that even when players are not utterly broken or exploiting balance issues statistically unfair scenarios can arise from sheer luck.

Increased Uninteractivity of Mid and High Level Invasions:
I have a more thorough writeup on this subject (he says, in his eight page dissertation) that goes into probabilities and such if you’re interested in the long version, but the short of it is that there are more ranged attacks than ever in Elden Ring. Melee characters can now do significant damage and hitstun at range through Ashes of War like Thunderbolt or Spectral Lance, while spellcasters can cast followup spells at a much greater pace and mix up their timing to a far greater degree compared to previous games in the series. Because of this, once players have access to these tools in the mid and lategame, invaders very frequently are facing groups where no matter how they position or approach they’re always or almost always able to be attacked by more than one person, which means that every second they’re in combat they’re risking being trapped into unavoidable damage by opponents attacking such that the second attack overlaps with the recovery frames of the roll that needs to be performed to dodge the first attack. This makes it very hard to actually approach groups of players and engage with them, which is further exasperated by the open world. Elden Ring’s open world is awesome, but it’s also massive and has a lot of large areas without much cover and with spread out and generally weak enemies. Because of this, invaders often find themselves in a situation where they have no cover to break line of sight, no enemies strong enough to divide attention for long enough to make plays, and thus no real way of trying to engage with their opponents outside of kiting endlessly or playing repetitive games of rocket tag around corners with very high damage ashes of war or setups in the hope of minimizing their time exposed to the group and thus the risk of unavoidable damage or death. This places invaders at a large and unfair advantage and results in matches that are less interactive and enjoyable for all involved. An excellent example of both sides of this problem can be seen in this video.

Ganking:
All of the preceding factors can combine to allow for ganking, a process whereby hosts and phantoms manipulate various balance issues to favor themselves, and combine that with the system's innate balance bias towards the host to create scenarios where they can attract and continually kill invaders in highly unfair fights instead of progressing through the level. Typical strategies include summoning OL phantoms to take advantage of their shoddy downscaling or to summon phantoms from the upper end of the host's bracket to gain an advantage over invaders, selecting areas and positions in them where the terrain and spawnpoints favor the host and phantoms, killing any level enemies the invader could have used to their advantage prior to summoning, resummoning phantoms, optimizing their builds and play to the context of the gank, etc etc etc. This is often done as a form of griefing to get a rise out of or "punish" invaders, but even when it isn't this abuse of balance issues results in a miserable experience for many invaders who are continually pulled into these ganks.

[ressenmacher]

Section 2/3: Design Flaws:

In addition to balance issues, invasions suffer from a number of design decisions or oversights which, while not always impactful to the balance of the game, impact the experience negatively by amplifying other problems, by encouraging the game to be played in a less interesting way or one which does not match as well with the game’s fundamental systems and goals, or which cause inconvenience and frustration within invasions.

Stalemate Meta:
This is an issue that arises from the fact that there’s no mechanic to force either hosts or invaders (ideally hosts, as the intent and general semblance of balance is around them progressing through the level) to engage, and that the optimal tactic for both parties is to stay put. For a host, moving back through the level towards the bonfire prevents enemies from interfering, gives easy access to plentiful summon signs, and makes it easier to retrieve their runes should they fall. Thus, hosts and coop groups are incentivized to pull back and wait for the invader to come to them. For an invader, going down to meet a group of enemy players or even a solo host at the bonfire without enemy support is a fight at a vast disadvantage much of the time, and one in which a host can continually summon backup. Thus, they are incentivized to wait in the level for the host to come to them. Invasions have no time limits or other features which compel action, so frequently the result is a stalemate where the host sits at the bonfire and the invader sits in the mobs and they glare impotently at one another until someone gets bored and takes the harder fight.

Infinitely Resummonable Phantoms:
Elden Ring, like all Souls games, is characterized in part by the permanence of mistakes. Healing, FP restoration, and consumable use are all almost strictly finite; once spent, they’re gone, and misuse represents a loss of resources that cannot be regained over the course of an invasion outside of very limited scenarios (regaining charges from killing phantoms, or a very long break allowing passive regen to come into meaningful effect). However, there is one resource which is not limited in this way, and paradoxically it is the strongest resource in the entire game: allied players.

