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To be honest, I never was able to help out someone with a boss in ds 1 more than two times in a row. I killed a boss with someone as a phantom, placed another sign and waited for over half an hour. Each time I encountered a new boss. People just... seem to have different builds I guess? I agree that soul memory can be janky at times, but I'd still prefer it, over being invaded by a sl1 pyromancer with DLC level pyromancy, which, you know, doesn't require leveling up :)
@@Stardust_the_F-104C Huh, that's strange. They do have more tiers on the desktop version of the page, however it is missing one, combining what should be tiers 44 and 45 into one, basically claiming the last tier starts earlier than it really does.
@@asketillus8679 same thing. People who barely know anything about a subject think that are experts. People who have any expertise realize how much more they have to learn.
@@asketillus8679 Look it up for your answer. It's a cognitive bias of failure to recognize one's own competence or incompetence. The overestimation or underestimation of ability.
I feel like Soul Memory should have accounted souls spent rather than souls gained. This would've had a lot of the same issues as before, but would have avoided the additional salt going into the wound of losing a huge bloodstain.
That is a terrible idea. People would just go through the game by spending the minimum amount of souls to get the best gear and invade weaker players at the start of the game.
@@lukamegru1537 I think OP meant that when you lose a bloodstain, those lost souls should be subtracted by your soul memory. After all, it's souls you've done nothing with so it's as if you hadn't gained them in the first place. The way it works in Dark Souls II is that I get doubly punished when I lose a bloodstain because I've now permanently increased my soul memory without having done anything to better my character with them. Not to mention it makes life hell for new players (same as your health bar decreasing for each death up to 50% but I digress)
Assign scores to gear and attuned spells based on upgrades and general quality (e.g. non-scaling weapons higher than ones with strong scaling) and combine that with souls spent leveling. PvE players would take the scores of the highest scored item per slot, including spell instruments for what they have attuned. Invaders would have the sum of all carried equipment to encourage smart choices regarding gear carried. I think that's the best solution but it would be difficult to fully tune.
@@TheClaybones - I had the same idea, basically that you matched based on your level, and the most-upgraded gear in your inventory or attuned added a fixed amount to your level based on it's upgrade or power. This could include weapons, armor, spells, even estus. Being level 1 but having your level artificially inflated to 60 because you have a +10 catalyst and Dark Bead would mean you being matched against players that might actually be able to handle that combination. Players that are advancing casually won't even notice it, as the inflations will generally put them in the same ranges as they want anyway. Experienced players could also "adjust" their level by putting gear in the box or changing their attuned spells, but that still means that they would weaken themselves to play with weaker players.
You know how many runs I had to restart after dieing loosing more then 30k souls. I did a straight sword hilt run on dark souls 1. The first boss I killed was pinwheel. With a hilt sword +5 and gold pine resign, took over 15 minutes. I went back to get the black knight. And he killed me. On my way back for the blood stain a Skelton smacked me off the cliff. :( RIP 20k souls.
Staying up until 2am to help you figure out the level ranges in Dark Souls 1& 2 are some of my fondest memories related to the Souls series. Even remember helping you mess around with some Chalice Dungeons in Bloodborne. Things were so much fun back when we were just figuring out how things were working. Noticed I wasn't included next to Niko and Europa, but that's fine! Thanks for all the effort and all the quality research over the past few years, very cool.
Oh no! That's absolutely right and sorry you got left out!! I went off of everyone I named in a reddit post from back in the day, unfortunately that particular set of tests now that I'm thinking about it probably didn't reference the entirety of it. Thanks again for all of your help over the years!
10:54 I think one of the reasons they separated matchmaking between NG and NG+~ initially was because after NG a lot of changes are made, like additional enemies being added to the world and parry riposte damage being increased by 50%. DS2 was the first game in the series to make so many sweeping changes to NG+, so I can understand why they might want to keep things separate. At the same time you can simulate nearly every change via bonfire aesthetic, so I'm not totally sure what they were thinking either.
Just wanted to mention that you can also read the Agape Ring as 'ah-gah-pay', a Greek noun meaning roughly that you want the best for others, a "charitable love". The word has different contextual variations also along the same lines, but the archaic verb form of agape in specific is "to show affection toward the dead". Given that they put the ring into the game for players who wanted to help others, I think that might be an intentional double reading of the word.
Yeah I've always thought it was the Grecian meaning of the term myself. But then, I took some Philosophy classes in college and actually knew what the term agape actually was from them. I don't think most people are even aware of that definition of the word.
It's because of the weirdness of language and translation/localization. The grecian "agape" and english agape are two separate words, that somehow when the grecian version was anglicized for english speakers and readers, matched an extant word. 'ag-gah-pay' is certainly not spelled 'agape' in ancient greek. Man, words are so weird.
Multiple variations of "love" as words are missing from English. The closest is "like" but that is too vague as it only implies basically to mildly love something. In order to specify the kind of love in English, an adjective is attached to love. For example: familial love, romantic love, and platonic love. I guess there is patriotism.
@@TheSuperRattColonel used to have an "r" but the word kept being simplified. English is basically the spaghetti code of human languages. It gets more confusing when you account for the weird differences between US and British English, which is why there is sometimes dubs of shows from one form of English to another. Also, in some old books and stories, with Poe's early writings being a good example, an exclamation point did not always indicate the end of the sentence and was actually used in the middle of the sentence for...some reason. Lastly, thou, thee, thy, and thine are not Old English forms of "you". They are actually the intended singular forms of the word. Now, "you" is used for both singular and plural as determining if "you" means one person or multiple is contextual. Yes, English is very weird. Although, if you look into Spanish, it is a bit quirky too.
Damn, had no idea this much work was involved with one person primarily spearheading it. I definitely wouldn't have the patience to figure it out. I thought it was the whole community pulling together, which it kind of was, but again didn't realize this one guy was so prominent in all the results. Awesome!
It wasn't until this video that I became aware of the fact that youre one of the major guiding members of the community. I've probably been using information you've made or contributed to for years and I only just started watching your channel two months ago. Thanks for your dedication to the series bro, its made a lot of great memories and experiences for my friends and I.
I HATED this mechanic. Made me feel bad when grinding for a certain outfit or item because then I'd be too "overleveled" soul memory wise to PVP or co-op.
@@QrBooze ds2 is actually terribly balanced now that people are a little more knowledgeable in pvp. The meta weapons are oppressive and there's more busted tech (e.g. quizzle, FUGS phantom blocking) than in other souls games. The argument people commonly use of "there's a lot more viable stuff in 2" is an illusion for fighting bad players where weapons like regular ultras (besides rolling r1 of 1-handed greathammers I suppose) are basically unusable vs. decent players. IMO at least compared to other souls games dark souls 3 has the most balanced pvp. pkcs/straight swords are cancer to fight but there are legitimitely viable caster builds and strength weapons can be viable when used a certain way (for example, off-hand yhorm's great machete with a fast weapon in right hand was a meta setup for early tournaments)
This is such an interesting video because I played these games way after they were released, I was never a fan of Soul Memory because I wanted to help other people in coop but it was near impossible most of the time, and it's interesting to see how From Software tried to continuously tweak the system. I have only tried PvP on Dark Souls Remastered, and the weapon matchmaking can help, but having magic not count as part of that system was dumb, so you get a lot of low level +0 weapon dudes at undead parish with Dark Bead which is just insane.
There has never been a effective system for reducing twink builds. The most satisfying attempt was DS3 but the *entire* game had to be designed in a straight forward manner. And even then, I made a level 20 character that could kill entire squads because I had access to later gear to bully with that did disproportionate damage to early game gear. It takes a immense amount of consideration for creating fun multiplayer in a game like this, it's probably why Miyazaki ditched it for Sekiro. Needed a damn break lol. Hopefully Elden Ring gets multiplayer and the best version of it.
I made a level 20 ds3 build just recently to do some blue invasions and help people out. It hinges around late game gear like Black Flame and chaos infused weapons. I think the easiest way to reduce twink builds is obvious - every new area I travel to either by load screen or fog wall should add a counter to my character so I can only invade people who have also been that far. i.e. If I get Black Flame from Karla in the Irithyll Dungeons, I should only be able to invade people who have also made it that far - and by using a "counter" system you could measure how far into the game any given character is even if they chose to go a different path (for example, if they never went to the dungeon and instead went to the Pontiff boss fight). I shouldn't be able to take an endgame boss weapon or spell back and start invading in high wall. Couple that with SL level ranges as well as the weapon upgrade level the game already uses and it'd be solved. The only complication is throwing in DLC, for example in DS3 nearly ever twink build runs straight to the DLC for the Ring of Favor +3 since rings don't count against them and it's a huge boost to have a +3 ring early game.
@@lonewolfsx29 idk man, I'd argue that invading a lv20 area with endgame gear should just motivate a player to then git gud and do that to other people. Besides, at lv20 your character is far from unbeatable. Tankier than a lv20 noob, but chances are, you're invading a party of players, so your disadvantaged there.
