There’s an odd trend happening in Elden Ring right now: Players are hiding from each other. This is unusual, because the players that are hiding are usually inviting other players into their game. Historically, souls games like Dark Souls have had a feature where another player could “invade” someone else’s game if they were playing online, so they could go and kill them to get some extra experience points. Of course, if the player fends you off, then they get experience of their own.
Elden Ring, however, is one of the first souls games where you have to opt into allowing other players to invade your game. So if someone is invading you, then that means you’ve chosen to have that kind of game experience. What players are finding is that when they invade other players, they can’t find them anywhere on the map. They search everywhere until they get bored and eventually leave, which nets the player being invaded their own experience points.
Again, this is odd for the invading players, because apparently, the ones invading chose to allow this, so what gives? It turns out that many of these players are using exploits to reach areas that are extremely difficult — if not impossible — for an invader to reach. Then, they call in any invaders to try and get some free experience out of it. Whether you think it’s cowardly or cunning, it’s a trend that is starting to get a little out of hand across Elden Ring.
A seemingly growing problem in #ELDENRING is AFK rune farmers. Hopefully @fromsoftware_sp and @BandaiNamcoUS can fix the issue of using a Taunter's Tongue in areas reachable only by Torrent soon because the longer it goes on the less many will care about fairness. pic.twitter.com/PL9hrQHRLm
— RKirby808 (@RKirby808) April 4, 2022
Players are fighting back in some really creative ways, as Kotaku highlighted in its writeup about these “rune farmers.” A personal favorite of mine was a Reddit comment where someone said they’ve started waiting out the player they invaded.
Obviously, players being able to hide from one another like this isn’t how the developers of Elden Ring intended the feature to work. We assume that a patch will be on the way in the near future. What’s particularly weird about this is that most players who are able to access invasions are at a level high enough to where they aren’t in need of runes to level up their character. There are infinitely better ways to farm runes and ones that probably use up far less times, even if this one does have the benefit of not requiring the player to do anything besides wait around.