Hosts can summon players at any point in an invasion, with no limit to the amount of summons either globally or per phantom. Password summoned phantoms (and potentially regular phantoms as well, but even if they carried the DS3 phantom cooldown over it’s so short that it often has little effect) can be called back as soon as they can place their sign down again. Obviously, a scenario where one side can endlessly replenish their resources and the other cannot is deeply unfair and highly imbalanced; it essentially becomes a PvP game where one side can respawn but the other cannot. This is both facilitated by and strengthens the stalemate meta by rewarding hosts for staying close to the Grace and its abundance of summon signs, and stunts their growth as players by encouraging them to adopt a heavily evasive playstyle focused on stalling. Consider as an example this video by Scott Jund in which he ends up having to kill his way through five players before getting a shot at the host because the host is continually bringing in more hunters and resummoning their phantom, or as a more clear demonstration of the problem this DS3 video by Project Goof in which he is forced to kill each of the host’s two phantoms three times over because the host was able to continually resummon them after death. It is simply ridiculous.

Poor Spawnpoints:
Credit where credit is due: spawncamping was somewhat fixed in Elden Ring by the introduction of very generous spawn iframes (crucially, this does NOT apply to respawning with the phantom finger, so you can still get blown up after using it). But there’s still problems with spawning for both hunters and invaders, particularly in terms of where they spawn. Hunters and invaders still spawn an inconsistent distance and direction from the host, which can sometimes be so severe that the bad spawnpoint decides the entire invasion. Additionally, players can spawn in glitched geometry, spawn stuck behind invisible walls they can’t break, or spawn in the Lake of Rot while the host is all the way up in Nokstella. Such issues apply also to the phantom fingers, sometimes bugging out so badly that players fall out of the map. My suspicion is that it much of it is a verticality issue, where the game is only checking for a horizontal distance from the host to determine the spawnpoint, and thus you frequently wind up perched in some inaccessible location if the level is highly vertical.

General Obfuscation of Mechanics:
Souls games have long been known for the extent to which they avoid “handholding,” in general leaving the player to learn and understand many aspects of the game themselves. However, this design philosophy renders many PvP relevant mechanics confusing, unintuitive, or downright impossible to understand without (sometimes very extensive) out of game knowledge. Examples include such fundamental things as how summoning RL and WUL brackets work, how damage is calculated (e.g. it helps to understand how flat defense and split damage interact if you’re buildmaking at low level), how backstabs work (stuff like false grab boxes, etc.) and undisplayed stats such as poise damage, hyperarmor startup times, multiplayer specific nerfs, etc. Poise deserves its own mention, being so complicated that it takes a near 20 minute video essay section to fully explain and so unintuitive that increasing poise can sometimes make you easier to stagger. This is compounded by the fact that FROM at times alters these values, often with only a vague explanation of what was changed. That vagary extends to in game information as well, with many effects described in such broad and sometimes misleading terms as “enhances” and “greatly enhances” on talismans which provide less than a 10% increase to sorcery/incantation damage, further intensifying the issue; see this datamined spreadsheet[docs.google.com] for more examples in this and other categories. New players already suffer heavily from a lack of information due to the poor state of balance and the ways latency interacts with the fundamentals of gameplay, and this withholding of certain topics does them no favors. It discourages getting into the PvP and makes it feel unfair, overwhelming, and confusing once you do.

Item Issues:
Elden Ring’s crafting system was designed to encourage engagement with the open world, as well as providing generalist rewards such as the oft-maligned Arteria Leaf to fill all that space. Unfortunately, many consumables and in some cases their interaction with the crafting system creates or encourages balance issues.

To begin with, many important items such as Preserving Boluses, Exalted Flesh, and offensive tools like Spark Aromatics and throwable pots require either unpurchasable items with ridiculously miserly droprates (e.g. Sacramental Buds are 3% base) or continual farming due to the high rate at which the items can be consumed (most notably drawstring greases). Because of this, most players simply do not engage heavily with the crafting system or use certain consumable items because of the inconvenience of it. This difficulty in acquiring items makes matches more inconsistent, as whether players have items and how willing they are to spend them varies massively, and it also is practically an invitation for cheaters and dupers to crop up.

