What are the recommended Soul Memory tiers for each area?

[Enderspoons]

In the even that multiplayer comes back, I think it would be helpful to know what the most common SM tiers are for each zone in this game.

Even if it doesn't I'm still personally curious.

[jodhy]

I dunno. Blue Acolyte?

[JellyPuff]

Everything between Lost Bastille and Drangleic Castle is spread pretty thin, due their being no intended order to tackle these. Naturally, you will get the most activity at the game's chokepoints, which are Forest of Fallen Giants, Heide's Tower and Drangleic Castle to Crypt.

The general rule of thumb from my experience:
39k Forest/Heide/Wharf
Up to 300k for Lost Bastille/Belfry Luna/Sinner's rise
200k-900k for everything between that and Drangleic Castle
900k-1.5M for Drangleic Castle to Undead Crypt
1.5M-2M for Aldia's Keep/Dragon Shrine/Aerie
2M+ is spread thin again, due to DLC and NG+

Also keep in mind how generous SM ranges for co-op are, especially at higher SM tiers, when you start going into 7-digit numbers. My suggested SM-ranges are at best a very rough guideline. If you stick to something, like 500k SM and use the Small Whitesign, you will be in range for most players tackling anything from Huntsman Copse to Gutter and Brightstone Cove.

With NER, these ranges become so big, that it might as well be a proto PW-matchmaking. The ideal scenario would be for the community to agree on a god chosen for the Name-Engraved Ring, to increase activity for those who want to help and those who need it. But i guess that ship has sailed and most player don't check the forums (it's been tried already with "Kremmel").

[NightmareGats]

Get agape ring to kill noobs in the early game.

[Paradox]

Originally posted by Enderspoons:

In the even that multiplayer comes back, I think it would be helpful to know what the most common SM tiers are for each zone in this game.

Even if it doesn't I'm still personally curious.

"Patch 1.10 added a function to make matchmaking easier: when you're in the warp menu, the areas with multiplayer activity close to your Soul Memory will be outlined in orange."

https://darksouls2.wiki.fextralife.com/Online

Originally posted by jodhy:

I dunno. Blue Acolyte?

Who knows what mods will or won't work, if it ever does get patched?
How many of the mod makers are still around or interested in updating, if the patch breaks them?

[JellyPuff]

Originally posted by Paradox:

Originally posted by jodhy:

I dunno. Blue Acolyte?

Who knows what mods will or won't work, if it ever does get patched?
How many of the mod makers are still around or interested in updating, if the patch breaks them?

There's likely going to be an update for Blue Acolyte in particular, if the upcoming patch breaks it. The author of that mod actually was the one who found the critical vulnerabilities of the souls-game's netcode (and having warned Bamco for years about it), ultimately leading to the current situation.

Edit: But i don't think it affects co-op play (besides the anti-cheat component) or SM ranges for co-op and only adds QoL improvements for invaders, like infinite SM ranges upwards or area-agnostic matchmaking.

[Call Sign: Raven]

Originally posted by Enderspoons:

In the even that multiplayer comes back, I think it would be helpful to know what the most common SM tiers are for each zone in this game.

Even if it doesn't I'm still personally curious.

Hi Enderspoons :D

These are SM caps that I had success with:

Early game areas; 30K or below

Mid-game areas: Cap at 120-150K

Next tier: Cap at 300K

Next tier: around 600-700K

I'm pretty sure the "meta" was 1.5 million SM. Whenever I played the game when it was at it's peak, I always had characters at each of those SM tiers and that worked great. :)

[Enderspoons]

Coolio, coolio. Well, I should probably spell out the actual reason why I asked.


I've been planning out a total overhaul of sorts for Dark Souls 2. Completely re-invented world layout, balance touchups on everything I can think of, new items and bosses and etcetera, all that good stuff.
Of course, I'm lazy and haven't written a single line of code yet (this project is only incoherent google docs right now), so it's not really anything to get your hopes up over.
My current plan is to go all-out on all possible changes/additions I want to see, and then cut stuff out once the realistic scope becomes more apparent during work.

Anyhow, I asked because I wanted to give some thought to rebalancing Soul Memory a little bit by making some more stuff contribute to it (e.g. weapon upgrades), and it would be pretty hard to balance SM properly if I had no idea what the most common SM tiers were in each area.

