Patient Gamers

My first experience with open pvp was darkfall, and the imbalance between pvers and pvpers broke the game the first go round. It was ridiculous how poorly anything pve was rewarded, so it would take hours to accomplish anything, while a single 10 minute pvp excursion would net you (potentially) all those hours of others' work. Eventually people realized it wasn't even worth trying to pve, resources quit coming in, and the game died. They had to reboot and ramp up pve rewards just to get people out in the world instead of hiding in their clan forts.

I feel like elden ring, even more so than dark souls, punished the players who were having fun exploring with their friends. It wasn't balanced for jolly cooperation fun. It felt like that first darkfall experience where everyone just got grumpy. Souls was much more focused on the bosses with what felt like little exploration, so a pvp incursion wasn't a big setback, but elden ring could just draaaag if you wanted to find a new secret and a little red guy popped up. Plus elden ring had a lot of late game meta items that could ruin a newbie's day with little recourse.