Speaking of cheating or duping, certain items accentuate the effects. FROM evidently did not learn from the Sieg/Blessing DS3 dupe meta, and as a consequence players who dupe, cheat, or hoard Raw Meat Dumplings and Starlight Shards can acquire a large advantage by having 2.5 times their max HP in additional healing and regenerating FP near endlessly.

Finally, some items are simply poorly balanced. Pots in particular can do ridiculous damage at low levels (in this case, the pot would still have done over 300 damage even if not boosted by gear, firmly placing it beyond even UGS damage at this level), or in the case of status pots instantly inflict ailments. Certain outliers, like Soporific Grease on the Ripple Blade or Halberd scaling with arcane and becoming absurdly potent or elemental damage greases stacked onto base elemental damage at low levels, are also problematic.

[ressenmacher]

Section 3/3: Technical and Mechanical Instability + Conclusion:

Technical and Mechanical Instability:

Previous sections cover cases where the way that the game works is bad for invasions. Technical and mechanical instability covers the cases where the way the game is NOT working is bad for invasions: bugs, glitches, performance and networking problems, and other such cases whe-[A CONNECTION ERROR HAS OCCURRED. RETURNING TO YOUR WORLD…]

Exploits:
Despite the game’s youth, numerous glitches have been identified which provide a greater or lesser advantage over other players. Examples include PizzaSwap (invisible 50 foot long chainsaws), camping in areas only reachable with Torrent to force invaders to sever out and provide souls (commonly referred to as “AFK farming”), abusing the deathblight death animation to keep phantoms, hunters, or invaders trapped in one’s world until they quit out, and applying the effects of one weapon art to the animation of another. This video contains yet more examples of PvP impacting exploits, including moveswapping to reach normally out of bounds areas (1:54), tumblebuffing (applying a buff to a weapon which would not normally permit it, 2:15. A PvP application can be viewed here), and the Fire’s Deadly Sin exploit (causes the Fire’s Deadly Sin incantation to apply a status element from a right hand weapon buff, typically Bloodflame Blade or Frozen Armament. 6:38).

The rate at which these exploits are addressed and patched out is absolutely abysmal. Many (tumblebuffing, moveset swapping) are bugs that were present as far back in the series as DS1. Nigh uncounterable exploits are left active for long periods of time. It took 3 weeks to fix the gamebreaking FDS + Eclipse Shotel and Erdtree Greatshield exploits, 2 months for oneshot Carian Retaliation to be fixed in 1.04, 4 months for the right hand buffed Pulley Crossbow to be fixed in 1.05, and 7 months for the Twinsage exploit to be fixed in 1.06. Seven months, to fix something as serious as an infinite healing exploit. As of the patch I am writing this post on (1.08.1), multiple exploits which utterly dominate any encounter in which they are present (PizzaSwap, FDS + BFB, certain Torrent or moveswap AFK spots, etc.) remain active.

It is true that, right now, these exploits are not particularly common outside of meta level hotspots, and even there they’re pretty rare. However, the real danger of these issues is that, as the game ages, the playerbase shrinks, and information about them is disseminated, they will become more and more prevalent until they dominate certain areas/levels of play and are a common nuisance at all others, just as with the DS3 Estus Cancel and similar exploits. It’s not bad now, sure, but it’s really not healthy for the longevity of the mechanic.