JellyPuff's answer is a good start, but I would have also appreciated some numbers concerning each individual area, but that's probably too much of an ask since SM is already a vague science.

-------------------------------

Some of you might be interested in looking at what little I've written down so far, so here ya go! Again, right now it's all theory, no practice.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ttcCT70g7hSVGyZyL8Jq9MaRlN5P_pxh?usp=sharing

[Paradox]

Originally posted by Enderspoons:

Coolio, coolio. Well, I should probably spell out the actual reason why I asked.


I've been planning out a total overhaul of sorts for Dark Souls 2. Completely re-invented world layout, balance touchups on everything I can think of, new items and bosses and etcetera, all that good stuff.
Of course, I'm lazy and haven't written a single line of code yet (this project is only incoherent google docs right now), so it's not really anything to get your hopes up over.
My current plan is to go all-out on all possible changes/additions I want to see, and then cut stuff out once the realistic scope becomes more apparent during work.

Anyhow, I asked because I wanted to give some thought to rebalancing Soul Memory a little bit by making some more stuff contribute to it (e.g. weapon upgrades), and it would be pretty hard to balance SM properly if I had no idea what the most common SM tiers were in each area.

JellyPuff's answer is a good start, but I would have also appreciated some numbers concerning each individual area, but that's probably too much of an ask since SM is already a vague science.

-------------------------------

Some of you might be interested in looking at what little I've written down so far, so here ya go! Again, right now it's all theory, no practice.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ttcCT70g7hSVGyZyL8Jq9MaRlN5P_pxh?usp=sharing

I don't think FS has ever done a good job with "balancing" players. I believe they started scaling summons (not invaders) to hosts in DS3, a good start, but still considerably lacking (not all stats).

If they ever bother to figure out how to do it properly, there wouldn't need to be LvL matchmaking of any kind. Unfortunately, i'm fairly certain they won't. They may even just ditch pvp altogether based on their seeming focus on the more casual player - which tend to dislike the invasion system. With no LvL MM, anyone could be matched with anyone else and it would be relatively "fair", at least in terms of stats. Obviously, some things like spell conditions, movesets, and other non-damage related things are outside the scope of just stat/power balancing.

I guess I just don't understand how such a simple concept as % scaling wasn't implemented. A lvl 10 and a 100 can be matched together rather simply and they can both have similar LvL power, no matter whether the 100 is scaled to the 10 or the 10 to the 100.

[JellyPuff]

Originally posted by Enderspoons:

Anyhow, I asked because I wanted to give some thought to rebalancing Soul Memory a little bit by making some more stuff contribute to it (e.g. weapon upgrades), and it would be pretty hard to balance SM properly if I had no idea what the most common SM tiers were in each area.

I'd either make it so, SM only increases for "souls spend on items/levels", rather than "souls acquired". Or just make SM irrelevant entirely in favor of SL and possibly WL.

If i had to make a MM-system, i'd probably just create an entirely different one from scratch and not even go for SL/WL, since that has proven to be just a little less imbalanced (or largely irrelevant, due to PW matchmaking in later games).

But why do you want to make an overhaul like this with balanced MP matchmaking? Unless it's just for the lulz, it seems like an unnecessary amount of work. At least i wouldn't prioritize matchmaking for a mod, which isn't going to break any playercount records and since an overhaul like this will softban anyways, why not just make SM stay at either zero or 999M at all times (independently from souls acquired/held/lost/spend)? Then once, the players wanting to play your mod are softbanned, they'll always have an easy time finding each other (similar to DS3's Cinders mod).

[Enderspoons]

Originally posted by JellyPuff:

But why do you want to make an overhaul like this with balanced MP matchmaking? Unless it's just for the lulz, it seems like an unnecessary amount of work. At least i wouldn't prioritize matchmaking for a mod, which isn't going to break any playercount records and since an overhaul like this will softban anyways, why not just make SM stay at either zero or 999M at all times (independently from souls acquired/held/lost/spend)? Then once, the players wanting to play your mod are softbanned, they'll always have an easy time finding each other (similar to DS3's Cinders mod).

I mean. It's not especially a priority, but I did want to try to attend to SM matchmaking, to see if I could do a better job of handling it than FromSoftware did.
It's more for the personal challenge than anything else.

