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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Would you like to have DPS/Healing metrics available in the game?
ArchivedUser
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So regardless of what I post here, people continue to argue that some folks like to use
these systems to be Elitist asshats. Let's be clear: people like that will use ANY excuse
to try and make you feel bad about playing your own game. Don't play a "Meta" build?
They'll call you out for it. Etc. The list goes on.
The point of this post is whether or not YOU would like to see/track your progress.
Just because someone gets off on trying to use these numbers to make you feel
bad does NOT make the system bad... it means that person is an asshat. Don't
confuse the two.
these systems to be Elitist asshats. Let's be clear: people like that will use ANY excuse
to try and make you feel bad about playing your own game. Don't play a "Meta" build?
They'll call you out for it. Etc. The list goes on.
The point of this post is whether or not YOU would like to see/track your progress.
Just because someone gets off on trying to use these numbers to make you feel
bad does NOT make the system bad... it means that person is an asshat. Don't
confuse the two.
0
Comments
I don't care so much if it is implemented for raids, pvp groups, or even small parties. I at least want a personal meter, so I can *truly* gauge if I am improving my output by using certain skills or gear. I absolutely despise the "take a video for 5 minutes of dummy boxing and add up all the numbers" method, and the "It kinda feels like I'm doing better" method is just....ugh
If your party accomplished your goal or if you accomplished your goal, finished dungeon, won PvP, whatever it is, it doesn't matter how much dps who did.
But there will always be people who will be like "we lost because you have no damage you useless piece of flummery" -> said to cleric, or any support oriented class.
When damage is measured people feel pressure to do the most damage, not really always helping their team the most. It affects teamwork in negative way.
So for me it's a big no no.
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EDIT: I don't know how i got tagged on this discussion but this was not me who posted the post above. I dont even know half of the terms he is using.
PS. the real Cypher only talks about furries and BARA and hairy guys kthxbye
Besides if I am a blacksmith forging swords I am going to want to know the progression I make as I craft newer/better models (even if it just equipping them and checking my own dps).
I literally laughed out loud at this. Hit me right in the funny bone!
Man oh man...I'm not trying to be rude but that same question could be posed about nearly anything in any game. No game *needs* much of anything, but many things are nice. Boats, caravans, nodes that develop with the efforts players put into the local area, markets to sell your crafted goods, life meters for yourself or enemies, in-depth character creation menus, multiple races, more than 3 or 4 different types of weapons, magic, housing, I can go all day with what games "don't need" but are very nice additions
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of meters being used in group content, but I 100% want to have some proof that I am improving when I make changes. PvP is a good example, of which Ashes will have plenty. I want to know that I'm keeping my team alive the best that I can. Be it bigger heals, or the most efficient over long periods of time at medium healing. Give me a personal meter that I can use to train myself. It doesn't even need to save numbers, simply show a live feed that averages the last 10 seconds or something.
There are plenty of people with the usual cries of 'But people misuse them!', 'I was kicked from a group because my DPS was too low!' but they play an important role in seeing how you are performing, what your output looks like in comparison to others and other people misusing that data isn't a fault of the tool itself.
Playing with other people means that you have to make a judgement call on whether they are up to the task of killing a boss or beating an encounter and many players use DPS meters which then in turn put players off that don't meet these standards.
The fact of the matter is that if it wasn't DPS they were being judged on it would be their gear, their achievements, etc - people will always use something to quickly gauge if a player should be able to perform to a suitable level within a group.
If people don't like them, don't like how they look, don't use them at all etc. then they simply don't have to use them but players that do like to track their performance, players that run raids and like to keep tabs on others, players that try to better themselves by seeing how/when they went wrong then they are invaluable tool.
Here's a scenario:
That's not a realistic scenario and neither is the usual answer of 'Play with your guild-mates', not everyone has 40 guild-mates ready to go at a moments notice and the only way they will be able to complete these raids is by creating groups with other community members.
Meters play an important part, they can be used in strange manners by idiotic players but that's the same for anything, if players weren't being judged on their damage then they'd be based on even worse metrics like their equipment, their class or some other weird metric that I can't even think of.
They aren't the be all and end all of how good a player is but they play a useful and important part of dungeons and raids and are at times the only way to be able to tell if players are performing to a suitable level in an encounter.
I'm not a hardcore raider by any measure but I can at least concede that they do have a place and can admit that for certain encounters a certain level of damage is required to be able to perform at a suitable level.