Bugs:
Not every issue with bugs is due to players actively exploiting them. Some are just good old fashioned technical problems that can’t be predicted and show up randomly to ruin your day. Many have to do with desynch, from opponents being some combination of invisible (or sometimes partially invisible) and intangible to aspects of the map (like elevators!). At other times, players can become stuck in the geometry, sometimes [/url]falling until they die[/url]. You can even invade and remain in the level while the host is in the boss room…and sometimes, you can actually spawn in the boss room yourself (though I do believe that this has been partially fixed as of the time of writing). And who could forget the persistent spell bug, progenitor of a thousand bad vape jokes? The example displayed here is harmless and does no damage (though it does foul up the screen and make it impossible to see what’s going on), but I’ve had one case where it wasn’t, and unending Placidusax’s Ruin put me (and, as it seems, other people) in the dirt right quick. An issue of similar strength can occur when using the Phantom Bloody Finger and remove all downscaling from the damage of overleveled phantoms, which is obviously horrific at lower levels of play (and sometimes hard to avoid because of how bad the spawnpoints are).

Cheating:
The technical problems are not limited to ones from within the game, though. Elden Ring uses Easy Anticheat, which in addition to making the game run like garbage for some players and occasionally failing to launch at all[www.windowscentral.com] generally fails to impede cheaters significantly. Cheaters are rare (in the aforementioned sampling, less than 1% of the players I encountered), but when they’re present their impact can be severe. Previously they were able to get players banned by dropping normally unobtainable items, though this has since been fixed and left them only the harmful option of particle and projectile spam to crash your game. Outside of this, they're problematic mostly in their ability to hold the player hostage and force them to quit, as well as in their ability to cheat for a statistical advantage.

Latency:
All online games will suffer from connection issues. This is not an issue unique to Elden Ring. However, due to poor design choices, Elden Ring suffers from connectivity issues to a far greater extent than do most games. Elden Ring uses a peer to peer system instead of dedicated servers, lacks a ping filter, has an absolutely worthless region based matchmaking if it exists at all (separates the world into Japan and not-Japan), and has no safeguards to remove or otherwise manage a player with an unstable connection once they are in the game.

The results are predictable. In the sampling of 139 invasions I did, 12 had a case of latency so extreme that my opponent stopped animating at one point. Even in the fewest player scenario possible, 9% of matches are rendered completely unplayable because the connection is so bad. From an invader’s perspective, it’s even worse due to more players increasing the probability that at least one opponent will be highly latent; my rate was 17%.

Even when your opponent is not ice skating around while killing you with invisible attacks, latency produces a number of deleterious effects, including allowing status effects to be applied without landing a successful attack on another player via hit confirms, extending[http//extending] a roll’s effective invincibility frames, make it harder to successfully interrupt hyperarmor attacks in their startup frames, and most notoriously producing phantom range, where opponents can hit you from vastly beyond visual range[/url] because hits are confirmed on the attacker’s screen.

Conclusion:

Let’s make this brief, because I’m about to hit the character limit again I’ve already pontificated for 8 pages and if that did nothing to convince you one more won’t change anything either. I love invasions, but right now they’re in a really rough spot. A fourth of the time they don’t even work, and when they do it’s an unbalanced, unfair mess so divorced from the principles and rules of the rest of the game that as often as not it doesn’t even feel like I’m playing Elden Ring anymore. It’s hard to have interesting and engaging combat, or roleplay, or much of anything really under such a system, and I think these flaws both squander the enormous potential of this PvP style and diminish the experience of many who play it.

[Turt]

Beautiful work as always ressenmacher. I'm still reading through this all, but had to at least make it known that I and many others appreciate the time and effort you put into these posts.

It's a shame the majority of discussion members are more interested in bait topics and complaints as opposed to informative posts like these that deal with the real issues at hand.

On a side note, I did read about another PvP bug that doesn't seem to be talked about a lot. I haven't tested this myself yet, but according to some users, using the Phantom Bloody Finger in a world will cause any downscaled phantoms to lose their downscaled status and allow them to deal full unscaled damage to you. As if overleved phantoms weren't scary enough.

[hemorrhage911]

All great points.

But this has been discussed since Demon's Souls. Nothing will change.

[ressenmacher]

Originally posted by Turt:

Beautiful work as always ressenmacher. I'm still reading through this all, but had to at least make it known that I and many others appreciate the time and effort you put into these posts.

Thank you; I'm glad you found it interesting, and hope it'll spark some useful discussion.