One thing I will do is make the Name-Engraved Ring turn SM-based matchmaking off. My gut tells me that's a good compromise for increasing connectivity, but I myself am not entirely sure what the ramifications will be.

[JellyPuff]

Originally posted by Enderspoons:

but I myself am not entirely sure what the ramifications will be.

You could look at how PW matchmaking affected later games. Take DS3, for example. You still have low LV twinks, but now they have a chance to invade into a gank with a high SL Havel monster, who might have nerfed HP and damage, but also having 7 max LV estus and only taking chip damage. So it's 2 big imbalances kinda cancelling each other out sometimes.

Otherwise, PW matchmaking has proven to be a great QoL improvement.

[jodhy]

DkS2 is my fav souls, but SM was a s*** attempt to "balance" the game. You can stuck in a boss and gain souls for nothing (until the enemies despawn ig). For the "balancing" was intented for new players, SM won't fix s***.

It's the player not the game. How tf can you balance a game, when some people can beat the game even without leveling up. I think SL is just the way to go. Or just remove the leveling mechanic, and then people gonna complain about weapon being OP.

[Call Sign: Raven]

Originally posted by jodhy:

DkS2 is my fav souls, but SM was a s*** attempt to "balance" the game. You can stuck in a boss and gain souls for nothing (until the enemies despawn ig). For the "balancing" was intented for new players, SM won't fix s***.

It's the player not the game. How tf can you balance a game, when some people can beat the game even without leveling up. I think SL is just the way to go. Or just remove the leveling mechanic, and then people gonna complain about weapon being OP.

Soul Memory was a perfect way to balance the game. I never felt as overpowered at low levels as I did in Dark Souls, and it doesn't have the same problem as the scaling phantoms in Dark Souls 3. You're just salty because you had to wear a ring if you wanted to keep your character at a certain level.

SL isn't the way to go; Dark Souls proved that with Dark Bead twinks.

[Koros Antavo]

SM is deeply flawed.

For one, the souls you lost on death don't detract form it. Meaning if you die a lot, you make multiplayer that much harder for yourself.

Then, souls spent on consumables and various trinkets don't detract from it. Meaning if you want to have an optimal build, you have to play perfectly and ditch the consumables. Consequently, there *will* be people who play perfectly, and all the rest are already at a disadvantage for properly engaging with the game.

And lastly. it is possible to transfer items between characters. Meaning it is possible to mule. If a normal player, who buys a reasonable amount of consumables and dies a reasonable amount, is up against a guy who muled all of his items from a different char and commited all the souls directly into levels, the normal player is at an unfathomable disadvantage.

[Call Sign: Raven]

Originally posted by Koros Antavo:

SM is deeply flawed.

For one, the souls you lost on death don't detract form it. Meaning if you die a lot, you make multiplayer that much harder for yourself.

Then, souls spent on consumables and various trinkets don't detract from it. Meaning if you want to have an optimal build, you have to play perfectly and ditch the consumables. Consequently, there *will* be people who play perfectly, and all the rest are already at a disadvantage for properly engaging with the game.

And lastly. it is possible to transfer items between characters. Meaning it is possible to mule. If a normal player, who buys a reasonable amount of consumables and dies a reasonable amount, is up against a guy who muled all of his items from a different char and commited all the souls directly into levels, the normal player is at an unfathomable disadvantage.

I would argue that the flaws you are trying to point out are actually flaws in the player, rather than the system.

You can 100% have optimal builds while still getting TONS of consumables. That's nonsense and doesn't need to be addressed further. Get the amount of items you think you'll need after you make your build, make a save backup, and reload the save when you run out. Pretty easy solution. "But I shouldn't have to do that." Well, you do. Get over it.

The mule argument doesn't make sense, because ALL players can do that, if they wish. If you choose not to have someone drop you an item and you want to play more fair, good on you! Just don't complain when others do it, when you can do it yourself if you wish!

The solution to soul memory is proper planning. The approach takes a SMALL amount of looking ahead, and a SMALL amount of maintenance. It is and still is by far, my favorite system for matchmaking that From has used.

Way better than password. Yes, password is convenient, but now you have to deal with hosts that have over-leveled phantoms as a result. Not a good tradeoff. Soul Memory prevents such abuse.