What I'd like to see fixed

I would personally like for From Software to put all they can into making the game good, functional and enjoyable and to not put a lump of money to away to attempt to stop hacking on something that's completely optional.

Good, functional and enjoyable games make an effort to prevent overt cheating.

Also, if From seriously didn't care about the "optional" online experience that was a *very* large portion of their design in Dark Souls (Several covenants are pure PvP, and the majority involve the online experience) they wouldn't feel the need to spend "a lump of money", as you put it, on servers.

However, since they *are* going to servers, having nothing to stop hackers is silly.

I'm not defending hacking, I just know from the knowledge I have in computer science and game development that its very very close to impossible to stop people looking at the code of your game, Console or not.

What % of "hackers" are people who have actually had computer science training, and what % are people who simply download a program and use it?  Even a tiny semblance of effort stops the latter, and they are *by far* the most common.  Most competent programmers have something better to do than cheat.  Most.

Spell animations in pvp. Soul spear itself doesn't lag, it just has a laggy animation. To an invader it might look like the SS went far away and missed completely, but it actually is tracing you and about to one shot you. I'd just like to see what I'm actually dodging instead of rolling blindly.

Welcome to client side hit detection + lag compensation, which I mentioned above.  IMO this is the sole reason that people think backstabs are overpowered and easy; they are *forced update* animations.

Souls has no option to restrict connections based upon ping, and neither do a lot of modern games.  That's rather flagrant as a poor design choice.

The extremely annoying thing about this is that the old "host look-up menu" from over a decade ago is both *easier* (less expensive) AND better (more consistent good connections to games) than the travesty that is usually used in games today.  Why can't we just look up connections by ping, or set a max ping we tolerate when searching for games?  Preferably, I'd like to hear a reason that isn't a logical fallacy.  Why are games ignoring a cheaper and stronger option in favor of laggy, skill-equalized nonsense that costs more to implement?

TheMeInTeam wrote:

What % of "hackers" are people who have actually had computer science training, and what % are people who simply download a program and use it?  Even a tiny semblance of effort stops the latter, and they are *by far* the most common.  Most competent programmers have something better to do than cheat.  Most.

I think you're forgetting about the people who make the programmers who have made the program for them to use  in the first place.