@@hardgay7537 Yeah I've completely changed my tune in the year since writing this comment lol. I think the main issue is just that players doing the invading a lot of times come up against players expecting to pve only with pve builds/gear and don't know how to handle it - to which I agree - git gud.
Unfortunately it's looking like MP for Elden Ring is going to be weak as far as invasions go. Co-op seems fine, but making it so you have to actively opt in to be invaded just sort of ruins the whole mystique of invading someone and stalking them to an ambush or acting as a level boss or any other fun stuff like that.
@@MidlifeCrisisJoe I disagree, it's only fun for the person who is invading. People who don't want to be invaded are now at least not discouraged from using helpful tools like being in soul/embered form or summoning help.
I suppose that the inclusion of enemies spawning a limited number of times makes some sense when considering new players - if you keep dying to the boss over and over, your soul memory doesn't keep going up. An inexperienced player also probably wouldn't be in the Company of Champions.I wish the Company of Champions wasn't a covenant so you could be in another covenant while gaining the effects of being part of the CoC.
I kind of agree with you about spawning, but I more so agree with the notion that it gives the impression of the game saying "Look; if you don't have it down by now, you never will."
@@straymerodach4713 it still doesn't. In fact it makes enemies significantly more difficult to handle and fucks with multiplayer so you're more likely to be invaded and have a harder time summoning help.
I always felt it to be a counter balance to the common complaint new, less experienced players belted out a lot in critiquing Dark Souls 1's lack of difficulty modes. That dying to a boss and being punished by having to clear regular mobs back to that boss as tedious, and not difficult. Often the mobs between you and a boss weren't hard to deal with after the 3rd time but just became grindy and annoying to do so. So with the limited spawn system you'd have to deal with it a few times, but once you effectively "got used to" killing those enemies easily they'd just stop being there to begin with so you could just go back for another boss attempt
Soul memory isn't an inherently bad idea, but I would make the following changes: • it is an extension of the level ranges, not a replacement • it only applies to invasions, and only applies until the early-midgame • it only counts souls that are spent on leveling up and equipment
@@DronesOverTheMoon Making it a ring kinda sucks tho, since it takes up a ring slot. Plus either way in the long run SM punishes you for not spending each and every soul you ever aquire
@@rustyjones7908 oh nice! I was heavily overburdened because I didn't know what to level up so I kept pumping str thinking I'd finally be able to carry enough. No idea I needed endurance!!! My second playthrough I did learn from my mistakes!!
"I just want the weird items nobody else wants" and I want a modified PS3 save with no souls, no soul memory, no items, and the agape ring so I can commit to a true ZERO SOULS run.
The problem solving and sheer amount of work put into figuring out Soul Memory is something I'd never really considered. I guess I had the vague notion of it being due to data mining also. That being said, now that I know, thanks for all the co-op you've allowed me to do by figuring this stuff out!
Noobs continuous dying would punish them. They’d get invaded by players with all their souls spent in items and levels. Also, if they wanted to invade themselves , the hosts could be much higher in level. Eventually, if they get in the top tiers, this all evens out.
@A Skyrim Sex Mod Where You're Just A Virgin Forever Its literally just a retarded way to stop twinking. DS1 remastered and DS3 solved this non issue more elegantly. Once the B team gets put on the bench suddenly the game works well.
it kind of is but does it worse than DeS imo. Demon Souls' directly punished you by adding black phantoms to your world if you had a black world tendency, this world tendency could eventually be shifted back to white. whereas in Dark Souls 2, a PvE player punishment remains forever.
Soul memory wasn't an awful solution, but i feel that implementing the previous games SL teirs and removing the souls from players who lost theirs upon death from their soul memory would've made things alot smoother
@@raphicoco not much really. soul memory would simply increase when you spend souls instead of when you get them. it could be a pain in the ass to change it after release (depending on what exactly triggers an addition to soul memory) but not "hard". just tedious. I honestly don't understand why they didn't do this in the first place.
@@raphicoco a little bit of math does the trick, as OP said, removing lost souls is enough. Souls Gained(one check) = Souls Spent (too many checks) + Souls Lost (one check) Gain-Loss=Spent
Nah. A good player can get a slight advantage by not losing bloodstains. But not much. And once you’re in high SM tiers, a single level costs as much as you would’ve lost throughout multiple playthroughs.
This channel is the absolute bees knees. I've already watched all the lore videos I can get my hands on, and love the obscurity of it all, the hypotheticals, the experimentation, etc, and having this in mechanic/game design form is just as cool! Keep it up man!
Dude I got into Dark Souls 2 super late and your findings helped me so much, soul memory is one of the things that really picked up my interest and you found it all for me, numbers on demand
god im getting flashbacks to me and my friends Coop sessions and how much of a pain it was... (+that one session we had to scrap half way through... he was playing a sunbro build and had to help some people to get medals... only to horribly outrank me in SM.)
TGR Yes! Thank you, someone else has said what I've been saying for years. Co-op is the most fun I have with any Souls game and I adore high level invasions because at that point it's mostly a fair and fun fight, but having mine and my newbie friends' experience ruined by some acne-ridden, sweaty, fragile-ego toting incel with min-max gear, fully upgraded weaponry, an infinite supply of lightning bolts who nobody in the party has a chance against is not fun nor is it balanced. Luckily, just closing the app on PS4, finding their user ID and blocking them stops them from invading in future.
I think it should be the other way around, so that invaders are never too high of a level, and co-op focussed players don't lose as much opportunity as they continue gaining souls. A player who loses a lot will get higher level co-op partners that can help them get through the game better that way, without opening themselves up to higher-level invaders.
Absolutely amazing! At first was like "why would this video be 40 minutes long, what could even take so long to explain?" Well it turned out it was everything.
Something I've just now figured out and accepted immediately: testing anything in any serious amount of detail, no matter what it is, will inevitably require doing/requesting something(s) normally considered strange/weird. But testing and coming to understand things like this is supremely helpful, so one shouldn't let that stop one. Thank you for your work. (Also, your honesty about your mistakes along the way is very welcome and appreciated. Honesty and integrity are better than impossible and untenable levels of inhumanly constant perfection.)
Something no one seems to talk about re: DS2 was how the scaling mechanics would have made a meta level pretty impossible in the first place, soul memory not withstanding. The original philosophy of stopping at 120 was that your build was "finished". Sure, you wouldn't have access to every weapon or spell, but your katana at 40 dex wasn't much weaker than someone at max level with 99 dex, and you didn't have much less health than them either. DS2 though, initially with much stronger scaling (with SL) on armor, and initially unbalanced weapons (like anything with mundane at max SL), threw this out the window. Anyone that played in the first month of release surely saw firsthand (or at least on youtube) the scourge of max level havel monsters that took single or double digit damage from your SL 120-150 character while having several hundred more HP and simultaneously being able to one shot backstab even other max level characters. Even though they patched most of this stuff, it was still a crazy departure from the mechanical design of leveling characters in the series before or since. Personally, I liked what it ended up becoming; instead of fighting the eventual stagnation of having one build only capable of doing one thing, just never stop leveling and combine whatever mechanics you want! I think my main character ended up around SL400, just to keep up with the traffic of the SM tiers I would make it to, and in retrospect it was a pretty fun way to pvp. You came across so many interesting builds.
Eh.. I dunno, that's kind of the thing with builds-- they're interesting because you have to decide what you can't do and what you can specialize in. You have to plan a path for your character and figure out what weapons work for your playstyle and your character-- it's what makes you wanna use those 10 character slots you're given. I stop at certain levels for my characters anyway, but I know there's no *real* reason to. Matchmaking doesn't care about it, so there's functionally no reason to not just keep pumping souls into levels until my build's can just do everything. And at that point it's not even a build, what did you sacrifice for it? It's just kind of a bad feeling. And half the people you come up against *are* pumping levels into everything, so you're at a disadvantage of a potential massive level disparity unless you bite the bullet. Plus, nothing really stops you from going up to level 350-400 in the other games, i'm pretty sure that's where the Japanese meta was. You just didn't get mingled with them with your level 120. I can see the appeal of the chaos of SM, but I honestly didn't-- and i'm not surprised most other people didn't either.
@@Ribboppity this. It's not a "build" anymore if you can do amazingly at everything. One of my favorite builds in any soulsborne is the glass cannon build; being able to hit really hard but having no health so I have to be careful in fights. Not much of a glass cannon if I can hit really hard and have a lot of health, but so does the other guy so what's the point in even trying that? May as well R1 spam or farm parries or use the grapesicle since weapon meta trumps build success in DS2.
