this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2025
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I really like Dark Souls/Elden Ring multiplayer PvP. I especially like Dark Souls 3 and it's still pretty active, at least on PC! Hosts can choose to be invaded by intentionally using an ember and the dried finger and even try to "gank" the invader by teaming up with other players to fight them with a massive advantage. It's fun to invade these worlds and have a duel, or try to overcome a gank. I got pretty decent at fighting, spacing, parrying, weapon-swapping during animations for massive critical damage, etc.
But the game will also ember you after beating bosses, opening you up to invasions even if you didn't want that. And invading is such an aggressive act that I don't find it fun to hunt down and kill someone who doesn't even want to PvP. So when I encounter someone who very obviously doesn't want to fight me (and I can't entice them to attack), I'll just follow them around in underwear or a crazy outfit, staying out of the way and gesturing and yelling by using the carvings at all the PvE enemies they kill. You can also drop items for other players. It's a silly, time-wasting thing to run around until the host dies or goes to fight a boss and you get kicked out of their world...
Helping as an invader is all I do. I can't bring myself to attack someone else who just wanted to play with their friends. Seamless coop was the fucking best thing to ever happen to elden ring.
Its funny how much of the random PVP crowd still cries about Seamless Coop. I have been playing open PVP games since Ultima Online and frankly open PVP has never been fun. See the fans of this mechanic will say "well you're just afraid to take risks carebear" but in reality they're the ones closer to carebear mentality than the people running valuables through risky places. The victim is ironically the only person taking any real risk, because the attacker can choose their battles and take only equipment they're willing to lose.
Once I figured this out I built myself to trick people into attacking me and then they'd find out I'm entirely specced for player killing, usually much too late to do anything about it. The tears from the people who call others carebears are the best tears of all.
My first experience with open pvp was darkfall, and the imbalance between pvers and pvpers broke the game the first go round. It was ridiculous how poorly anything pve was rewarded, so it would take hours to accomplish anything, while a single 10 minute pvp excursion would net you (potentially) all those hours of others' work. Eventually people realized it wasn't even worth trying to pve, resources quit coming in, and the game died. They had to reboot and ramp up pve rewards just to get people out in the world instead of hiding in their clan forts.
I feel like elden ring, even more so than dark souls, punished the players who were having fun exploring with their friends. It wasn't balanced for jolly cooperation fun. It felt like that first darkfall experience where everyone just got grumpy. Souls was much more focused on the bosses with what felt like little exploration, so a pvp incursion wasn't a big setback, but elden ring could just draaaag if you wanted to find a new secret and a little red guy popped up. Plus elden ring had a lot of late game meta items that could ruin a newbie's day with little recourse.