More Elden Ring Testing (+ minor boss spoilers)

Oops, sorry I'm a day late with the update here! Unsurprisingly, with Elden Ring out I'm now engaged with trying to figure some things out. Yesterday I began working on figuring out how runes (souls) are awarded in PvP. It uses the same system as previous Souls games, where it's a fixed amount based on the level of your defeated opponent (though the amount changes depending on which role you take and the type of multiplayer occurring).

Knowing how this works is often one of the first things I check whenever a new Souls game comes out, since it can be used to confirm the level of random players you run into online, which is helpful for hypothesizing and testing level range formulas. I've written some more about it here, and I plan on getting a few more perspectives figured out today. 

A couple funny considerations:

• Elden Ring once again uses the same leveling cost table as every other soulsborne game (even Demon's Souls and Bloodborne), with only Dark Souls 2 being the odd-one-out. The cost to level up from level 39 to 40 is exactly 9505 in all of these games.
• The amount you get doesn't appear to be downscaled for downscaled players. What I mean is that there's nothing to stop a new player from using a password to summon a dueling opponent (with the equivalent of the Red Sign Soapstone) who is  a much higher level than them, and have them die on purpose to gift the host a bunch of souls. I can see this becoming a fast-leveling strategy when the game has been out longer and there's more high level players available.

I think I am going to redo my video on group passwords as well. Right now my "How Elden Ring is fixing Community Matchmaking" video is the most thorough explanation of it, but it works a bit differently than in the network test and has another mechanic we weren't capable of knowing about back then. Might as well get a proper video out to replace that!

Unrelated to all of this, here's a video of my fight against the Crucible Knight! I came back decently leveled up, but I was still happy about how it went. I was having a lot of trouble with the parry timings, but I forced myself to become somewhat decent at it. It took a whole bunch of deaths. :p