I think the build variety would be more shown in loadouts than stat delegations. Like sure you could have all max stats. But what kind of build are you going to make out of it?
the bad part about builds is that people that know about the meta rush to the level, while new players don't get to experience any multiplayer, when dark souls came out i pretty much stayed human to summon/get invaded with no luck, since i managed to finish the game before level 70, dark souls 2 i pretty much had the entire playtrough with invaders and some co-op
It really just has something alluring about it Really each dark souls has it's own unique allure and each one is very different. Ds2 to me is special because it feels like it is in the same universe but very far away from the other two
It doesn't deserve the hate it got. Sure, it wasn't the originally lead from DS1, but it was a fantastic title and worked just as well as the other games. It had a sort of... I don't know, breeziness to its movement and combat systems that I still like to this day. DS1 and Demon's Souls felt sluggish and unresponsive by comparison. DS3 was a little looser, too, maybe because of DS2's example. They really fine-tuned some of the controls. And the areas you could explore were great, too. Even though the paths to each area were a bit nonsensical. How do you go waaaay up an elevator and then wind up down at the base of a lava-strewn kingdom?
Been loving the series. I remember a few years ago hearing you on the bonfireside chat podcast, as well as the countless times you were mentioned. Keep up the vids!
Man all these recent videos have been trippy to see, having been part of the community for all the discoveries. Its like a nostalgia bomb of all that old theorizing and working together to figure stuff out when a game was new n such haha
a much more awesome story than i initially expected, i really did expect like "obviously someone just cracked the game open and dumped the info online thats what always happens when a new game comes out" but honestly it makes me really happy to see thats not the case. also i instantly subbed and turned on the bell when you started talking about the calculators and the data and all that, ive used the calculators for dark souls 2 a TON, and realizing that i had been watching the videos of the guy who figured all that out, and that it wasnt a trivial matter for some random guy to just crack open the files and dump the data online was the final (and way overkill) push for me to subscribe love the videos so far, and thank you very much for testing and helping to figure that crap out XD
Your commitment to this research is admirable. You are like Holmes chasing a mystery, driven forward until you had all the facts. Well done, excellent breakdown as well.
Great video! From my perspective DS2 had the best pvp, ruined by the worst matchmaking. Even with that the endgame fight clubs and arenas were the highest populated and most fair (compared to DeS, and DaS1,2,3), and the twinking in DS2 was the most fun. My son and I created a soul memory tree in order to pass down gear to new characters. It took an extreme amount of effort, but it was also a lot of fun. My favorite weapon to invade with was the scorpion stinger, and he loved to dual wield spotted/old whips.
@@christophercollins3632 Back before that ring existed you had to do the tree thing to trade down. By the time that ring was in the game half the playerbase was gone
5:29 I played DS2 SotFS recently, I can tell you exactly what was my Soul Memory 4177267 ... On a first playthrough Without even touching NG+ And only grinding for levels at the start of the game to have 60 INT All other grinding was for titanite
This does at least answer my most burning question all these years: _why_ Soul Memory? Well, because they were already tracking soul memory (by another name) before and it was an easy thing to repurpose to deal with matchmaking. I'm still curious about why weapon upgrades took so long to be factored in, why matchmaking in later games doesn't let you put items in a storage container to adjust your matchmaking, why we don't simply make weapons behave differently against phantoms/hosts so that weapon scaling can be completely ignored for multiplayer (aside from hosts more easily dispatching NPC enemies and thus making hte invader's life harder but NG+ already throws a wrench in that), but at least knowing that it was an _easy_ solution eases my complete bewilderment that Soul Memory came to be. Oh, and I did want to mention that item damage held special importance in Soul Memory, since repairs cost souls and there was specific spells and items that could break weapons and armor, permanently increasing Soul Memory without being a hacker. Griefing someone's matchmaking forever, amazing! I hope if we ever get a remake of DS2, we can get a version with better matchmaking so we can really enjoy the game in the series that gets so much praise for its relative balance in PvP.
Thank you SO MUCH for these intensely-interesting deep dives! I am supremely impressed by the sheer amount of hours you have dumped into brute-forcing to learn all these numbers, as well as how willing you are, and have been, to share them! I have never hacked a game on anything more complicated than the Nintendo DS, so watching you use those cheat-spawned-items at 24:05 made me make an ungodly choking sound... I am just NOT used to seeing cheats like that! My favorite type of cheating is unlocked cameras for fly-overs, so I'll definitely be watching your other videos where you do things like that!
It’s very deliberate that they keep changing the matchmaking algorithm with each game; it’s literally security through obscurity. If they had a foolproof system that allowed for matchmaking whilst preventing abuse, they’d have no reason not to be totally transparent in how it works.
I have been achievement hunting, all I need rn is miracle and pyromancies. I already have obtained the sun bro only one by this point. And the rush for agape can only be described as a "speed run", where every single tiny soul is one second, and you have to stay as low as you can, I unironically have gotten really good at avoiding souls because of it. Like I can get the no man's with only 12-15K souls and get to the lost bal- brain can't remember the area name, but yeah get there with like 28K or so
I remember wearing it through about 8 bosses on my first playthrough thinking I could get the souls out of it like a piggy bank, lol. I even thought it was overpowered since I didn't have to worry about losing my souls upon death
i'm not really sure why i watched a 40 min video on a subject i already intimately understand. good job on your presentation. it was pleasant enough to keep me watching although none of this was new information for me personally.
I really like how Bloodborne handled invasions. Because when a friend and I want to just have fun and co-op through one of these games, we would like to have the power to just stop all invasions from happening without disabling co-op. I really hope they have something like that in Elden Ring. Invasions can be fun, but when you get to invasion hotspots, it becomes REALLY annoying to just progress in a co-op manner. And before anyone says that we could just go offline and then reconnect outside the hotspot, we say that that defeats the purpose of going on a fully co-op adventure. Also, invasion ranges cover a big enough portion of the map that skipping it will mean skipping a lot of jolly cooperation.
The design fix is just to implement a ring with a code that allows you to summon only your ally wearing the same friendship ring while you're both hollowed. Not to neuter the entire invasion system.
Yay! Dark Souls 2 content! I have such a soft spot for this game. It is very flawed, but considering that it had huge development cutbacks was a followup to a classic, I think the product could've been so much worse so it shows how talented B Team were.
Okay after just hearing what soul memory is and how it's supposed to work there is one GIAAANT issue that immediately comes to my mind: So we got rid of people staying low level to invade noobs (no, that's not an insult, I'm a noob myself and in terms of Soulsborne especially I use it in its original meaning of "newbie", aka being relatively new to a game), that's cool. But now we have an entire different issue resulting in almost the same outcome. We wnted to prevent experienced players from invading noobs. Well, now what's an experienced player gonna do? Right, they'll clear an area rather easily, not gathering too many souls in the process. What's a noob gonna do? Fight their way thorugh the first querter of the area, die 9 times, finally making it to midway point, die 17 other times on the way etc. At the end, the experienced player killed every enemy once or maybe twice, while the noob killed half the enemies at least a dozen times, a significant amount of enemies even like 20 times - and therefore gained waaaaaaay more souls summed up. What does this mean? Exactly, the best way to invade noobs is to... well, do what you'd do anyways, clear the are fast and efficient without too many attempts so your soul memory tier is low enough to invade noobs in the earliest are while almost having completed the game yourself already. So you are effectively putting people who almost could speedrun the game in one pvp-tier with people who died 30 times while trying to clear the very first area. Okay, having said that, let's see what actually happened, maybe I'm completely wrong and/or misunderstood the system and its implications massively :D Oh look, just what I said. Plus the issue of gaining souls by helping other which puts you in a tier where you can't help others anymore... that's an entire part I did not even consider, great point. Though I'd like to believe these 2 issues kinda cancelled each other out like... helping players moves you to higher tier, but in higher tiers there are also players who struggeled quite a lot and got to that tier because they died and , so in the end you are again in one tier with players who really could use your help, but ofc I'm not sure if that's how it ended up playing out. So you said about yourself that you are not good at maths. Let me tell you, that's complete bullshit (and pls don't take that as an insult^^). Maybe you are not good at classic school calculus, that's something I wouldn't dare to judge, but on multiple occasions in just this one video you definitely showed the kind of thinking that's necessary for a good mathematician - like for example realising the level range is significantly different wether calculated from host or phantom point of view, and also that it's important at what exact point and which "way" numbers are rounded. Also, bruteforce testing a bunch, then coming up with a hypothesis based on these results and then again testing that hypothesis is a textbook way to find a formula in actual mathematics. Okay, let's be honest here: Your entire process of figuring out level ranges in DS1, and even more so figuring out soul rewards in DS2 for the sole reason of having a table of that so you could reliably track enemy stats in order to get to another table that eventually shows a (likely) level range for DS2 to me screams, that you'd make a great statistics guy or something similar, just judging by skillset, way of thinking and approach to these things - obv only if that was something you'd enjoy, but other than personal preference I don't see what could stop you from pursuing a career in these fields. And I think the only other thing that would stop you from becoming great at maths might be a lack of ... reason in the early stages, like maths initially often has the goal to find a formula without necessarily having a goal of what to do with that formula afterwards. On the other hand, you are figuring out level ranges for pvp with (I assume) no more goal than to...well, know them at the end so that's again a math-y approach in a way xD So I guess the process is already (more or less) finished, but while watching this, I kinda started to come upt with a system/algorithm to say so, on how to find tier boundaries: Let's call the 2 players A and B, A is trying to summon B for Co-op. *) Step 1: B gathers souls until A can no longer summon B - you got one tier break point *) Step 2: A gathers souls until A is able to summon B again - you got the break point of the first/second tier *) repeat *) as soon as A crosses the break point found in Step 1, you can jump up some tiers However, the fun part actually might be trying and testing wiht different items without knowing how many tiers they can croos xD Okay if you can only invade upwards, that's super easy (but still a lot of work) way to test tiers xD
Huh, I never realized you did testing. Do you think you could do a video on poise health and poise damage? I'd be particularly interested to see how it works in DS3, which seems to split poise health into "hyperarmor" from melee attacks and "perseverance" from its weapon art and unfaltering prayer, the latter of which appears independent of the user's poise stat.