Originally posted by Turt:

On a side note, I did read about another PvP bug that doesn't seem to be talked about a lot. I haven't tested this myself yet, but according to some users, using the Phantom Bloody Finger in a world will cause any downscaled phantoms to lose their downscaled status and allow them to deal full unscaled damage to you. As if overleved phantoms weren't scary enough.

It could definitely see that being the case. The PBF seems to function really wierdly; it also sometimes fixes desynch issues like invisible people, too. The issue is that I tend to not get hit both before and after use to see if that's true; I tend to use the Finger either before I find the group to correct for a bad spawn, or not at all because there's neither the time nor a reason to use it once you've already found the group.

Originally posted by hemorrhage911:

All great points.
But this has been discussed since Demon's Souls. Nothing will change.

Probably. But I feel better now that I've done my best to tackle this argument that I've had with people on here over and over and over again to the extent that it deserves.

[Hanlon Lavelle]

Get good.

[ressenmacher]

Originally posted by Banished Acolyte:

Get good.

Theoden.mp4

[Yal]

Back in DS3, I thought most of the reason why twinking was so prevalent was because of the half-dozen covenants that progressed from invasion kills. In Elden Ring there's just no mechanical reward to do invasions (regular co-op at least gives you easy runes and Rune Arcs) but it's more prevalent than ever.

The worst part is that it hurts the co-op scene, every 30 minutes you'll get something ranging from a tedious distraction to a complete obliteration depending on how much meta prep the invader has been doing and a lot of people only do it when absolutely necessary.

IMO they should just ditch the whole mechanic and put the effort into making a more interesting arena mode instead.

(This is coming from someone with like 2000+ hours in the FROM library, I'm not just salty I've lost a couple invasions)

[Turt]

Originally posted by Yal:

Back in DS3, I thought most of the reason why twinking was so prevalent was because of the half-dozen covenants that progressed from invasion kills. In Elden Ring there's just no mechanical reward to do invasions (regular co-op at least gives you easy runes and Rune Arcs) but it's more prevalent than ever.

The worst part is that it hurts the co-op scene, every 30 minutes you'll get something ranging from a tedious distraction to a complete obliteration depending on how much meta prep the invader has been doing and a lot of people only do it when absolutely necessary.

IMO they should just ditch the whole mechanic and put the effort into making a more interesting arena mode instead.

I personally always disliked the idea of ditching invasions all together, but honestly I've been having second thoughts on the matter. Back before Elden Ring came out, a similar thread was posted on Ds3 and many of us concluded that if Fromsoft wasn't going to put in the time and effort in PvP and invasions, then perhaps they should be scrapped entirely.

[supa hacka]

Elden Ring is not a PVP Game. Stop trying to force it.

[Turt]

I finally finished reading through all this and honestly there isn't much or really anything I can disagree on. While I feel like Fromsoft has been putting a better emphasis on PvP (Especially with the recent colosseum update), Invasions as a whole still feel largely neglected which sucks as invasions have traditionally been the source of Souls games longevity and content.

One of the things that did catch my eye is general balance meta. One shot builds are still easily achieved and often don't have to sacrifice much in order to obtain insanely huge damage. When Elden Ring reaches a point where you have to sacrifice everything to one-shot (like naked Ds3 dragon man) then maybe we can start to say Elden Ring is somewhat balanced.

I also really want to see better balance across player levels as well. PvP in early levels is still a complete mess. Overleveled phantoms are still too strong to kill which then encourages invaders to twink and then at that point no one is having fun.

Honestly overall, while I do feel like we have come a long way from day 1 of Elden Ring and I do appreciate all the effort Fromsoft has taken as well as even showing they are listening, we still have a long way to go before Elden Ring's PvP can even hold a candle to Ds2 and 3. And I don't know if we'll have enough time to reach that point before Fromsoft moves on.

[ressenmacher]

Originally posted by Yal:

Back in DS3, I thought most of the reason why twinking was so prevalent was because of the half-dozen covenants that progressed from invasion kills. In Elden Ring there's just no mechanical reward to do invasions (regular co-op at least gives you easy runes and Rune Arcs) but it's more prevalent than ever.

it was never about covenants. In fact, back in DS3 covenant invaders, especially early in the game's lifecycle, were derided in the invasion community because they were typically so much WORSE than the average invader-the people invading because of covenants were generally less prepared and less skilled than those doing it for fun.

