Allow me to tell you my woes of online multiplayer in Dark Souls.
There are 8K+ players, one would think then that matchmaking would be easy.
WRONG! First of all matchmaking (or node visibility) depends on the Steam Servers, which works about as well as a shark in a volcano.
This morning by sheer luck I managed to connect to one node and build up from that.
And that was a fluke. After I restarted the game I wasn't able to get a single connection again after that.
So I started looking around in the forums about this problem and what do I find?
That the modding community had come up with a mod which will forcefully connect you to a known node (player) and from that, build up your node pool bypassing the Steam servers entirely.
And once again, modders have to fix what developers shit out.