Dark Souls Dissected #20 - Invasion Cooldown Timers

Today's episode of Dark Souls Dissected reviews the cooldown timers that block instant invasions from happening repeatedly. Some brand new discoveries relating to its Limit Level system, as well as Vagrant cooldowns, are explained as well.

0:00 Introduction
0:49 Invasion Cooldowns
3:19 Clearing the Cooldown Timers
5:54 Limit Levels
9:22 Invasion Frequency Balancing
14:15 Dark Souls 2
15:19 Dark Souls 3 and Elden Ring
17:43 Gravelord Cooldowns
18:59 Why Were Limit Levels Removed?
19:44 Vagrant Cooldowns
24:06 Closing Words

Special thanks to Metal Crow, Europa, FenotheFox, Karl Germ, Algi, Ariane, and HotPocketRemix for various assistance (coding / testing / multiplayer help).

Artist of Dank Furtive Pygmy sadly unknown! Original upload here:

[illusorywall]

Answering a few questions here!

1) From @piatansfair - "Does the timer continues running if I am being summoned to another world? Let's say I was invaded and died. So now my timer of 900s is on (ds1). If someones summons me, while I'm on their world, is my timer running as well? Or it only counts when I'm on my world? Also does it count when I'm hollowed as well?"

The timer is persistent regardless of whose game you're in. If I get invaded, have the cooldown timer start, then get summoned for co-op to help someone else, the timer will be unphased by all of this and continue counting down without pausing through loading screens and while you're a phantom. It also keeps counting just fine while you're hollow.

2) Another from @piatansfair - "So in Dark Souls 1, summoning has no effect whatsoever in the invader timer?"

Correct! The 15 minutes (or higher w/ limit levels) is locked in if you don't do any of the specific things mentioned to clear it. Unlike DS3 / Elden Ring, summoning help in DS1 doesn't immediately open you to invasions and the timer is free to do its own thing. As much as these later titles tried to protect hosts from invasions more overall, this is somewhat counterproductive in that the experience in something like Elden Ring meant that summoning help (especially when the game was brand new), meant being open to practically constant invasions. DS1 doesn't do this, you can summon help without clearing the timer, so that's actually one way that DS1 manages to be a little more forgiving.

This means that for anyone just trying to play with friends in DS1 and is frustrated that they just got killed by an invader, DO NOT WAIT. Go grab your friend's summon sign again ASAP to take advantage of that cooldown.

3) From @RosiYYAP - "Do the vagrant timers affect your ability to send out vagrants, either by dropping items and reloading or dying with 5 humanity? Also does the inverse apply? Does starting a vagrant affect the timers either negatively or positively?"

I mentioned in the video how any Vagrants created while the cooldown is running get held onto in your "outbox", and the game will wait to send it out when then cooldown clears. So Vagrants you create while you can't send any out aren't wasted, they're just "frozen" for a bit. They won't be sent out immediately when the cooldown clears, but when you do the needed action after it clears (dying / reloading / warping / quitting, etc). However, I didn't cover what happens if you receive a Vagrant while the cooldown is running!

If you receive one while the cooldown is running, you do still receive it into your inbox, but you won't actually be able to see or get it. How you normally receive Vagrants is that they wind up in your inbox before they're actually in your game. Once received, you have 5 minutes to reload the game to actually get the Vagrant out of your inbox and into your game, otherwise it just gets sent back out to another player if those 5 minutes run out. This is why you can't go AFK by a Vagrant spawn location all day long and expect to see Vagrants start showing up. You'd want to reload the area every ~4 minutes and 50 seconds to optimize your chances of getting one and not just unwittingly sending one straight back out to another player- something that happens to us behind the scenes all the time without having any idea.

The cooldown just prevents reloading from being able to pull the Vagrant out of your inbox into your game. It stays stuck in your inbox, and the 5 minute "inbox timer" will just continue otherwise as it normally does and you'll pass the Vagrant back out to someone else. None of the actions affect the Vagrant cooldown timer either, it'll just keep counting down and doing its thing.

[heyguysinternet]

“I think most players will feel that it was underutilized and didn’t go far enough.” Man, ain’t that just the story for so many of this game’s online details.

[illusorywall]

2:04 For the sake of transparency, this wasn't actually part of the exact hatemail exchange I was referencing, but it was the most appropriate message I could dig up from my older PSN chats. It appears that PSN has automatically deleted a lot of the more hateful messages, so the actual hatemail I received is lost to time sadly. However, this was ANOTHER message from someone else I also kept invading repeatedly because of constant disconnects, around the same period of time. This one had a much friendlier ending, where they asked if I could stop because they were on their last humanity and wanted to play with their friend. IIRC, I dropped him a bunch of humanity and black crystal'd out, as the last message he sent me was thanking me, so I must've cooperated and helped in some way (and I vaguely recall doing that).

