Connectivity

I'm close to giving up on the PC version. Something is just wrong, I love this game
because of the online experience but now there simply isn't one. I've stood in the forest for half an hour with no invasions. I have yet to be summoned in the entire play through and summon signs are as rare as ones for the Moonlight Butterfly at sl 70.

-I have open NAT in GFWL
-I have Dsfix and DSCfix
-I enabled Upnp

What else do I have to do?
Is it that there are no players? I've had more luck in Demon Souls online earlier this year.

That is sad. :C

I have only ever played on the PC, and generally online has worked well. (Aside from "Summoning Failed".) I get invaded fairly regularly, and when I lay my sign to be summoned I usually only wait 5-10 minutes - or less - depending on the location. Unless you are NG+, in which case you are SOL for co-op.

I sounds like there are, indeed, some connection problems going on for you. But I do not know what to suggest that you have not already tried. GFWL can be a butt, often times. :/ Earlier today it wouldn't let anybody summon or invade for a good 15 - 20 minutes. Best I can say is to exit game, and sign in to Live again. And pray.

What have you done to your game then? Or are you vanilla without DSCfix/DSfix?

Just DSfix and DSCfix. That's all. I do have fairly speedy internet, tho.

I do too, I think its just GFWL hating me.

GFWL hates all of us. <:C

Maybe you could do something like reset your router. Or...... I dunno..... Maybe continue logging in, logging out of GFWL?

What times of the day do you play? Maybe the traffic is just really low? I've noticed that around 12 AM EST things drop off a bit. (Although I still think you'd see some sign of other players. PC community is the smallest, but it's not that small.)

Sorry I have no better advice for you. I hope you find an answer. No multiplayer is lame.

Picked it up on pc around launch time and gave up on it in febuary, went to the consoles. Too many invasion\summoning failed ticked me off. GFWL is a disaster, however i did find if you start up the game, let it log into the gfwl and go away for 30 mins or so, it helps. Apparently GFWL takes time to fill it's IP pool and waiting helps.

As for dscfix, i'm not 100% on it but myself and a few others feel like it sorts summoning those on your friends list but borks the random invasions\summons etc.

I thought so about the DSCfix, I'm curious about Upnp too since I tried playing BF3 with it on and my projected ping of 60 turned out to be 1400 in game. There's no way I'm getting 2 for PC. My console copy seems to be broken too. After playing for about an hour I get infinite loading screens and see through walls. v.v I deleted all my characters too so I don't feel like restarting again. I'll keep tinkering with PC then. One fix I saw was to download Windows flight from steam but it's not there anymore.

Take out DSC fix completely. When it first came out, it pretty much messed with everyone's connections. I don't know if it got fixed, but it was REALLY REALLY bad when it first came out. I mean, it let you connect to your friends, but that was it. And there was a horrible bug that caused you to require a relog if you finished a boss with your friend in your world. I don't even know if that's gotten fixed since.

Assuming that that bug has been fixed, I still wouldn't recommend DSC fix unless you're planning on playing with your friends alone.

Dark Souls on PC is very buggy, and I don't see the need to try to get mods, because I feel like you're just going to roll dice to see if it works for your PC or not. I haven't had any trouble with Dark Souls until I got DSfix, and then I stopped having random crashes when I disabled it. Friends of mine have had the same experience.

So, I'd say just a clean re-install. Take out all your mods, and just try it then. It's true that you might have to wait a while until you get the IP's in your lobby up and running and circulating, but the good part about PC is that once you get connected, you're connected. You won't have any troubles. Whereas, on Console, the connection would go in and out. Playing with a friend was way more difficult because every time you tried to summon each other, it took a 3 or 4 fails, but on PC, once you get that first summon, unless you get invaded a million times (like in the forest) they'll stay in your IP cache and you'll get instant summons.

Hm. I like DSfix for removing the throttle, with it on I get under 30 but with it off I get screen tearing (which is rectified by using a recorder) I will try without DSC and start letting my game idle. Also, to Upnp or not to Upnp? (Network discovery) one thing I find happen a lot, is that I start getting invaded and the fog walls go up but I don't actually get invaded.

That fog is not a pc thing, i get it on the box a lot but did see it more on pc, oollacille town fog drives me nuts.

I know that it happens on all consoles, but with mine I only get that. If the wall goes up on ps3 I assume I'm being invaded but on PC I assume I'm not going to. It's to the point where it's just a waste of time since I can't leave the area and am not getting invaded.

No problems summoning ever, but I add everyone I play with GFWL and I don't really do anymore random pvp

If you're getting 1400 ping on another game, unless the server is on the freakin moon or dying (in which case it should be bad for everyone) something is wrong so I doubt it's Dark Souls exclusive

that being said, if it was Dark Souls I also highly doubt it'd be DSCFix or DSFix. I used to toggle DSCFix on and off due to hearing people say it could hinder random invasions, however I've long since stopped and with it on can still go into the forest and get perma fogwalled and constantly invaded or the township and get steady PvP assuming it's the right time of day. As for DSFix, I don't know a single individual whose game experience has been made worse by DSFix assuming they had the newest version installed and it was installed properly. I'm actually a bit shocked people would suggest avoiding mods that do little more than fix what From *** up.

anyway, to rule out if it's related to the PC port being a poor port or your connection I would set up DSCFix and try summoning a friend, if that doesn't work than something is probably screwed up with your connection rather than it simply being GFWL being GFWL

waiting 15-30 minutes before PvPing can help as well though, as it is possibly the IP pool needing to populate

outside of that 1400 ping on a BF3 server, what is your connection like on other games?
Are you on wifi or a wired connection? If you're on wifi, what kind of ping are you getting to your router? If it's an issue with wireless connectivity it could be a headache and a half to troubleshoot but I'd check your adapter, reset and make sure your router is in good shape (not clogged up, overheating, in a place where the signal is being blocked, etc), and check for things that could be causing noise (pretty much everything electronic...). Wired or wireless, what kind of ping time (and consistency) are you getting to google? If you're getting unstable or slow pings to google on a wired connection than something is definitely up, may have to contact your ISP, again could try resetting and checking on your router. Have you cleared your DNS cache recently? ipconfig /flushdns in the command prompt, it can't hurt. Lastly, are you sure your firewall isn't messing with something?