@@illusorywall I'm actually really interested in the poise mechanics in dark souls 2, cause it often feel that enemies have more poise and deal more poise damage than I do even tho I'm a giant dad build.
Jacob Friedman Poise in DS2 is well documented at this point. You have a hidden poise meter, which gets damaged from poise. Once it reaches zero, you get poise broken, and the meter resets to full. It does automatically refill, but incredibly slowly. However, there are many attacks that auto-stagger no matter your poise, such as all rolling attacks will stagger you.
@@darkjackl999 in order to tank a two handed straight sword attack in ds2 you need to wear full havels and pump adp and attunement to 40 (I think). So I don't wanna say that poise is kinda pointless in ds2... but it kinda is pointless in ds2. You are better of wearing that skirt that gives dark resistance and maybe havel's gauntlets for some defense
@@Avrysatos Yeah looking up adaptability is definitely recommended if you're struggling with the change in "feel" from Dark Souls 1 and you find yourself not rolling through attacks as expected.
I started playing Darksouls when Prepare to cry came out and i played a lot of coop and pvp in all of the games. But In all of these years i never understood just how the community was able to figure out all the limits on the individual multiplayer items in the series in generell and who in specific did make the discoverys. Back in the day as Darksouls 2 released and i heard about how soul memory worked i was scratching my head about "Who for f*** sake figures this wierd stuff out and who do i have to thank for making my life in Souls online A LOT easier". Now after so many years i finally figured it out. BIG THANKS to you and your friends and all of those in the community that helped. You all really improved the Souls game expirience for so many players. Thanks again much appriciated.
I am currently going back through Dark Souls 2 to get all achievements. I don't think i would have found this channel if i wasn't and that would be a damn shame. These videos are amazing!
Really enjoyed the video! I really love DS2, it sets such a different tone in its design. Especially the lighting makes it feel more like a positive dream instead of the grim nightmarish concept of DS1 and sometimes DS3. It feels more colorful in some way that the other Souls games don't. But soul memory and the weapon durability made it just a whole lot harder to actually enjoy it, like what the hell am I to do when my +10 weapon almost breaks, twice, on the same boss!? I'm still upset about that. Anyway great content as always!
I remember my first playthrough of Dark Souls II, a cheater hacked his Soul Memory really low so he could invade me when I was in my 30s I think, he must have been in his 100s. Well he ended up falling to his death(After he had invaded and killed me 3-4 times)and I got enough souls from that to level up over somewhere to 50-100 times. Looking back I wish I had killed myself to lose those souls, as I think it ended up making me over powered. I still have Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin to play at least, so I can try again without being over level.
I've been looking forward to this since I saw your tweet about looking for someone who didn't care about being soft banned. I have a lot of affection for Dark Souls 2 because of how extremely weird it is in comparison to the other Soulsborne games (granular movement speed really put me off the game for a long time)
Yeah absolutely, it's really lame having to manage it. I mean, arguably, you still had to manage level ranges before the games started adding passwords and that could take some effort, but that was still much less of a hassle.
Seems easier to just assign numeric values based off the items/equipment, upgrades, and stats and matching you based on that. Every item is given an innate number assigned to it that increases with upgrades, and every 5 levels you gain in SL puts you up a tier. Add these together and that's your matchmatching level. You can go 5 below your level and infinitely above. Take souls out of it completely and only apply it to what you actually have.
hey man, ive been following your work on and off sense dark souls 1 and thoroughly enjoy the content that you put out, the work that you put in, and watching the your very well researched and put together videos dissecting everything about the soulsborne series. Thank you for all the information you gave this community and keep up the good work!
I'mma be honest, I've never played any of the Soulsborne series but 1. This stuff is absolutely fascinating and 2. I hope to be as dedicated to a game community as you are one day
![Knight Artorias || SL1 (No roll/No block/No parry/Hitless) [practice using RTSR]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/jAgW_ig3fv0/mqdefault.jpg)
Hey everyone! If you enjoy these videos and the game research I do, please consider supporting the Patreon I just launched!
www.patreon.com/illusorywall
Any amount of contribution would go a long way into supporting what I do.
Could you cover the curse in DS1 The effects it has on fall demage and how some rings work with curse like red tearstone ring and FAP ring?
Go go people support him :D apparently we only need 5 more bucks to get the 8 bit majula cover :D
To be honest, I never was able to help out someone with a boss in ds 1 more than two times in a row. I killed a boss with someone as a phantom, placed another sign and waited for over half an hour. Each time I encountered a new boss. People just... seem to have different builds I guess?
I agree that soul memory can be janky at times, but I'd still prefer it, over being invaded by a sl1 pyromancer with DLC level pyromancy, which, you know, doesn't require leveling up :)
For phones fextralife doesn't seem to show the extra 4 SM tiers. Can someone who is on PC confirm that fextralife their has those extra 4 tiers?
@@Stardust_the_F-104C Huh, that's strange. They do have more tiers on the desktop version of the page, however it is missing one, combining what should be tiers 44 and 45 into one, basically claiming the last tier starts earlier than it really does.
"I'm not great at PvP", "I'm not that good at mathematics", ""I'm not amazing at statistics myself". *Does everything exceptionally well*.
Dunning-Kruger effect
JustAnotherGaian I thought that was the opposite tho, someone who thinks they are very good but are very bad at something
@@asketillus8679 same thing. People who barely know anything about a subject think that are experts. People who have any expertise realize how much more they have to learn.
@@asketillus8679
Look it up for your answer. It's a cognitive bias of failure to recognize one's own competence or incompetence. The overestimation or underestimation of ability.
Remimds me of the guy that says that about a test, yet gets a 98 or higher.
At least in Sekiro they finally figured out how to fix the issue entirely.
😭
No early game griefing if there's no multiplayer *taps forehead*
Gl trying to pvp in sekiro man
Martyna Petrauskiene laughs in multiplayer mods
@@AutistiCat2406 they're an actual thing? Damn
I feel like Soul Memory should have accounted souls spent rather than souls gained.
This would've had a lot of the same issues as before, but would have avoided the additional salt going into the wound of losing a huge bloodstain.
That is a terrible idea. People would just go through the game by spending the minimum amount of souls to get the best gear and invade weaker players at the start of the game.
@@lukamegru1537 I think OP meant that when you lose a bloodstain, those lost souls should be subtracted by your soul memory. After all, it's souls you've done nothing with so it's as if you hadn't gained them in the first place. The way it works in Dark Souls II is that I get doubly punished when I lose a bloodstain because I've now permanently increased my soul memory without having done anything to better my character with them. Not to mention it makes life hell for new players (same as your health bar decreasing for each death up to 50% but I digress)
Assign scores to gear and attuned spells based on upgrades and general quality (e.g. non-scaling weapons higher than ones with strong scaling) and combine that with souls spent leveling. PvE players would take the scores of the highest scored item per slot, including spell instruments for what they have attuned. Invaders would have the sum of all carried equipment to encourage smart choices regarding gear carried. I think that's the best solution but it would be difficult to fully tune.
@@TheClaybones - I had the same idea, basically that you matched based on your level, and the most-upgraded gear in your inventory or attuned added a fixed amount to your level based on it's upgrade or power. This could include weapons, armor, spells, even estus. Being level 1 but having your level artificially inflated to 60 because you have a +10 catalyst and Dark Bead would mean you being matched against players that might actually be able to handle that combination.
Players that are advancing casually won't even notice it, as the inflations will generally put them in the same ranges as they want anyway. Experienced players could also "adjust" their level by putting gear in the box or changing their attuned spells, but that still means that they would weaken themselves to play with weaker players.
You know how many runs I had to restart after dieing loosing more then 30k souls.
I did a straight sword hilt run on dark souls 1. The first boss I killed was pinwheel. With a hilt sword +5 and gold pine resign, took over 15 minutes. I went back to get the black knight. And he killed me. On my way back for the blood stain a Skelton smacked me off the cliff. :( RIP 20k souls.
Staying up until 2am to help you figure out the level ranges in Dark Souls 1& 2 are some of my fondest memories related to the Souls series. Even remember helping you mess around with some Chalice Dungeons in Bloodborne. Things were so much fun back when we were just figuring out how things were working. Noticed I wasn't included next to Niko and Europa, but that's fine! Thanks for all the effort and all the quality research over the past few years, very cool.
