Dark Souls 2 Dissected #1 - How Soul Memory Was Solved

hello and welcome to the first episode of Dark Souls - dissected this is part of a larger series of videos that explore the mechanics of the souls games and we're going to break the ice with Dark Souls 2 by talking about soul memory as some viewers may recall when this game first came out you had no idea who you could pair with the matchmaking ranges were a complete mystery and it wasn't something you could look up so I wanted to retrace my steps and share the story of how soul memory was solved but before we begin I realized some viewers will be more familiar with this game than others so I'm also going to kick things off with the deep dive on what soul memory is how it works and why it was so strongly disliked by the community if you're already familiar with all of that then feel free to skip ahead to the timestamp on your screen otherwise I hope you enjoy the rest of this episode soul memory was introduced as a new form of online matchmaking for Dark Souls 2 it was a counter mechanic for twinken the idea being that if you got invaded in an early area of the game it probably shouldn't be by another player who is incredibly overpowered well let's go back to the very beginning to understand the problem a bit better 2009 steamin Souls established the framework for the souls borne series including it's very cool but also up to multiplayer components you could summon other players online to assist you in co-op but you could also be invaded and killed by other players as well PvP existed primarily as a sort of chaotic counterbalance to co-op it was there to make the multiplayer itself a risk forward system as you couldn't summon help without the risk of also being invaded but the PvP itself has never had a great reputation for being finally balanced - from software's credit balancing what is otherwise a single-player action RPG for PvP is a huge uphill battle there's just so many different stats weapon types mu sets etc that are primarily designed as a toolkit for the offline experience how all these things need to be balanced for PvP is likely an afterthought for how they function against a regular enemies in the game a simple attempt at balance came in the form of level ranges as you can only meet players within a certain range not too far from your own for example if you were a level 100 host you could summon other players for co-op who were between the levels of 80 through 120 though Demon Souls was their first attempt in the series they did still consider the issue of invader as having an unfair advantage so they applied a different level range for that the specifics are a little more complicated but essentially invaders could only invade levels higher than their own kind of like if you took the previous coop range I just mentioned but get rid of the downwards half of that range for the invader so they tried to give a level advantage to the player who got invaded but being something like 10 levels above someone else isn't enough to compensate for what happens when an experienced player with fully upgraded gear invades an inexperienced player with starting gear to exacerbate the problem in Demon Souls the item that allowed invasions dropped when you killed your first NPC black phantom this would be like if you got the full red eye orb in Dark Souls 1 as soon as you defeated Kirk or Mildred so the skill requirement for someone to invade early in Demon Souls was low so let's look at how Dark Souls one responded to the issue as I just pointed out the red eye orb was pushed further back into the game than Demon Souls invasion item this time they hit the item behind a boss that most players won't fight until much later in the game through a covenant that was easy to miss as well for you dog they also advanced the idea of invading other players who were hired level as they removed an upwards level cap altogether now invaders using the red eye orb could invade players hundreds of levels higher than themselves all the way up to max level even the only problem is that this wasn't remotely sufficient plenty of players took on the challenge of getting the red eye orb at a low level and getting the best gear possible the infinite upwards invasion range didn't do much to help either because you could reasonably guess the most common levels in a given area sure there might be a level 200 hosts waiting for you when you're targeting low-level hosts but the players looking to grieve easy targets would still get what they wanted the vast majority of the time as most viewers probably know the invaders who stay low level like this on purpose to gain a massive advantage in PvP are known as twinks not to be confused with the other meaning of twink of course so this became what was probably the single biggest issue with souls PvP sure we can also talk about backstabs latency etc but the widespread issue of extreme twinken turned a lot of players off to multiplayer so as a response to this there's been a consistent effort to minimize twinken and all of the games that have come out afterwards Dark Souls 2 blood-borne and Dark Souls 3 have all handled this differently but the most interesting and perhaps most controversial reaction came in the form of soul memory Dark Souls 2 removed level ranges from the game entirely and instead based who you could pair with on your soul memory which was the total number souls your character has ever obtained it's the number seen here in the top right of the menu it uses a tier