Jesus Christ alive. There is an elitist cabal of players that hunt down and gang up against players that don't play the game their way. Their way of hunting involves putting your steam ID into a list were they keep track of what hours of the day you are on, what your rune and weapon upgrade level is, who you summon and who your friends are. They use lag-switches to blast you with damage that you won't be able avoid and glitches that give them invincibility from damage as well as weapon ash-of-war swap glitches that can kill you instantly, through walls, with a massive range (like larger than any spells travel).

Even insta-killing throwing knives it seems.

Play offline or go to nexusmods.com and find the seamless coop mod if you want to play the game in peace.
Ignore all that nonsense about how that mod is killing this game, it isn't, the toxic player-base is doing enough of that.
And if you know about the reason the dark souls games' servers went down for maintenance, then you should know how dedicated these people are to ruining the game for others. It will only get worse.

This game has a cheater problem. And the anti-cheat they use, while obviously useless, has a very noticeable performance hit.

This game is a raging dumpster fire. Do you know what burning trash smells like?

My God! I am sick of seeing bull-goat armor|magic, it's to the point seeing any piece of that set|magic wand just makes me physically ill. If I see you wearing|wielding it I am going fight you in the most un-fun way I can. I'm summoning blues, I'm using bloodflame blade and Fire's deadly sin to keep you the hell away from me and I will block you on steam so I never have to see you again you cancerous scum. And bleed builds can ♥♥♥♥ right the hell off.

Oh man Demon's Souls 5 has bad netcode and poor optimization. 10\10 Ihateit