It's data that is undoubtedly abused by bad raid leaders in games like World of Warcraft as a sort of 'You do X DPS or kick' but that shouldn't mean that other players should be prevented from seeing and using this data in other ways just because other players draw bad conclusions from the numbers.
For personal use visible only to yourself, noone can say it's toxicinducing. In my personal years of playing WoW WITH dps meter, I have never encountert toxicity due to dps meters. We still understood that there is a myriad of reasoning why something didn't work out for someone in a raid. Be it they got to be the target of several abilities, be it that they had other responsibilities like making sure he can burst some spawning add, or the simple fact that his class was generally underwhelming in this patch.
We still understood that, but then again while I played, there was still a bigger emphasis on community, might be a bit of a working part in there.
DPS meter can just as well be friendly competiton spuring you on. Dps meter doesn't induce one way or another. It's the already establish attitude of the person behind that tilted it one way or another.
A raid was the only place where it really mattered and if you join a toxic community you can't expect they will not abuse that information.
Anyway, in general I do want to have at least a personal dps tracking for improvment validiation. You can't really validiate testing of different statcombinations if you have no information gathering available.
The other side of the question is, will it be necessery?
Best example. Burning Crusade, very last raid of the expansion. There was a dps race boss. It had a tight hard timer and it was nearly impossible to beat him at the time, heck 2 expansions later people struggle against it for various reasons.
Those that took the challenge weren't toxic to each other.
People NEEDED to know what deals those 100dps more. People NEEDED to know who and what benefits most of some limited groupbuffs. They poured every ounce of knowledge they had and were still building on destroying that monstrosity.
Without a dpsmeter of any kind that endevour would have been like trying to throw a pin into a pitch black room and hoping to magically thread a string. That's how complex a game can get when we talk about min-maxing, on a personal scale as well as a group scale.
If we have tight timecaped encounters that are meant to be about min-max/ validiating that your group is ready for that challenge, noone in his right mind can tell me they vote against dps meters. If the game is built that way, it is built that way, if it isn't and we see some more open end style/ different approach style encounters
then it would still be nice to have at least a personal insight to figure out what works and what doesn't to help your group.
Shouldn't be such a focus on DPS.
But when you say, "
"Or, in high-end content, ensure that everyone is working together"
Which says to me, correct me if I'm wrong, that you need to know that everyone is doing what YOU expect from them.
This is fine in high end raids where progression is the ultimate high for hardcore gamers. They have that need to know that people are doing what they insist is the best. But it is also a way and excuse for them also to disrespect and insult others. It also tends to intimidate many. I have seen it happen way to many times. It is not always used as a learning tool in this regard.
Ashes is a game about bringing people together for common cause. It's a world wide endeavor. DPS meters have no place here other then for personal use and improvement. We don't have any idea yet how high end dungeon raids will be but I don't foresee them as the ultimate goal of this game. The guilds that don't or can't invite solo players or small guilds to help them save their lands or caravans shows an elitism which actually doesn't make them better then the whole.
Again I say DPS meters would be fine for personal improvement but not for group IMHO.
However, as mentioned here already, in the end it started to become a blaming game and people only monitored the meters instead of enjoying the game.
I want to go back to oldschool gaming instead of over technical analytic gaming.
Though... They could save resources and let the community develop their own parsers.
Thus, I'm not saying I want to be Elitist, or an asshat, as a general rule. Just that there are times when knowing where your group stands is vitally important.
Its a simple tool being used by some, misused by others.
If i were you i would add "No dps meter" "Personal dps meter only you can see" and "Yes we should have group/raid wide dps meter" and see the results.
First of all, if all you want it for is "for yourself," not so that you can use it to discriminate about whom you wish to play it with; that's all fine and well, for yourself. But when you consider that human nature is what it is, then you must realize that this will automagically prompt people to demand a "self-confessed" DPS of whatever to get to do content with them.
It will happen. Make no mistake, take this to the bank.
If your only desire to have it for is "for yourself," so that you can track your progress; I have to ask, is your progress not "I'm alive and bad guy's dead?" What matters the numbers, if this is true?
So it's a how can I kill the bad guy faster type purpose.
I fully agree with you that people will use it to compare themselves with others though and the resultant fallout will happen. Perhaps if they implemented it so you can only see your own metrics?
Not everyone is going to be able to perform at the required level for every single encounter, pretending that everyone is able to play a useful part in a team is just being plain naive.