system that's hidden to the player this little memory dictates which tier you're in and that decides who you can connect with so it doesn't matter what you did with your souls you could have hoarded them spent them to level up or buy stuff or you just could have lost them by dying all the game is keeping track of is how many you've ever gone soul memory as a concept was new to Dark Souls 2 though the games did keep track of this number since Demon Souls in that game you can view how many souls other players have obtained if they wound up in the pantheon [Music] in Dark Souls 1 it also kept track of this number behind the scenes but didn't allow you to actually look it up anywhere in game so they gave it a new name made it something you could see in your menu and based their entire matchmaking system around it it was a weird solution but it actually kind of worked between su state low level and Dark Souls one still had to defeat bosses like SIF and the four kings to get the red outward and they also had to acquire gear and upgrade materials they could generally avoid leveling up but they couldn't have avoided getting souls if Dark Souls 1 had soul memory it would have separated low-level invaders from most other low-level players in the early game areas so that's the system we see in place in Dark Souls 2 and though some viewers are probably gonna point out that it didn't stop twinky it actually did a pretty decent job at it there was sometimes a kind of binary outlook on twinken in the community that if it exists in any shape or form then that means any attempts to counter it were a total failure but hosting an early game areas like the force to fallen Giants and Heights tower flame wasn't anything quite like the horror show that was the undead parish in Dark Souls 1 we could debate just how effective soul memory was at countering tweaking but even if you think it was insufficient I think it's hard to dispute that there was a clear improvement over Dark Souls 1 in this regard so why was it so widely reviled well that's because of how badly soul memory screwed everything else up let's say you wanted to hang out in a certain area and help other players in coop as you collect Souls from taking down the same boss repeatedly you would find yourself getting pushed into higher tiers of cell memory pretty quickly you would then be out of the range of the general player base for that given area making it harder and harder to get summoned for some players this was very damaging to the replay value of Dark Souls 2 coming from the previous games there was never any reason to suspect that the punishment for helping other players too much would be making it harder to help other players and you know effectively kick you out of the area you're in they did eventually patch in an item called the gaping as a response which prevents soul acquisition while it's being worn allowing you to remain at a fixed amount of soul memory it was a band-aid solution that largely remedied the problem but it took an entire year to get added to the game and the ring has its own host of problems the game is certainly much better off with its inclusion but wearing it means giving up a ring slot that you probably would have wanted for something else also if you have a build that relies on a stock of items that cost souls like arrows or dunk pies then you're gonna have to acquire Souls at some point to keep that going and because it allows players to progress through the game without requiring souls that sort of reopens some avenues for tweaking the gaping is not available for sale until you've acquired 30,000 soul memory which is the fourth tier of soul memory that does restrict invasions against the lowest tiers so it wasn't a complete reversal on the reduced twinken of the first couple areas I imagine there was a lot of debate from the developers on how early in the game via capering that should be available to the player as they essentially back themselves into a corner and had to be very careful about how to proceed with it make it available too early and you done do the entire point of soul memory make it available too late in the game and then what would even be the point of having it at all so it's definitely not a random choice that they placed it in the lost best deal with a tier 4 requirement they basically picked the most inoffensive option available and we haven't yet acknowledged the players who are going to die more often which means we're playing areas more and more before moving on and likely winding up in higher tiers of soul memory relative to other players because the matchmaking is based solely on soul memory as long as two players are near enough in soul memory tier it doesn't matter if they're far apart in soul level so the whole soul memory system can be punishing too though you don't level up efficiently then there's also the impact on the PvP meta to consider where players previously tried to PvP within a certain level range in past Souls games switching to soul memory made that more awkward for the community to try and self impose though opening things up at higher tiers of soul memory did have a positive so you have to weigh the bad with the good a little let's briefly talk about a positive here in previous souls games players unaware of community metas and those unaware of how the level ranges worked in general but sometimes push themselves outside the range of multiplayer activity without realising that was going to happen on a character that keeps playing