Oh no! That's absolutely right and sorry you got left out!! I went off of everyone I named in a reddit post from back in the day, unfortunately that particular set of tests now that I'm thinking about it probably didn't reference the entirety of it.
Thanks again for all of your help over the years!
Oof
10:54
I think one of the reasons they separated matchmaking between NG and NG+~ initially was because after NG a lot of changes are made, like additional enemies being added to the world and parry riposte damage being increased by 50%. DS2 was the first game in the series to make so many sweeping changes to NG+, so I can understand why they might want to keep things separate. At the same time you can simulate nearly every change via bonfire aesthetic, so I'm not totally sure what they were thinking either.
Had no idea parry/riposte damage went up in ds2 because I rarely use the mechanic, thanks for the info!
Is ds1 the same? If you stay at level 3 and go into ng+ can you invade/be invaded by someone in ng or ng++?
@@vieyel9031 shhhhhh
@@vieyel9031 All the other games don't care about your NG cycle. Someone in NG+7 can invade someone in NG, and vice versa. DS2 is the odd one out.
No, you are mistaken - it is absolutely meant to be conflated with the “other” meaning for the word twink.
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
I was a twink who was also a twink
@@kdtprojekt681 was?
@@dontminchinit2656 once you stop harassing low level players you become a bear
Just wanted to mention that you can also read the Agape Ring as 'ah-gah-pay', a Greek noun meaning roughly that you want the best for others, a "charitable love". The word has different contextual variations also along the same lines, but the archaic verb form of agape in specific is "to show affection toward the dead". Given that they put the ring into the game for players who wanted to help others, I think that might be an intentional double reading of the word.
Yeah I've always thought it was the Grecian meaning of the term myself. But then, I took some Philosophy classes in college and actually knew what the term agape actually was from them. I don't think most people are even aware of that definition of the word.
It's because of the weirdness of language and translation/localization. The grecian "agape" and english agape are two separate words, that somehow when the grecian version was anglicized for english speakers and readers, matched an extant word. 'ag-gah-pay' is certainly not spelled 'agape' in ancient greek. Man, words are so weird.
Multiple variations of "love" as words are missing from English. The closest is "like" but that is too vague as it only implies basically to mildly love something. In order to specify the kind of love in English, an adjective is attached to love. For example: familial love, romantic love, and platonic love. I guess there is patriotism.
@@TheSuperRattColonel used to have an "r" but the word kept being simplified.
English is basically the spaghetti code of human languages. It gets more confusing when you account for the weird differences between US and British English, which is why there is sometimes dubs of shows from one form of English to another. Also, in some old books and stories, with Poe's early writings being a good example, an exclamation point did not always indicate the end of the sentence and was actually used in the middle of the sentence for...some reason.
Lastly, thou, thee, thy, and thine are not Old English forms of "you". They are actually the intended singular forms of the word. Now, "you" is used for both singular and plural as determining if "you" means one person or multiple is contextual.
Yes, English is very weird. Although, if you look into Spanish, it is a bit quirky too.
Damn, had no idea this much work was involved with one person primarily spearheading it. I definitely wouldn't have the patience to figure it out. I thought it was the whole community pulling together, which it kind of was, but again didn't realize this one guy was so prominent in all the results. Awesome!
I was dreaming with hope that you would make a DS2 dissected series, can't believe I was right.
The next video is also going to be about DS2. Two in a row!
illusory wall my GOD finally good news in 2020 :D
@@illusorywall Absolutely great news!
@@raphicoco I've got more good news for ya; we're gonna build a wall in Anor Londo and make the undead pay for it ;D
Jacob Friedman That 2011 news boyo. You are 9 years too late :/
It wasn't until this video that I became aware of the fact that youre one of the major guiding members of the community. I've probably been using information you've made or contributed to for years and I only just started watching your channel two months ago.
Thanks for your dedication to the series bro, its made a lot of great memories and experiences for my friends and I.
“they are known as “twinks” (not to be confused with the other kind of twink)” thanks, Illusory wall!
I HATED this mechanic. Made me feel bad when grinding for a certain outfit or item because then I'd be too "overleveled" soul memory wise to PVP or co-op.
Well 2 was meh anyway compared to 1 and 3
@@RvnWolf 2 was godly what do you mean
Maybe 2 was godly pvp wise but I can safely say that ds1 and 3 are just better lol, pretty sure a vast majority agree with me here
@@QrBooze ds2 is actually terribly balanced now that people are a little more knowledgeable in pvp. The meta weapons are oppressive and there's more busted tech (e.g. quizzle, FUGS phantom blocking) than in other souls games. The argument people commonly use of "there's a lot more viable stuff in 2" is an illusion for fighting bad players where weapons like regular ultras (besides rolling r1 of 1-handed greathammers I suppose) are basically unusable vs. decent players.
IMO at least compared to other souls games dark souls 3 has the most balanced pvp. pkcs/straight swords are cancer to fight but there are legitimitely viable caster builds and strength weapons can be viable when used a certain way (for example, off-hand yhorm's great machete with a fast weapon in right hand was a meta setup for early tournaments)
@@johnhalo8726 Imagine having taste this shit
This is such an interesting video because I played these games way after they were released, I was never a fan of Soul Memory because I wanted to help other people in coop but it was near impossible most of the time, and it's interesting to see how From Software tried to continuously tweak the system. I have only tried PvP on Dark Souls Remastered, and the weapon matchmaking can help, but having magic not count as part of that system was dumb, so you get a lot of low level +0 weapon dudes at undead parish with Dark Bead which is just insane.
The Dark Bead shotgun spammers in Undead Berg . . . wew. It's almost a tradition at this point.
20:45 “or if I can prove myself wrong” the world needs more people like you sir
If by that you mean people that have a strong grasp about the statistics on scientific method, you bet it needs
Can't wait for "Elden ring dissected" to be a thing
One day we'll get a new trailer... one day
Oooooohhhh
Oohhh..elden ring..
*OOOOOHHHHH*
“It’s been 84 years....”
''dissected by someone or something "
There has never been a effective system for reducing twink builds. The most satisfying attempt was DS3 but the *entire* game had to be designed in a straight forward manner. And even then, I made a level 20 character that could kill entire squads because I had access to later gear to bully with that did disproportionate damage to early game gear.
It takes a immense amount of consideration for creating fun multiplayer in a game like this, it's probably why Miyazaki ditched it for Sekiro. Needed a damn break lol.
Hopefully Elden Ring gets multiplayer and the best version of it.
I made a level 20 ds3 build just recently to do some blue invasions and help people out. It hinges around late game gear like Black Flame and chaos infused weapons. I think the easiest way to reduce twink builds is obvious - every new area I travel to either by load screen or fog wall should add a counter to my character so I can only invade people who have also been that far. i.e. If I get Black Flame from Karla in the Irithyll Dungeons, I should only be able to invade people who have also made it that far - and by using a "counter" system you could measure how far into the game any given character is even if they chose to go a different path (for example, if they never went to the dungeon and instead went to the Pontiff boss fight). I shouldn't be able to take an endgame boss weapon or spell back and start invading in high wall. Couple that with SL level ranges as well as the weapon upgrade level the game already uses and it'd be solved. The only complication is throwing in DLC, for example in DS3 nearly ever twink build runs straight to the DLC for the Ring of Favor +3 since rings don't count against them and it's a huge boost to have a +3 ring early game.
@@lonewolfsx29 idk man, I'd argue that invading a lv20 area with endgame gear should just motivate a player to then git gud and do that to other people.
Besides, at lv20 your character is far from unbeatable. Tankier than a lv20 noob, but chances are, you're invading a party of players, so your disadvantaged there.
@@hardgay7537 Yeah I've completely changed my tune in the year since writing this comment lol. I think the main issue is just that players doing the invading a lot of times come up against players expecting to pve only with pve builds/gear and don't know how to handle it - to which I agree - git gud.
Unfortunately it's looking like MP for Elden Ring is going to be weak as far as invasions go. Co-op seems fine, but making it so you have to actively opt in to be invaded just sort of ruins the whole mystique of invading someone and stalking them to an ambush or acting as a level boss or any other fun stuff like that.
@@MidlifeCrisisJoe I disagree, it's only fun for the person who is invading. People who don't want to be invaded are now at least not discouraged from using helpful tools like being in soul/embered form or summoning help.
I suppose that the inclusion of enemies spawning a limited number of times makes some sense when considering new players - if you keep dying to the boss over and over, your soul memory doesn't keep going up.
An inexperienced player also probably wouldn't be in the Company of Champions.I wish the Company of Champions wasn't a covenant so you could be in another covenant while gaining the effects of being part of the CoC.
I kind of agree with you about spawning, but I more so agree with the notion that it gives the impression of the game saying "Look; if you don't have it down by now, you never will."
iirc on launch CoC didnt stop enemies from de-spawning
@@straymerodach4713 it still doesn't. In fact it makes enemies significantly more difficult to handle and fucks with multiplayer so you're more likely to be invaded and have a harder time summoning help.
@@mrbubblestea it does stop enemies from despawning, last year i used it to farm humanity.