Just wanted to point this out in the VERY rare chance that the person who messaged me that sees this and is like "wtf, illusory thought that was hatemail???". They weren't actually cussing me out like the other message I was hoping to find and share here.

[OrigamiPhoenix]

These investigations ignite that sense of curiosity I associate with childhood, when I was finding flattened boss arenas hidden at the edge of maps and getting confused by Sims glitches.

[Linkarcus]

I like the juxtaposition of you saying you were introduced to pvp in a relaxed way, while being killed on screen by an invader with the Scraping Spear.

[khajiitimanus]

Honestly, if there's one thing I absolutely despised about the Remastered, it was the removal of Darkmoon Blades invading downward. (As I understand it, the Remastered matched the Darkmoon range with Darkwraiths). It is a travesty.

[NewbDragoon]

Re: Invasions mostly being limited to groups, this also has a subtle side effect of making invaders far more threatening, and generally less pleasant for the invadee as well.

Back in the days of launch-era Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, invaders would NOT always be twinked-out min/max shit houses that would obliterate you. It wasn't totally uncommon to get some random person invading you - obviously a threat, but much more manageable.

Fast-forward to Elden Ring, and since invaders will almost always be up against 2+ enemies, all those casual invaders get weeded out - the invader needs a super optimized build to blow people up or they get ganged up on. There's no more room for just a casual build that the host actually has a chance of standing a fair shot against even if they themselves aren't optimized for PvP. Thus if you don't care for PvP, then when you DO get invaded it feels like you stand zero chance, because the invader HAS to have a build that can deal with 2-3 enemies at once.

[davidlejenkins]

I haven't even played this game in 10 years but listening to obscure mechanics I never knew about is water for my parched soul.

You are my hero.

[Melanittanigra]

the number of complicated but practically useless or unused mechanics in Dark Souls 1 is insane

[avyntide]

I couldn’t tell you how unnoticed by the larger community of the game it was, but the ‘revenge value’ system from Kingdom Hearts 2 is my favorite obscure system that secretly makes the game way better.

Essentially, it’s a mechanic that determines when a boss can break out of a combo. Every hit of your combo adds a certain amount of revenge, and when that number hits the bosses revenge value, the boss breaks out and counterattacks. It happens at the same number every time, meaning an observant player can pick up on this, and adapt. Although it’s never explained or shown anywhere, which is why I categorize it as obscure.

[YoYoCheese]

In Vampire Savior / Darkstalkers 3, defense revolves around the pushblock mechanic. One bizarre quirk of pushblocking, however, is that it is random. Literally. If you input the command for a pushblock correctly, then the game rolls an RNG check to decide if your character does the move or not. This caused the competitive community problems for decades and playing around it was an important part of the meta. Then, in the mid-2010s, it was discovered that one of the programmers snuck in a hidden alternate input for pushblocking that has no RNG roll. It just works every time. The game came out in 1997.

[illusorywall]

Just one tangential consideration; I didn't mention it in the final video because it felt like too unnecessary of a tangent to have to explain further, but I hope my rose-tinted glasses for Demon's Souls invasions didn't send the wrong signal of "just do what Demon's Souls did again"! Definitely not, a big chunk of how that game pulled off an invasion pacing I found admirable was because of how it was artificially protected by having a much smaller playerbase. In addition to lacking covenants that could've incentivized repeated multiplayer loops. What I want is for them to pursue the sort of vibe it had, and pulling that off in a modern title of theirs means having to include systems that Demon's Souls DIDN'T have. So I hope I didn't make it sound like Demon's Souls was designed any better, because it wasn't. It just sort of worked out that way. No invasion cooldowns combined with solo invasions and the ability to easily get a permanent use invasion item (early in the game), in a modern title of theirs? lmao, that would be a fantastic train wreck

[EzloMinish]

This isn't really what you were asking for, and is more of a developer oversight than anything, but I still find it amusing and it sort of fits the theme of 'undiscovered for years'.

In Final Fantasy XIV, there's a very minor mechanic where certain NPCs will have a small speech bubble pop up above their head when you walk past, purely for a little bit of worldbuilding. I assume it just waits for you to pass within a certain distance of the NPC and triggers the bubble.

In patch 5.3, a whole ~6ish years after the big re-release of 2.0, they added flying to the early areas, letting people reach previously unreachable spots on each map (you can see where this is going). Players quickly found a fisherman in a boat just off a pier that spoke exclusively in Japanese, as his trigger range was too small to reach the nearby pier. The playtesters (who couldn't fly) missed that his text hadn't been translated, and it went unnoticed until someone flew by years later and went "hey, wait a minute..."

Japanese fisherman was a minor tourist attraction until they patched him to be multilingual shortly after.