through tired new game+ cycles they might just keep leveling up not realizing that maybe they should have stayed at level hundred and twenty if they wanted better chances of finding PvP and higher level co-op soul memory largely fixed this by having a somewhat reasonably low max tier once he got to 15 million soul memory that was it it was now the same bracket all the way up to the max of 999 million soul memory this meant that generally speaking a level 200 ish player is probably gonna have no issue finding a level 500 player it put all these higher level players together in ways where they would have been a lot more isolated in Demon Souls and Dark Souls that sounds good and all but there's yet another catch to this in spite of this benefit they originally separated those who were in the first playthrough from New Game+ and beyond this was the only Souls game to do that and I don't know what they were thinking this divided the laking player base in a way that just seemed totally unnecessary this was also patched out when the gap ring was added and scholar of the first sin launched however when they patched this out they added four more tiers beyond the 15 million bracket beginning at twenty thirty forty five and finally 360 million soul memory so they wanted to protect some of the higher level players people looking to PvP at the meta perhaps from those who were obscenely higher levels they perhaps felt that removing the New Game+ division needed to be balanced with the inclusion of additional tiers so once again it feels a bit like how they introduced the Cape ring they were making changes to try and improve things but also trying to not upset things too much tip toeing around the confines of their weird matchmaking system you let's also talk about cheaters cheating is a whole separate issue from regular twinky on its own and you can't necessarily blame the games mechanics when outside tools are being used to mess things up but it still shows a lack of foresight on all of the problems that soul memory brought with it due to level ranges no longer existing a level one player and a max level player can still meet that's basically guaranteed to never happen under normal circumstances but it is technically allowed by the matchmaking so if someone wants to cheat they can pull that off players being able to hack their stats was nothing new but this was particularly insidious in Dark Souls 2 because of the way soul rewards work in these games when another player dies in PvP you get a fixed amount of souls based on that players level it's a percentage of their leveling cost not how many souls they're actually carrying so what cheaters would do is make themselves max level with low soul memory and fade in the early game and actually die on purpose to the person they invaded this would reward the host with a ton of souls against their will and push them far beyond their previous tier soul memory this effectively removed coop as a viable option for early and mid-game areas and ruined things for people who are planning on playing with friends they did wind up patching solar awards from PvP as a result I believe making Dark Souls 2 the only souls game to mess with anything like that after release how it works in the current version of the game is that solar awards are now capped at a maximum of 40 levels above your own so if you're a level 100 host killing a level 200 invader they're only going to drop the amount of souls that a level 140 player would instead okay so that should get you up to speed on how soul memory tried to fixed winking but caused a bunch of other problems now let's dive into the process that was involved in uncovering the matchmaking rules of the souls games when Dark Souls 2 first launched there was a lot of confusion about how cell memory worked and there weren't any specifics to go on a statement from Namco Bandai recommended that players be generally within 50,000 cell memory and that they also be within 10 soul levels of each other but that's not how it works and it isn't a very good shorthand explanation either I don't think whoever came up with that explanation was lying there's just a history from software being vague about all of this and it seems likely the information got distorted through some misunderstandings perhaps like a game of telephone Skinner said the teachers will crack any minute purple monkey dishwasher they didn't intend for these games have anything beyond connections with random players at least not initially so they made no effort to explain these things in detail any information that we get we're the publisher the game we don't make the game any information that we get is always you know notic we're not sitting next to guys from software I'm talking about what they're gonna do like they would discuss that with us anyway so how did we figure these out I think a lot of people have a misconception that all of this stuff gets data mined look we just look at the code and go well there it is well not only am I not smart enough to do that as I have zero hacking abilities and can't really just reverse-engineer code like that but even if I could I'm not sure how reasonable of a goal that is none of the souls games have had their level ranges data mined to my knowledge you can sometimes find numbers that relate to the level ranges if you poke around in the right places apparently but I'm not sure that can ever really provide the complete formulas on its own so how did we do it there was a lot of brute force testing and