There were plenty of times in games like World of Warcraft where I'd want to do certain raids and encounters but the simple fact of the matter was I didn't have good enough gear and wouldn't be able to perform to the required standard for that encounter so I was unable to do so, looking at DPS is just a quick and rough method of being able to gauge if a damage dealer is going to be able to perform to a decent standard, it's not the be all and end all though.
The alternative would be that these players didn't know how poor I was going to be, invited me along and then inevitably failed because I was unable to perform to a certain standard.
If someone isn't doing enough damage in an encounter, if someone is unable to perform to a sufficient level then what's the issue with wanting to take a player more suited for that encounter and instead?
If you were doing a dungeon then you wouldn't want to take someone that insists fighting naked or with a bunch of broken equipment because you'd instantly know that they weren't going to be able to perform to the same standard as the rest of the properly equipped team, things like damage meters are nothing more than an extension of this for when it becomes harder to determine performance purely based on gear choice.
Whether people want to admit it or not, not everyone is equally good at the game, not everyone is going to perform to the same level and not everyone is going to be useful in raid scenarios, hiding the numbers from people isn't going to change that at all.
Players that aren't performing poorly are going to be performing poorly with or without damage meters.
I'd ask you this question:
Do you think it's fair that a 40-man raid made up from a bunch of random community members should be held back or disbanded due to a handful of people that weren't very good at the game and the other players had no way to tell who wasn't performing well enough?
Some times these tools can be considered a way to weed out the weak and have a negative effect on the community or player experience, but I feel it is a way for people to figure out their full potentials and really see the progression into their class either from gear or being more skilled as a player.
We currently use these tools in our raids in a certain game to figure out who needs help with what. If we didn't have these tools the game would have literally 50% of the immersion factor. After raids we look at charts and see who is where and what we need to improve on or what to coach less experienced players with..
I do agree they can have a negative effect but as a whole I think not having them in the game from the get go may have more of a negative effect on players immersion and happiness.
Real-time metrics give an incentive to pad the meters rather than actually do what is needed in combat.
They also create a difficult challenge for the game designers who have to make encounters enjoyable and doable by people who aren't mathematically minded or interested in following numbers while immersed in combat.
Finally, and most importantly, ahem: Anything that reduces my contribution and capabilities to a bunch of numbers I find offensive to my Elven sensibilities!
Alternatively, I can tell them any number I want and they can't prove it false without being able to measure my dps/healing.
The short answer:
It matters. A lot. You need to know how to most efficiently use your skills to make sure you get to the point where "bad guy is dead" and your group is not
The long answer:
As a tank, only a threat meter would matter, so I can ask Jimbo the Magic Cannon to chill out before the boss rips his head out from under his hat.
As a damage dealer, you should be looking for ways to help your team. This applies to pvp, pve, high-end content, low-end content...pretty much everything. CC, adds on the healer, moving out of fire so you don't die (dead dps = no dps), calling different effects that the team needs to know about, the list goes on. When you're not taking care of that, you need to quickly adjust yourself to get back on damage duty.
I need to know the best way to get my damage back up if I have to stop for any reason. Do I need to prime one skill before I use another? Which should I always use first? Am I better off putting dots on lots of things, or just single target bombs?
I need to know what skills to use to blow up an add quickest if it's on the healer.
Is it better to AoE with 3 adds, or should I single target them? QUICK! They're about to eat the healer!!
As a healer, sometimes mana just doesn't last an entire fight unless you know which skills will stretch it the farthest. As a healer, *all* the time, your tank dies if you can't heal him quick enough. Tank dies, the group dies. You need to know which skills to use in which order to get fast, big, and expensive heals. You need to know which other skills to use to make your mana last in an extended fight. You need to know how long you can make your mana last, so you can ask a team member to help you if you *know* you're going to run out of mana in 30 seconds if you can't get a break to regen. No mana = all die
Got a new piece of gear, eh? Nice!! How much better is it? oh....different secondary stats, so you have no idea, eh? Good thing you have a meter to help you figure out which is better for you, amirite? Turns out that one piece is a LOT better for burst healing, but the other is superior saving/regenerating mana in long fights...good to know, now you can plan ahead!
Aside from all that, I like to know that I'm getting better. Damn any comparison to anyone else. I want to know that I, personally, am improving. My practice is paying off. I hope others can at least appreciate that bit as a valid explanation, even if the rest doesn't make sense.