An up to date Dark Souls Connectivity Guide.
Created in order to dispel misinformation surrounding the various workings of Dark Souls

Index

• Quickest way to connect to another specific player
  
• Quickest way to connect to other players in general
  
• How Dark Souls establishes peer to peer (p2p) connections
  
• Known problems with how Dark Souls gathers and maintains connections
  
• Known glitches in Dark Souls, and how to prevent them
  
• Essential Mods
  
• Hear-say about Dark Souls connectivity
  
• FAQ

The fastest way to connect to another player is to follow these steps:

1 - Install Wulf's connectivity mod (Link in the mods section)
2 - Open Dark Souls and load your character
3 - Alt-tab out of the game and open Wulf's mod
4 - Change your MP channel to something other than 7 (0 -15), have your friend do the same

After following these steps you should be able to invade, summon, or be summoned by the other player within a few minutes, sometimes within seconds.

In order to summon other players for help in Dark Souls you must first be in human form. To change in to human form you must first gather an item called Humanity. There are two forms of Humanity, most of the community refer to these as "hard" and "soft" humanity.