sometimes using obscure tangential mechanics to help guide us in the earliest days a lot of this was figured out even without special tools or cheats of any kind just playing the game normally and trying to figure out how it could be tested in game I was behind a lot of this at least for the earlier games of course I didn't do it all alone and I had a lot of testing partners along the way and there were some other independent efforts as well but ultimately most of the matchmaking calculators you'll find today are beasts directly on my findings what pulled me in is that I came to Dark Souls as a fan of Demon Souls but a wiki had already existed for Demon Souls by the time that I got into that game I wasn't deep enough into community discussions to have any awareness of things like mechanics not being fully understood but then I picked up Dark Souls the day it launched and became fully immersed in the discussion that surrounding that game and I very quickly realized that no one had any idea what was going on it fascinated me that even with the existence of an official guidebook that the community was full of questions about how things worked and there weren't really solid answers breaking the ice with getting fully accurate matchmaking information started with a simple problem we apparently knew the formula for co-op as it carried over from Demon Souls the wiki site already had a calculator for that and I think souls wiki which later became vexed her life had some calculators for Dark Souls pretty early on as well but reports came in of the calculations not being on to present accurate and they were being treated more like a ballpark answer the problem that stood out to me is that the calculators didn't consider perspective I'll keep the math really simple so it's easy to follow along I'm not great at math myself so I promise this will make sense the coop range was described as a 10 + 10 percent range what does that mean well let's say your level 110 percent of 100 is obviously just 10 you add the other 10 to that and so you get a total of 20 now you go back to your level and you add and subtract 20 to get a range of 80 to 120 that sounds simple enough but there's a problem here that wasn't being accounted for the math says we can meet a level 80 player from level 100 but what happens when we apply the same formula to level 80 ok so 10 percent of 80 is just 8 a tenth of that to get 18 80 plus or minus 18 equals wait a second that only reaches up to level 98 it doesn't reach 100 so are we saying that level 100 player simultaneously can and cannot pair with a level 80 player it actually turned out to be pretty simple issue of perspective that the two players aren't looking for each other and that the math is one-sided so if you're hosting versus getting summoned that makes a difference on who's doing the math and if they can reach the other player or not there was also the issue of rounding when we're talking about something like 10% what does that mean exactly when decimals start showing up like let's consider so level 45 10 percent of 4 five is 4.5 do you round that up or down do you run that immediately or does the routing occur as the last thing that happens in the formula these can give you different results it was ironing out these minor details that revealed a consistent level range formula and we no longer had to be confused by calculators making small mistakes testing this was pretty easy as you could imagine you can just see when you're summon signs do and don't show up for each other but what about invasions if you can't choose who to invade what are you supposed to do exactly not being able to invade your testing partner doesn't necessarily mean that they're outside your level range especially when the game was new and had lots of activity even in weird locations the possibility of simply having bad luck and old the invading other players was very real you could get false negatives trying to test that way you could invade random players check your system for players you've met online and politely send them a message asking them their levels but this is unreliable as well for a variety of reasons it's basically guaranteed that you will get some wrong answers along the way asking random people to self-report is just really bad methodology so here was my solution earlier in the video I mentioned how players in PvP drop a fixed amount of souls based on their level it's actually based on percentage of their most recent leveling cost so let's say you kill a level 120 host in Dark Souls 1 it costs ninety thousand four hundred and one souls to level up from level 119 to level 120 so that means they will drop some percentage of that amount this case that invader gets 10% awarding them nine thousand and forty souls so if you know how souls are awarded in PvP and you have the table of levelling costs in front of you all I have to do is use the souls drop to determine an opponent's level this is why pretty much the first testing I do any time a new Souls game comes out is to determine exactly that for one it's just kind of cool to know I found in Dark Souls 3 that solver rewards in PvP were drastically nerfed in some cases going as low as 1% but more importantly it can be a toolset for reverse engineering invasion ranges I mentioned brute force testing and this is of course where that applies to determine a range for invasions how large of a data set do need how many invasions will it take to find both the bottom and upper cap for a given range and