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.

“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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Butters was the only invader who I felt added to the experience.  Everyone else was just wasting my time or forcing me to play the game the way they wanted me to.  But Butters?  Dude single handedly made Irithyll Dungeon memorable in a good way.  He played the role of a mischievous scamp who pointed out one mimic, only to try to convince me another was safe.  He would attack now and then when the other enemies did, and back off when he realized I was on to his shenanigans.  Sometimes he would follow along harrying me along the way, sometimes he would go away for about five minutes and suddenly jump back in.  It was a playful sort of invasion, one in which he was obviously trying to kill me but wanted to make a game of it.  It wasn't until the very end of the area when we reached the bridge to the Profaned Capital that we actually fought with any real intensity.  My brother and I ended up victorious, and we moved on to the next area to murk the gimmick boss.

Unfortunately, now every time I go through Irithyll Dungeon it just isn't the same.  It feels like a large part of the zone is missing, like it lost its soul.  I wish Butters would invade me again, but no... it was a chance encounter, never to be had again.  Now there are no invaders at all most of the time, and the few there are tend to be the usual riffraff who spam the same "OP" weapon art as everyone else.  Thanks to this video I now know it's because I rarely summon anyone so I rarely open myself for invasions in the first place.

11:55
"They kicked my ass, and i loved it"
~illusory wall 2024

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.

This entire series really encapsulates what makes DS1 such a special game to me, it feels like so many creative, unique and innovative ideas and mechanics for online play were thrown into this game during development that unfortunately were never explored or utilized much, if at all, in subsequent games. This one isn't one of the craziest mechanics DS1 implemented, but sounds like one that should definitely be brought back and fleshed out more for a future game, as much as I respect Fromsoft for trying to make invasions less frustrating, going into the complete other extreme and turning them into basically duels rather than invasions feels like the wrong choice.

Not quite a completely unknown mechanic because it had a short shout-out in the official guide, but The Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion is intended to have a mechanic where you can start wars between the various in game Goblin tribes, but the methods to trigger them are so weird and specific that it was more or less impossible for anyone to find on their own, and whether the system actually exists in the game, was partially and messily cut, or was broken by a patch and worked originally, is really unclear and obtuse.

as much as i generally dont like invasions, i very much empathize with your "this is some more bullshit to deal with and,, actually i love it" reaction to your first demon's souls invasion; it's how i felt getting continuously ambushed by mobs in ds2.

In The Legend of Zelda: A Link the Past, it was seemingly not widely known for quite some time that the Fire and Ice Rods rendered Trinexx's Ice and Fire heads temporarily vulnerable to sword blows. It was thought that the rods were the only way to damage those heads. Which made the boss very annoying: there's a slight delay with their projectile launch, and hit detection on mobile opponents like those heads with the rods' projectiles is a bit finicky (making it easy to miss). You also have a limited supply of magic to cast from the rods with, so you can end up screwed if you don't have any magic-refilling potions.
It becoming more widely known that you could just hit those heads with your sword during their stunned state after taking a rod hit... made Trinexx MUCH less of a problem. Saves magic, and lets you kill the heads a lot faster.