I always felt it to be a counter balance to the common complaint new, less experienced players belted out a lot in critiquing Dark Souls 1's lack of difficulty modes. That dying to a boss and being punished by having to clear regular mobs back to that boss as tedious, and not difficult. Often the mobs between you and a boss weren't hard to deal with after the 3rd time but just became grindy and annoying to do so. So with the limited spawn system you'd have to deal with it a few times, but once you effectively "got used to" killing those enemies easily they'd just stop being there to begin with so you could just go back for another boss attempt
Love how you randomly wanted to focus on the guy sliding for whatever reason lol @13:35
I love DS2 coop the most of the three, but man, punishing players over such a terrible system such as soul memory was downright oppressive.
I agree this games coop makes me want to replay dark souls 2 so many times.
@@nik774 go for it, game is still very popular. Even on ps3!
Soul memory isn't an inherently bad idea, but I would make the following changes:
• it is an extension of the level ranges, not a replacement
• it only applies to invasions, and only applies until the early-midgame
• it only counts souls that are spent on leveling up and equipment
@@ENCHANTMEN_ then it easy to remove sm anyways because agape ring still exists
@@DronesOverTheMoon Making it a ring kinda sucks tho, since it takes up a ring slot. Plus either way in the long run SM punishes you for not spending each and every soul you ever aquire
The guy that kept doing heavy attacks in the four kings footage gave me conniptions due to him using only, ONLY, heavy attacks
My first time against the 4 kings I used a full Mossy Stone Guardian Set and the Great Axe.
Wooohooo.... I hated the fight....
My first time was full havels and a zweihander. I don't think I drank one estus.
@@rustyjones7908 oh nice! I was heavily overburdened because I didn't know what to level up so I kept pumping str thinking I'd finally be able to carry enough. No idea I needed endurance!!! My second playthrough I did learn from my mistakes!!
"I just want the weird items nobody else wants" and I want a modified PS3 save with no souls, no soul memory, no items, and the agape ring so I can commit to a true ZERO SOULS run.
The problem solving and sheer amount of work put into figuring out Soul Memory is something I'd never really considered. I guess I had the vague notion of it being due to data mining also.
That being said, now that I know, thanks for all the co-op you've allowed me to do by figuring this stuff out!
Skip ahead? In an illusory wall video? No, I don't think I will
Soul memory always felt like a penalty for poorly skilled players...
I'm interested to see how this works.
I don't see how that makes any sense
The more you fail the higher the chance to summon a high level phantom to aid you. So I honestly think it serves the opposite.
Noobs continuous dying would punish them. They’d get invaded by players with all their souls spent in items and levels. Also, if they wanted to invade themselves , the hosts could be much higher in level. Eventually, if they get in the top tiers, this all evens out.
@A Skyrim Sex Mod Where You're Just A Virgin Forever Its literally just a retarded way to stop twinking. DS1 remastered and DS3 solved this non issue more elegantly. Once the B team gets put on the bench suddenly the game works well.
it kind of is but does it worse than DeS imo. Demon Souls' directly punished you by adding black phantoms to your world if you had a black world tendency, this world tendency could eventually be shifted back to white. whereas in Dark Souls 2, a PvE player punishment remains forever.
Soul memory wasn't an awful solution, but i feel that implementing the previous games SL teirs and removing the souls from players who lost theirs upon death from their soul memory would've made things alot smoother
Possibly even ignore most of these with the name engraved ring
Yeah. Maybe a memory on only spent souls would have been better. But I can’t imagine the programming hell that would have caused with this.
@@raphicoco not much really.
soul memory would simply increase when you spend souls instead of when you get them.
it could be a pain in the ass to change it after release (depending on what exactly triggers an addition to soul memory) but not "hard". just tedious.
I honestly don't understand why they didn't do this in the first place.
@@raphicoco a little bit of math does the trick, as OP said, removing lost souls is enough.
Souls Gained(one check) = Souls Spent (too many checks) + Souls Lost (one check)
Gain-Loss=Spent
Nah. A good player can get a slight advantage by not losing bloodstains. But not much. And once you’re in high SM tiers, a single level costs as much as you would’ve lost throughout multiple playthroughs.
This channel is the absolute bees knees. I've already watched all the lore videos I can get my hands on, and love the obscurity of it all, the hypotheticals, the experimentation, etc, and having this in mechanic/game design form is just as cool! Keep it up man!
Dude I got into Dark Souls 2 super late and your findings helped me so much, soul memory is one of the things that really picked up my interest and you found it all for me, numbers on demand
The ghost doing a power slide at 13:30 lol
I can't believe I've been using your data for almost 10 years and didn't know it!
21:17 dude, you've invaded and beaten more players than I've even met in all my time in the games
I just wanna say thank you for all you've done for the Souls community. You deserve way more subscribers for the quality of content you put out.
Co-op should've been attached to Player Level, whereas PvP should've been attached to Soul Memory. I feel like it's the best of both worlds.
god im getting flashbacks to me and my friends Coop sessions and how much of a pain it was... (+that one session we had to scrap half way through... he was playing a sunbro build and had to help some people to get medals... only to horribly outrank me in SM.)
TGR Yes! Thank you, someone else has said what I've been saying for years. Co-op is the most fun I have with any Souls game and I adore high level invasions because at that point it's mostly a fair and fun fight, but having mine and my newbie friends' experience ruined by some acne-ridden, sweaty, fragile-ego toting incel with min-max gear, fully upgraded weaponry, an infinite supply of lightning bolts who nobody in the party has a chance against is not fun nor is it balanced.
Luckily, just closing the app on PS4, finding their user ID and blocking them stops them from invading in future.
I think it should be the other way around, so that invaders are never too high of a level, and co-op focussed players don't lose as much opportunity as they continue gaining souls. A player who loses a lot will get higher level co-op partners that can help them get through the game better that way, without opening themselves up to higher-level invaders.
Absolutely amazing! At first was like "why would this video be 40 minutes long, what could even take so long to explain?" Well it turned out it was everything.
Something I've just now figured out and accepted immediately: testing anything in any serious amount of detail, no matter what it is, will inevitably require doing/requesting something(s) normally considered strange/weird. But testing and coming to understand things like this is supremely helpful, so one shouldn't let that stop one. Thank you for your work. (Also, your honesty about your mistakes along the way is very welcome and appreciated. Honesty and integrity are better than impossible and untenable levels of inhumanly constant perfection.)
Something no one seems to talk about re: DS2 was how the scaling mechanics would have made a meta level pretty impossible in the first place, soul memory not withstanding. The original philosophy of stopping at 120 was that your build was "finished". Sure, you wouldn't have access to every weapon or spell, but your katana at 40 dex wasn't much weaker than someone at max level with 99 dex, and you didn't have much less health than them either.
DS2 though, initially with much stronger scaling (with SL) on armor, and initially unbalanced weapons (like anything with mundane at max SL), threw this out the window. Anyone that played in the first month of release surely saw firsthand (or at least on youtube) the scourge of max level havel monsters that took single or double digit damage from your SL 120-150 character while having several hundred more HP and simultaneously being able to one shot backstab even other max level characters.
Even though they patched most of this stuff, it was still a crazy departure from the mechanical design of leveling characters in the series before or since. Personally, I liked what it ended up becoming; instead of fighting the eventual stagnation of having one build only capable of doing one thing, just never stop leveling and combine whatever mechanics you want! I think my main character ended up around SL400, just to keep up with the traffic of the SM tiers I would make it to, and in retrospect it was a pretty fun way to pvp. You came across so many interesting builds.
Eh.. I dunno, that's kind of the thing with builds-- they're interesting because you have to decide what you can't do and what you can specialize in. You have to plan a path for your character and figure out what weapons work for your playstyle and your character-- it's what makes you wanna use those 10 character slots you're given.
I stop at certain levels for my characters anyway, but I know there's no *real* reason to. Matchmaking doesn't care about it, so there's functionally no reason to not just keep pumping souls into levels until my build's can just do everything. And at that point it's not even a build, what did you sacrifice for it? It's just kind of a bad feeling. And half the people you come up against *are* pumping levels into everything, so you're at a disadvantage of a potential massive level disparity unless you bite the bullet.
Plus, nothing really stops you from going up to level 350-400 in the other games, i'm pretty sure that's where the Japanese meta was. You just didn't get mingled with them with your level 120.
I can see the appeal of the chaos of SM, but I honestly didn't-- and i'm not surprised most other people didn't either.
@@Ribboppity this. It's not a "build" anymore if you can do amazingly at everything. One of my favorite builds in any soulsborne is the glass cannon build; being able to hit really hard but having no health so I have to be careful in fights. Not much of a glass cannon if I can hit really hard and have a lot of health, but so does the other guy so what's the point in even trying that? May as well R1 spam or farm parries or use the grapesicle since weapon meta trumps build success in DS2.