Now, I think it may indeed have gotten more prevalent in DS3, but I suspect that it was to try and deal with OL phantoms, not for covenants.

Originally posted by Yal:

The worst part is that it hurts the co-op scene, every 30 minutes you'll get something ranging from a tedious distraction to a complete obliteration depending on how much meta prep the invader has been doing and a lot of people only do it when absolutely necessary.

IMO they should just ditch the whole mechanic and put the effort into making a more interesting arena mode instead.

Every thirty minutes? Wow, the pace must have really slowed down.

In any case, I don't want to see it gone...but I think the option to engage in it or not would be nice, and helpful to both TT runners who don't like the unending deluge of invaders and coopers who just want to do PvE. I would rather see invasions be given attention than duels, given invasions are more unique and IMO offer more potential to enhance the game.

Originally posted by senpaigamer:

Elden Ring is not a PVP Game. Stop trying to force it.

I'm going to be charitable and respond to the argument that you could have made, rather than the one you did or the way you said it.

Elden Ring is not a PvP game, true. But it includes PvP, and that PvP is tied to other activities as well. If they're going to spend the effort to include it as part of the game and if it also affects other parts of the game, I think it's only reasonable to expect it to be handled at least decently well. And it just...isn't, even outside of effort, because the very low hanging fruit to make huge gains in quality for almost no work (flask scaling, the various nuclear OL phantom options, specific nerfs like Antspur or D. Halberd, etc) has not yet been plucked.

Originally posted by Turt:

I finally finished reading through all this and honestly there isn't much or really anything I can disagree on. While I feel like Fromsoft has been putting a better emphasis on PvP (Especially with the recent colosseum update), Invasions as a whole still feel largely neglected which sucks as invasions have traditionally been the source of Souls games longevity and content.

One of the things that did catch my eye is general balance meta. One shot builds are still easily achieved and often don't have to sacrifice much in order to obtain insanely huge damage. When Elden Ring reaches a point where you have to sacrifice everything to one-shot (like naked Ds3 dragon man) then maybe we can start to say Elden Ring is somewhat balanced.

I also really want to see better balance across player levels as well. PvP in early levels is still a complete mess. Overleveled phantoms are still too strong to kill which then encourages invaders to twink and then at that point no one is having fun.

Honestly overall, while I do feel like we have come a long way from day 1 of Elden Ring and I do appreciate all the effort Fromsoft has taken as well as even showing they are listening, we still have a long way to go before Elden Ring's PvP can even hold a candle to Ds2 and 3. And I don't know if we'll have enough time to reach that point before Fromsoft moves on.

I also worry, and this is why I spent so much time on the glitch and exploit section: FROM has a history of moving on and ending support really fast (ex: DS3's last major patch was only a year after the DLC came out), which means that unless they get a serious move on, in a few years Elden Ring "PvP" will constitute who can Pizzaswap faster and that's just not fun.

The damage and oneshot meta is also problematic. I think the issue isn't so much the damage that characters do, but that it keeps scaling upwards after there's no opportunity for increasing survivability. Once you hit 60 vigor, put on decent armor, and grab a few talismans you're done, and yet players are encouraged to reach even higher levels than ever before. Damage keeps scaling, where you can now start hitting softcaps of 80 or 60/60.

I can't think off the top of my head how to fix it, but the damage at higher levels really does need SOMETHING to tone it down. Meta feels like the old DS3 overleveled brackets and it's nuts.

[CazadorDeLobo]

Twinking is only a problem if one allows it to be a problem. Therefore, it is not really a problem that can be fully addressed from the outside, as people are autonomous and many obvious workarounds exist. A solution to twinking would be to avoid opening yourself up to invasions until you're ready for them.

The co-op problem attached to this is solved with a mod, that should be integrated into the game, IMO.

