Hello! I'm Optissima, an avid Bloodborne fan that has put over 1k hours into just co-op, not counting being summoned (add another 1k for certain)! And Great Eye of Mensis, summoning is a slow and painful process. I'm here to educate you on how to speed up this process by a factor of up to 4!
Grant Us Eyes
Background Insight on how the bells work
Many have an belief of how the bells work, based on the misnomer of the English naming scheme and the lore descriptions: the summoner Beckons others, calling others to them, and then those that wish to be summoned ring their Resonant Bell, which in lore resonates with the Beckoners bell and unites them. This would imply that there is a list of Beckoners that Resonators check against. While in lore, this makes sense, this is actually the opposite of how it works on the server.
The server is based on the Dark Souls Sign system: you put your name down, you go on a list that is revealed to others based on coordinates, then the Summoner chooses from those that appear. Once per minute, your game will ping, looking for more signs. When you are being summoned, your systems will "handshake" to establish a better connection, which seems to take about 10-15 seconds.
While we don't have the ability to choose here, the internal system is the same: when you want to be summoned, ringing your Resonant puts you on the Queue, along with your current location. When you initially Beckon, it forces a check against an automated list for relevant Resonators. If there are no available Resonators when the Beckoning Bell is rung, it will check again in 1 minute (the Resonating Bell similarly adds you to the list initially, and once per minute lets the server know you still want to be on the list). You can know that it is pinging the system when the message "Searching for the chime of a Small Resonant Bell," which appears each minute.
You may be thinking "Wait, you're telling me that the coop system is only trying once per minute to connect me, and because Beckoners ring first, before Resonators, there is an additional minute between checks where we can connect?" Yep, that's exactly the issue! How do we remedy this?
Ringcycling
The solution I have devised and found to be terribly effective is what I have called Ringcycling, which is executing these actions for Beckoners:
- Ring your Beckoning Bell
- Wait for the "Searching for the chime of a Small Resonant Bell" message to disappear, then wait another 5-10 seconds. We don't want to cancel during the handshake!
- Use your Silencing Blank to stop searching
- Restart at step 1
This forces the server to do the initial check for Resonators, but instead of waiting another minute before it checks again, you are forcing a new search, allowing for a faster connection.
Sucking the bloodmarrow dry with more tips
Beckoners
So you really want to connect fast? Well, lets get into that "handshake" more. It is fast, but I have softlocked my game by ringcycling too quickly (I get stuck in a pseudo-loading state pre-loading screen). After the initial handshake, the 2 client systems will share character info, save info, and more. This can happen even after one has silenced their bell, as the summoning process has already started and silencing is only for being on/checking the server list.
Why does this matter? Because you can technically Ringcycle through it. You can ringcycle, let the handshake happen, cancel, and get a near immediate summoning next Beckon. However, there is a caveat: your insight is lost once you handshake, not when you get summoned. This is two-fold, you can lose more insight if you keep ringcycling while being summoned, but this means you can use that as the earliest indicator that you have made a connection. If you beckon again fast enough (the second insight usage), the handshake will not fail and you can secure that connection.
Resonators
Resonators are fairly limited in their ability to impact being summoned. I find that Resonating ~15 seconds before the Beckoner really boosts the connection speed. I use a series of indicators to track if a handshake happens, in order of game lockout, with the servers actions in between:
- Handshake
- Fogwalls that block areas reappear
- Bold Hunters Mark becomes unavailable to use
- Being summoned
- The sit emote, which ends when the connection is fully established
If you have any questions, ask away. All this I knowledge I gained through experimentation, so if something needs to be corrected let me know!
Japan has been isolationist since way before weebs existed...