I think the build variety would be more shown in loadouts than stat delegations. Like sure you could have all max stats. But what kind of build are you going to make out of it?
the bad part about builds is that people that know about the meta rush to the level, while new players don't get to experience any multiplayer, when dark souls came out i pretty much stayed human to summon/get invaded with no luck, since i managed to finish the game before level 70, dark souls 2 i pretty much had the entire playtrough with invaders and some co-op
No matter how screwed up this game is, I love it with all my heart. I have no idea why but as soon as I played it I knew it was my favourite.
It really just has something alluring about it
Really each dark souls has it's own unique allure and each one is very different. Ds2 to me is special because it feels like it is in the same universe but very far away from the other two
@@Aetius_of_Astora To me, Dark Souls 2 feels the most like a Dream
It doesn't deserve the hate it got. Sure, it wasn't the originally lead from DS1, but it was a fantastic title and worked just as well as the other games. It had a sort of... I don't know, breeziness to its movement and combat systems that I still like to this day. DS1 and Demon's Souls felt sluggish and unresponsive by comparison. DS3 was a little looser, too, maybe because of DS2's example. They really fine-tuned some of the controls. And the areas you could explore were great, too. Even though the paths to each area were a bit nonsensical. How do you go waaaay up an elevator and then wind up down at the base of a lava-strewn kingdom?
@@Lucifronz Lol DS2 is the slowest of all of the souls games, movement and combat feels clunky compared to the rest.
@@karljuliuz More that DS1, impossible.
Been loving the series. I remember a few years ago hearing you on the bonfireside chat podcast, as well as the countless times you were mentioned. Keep up the vids!
Man all these recent videos have been trippy to see, having been part of the community for all the discoveries. Its like a nostalgia bomb of all that old theorizing and working together to figure stuff out when a game was new n such haha
This man did a whole ass research paper along with a 40 min video presentation on Dark Soul's multiplayer
hell yeah, ive been so excited to see you start dissecting ds2
a much more awesome story than i initially expected, i really did expect like "obviously someone just cracked the game open and dumped the info online thats what always happens when a new game comes out" but honestly it makes me really happy to see thats not the case.
also i instantly subbed and turned on the bell when you started talking about the calculators and the data and all that, ive used the calculators for dark souls 2 a TON, and realizing that i had been watching the videos of the guy who figured all that out, and that it wasnt a trivial matter for some random guy to just crack open the files and dump the data online was the final (and way overkill) push for me to subscribe
love the videos so far, and thank you very much for testing and helping to figure that crap out XD
Your commitment to this research is admirable. You are like Holmes chasing a mystery, driven forward until you had all the facts. Well done, excellent breakdown as well.
Extreme twinking, now you have my interest
lol 👍
Oh man I am so glad people like you exist. I would never have put the time in to figure all of this out. Thank you for your hard work sir.
Great video! From my perspective DS2 had the best pvp, ruined by the worst matchmaking. Even with that the endgame fight clubs and arenas were the highest populated and most fair (compared to DeS, and DaS1,2,3), and the twinking in DS2 was the most fun. My son and I created a soul memory tree in order to pass down gear to new characters. It took an extreme amount of effort, but it was also a lot of fun. My favorite weapon to invade with was the scorpion stinger, and he loved to dual wield spotted/old whips.
That's super cool. And yeah I can see just how much effort that would be!
You do you, seems good. Just sayin: equip Agape Ring and with Bonfire Ascetics, tons of gear/spells are obtainable early on.
@@christophercollins3632 Back before that ring existed you had to do the tree thing to trade down. By the time that ring was in the game half the playerbase was gone
5:29 I played DS2 SotFS recently, I can tell you exactly what was my Soul Memory
4177267
... On a first playthrough
Without even touching NG+
And only grinding for levels at the start of the game to have 60 INT
All other grinding was for titanite
This does at least answer my most burning question all these years: _why_ Soul Memory?
Well, because they were already tracking soul memory (by another name) before and it was an easy thing to repurpose to deal with matchmaking. I'm still curious about why weapon upgrades took so long to be factored in, why matchmaking in later games doesn't let you put items in a storage container to adjust your matchmaking, why we don't simply make weapons behave differently against phantoms/hosts so that weapon scaling can be completely ignored for multiplayer (aside from hosts more easily dispatching NPC enemies and thus making hte invader's life harder but NG+ already throws a wrench in that), but at least knowing that it was an _easy_ solution eases my complete bewilderment that Soul Memory came to be.
Oh, and I did want to mention that item damage held special importance in Soul Memory, since repairs cost souls and there was specific spells and items that could break weapons and armor, permanently increasing Soul Memory without being a hacker. Griefing someone's matchmaking forever, amazing!
I hope if we ever get a remake of DS2, we can get a version with better matchmaking so we can really enjoy the game in the series that gets so much praise for its relative balance in PvP.
These videos just keep getting better and better! I hope we get more deep dives into the history of how things like this were solved.
This is a great example of the classic saying "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
Thank you SO MUCH for these intensely-interesting deep dives! I am supremely impressed by the sheer amount of hours you have dumped into brute-forcing to learn all these numbers, as well as how willing you are, and have been, to share them!
I have never hacked a game on anything more complicated than the Nintendo DS, so watching you use those cheat-spawned-items at 24:05 made me make an ungodly choking sound... I am just NOT used to seeing cheats like that! My favorite type of cheating is unlocked cameras for fly-overs, so I'll definitely be watching your other videos where you do things like that!
It’s very deliberate that they keep changing the matchmaking algorithm with each game; it’s literally security through obscurity. If they had a foolproof system that allowed for matchmaking whilst preventing abuse, they’d have no reason not to be totally transparent in how it works.
No way!!! I’m so happy you did this and I can’t wait for more.
Oh, so _that's_ why the Agape Ring exists.
I've never figured out why anyone would take it outside of self-imposed challenges.
I have been achievement hunting, all I need rn is miracle and pyromancies. I already have obtained the sun bro only one by this point. And the rush for agape can only be described as a "speed run", where every single tiny soul is one second, and you have to stay as low as you can, I unironically have gotten really good at avoiding souls because of it. Like I can get the no man's with only 12-15K souls and get to the lost bal- brain can't remember the area name, but yeah get there with like 28K or so
I remember wearing it through about 8 bosses on my first playthrough thinking I could get the souls out of it like a piggy bank, lol. I even thought it was overpowered since I didn't have to worry about losing my souls upon death
i'm not really sure why i watched a 40 min video on a subject i already intimately understand.
good job on your presentation. it was pleasant enough to keep me watching although none of this was new information for me personally.
I really like how Bloodborne handled invasions. Because when a friend and I want to just have fun and co-op through one of these games, we would like to have the power to just stop all invasions from happening without disabling co-op. I really hope they have something like that in Elden Ring. Invasions can be fun, but when you get to invasion hotspots, it becomes REALLY annoying to just progress in a co-op manner.
And before anyone says that we could just go offline and then reconnect outside the hotspot, we say that that defeats the purpose of going on a fully co-op adventure. Also, invasion ranges cover a big enough portion of the map that skipping it will mean skipping a lot of jolly cooperation.
The design fix is just to implement a ring with a code that allows you to summon only your ally wearing the same friendship ring while you're both hollowed. Not to neuter the entire invasion system.
Bloodborne had the worst invasion ecosystem wtf you talking about
@@Sohelanthropus the best invasion system is one that doesn't exist and Bloodborne is the closest we have to that
It's just insane how much work u put into this. Keep up the good work!
Yay! Dark Souls 2 content! I have such a soft spot for this game. It is very flawed, but considering that it had huge development cutbacks was a followup to a classic, I think the product could've been so much worse so it shows how talented B Team were.
Every soul's game is a flawed masterpiece.
thanx for all the videos. not only are they informative but highly entertaining.
Okay after just hearing what soul memory is and how it's supposed to work there is one GIAAANT issue that immediately comes to my mind:
So we got rid of people staying low level to invade noobs (no, that's not an insult, I'm a noob myself and in terms of Soulsborne especially I use it in its original meaning of "newbie", aka being relatively new to a game), that's cool. But now we have an entire different issue resulting in almost the same outcome. We wnted to prevent experienced players from invading noobs. Well, now what's an experienced player gonna do? Right, they'll clear an area rather easily, not gathering too many souls in the process. What's a noob gonna do? Fight their way thorugh the first querter of the area, die 9 times, finally making it to midway point, die 17 other times on the way etc. At the end, the experienced player killed every enemy once or maybe twice, while the noob killed half the enemies at least a dozen times, a significant amount of enemies even like 20 times - and therefore gained waaaaaaay more souls summed up.
What does this mean? Exactly, the best way to invade noobs is to... well, do what you'd do anyways, clear the are fast and efficient without too many attempts so your soul memory tier is low enough to invade noobs in the earliest are while almost having completed the game yourself already. So you are effectively putting people who almost could speedrun the game in one pvp-tier with people who died 30 times while trying to clear the very first area.