when you first encounter them you're not yet going to know that they're the caps so how many more invasions do you have to do on top of that I'm not a statistician so I really have no clue but generally I try to get decent sample set to first make a hypothesis then I'll do a ton more testing afterwards to see if it holds up or if I can prove myself wrong this is where testing merges with simply playing the games for fun thankfully I find casual PvP enjoyable even though I'm not that great at it I'll throw on a podcast or listen to music and just PvP with a text file or a spreadsheet on hand to log hosts levels here's a particular range I tested in Dark Souls remastered checking out the new range of the red eye orb a level being listed at all in here means it's been locked once all the individual X's afterwards each indicate repeat instances of killing another host of the same level the size of this particular data set might be a little bit of overkill but when you've invaded literally every single level within a hypothetical arranged multiple times and you have a pretty solid wall of invasions near the caps it reaches a point where if it were possible to invade higher and lower it basically makes no sense to not have happened yet okay so that was a lot of talk about Dark Souls 1 but this sets the stage for soul memory I came in with experience in sharing this kind of information so I figured I'd give it a shot we had that statement from Namco about the ranges but there was immediately in abundance of anecdotes that didn't agree with it people were pairing with a much greater disparity than what was stated so before diving into soul memory one of my earlier tests was to try and see what was up with the level ranges and I decided to start with PvP I immediately encountered an obstacle and at the table of levelling costs had changed from Dark Souls 1 so I had to start from scratch a little bit to figure out the soul rewards in PvP I created the page that lists out the leveling costs on the Dark Souls 2 wikidot and looking back at the revision history is reminding me that this was one week after the game came out it's funny looking back at this and reflecting on what I was doing to the end user it makes sense that a wiki would have information like this but for my perspective this was largely just a means to an end I wanted this information available to help me figure out other things I considered more important changing something like the leveling costs from Dark Souls 1 might seem obvious to the viewers as it's a different game with some different stats but it is a bit weird in retrospect as Dark Souls 2 is actually their only game to not recycle the exact same table of levelling costs even Demon Souls and blood-borne share the same table as Dark Souls 1 & 3 this is perhaps indicative of how Dark Souls 2 might be the most different underneath its hood even against other titles that are outside of the Dark Souls trilogy and ok so you probably know where this is going by now once PvP rewards as a way to determine levels was ironed out I quickly found some examples of pairing with a few levels pretty far apart from my own not a huge disparities since soul memory still put us in the same kind of ballpark those sorts but enough to agree with their ports that were casting doubt on the level range side of things so switching over to coop I expected coming from Dark Souls that this would be the easier thing to test but it wasn't that we did get something that helped the testing process tremendously really what made this all possible hackers provided an edited save file for the PlayStation 3 something that took a decent while to occur for Dark Souls 1 was here pretty much on arrival for Dark Souls 2 some players were getting themselves soft banned by experimenting with safe edited files but a safer one that avoided detection was also created it didn't give you any modified stats or anything fundamentally invalid apart from simply starting with 99 of most consumables and having all the bonfires unlocked but you at least started with 0 souls on hand so the game didn't know that you were doing anything inappropriate with your souls or soul memory since you had to go through the physical process of consuming actual soul items to get it where you wanted it was pretty much immediately clear that the recommendation of being within 50,000 soul memory to pair with someone else was just completely wrong at the lowest values of soul memory this could be a little too far outside of your range and at the higher values of soul memory you could also pair with players much much further than 50000 apart there are also some early suggestions from the community of something like a plus slash minus 25% range but I also found that to not hold up either the issue with a range being calculated like that is that you'd expect the ranges to transition smoothly let's say your soul memory increases by a hundred thousand you would then expect a range to be a bit different than it was before but instead we found that there are times where increasing a decent amount did nothing then increasing that just a little more suddenly shifted the range to something else this correctly informed us that we were hitting set breakpoints for cell memory or in other words tears or brackets and the expected math of anything like plus or minus X plus X percent from the previous games was totally gone here so we were on the right track but I ran into another problem as we increased our soul memory we