You might have a point. Obviously spending souls on upgrading weapons is going to take you a lot further than spending them on leveling up in just about every instance, whereas spending them on base items from a store or losing them outright obviously shouldn't factor in to your character's sum power. This is why I wasn't inherently against the system when it was announced, because there's really no way to see its repercussions until you hit endgame. I agree that if they were a bit more selective about what souls counted the system would have worked fine. We'd be able to choose when to stop leveling again, which would address my primary complaint.
yeah, I wonder if they tried a bunch of things but found that player experience was the largest determining factor of dissatisfaction coming out of unwanted PvP fights.
Basic matchmaking for most games have hidden stats that determine who fights who and how ranking is done because just using wins and losses isn't good enough to prevent gankers, twinks, or just overskilled players stopping at a certain level and blowing people out of the water.
Soul Memory was probably seen as a simple way to judge overall "experience" because regardless of whether you were going through the world or staying in a single spot and killing player after player in PvP, you were "ranking up".
Having it so that it was only based on level of character/equipment/spells doesn't factor in the actual skill of the user. Even Street Fighter has a ranking system so that less skilled players aren't constantly fighting very skilled opponents.
And to anyone who thinks it is fair/good/whatever and that the new players should just "get good", they are pretty short sighted. And it's for a multitude of reasons:
1) PvP in Dark Souls is unrequested
2) The more skilled players win, the better they get and the more they dissuade new players from wanting to engage in PvP
3) You end up with a highly skilled, incredibly small community. New players are the lifeblood of a game.
4) Putting new players against very high skilled players is not the best way to teach them how to play the game. Playing against people who are continuously just a bit better than you is. Player X vs Player X+1000 doesn't teach Player X anything...they don't even know what they are looking at. They should be playing Player X+10 so they can analyze their faults and grow in knowledge and skill.
This is actually a super difficult design problem to overcome, especially in a game like DS that doesn't have set builds and the build combinations are so wide.
That said, the brackets are enormous at the top levels and NG+ has a ton of PvP going on.
I mean, are you really disappointed that someone who has 6 million soul memory can't fight someone with less than 1 million, especially since the soul payout as the levels go up isn't exponential?
, while even with Soul Memory I have been invaded, I have invaded and I've been summoned in several occasions; being a member of Drangleic Police Department is probably the worst experience when it comes to covenants though.