Okay, having said that, let's see what actually happened, maybe I'm completely wrong and/or misunderstood the system and its implications massively :D
Oh look, just what I said. Plus the issue of gaining souls by helping other which puts you in a tier where you can't help others anymore... that's an entire part I did not even consider, great point. Though I'd like to believe these 2 issues kinda cancelled each other out like... helping players moves you to higher tier, but in higher tiers there are also players who struggeled quite a lot and got to that tier because they died and , so in the end you are again in one tier with players who really could use your help, but ofc I'm not sure if that's how it ended up playing out.
So you said about yourself that you are not good at maths. Let me tell you, that's complete bullshit (and pls don't take that as an insult^^). Maybe you are not good at classic school calculus, that's something I wouldn't dare to judge, but on multiple occasions in just this one video you definitely showed the kind of thinking that's necessary for a good mathematician - like for example realising the level range is significantly different wether calculated from host or phantom point of view, and also that it's important at what exact point and which "way" numbers are rounded. Also, bruteforce testing a bunch, then coming up with a hypothesis based on these results and then again testing that hypothesis is a textbook way to find a formula in actual mathematics.
Okay, let's be honest here: Your entire process of figuring out level ranges in DS1, and even more so figuring out soul rewards in DS2 for the sole reason of having a table of that so you could reliably track enemy stats in order to get to another table that eventually shows a (likely) level range for DS2 to me screams, that you'd make a great statistics guy or something similar, just judging by skillset, way of thinking and approach to these things - obv only if that was something you'd enjoy, but other than personal preference I don't see what could stop you from pursuing a career in these fields. And I think the only other thing that would stop you from becoming great at maths might be a lack of ... reason in the early stages, like maths initially often has the goal to find a formula without necessarily having a goal of what to do with that formula afterwards. On the other hand, you are figuring out level ranges for pvp with (I assume) no more goal than to...well, know them at the end so that's again a math-y approach in a way xD
So I guess the process is already (more or less) finished, but while watching this, I kinda started to come upt with a system/algorithm to say so, on how to find tier boundaries:
Let's call the 2 players A and B, A is trying to summon B for Co-op.
*) Step 1: B gathers souls until A can no longer summon B - you got one tier break point
*) Step 2: A gathers souls until A is able to summon B again - you got the break point of the first/second tier
*) repeat
*) as soon as A crosses the break point found in Step 1, you can jump up some tiers
However, the fun part actually might be trying and testing wiht different items without knowing how many tiers they can croos xD
Okay if you can only invade upwards, that's super easy (but still a lot of work) way to test tiers xD
37:16 you got robbed of that second R2 thrust
Huh, I never realized you did testing. Do you think you could do a video on poise health and poise damage? I'd be particularly interested to see how it works in DS3, which seems to split poise health into "hyperarmor" from melee attacks and "perseverance" from its weapon art and unfaltering prayer, the latter of which appears independent of the user's poise stat.
Oh I'll definitely talk about poise sometime!
@@illusorywall I'm actually really interested in the poise mechanics in dark souls 2, cause it often feel that enemies have more poise and deal more poise damage than I do even tho I'm a giant dad build.
i actually would like to see a dissection of poise throughout the series
Jacob Friedman Poise in DS2 is well documented at this point. You have a hidden poise meter, which gets damaged from poise. Once it reaches zero, you get poise broken, and the meter resets to full. It does automatically refill, but incredibly slowly. However, there are many attacks that auto-stagger no matter your poise, such as all rolling attacks will stagger you.
@@darkjackl999 in order to tank a two handed straight sword attack in ds2 you need to wear full havels and pump adp and attunement to 40 (I think). So I don't wanna say that poise is kinda pointless in ds2... but it kinda is pointless in ds2. You are better of wearing that skirt that gives dark resistance and maybe havel's gauntlets for some defense
Dude I really enjoy these videos, thanks for bringing dark souls 2 into the dissected series
Thank you! I'm trying to get through this game, and mechanics are so different from DS1.
Aw man.... just wiki the mechanics. This game is super long and it'll be even longer if you have no idea what adp is for.
@@Avrysatos Yeah looking up adaptability is definitely recommended if you're struggling with the change in "feel" from Dark Souls 1 and you find yourself not rolling through attacks as expected.
I started playing Darksouls when Prepare to cry came out and i played a lot of coop and pvp in all of the games. But In all of these years i never understood just how the community was able to figure out all the limits on the individual multiplayer items in the series in generell and who in specific did make the discoverys. Back in the day as Darksouls 2 released and i heard about how soul memory worked i was scratching my head about "Who for f*** sake figures this wierd stuff out and who do i have to thank for making my life in Souls online A LOT easier". Now after so many years i finally figured it out. BIG THANKS to you and your friends and all of those in the community that helped. You all really improved the Souls game expirience for so many players. Thanks again much appriciated.
Hey thanks so much, it makes me happy the info could be put to use to help the community.
Wow please dissect ds2 fully! favorite souls game and i feel like it has an insane amount of detail!
thats some crazy diligence i applaud you good sir
Love this series - Can we expect a Dark Souls 3/bloodborne dissected in the future too?
I am currently going back through Dark Souls 2 to get all achievements. I don't think i would have found this channel if i wasn't and that would be a damn shame. These videos are amazing!
Seeing that Demon's Souls invader using a greataxe warms my soul💕
Wow, I just... wow. Very informative, absolutely loved the video
Always love to see someone else uploading dark souls 2. The lore and overall mechanics of dark souls 2 makes it the best of the souls series
Terrible bosses and areas though
After playing this game to extinction, its refreshing to watch your videos. Good work man. Subscribed!
Damn, so much work, my deepest respects to you and your testing partners, it helped a lot of us and was really intereting to watch
This was an awesome video man, thanks for the nostalgia trip.
26:35 "Larry Capija" translates to "The Tasty C**k". This is gold naming lololol.
This video is a gold mine! Why didn't this exist back when I picked up DS2: SotFS a couple years ago?
Really enjoyed the video! I really love DS2, it sets such a different tone in its design. Especially the lighting makes it feel more like a positive dream instead of the grim nightmarish concept of DS1 and sometimes DS3. It feels more colorful in some way that the other Souls games don't.
But soul memory and the weapon durability made it just a whole lot harder to actually enjoy it, like what the hell am I to do when my +10 weapon almost breaks, twice, on the same boss!? I'm still upset about that.
Anyway great content as always!
Dark Souls II! My first Dark Souls game.
Beautiful video as always, congratulations my man
I remember my first playthrough of Dark Souls II, a cheater hacked his Soul Memory really low so he could invade me when I was in my 30s I think, he must have been in his 100s. Well he ended up falling to his death(After he had invaded and killed me 3-4 times)and I got enough souls from that to level up over somewhere to 50-100 times.
Looking back I wish I had killed myself to lose those souls, as I think it ended up making me over powered.
I still have Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin to play at least, so I can try again without being over level.
I love all of your dissected videos !
I've been looking forward to this since I saw your tweet about looking for someone who didn't care about being soft banned. I have a lot of affection for Dark Souls 2 because of how extremely weird it is in comparison to the other Soulsborne games (granular movement speed really put me off the game for a long time)
Thank you for the new video! This channel never fails to educate me on things I didn't know I wanted to know. :- )
"Not to be confused with the other meaning of twink, of course"
lmao thanks for that tidbit
What's your pfp?
@@cry9297 Maki Nishikino, from Love Live. www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/38355698
You deserve more subs. Godspeed on that journey.
26:40 Larry Capija. Spanish talkers will understand lol
I'm happy there are people smart enough to data mine. I only play the game normally, but it's still fun to see what they find in the data
I grind areas, die, and grind more to make up the loss. Soul memory has screwed up my friend trying to co op
Yeah absolutely, it's really lame having to manage it. I mean, arguably, you still had to manage level ranges before the games started adding passwords and that could take some effort, but that was still much less of a hassle.
Excellent documentation! Thanks for preserving the story
I hated going online on this game. Kept getting invaded by people who were way stronger than me
As a long time DS2 pvp fan, I'd like to thank you for your selfless work for the community
Ditto
Seems easier to just assign numeric values based off the items/equipment, upgrades, and stats and matching you based on that.
Every item is given an innate number assigned to it that increases with upgrades, and every 5 levels you gain in SL puts you up a tier.
Add these together and that's your matchmatching level. You can go 5 below your level and infinitely above.
Take souls out of it completely and only apply it to what you actually have.
hey man, ive been following your work on and off sense dark souls 1 and thoroughly enjoy the content that you put out, the work that you put in, and watching the your very well researched and put together videos dissecting everything about the soulsborne series. Thank you for all the information you gave this community and keep up the good work!
Thank you so much, glad you appreciate it!
Holy shit YOU are one of the people who made the SM calculator?? Bless your kind heart!
hey dude i absolutely love these videos! looking forward to the rest of the dissected series !
Ah yes soul memory, a concept that partially solved one problem, while simultaneously creating twenty more fucking problems
I'mma be honest, I've never played any of the Soulsborne series but 1. This stuff is absolutely fascinating and 2. I hope to be as dedicated to a game community as you are one day
Illusorywall being the first person to like your comment 2 years and a half after the video released shows how much of a legend he is
Best souls 2 is finally get dissected, this is a great day
Thank you for your service.