tried to tease out the exact tears sometimes we'd hit a breakpoint with confidence say to ourselves okay that's where the next tear must be and go from there but as soon as we thought we knew what was happening we'd retest or try something a little different and our results were inconsistent hypotheses can only hold up if it makes accurate predictions and at the stage it was like we're only guessing things correctly half the time at this stage we had already found that the white scent soapstone and small white sign soapstone had different ranges and also different ranges yet again if you use the name and crave train so this suggested to me that you're not just locked into one specific tear at a time that different multiplayer items could cross into neighboring tears by different amounts let's say hypothetically one item could reach three tiers above your own maybe another one can reach four and while this turned out to be correct it was less of an immediate victory and more something that kind of broke my brain to see that all of our previous cooperate testing actually had more tears between what we were finding was kind of like this oh [ __ ] moment how many did we miss and where exactly and also since I didn't know how the different items worked trying to account for the fact that we're finding the boundaries of other tears were not actually in just made all the more confusing if I found an upper range of a host who can find my white side soapstone is that actually one tier both mine or is that two or maybe three trying to wrap my head around how to best account for all of that maybe just kind of mentally check out I knew would be solvable but that it was also going to be a ton more work and I was gonna have to think harder and that didn't sound like fun being kind of exhausted by what I felt like was a bunch of wasted hours of testing so at this point I published a co-op guide to read it I kept it simple and basically said hey here's a summoning range guide for the white sign soapstone from a set of arbitrary values of soul memory this was to give players some usable information while also acknowledging the problems that I ran into it's a little odd quoting myself from the past but I did mention this as well one way to find out all the individual tears would be to redo this list I have at a much greater resolution add a bunch of values in between and test them but I think I might have figured out better faster way so I'll be looking into that what I was hinting at here was how the cracked red eye orb was going to save the day but there is more backstory here that I never admitted to because I didn't want to get anyone fired but enough time has passed and I don't even know who this person is and I'm confident no one can be pinpointed with what I'm about to share so I actually had some inside help it's not that the story of me testing and generally finding these things on my own is untrue but I got a very useful nudge in the right direction around this time someone contacted me they were aware of my testing efforts and were sympathetic to the community not having this information so they just gave it all to me a complete tear list and an explanation of the basic systems I was expecting to find but it was wrong things weren't matching up the tiers were wrong and also some of the ranges that were given to me didn't make sense either but it's clear the source was trustworthy because the basic framework was spot-on and they also had certain details nailed down that the community didn't know yet for instance the game at launch had a max tier of 15 million soul memory I believe I first incorrectly reported that it began at 12 million being thrown off by not knowing all of the individual tiers yet here this person had some hidden insight that was still a complete secret to the community and one thing in particular stood out to me they mentioned they couldn't invade a single tier below their own but that they could invade upwards a bit this resonated with how invasions in the previous Souls games generally invaded upwards so it sounded very plausible and most importantly we're talking about an item that reportedly couldn't pair below its own tier so if I try to invade someone who is below me and soul memory and I can't reach them then they're not in the same tier at all as they raised their soul memory the moment I can reach them indicates the true tier boundary no more awkwardly and confusingly crossing multiple tiers at a time there is now an easy solution for finding all the actual tears now so I couldn't use all the information this person gave me but the validation that I was on the right track in the revelation that the cracked red eye orb was our key to success was incredibly helpful though remember all that brute force testing with invading strangers in Dark Souls 1 using soul memory in an unintended way thankfully allowed us to avoid that problem remember how I said that the hacked C file gave us all the bonfires unlocked at the start of the game what happens when you go to a late game area with impossibly low soul memory well you effectively get your own private lobby because no one else is there with low soul memory so we just did a ton of invasions in the undead crypt all invasions were basically guaranteed to target my testing partner found that it was incredibly reliable and we went from there once we use the cracker I orb to create a complete tier list finding out the actual ranges for most of the rest of the multiplayer items was fairly