Laharls_Wrath wrote:As for DSFix, I don't know a single individual whose game experience has been made worse by DSFix assuming they had the newest version installed and it was installed properly. I'm actually a bit shocked people would suggest avoiding mods that do little more than fix what From *** up.

Around the time DkS first came out and the mod was first up, I tried it, and it made my game crash randomly when I booted it up. Took it all off, never had that problem until I installed it again for DSCfix. My friend tried DSfix and had it crash on him randomly on start-up too, and it was the latest and greatest a month ago. *shrug* it depends on the PC, I'm guessing, since I know a guy who's had it since it came out, and it's never given him a problem, but if there are problems, avoiding it might be a solution.

It could just be what it's configured to in the .ini I made it fairly vanilla, I don't care about the graphic additions.

Yarxov wrote:It could just be what it's configured to in the .ini I made it fairly vanilla, I don't care about the graphic additions.

Yeah, sounds like your PC can't really handle them, like mine haha! Except, I don't get screen tears without the fix. That sounds horrible.

Well, here's what I saw on google. Looks pretty legit.
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2959611

JoeBroski09 wrote:

Laharls_Wrath wrote:As for DSFix, I don't know a single individual whose game experience has been made worse by DSFix assuming they had the newest version installed and it was installed properly. I'm actually a bit shocked people would suggest avoiding mods that do little more than fix what From *** up.

Around the time DkS first came out and the mod was first up, I tried it, and it made my game crash randomly when I booted it up. Took it all off, never had that problem until I installed it again for DSCfix. My friend tried DSfix and had it crash on him randomly on start-up too, and it was the latest and greatest a month ago. *shrug* it depends on the PC, I'm guessing, since I know a guy who's had it since it came out, and it's never given him a problem, but if there are problems, avoiding it might be a solution.

if it's crashing on start up, is AA disabled in the ingame options and are things set up right in the ini? Every time I've (personally) seen people complain about crashing on startup it's been user-error

Yarxov wrote:It could just be what it's configured to in the .ini I made it fairly vanilla, I don't care about the graphic additions.

throw it up on pastebin and can take a look?

Well, considering that I double and triple checked all the settings, and even took it off and back on and redid the settings when DSCfix came out because I really wanted that to work (ended up being a bomb at release), but no matter what I did, sometimes it would crash at start-up, and sometimes it wouldn't.

Also, on a side note, if I turned on AA, the game wouldn't act any differently, until I loaded up a character, and then my game would be half the size in the top left corner, unless I opened the menu. I'm guessing the game was rendering twice or something

It did that to me too when I accidentally had it on. Was there no pattern to the crashes? Like if it was the first launch of the day?

Yarxov wrote:It did that to me too when I accidentally had it on. Was there no pattern to the crashes? Like if it was the first launch of the day?

Not always. But the second time crashed less often than the first time, though it still did sometimes.

My entire computer is like that xD it boots in a fraction of a minute but might reboot during the reboot. (It keeps changing the boot order by itself even though I have the correct order saved. It'll also randomly restart. I can let it idle in the other room and ill hear it restart. It's been better lately but it still hates me. I compliment it every day but it's just so full of angst and hormonal.)

Wait, your computer crashes often?

JoeBroski09 wrote:Also, on a side note, if I turned on AA, the game wouldn't act any differently, until I loaded up a character, and then my game would be half the size in the top left corner, unless I opened the menu. I'm guessing the game was rendering twice or something

I work in IT, I've learned not to trust the user to accurately describe the problem beyond "it doesn't work"

JoeBroski09 wrote:

Yarxov wrote:It did that to me too when I accidentally had it on. Was there no pattern to the crashes? Like if it was the first launch of the day?

Not always. But the second time crashed less often than the first time, though it still did sometimes.

Was it always on startup? If you disable intro movies their's a split second where it hangs when launching, could very well be tied to that

Yarxov wrote:My entire computer is like that xD it boots in a fraction of a minute but might reboot during the reboot. (It keeps changing the boot order by itself even though I have the correct order saved. It'll also randomly restart. I can let it idle in the other room and ill hear it restart. It's been better lately but it still hates me. I compliment it every day but it's just so full of angst and hormonal.)

This is bad ._.
Scan for malware and clean your registry, as a bare starting point? Dunno if the rebooting is an issue with the MBR
and is it randomly restarting or blue screening and then rebooting?

I know about the AA problem. That's why I turned it off, though it didn't change the crashing problem whether AA was on or off.

Also, I haven't really thought about it a lot since then.. but my crashing may be due to the fact that my computer has Duel Graphics. One integrated and one dedicated. I've had troubles with it before, I wouldn't be surprised if DSfix had issues with 2 graphics cards. I'm just spit-balling here.

Also, yes, it is very bad to have a computer turn off randomly. The IT man is the one for the job, listen to him. He's not the one who had a virus yesterday... Man, that took me hours to remove ;~;