Invaders are not always great. People therefore develop associations with them and choose to gank instead of play fair - at the end of the day, that is what you seem to want. It's totally hopeless, dude. People are going to use the strongest stuff, in the most advantageous situations they can insert themselves into for free. Invasions are opt-in. You're opting into someone else's game where there are no rules. None whatsoever. That may suck, but that's clearly the vision at FS for PvP.

The actual balancing structure, in terms of statistics, is quite sensitive to any changes. It's simply too complex with the number of weapons, ashes, incants, and spells, to try and make them all work together, at every possible level, with no complaints from anyone. Can you agree with that?

In short, we can scream into a void all we want, but it won't net us anything but a sore larynx.

If you'd appreciate it, my feedback as a writer is:

This is a compilation of word walls constrained by the structuring of the narrative. I suggest switching to essay format.

[ressenmacher]

Originally posted by CazadorDeLobo:

A solution to twinking would be to avoid opening yourself up to invasions until you're ready for them.

The co-op problem attached to this is solved with a mod, that should be integrated into the game, IMO.

I don't think this works, largely because the problem is still present for people who enjoy the PvP. I enjoy normal low level invasions, from both sides-but I can't play them without also dealing with twinks. It's particularly detrimental to new players who might otherwise get into PvP, too, because it's still likely to be their first experience if they opt in and low level PvP in general is the best place to learn fundamentals.

Originally posted by CazadorDeLobo:

T
Invaders are not always great. People therefore develop associations with them and choose to gank instead of play fair - at the end of the day, that is what you seem to want. It's totally hopeless, dude. People are going to use the strongest stuff, in the most advantageous situations they can insert themselves into for free. Invasions are opt-in. You're opting into someone else's game where there are no rules. None whatsoever. That may suck, but that's clearly the vision at FS for PvP.

No, I hate ganking. I think I forgot to include it as a criticism in the OP (though I do touch on the factors that make ganks so strong), but it's a way of exploiting the game to engineer a scenario in which you can get easy wins at the expense of others, just like malicious twinking. It needs to go too.

This "opting into someone else's game" stuff only holds in the ♥♥♥♥ system we have right now, where you legitimately get people who don't want to engage with the mechanic playing it. Under a truly opt-in system, it's not so much showing up in someone's world as it is queing into a PvP match, and it should be treated and balanced accordingly.

Originally posted by CazadorDeLobo:

The actual balancing structure, in terms of statistics, is quite sensitive to any changes. It's simply too complex with the number of weapons, ashes, incants, and spells, to try and make them all work together, at every possible level, with no complaints from anyone. Can you agree with that?

You'll never get perfection, but that's no reason not to pursue it, nor to avoid trying to reach acceptability. Obviously a game like ER is hard to balance perfectly, but it's so poorly balanced right now that even I, someone with no dev experience and who just plays the game, can pick out like a dozen examples of changes that would instantly and massively improve the balance.

I can get behind the "it's too much effort" argument, but only once the problem is them needing to put in that effort rather than pluck the low hanging fruit.

Originally posted by CazadorDeLobo:

If you'd appreciate it, my feedback as a writer is:

This is a compilation of word walls constrained by the structuring of the narrative. I suggest switching to essay format.

I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to get across here. This is essay format to the extent of my knowledge, albeit with more subdivision? I've got my thesis (invasions are in a poor state because x, y, z), my body paragraphs in the sections for how and why x, y, and z are causing it to be in a poor state, and a conclusion. The only thing I think I don't have are the end-paragraph connecting sentences; other than that, can you point out the difference? I apologize, but I don't see the distinction you're trying to make.

[cridus]

please update the third post and specify that cheaters can't drop cut-content stuff to others anymore, and that the RCE exploits have been fixed. let's not keep fearmongering about old, resolved issues that don't exist anymore.
all cheaters can do to people currently, is kill them unfairly in the game. maybe, trap them somewhere so they can only quit or disconnect, but yeah, that's it.


p.s. there's some idiot giving clown awards seemingly at random.
the only people I could see giving a clown award to this thread are dumb kids who get scared by a post longer than 3 lines and who only read the title to "decide" what the thread is saying.