trivial overall I enlisted the help of around seven different people or so and the testing was spread out over a full month before we finally had all the information and that's the story of Harrow soul memory was solved there were a few holdouts that were a little more stubborn though and we can take a closer look at those now [Music] testing the auto summon covenants was a bit more awkward we sometimes found very long weights when we were still in range of each other but our first attempts would usually happen quickly and smoothly so it's not that connections here seemed outright unreliable it's almost like you get bet on it starting off just fine and then getting worse the more you try so to this day I still don't know why that happened the subject of invasion cooldowns could be a discussion for a future video but we walked away with a strong suspicion that there might be some kind of a cool-down that's unique to these covenants that of hosts keeps getting invaded by the same person over and over then the game starts making that specific invader wait longer and longer is that how it actually works I'm not sure it seems plausible so it just made testing here more annoying but we were still able to get the ranges figured out nonetheless then there was also the Guardians seal this is the item that allowed blue sentinels to get automatically summoned to help members of the way of blue covenant when they got invaded this required testing with two other people at the same time so it was a bit more of a hassle though we got the range figured out a few days after the rest I did manage to overlook something calibrations 1.08 launched in July of 2014 which expanded the soul memory ranges of the various multiplayer items I've retested all the ranges and fixed the wiki but the wiki's and the calculators have actually been wrong about the Guardian seals range this whole time simply because I forgot about it entirely and failed to include it in that batch of retesting oops its range of down five tears in up for tears was changed to down seven tears and up six tears and I didn't know this until making this video and that's not the only bit of new information I have in spite of all the testing I put in I still had my limits I drew the line at abyss spirits and Looking Glass Squires for the abyss spirits that involves joining the pilgrims of dark covenant which means meeting a certain NPC in three different locations first it just felt like too much setup and I wasn't interested in even trying for the looking-glass night I did try to test it but I couldn't get it to work I just failed to get pulled into the fight and couldn't figure out what was wrong now what these two things have in common is that they don't have their own multiplayer items use existing like the red sign soapstone and the craft right I were to be coming up a spear or a lookingglass Squire so I figured if we already knew the ranges to those items that's good enough because they're probably staying the same but my confidence in overlooking that changed when I discovered something else in Demon Souls a few months later a save edited file for Demon Souls was publicly released and the quick build making that enabled inspired me to go back and look at its level ranges to give this some context this was now over 6 years past the release of Demon Souls and only a few months before blood-borne was out it felt like too little too late but the most interesting finding was how the old monk bossfight did not obey the rules of the other matchmaking items just like the abyss and looking-glass summons he used different items to get pulled into the old monk boss fight and I found that the old monk ignored their level ranges and used its own now we actually had a very clear precedent to suggest that these two things in Dark Souls 2 might work differently so I've suspected as much since 2014 but I decided to finally get an answer once and for all in preparation for this video and this did turn out to be the case here once again well the red sign soapstone maintains its normal range for abyss summons but for some reason it does change the range of just the cracked over that orb allowing the faders to invade eight tiers above their own instead of the usual four and we also have the looking last night which turned out to have the following ranges what made the looking last night tricky was how it kept failing at first I wound up having a very particular timing to it which could make for its own lengthy tangent so I'll just quickly say what works best without the added speculation the best way to pair with a specific player is to place the red sign soapstone maybe only a second or so before the host walks through the fog gate but no sooner the sign should be down for long and if you're using the cracked red eye orb use it right after the host passes through the fog gate and if it fails use it again immediately after waiting only maybe three seconds or so before your subsequent attempts if you don't find a connection within 10 seconds of the host entering the fight don't even bother trying to get summoned later on during the fight though it is possible it's better to just have the host quit out and start over rinse and repeat until it works with the goal of getting a nearly instant summon Dark Souls 2 has a couple of pvp arenas a set of arenas for both the blue sentinels and a Brotherhood of blood covenants the exact workings of these have been a bit mysterious but we do have some solid enough information to go on we