[varsoonhks]

I was one of the people who baited invasions in Anor Londo.
Dressed up as Ornstein while a friend cosplayed Smough.
We did it for awhile without Dried Finger and I had the sense of it 'feeling longer' to catch later invasions, so it's nice to have that feeling validated.
When I looked up a solution online at the time, people just suggested the Dried Finger, so that's where I ended up.

The first time I was ever invaded was when I was struggling through Shrine of Storms as a complete beginner.
I sent the invader a message asking why he invaded and killed me and that the game was hard enough as is.
They wrote back to say that this was how they had decided to regain their humanity--it was nothing personal, this was just easier and more fun for them than co-op.
And that's something that really struck me with the rest of the Dark Souls franchise :
Being in your 'offline' mode didn't punish you like Soul Form did.
Invasion as a means of netting something valuable for a player at another player's expense is just infinitely more interesting than what we got in every game since.
But you can play through the rest of the entire franchise of FromSoft RPGs without ever needing to 'be online' or see a single invasion at little to no detriment to yourself.
So players could just opt out entirely of what was one was one of the most interesting aspects of Demon's Souls.
It was lame.

I loved Bloodborne.
Played hundreds of hours of it.
Never once was I invaded during any regular playthrough.
I knew invasions could happen, it's just that the whole system was opt-in.
And most players were only opting in to summon for a boss, in which case, well, they'd just walk into the boss room.
So I lingered for a very long time in the Nightmare Realm and I finally saw another player invade there.
We killed each other because nearly every attack would stagger one-another.
I've played Bloodborne a lot since and still haven't been invaded again.
It was lame.


The last invasion I ever did was on Dark Souls remastered.
I had cleared the game at SL1 and had given myself enough levels to cast Chameleon.
I wanted to provide some of the fun of invasions to players new to the game, so I bloated my level range to fit somewhat overleveled players in the Undead Parish.
I'd invade players and equip a fitting antagonistic gear set for themed invasions or
I'd invade and Chameleon and follow them like Looney Toons and even dress up like them secretly or
I'd dress like a knight and help 'guide' them and show them where secrets were while ensuring no one else could invade them.
There were a lot of people who would just immediately disconnect or there were people who were obviously not on their first playthrough.
But there were also gank squads and people who'd trap you on one side of the Parish gate / fog with no way to get to them but to stone out.
The worst of it was chasing a seemingly new player down the stairs in the Armored Boar area only for a group of two different gankers to descend from the rafters with +5 Chaos weapons and kill me in a single hit with plunging attacks and then watch the host pop Dried Finger to queue that sequence again.
I just didn't understand.
Where was the fun in that?
What was the point?
The hyper-vigilance around 'Invaders' had gotten so bad from DS3's trashfire that it'd poured into the Remaster's culture and, yeah, it sucked.
It was lame.

[RagnarokiaNG]

Purple Mad Phantom summons in Dark Souls 3 is my favourite go to, the uncertainty of helping, hindering, or memeing always being a fun time, likewise it's fun to watch Hodrick fight crabs.

[SwedetasticGames]

Low chance/long randomized cooldown on being solo invaded in Elden Ring being a toggle would add an imeasurable amount of replayability.

[Thezanlynxer]

City of Heroes has the concept of "ArcanaTime", named after the user Arcanaville who discovered it about 4 years after the original release of the game. In City of Heroes you attack with powers that have a listed cast time, such as 1 second. However, the server has to finish processing its current clock tick (about 0.132 seconds) before you're allowed to use another power, and then you also have to wait for the next tick for that power to actually start casting. So that 1 second cast time becomes 1.188 seconds in ArcanaTime, and this discovery ended up having a big effect on how players did calculations to find the most optimal attack chains.

[thefreebooter]

I still think that Elden Ring should have had a gravelording equivalent. Imagine some Volcano Manor Boi invading you in a major legacy dungeon like Leyndell or Raya Lucaria, but they just add more enemies. Then when you invade them you see like 6 guys trying to kill a cackling black phantom which is insane and I want that

[SmugLookingBarrel]

I think my favourite obscure mechanic from a game that went unnoticed applies to the original Pokemon games, and it's the fact that the move Body Slam can't paralyze normal-types, because that discovery massively shook up the PvP meta of a game that was 20 years old when it was found.

[AbruptAvalanche]

In Super Smash Bros Melee, an intended game mechanic relevant to competitive play was discovered 14 years after the game released. The community calls it V-canceling. If you're in the air (not in hitstun or an attack animation) and hit the shield button 1 or 2 frames before getting hit, your knockback will be reduced by 5%. The intention was likely to give some consolation to players who try to airdodge just a frame or two late. It's a small difference, but also crazy that it took so long to discover given how thoroughly dissected Melee is.