know that they don't have any hard restrictions of any kind here's old cellphone photos from back in the day showing how a player with a zero soul memory was able to meet another player who is max level nine hundred ninety nine million soul memory in the blue sentinels arenas and we recently replicated this again in scholar of the first sin just to be sure nothing changed the Brotherhood of blood arenas weren't as cooperative we would only find other players and additionally we wouldn't see any of the same players making it seem like perhaps there was some kind of soul memory range or perhaps a priority given to players who were closer in soul memory and given how these arenas had a ton more activity than the blue arenas you can just see how that might block is preparing here later on it was suspected by others in the community that an additional level range was in place the one place in all of Dark Souls 2 where your soul level actually factored in there was some testing done on this and the takeaway was that you could pair with other players within five levels of yourself at first but then the longer you waited the more the game would ease up on that range perhaps after a minute or so however my recent testing found instances of pairing with other players who were over a hundred levels apart instantly it always rubbed me as a bit odd that they had add level ranges to just one place in the game but the findings were presented with such confidence that I didn't really know what to make of it and I just kind of partially trusted it with some minor skepticism after all it was one possible explanation for why I couldn't meet someone else who is far apart in both level and soul memory but now that have done more testing again recently with a far less populated Brotherhood of blood arena I have in fact paired instantly with a level 10 player from lovely a hundred and thirty-eight when neither of us were waiting more than a couple seconds I think it's safe to say they misinterpreted their results I do think that the more populated these areas are the more looks for players closer and soul memory and that sort of priority made it look like there was a level range but the fact that their range didn't stay consistent that has stated to be exactly five levels until you wait long enough maybe indicated that it was never really fixed at five levels for any duration of time in short the Brotherhood of blood arena is also without any cap to its sole memory or level ranges but it being more populated might make it harder to pair at the extreme ends one last tangent here remember how I mentioned that we were using a modified version of the edited save file that was available to the public the reason for this is a bit silly but also very important to what we were doing the creator of PvP watchdog was gracious enough to make an edit for me that added stockpiles of smaller soul items the original save edited file probably rightly assumed that no one would need large amounts of lesser soul items because what would be the point when you can just use bigger soul items but I wanted to be able to tiptoe over the tier boundaries to make sure we really had them accurate so I was the one weirdo who actually wanted 99 feeding Souls in my inventory I ran it to something similar with Dark Souls 1 where before debug leaked for the PC version I was doing some brute-force vagrant testing with a safe edited file but that file was intended to help facilitate quick build making for the PvP community and wasn't intended to help give players an unfair advantage so it withheld certain items like divine blessings and Elizabeth mushrooms it also emitted items like rubbish pendants the various coins you know the useless things I wanted all of these things to test get vagrants but my initial requests were met with doubt it was kind of like sure buddy you want 99 divided blessings just to test vagrants anyways I just thought it was funny that I went through two different Dark Souls games and I wanted the weird items that no one else wanted hacked into their inventories but of course my needs were a little out there so that just about wraps up the discussion on soul memory it was a fundamentally flawed mechanic that tried to address invasion balancing as I mentioned earlier every Souls born game tough come out since has tried different methods each with their own pros and cons it goes to show that from software definitely wants to prevent early game invasions from being anything like Dark Souls 1 but the fact that they keep changing how they go about it possibly indicates that they're not fully content with the execution thus far if you'd like to support this channel and the work that I do I'm launching a patreon you can find the link in the description below or just visit patreon.com slash illusory wall it would be a huge help and it's also a way for you to get updates on what I'm working on and I'd also like to thank everyone who helped make this video possible shout out to my friend Karl in particular who bore the brunt of helping me test and discover all the previously unknown soul memory ranges he streams dark souls speedruns on twitch.tv slash Karim you should check that out as always thanks again for watching you

Channel: illusory wall

Views: 155,108

Rating: 4.9668093 out of 5

Keywords: dark souls, dark souls 2, dark souls II, soul memory, from software, dark souls dissected

Id: pDuDgsmDKWY

Length: 40min 0sec (2400 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 30 2020