Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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.
Comments
I basically agree with all that. I'm saying that there are good and bad ways to use a DPS meter. So people should be allowed to use them in the good ways, and Intrepid should focus their efforts only on combating the bad ways people use them. Making a broad, hamfisted statement that combat trackers are banned is only slightly more helpful than making no statement at all, and letting the community figure it out themselves.
If they're gonna ban people for abusing DPS meters openly, I'd rather they do it under the pretense of fighting asshole behavior rather than fighting the DPS meters themselves. A blanket-ban of DPS meters gives them the same justification to ban people, but it also inflames more debate and hard-feeling when it comes to DPS. Even talking about poor DPS without checking meters becomes more difficult, because people are primed into thinking that DPS is a taboo/controversial subject.
Tanks are able to talk about whether they did their job well or not, as they have a system built in to the game to tell them so (if they kept encounter focus on them, they did good). Healers are able to talk about whether they did their job well, as they have a system built in to the game to tell them so (if no one died, they did good).
There two roles both work on absolutes. They are very much black and white in terms of whether you did a good job or not.
DPS though, without meters the only thing that can be done is to set up a stop watch and time how long it takes to kill an encounter. The fact that the encounter died doesn't mean the DPS did a good job, as if there is no time limit on kills, a raid full of healers whacking at the thing will kill it - eventually.
As far as support goes, without a combat tracker, they are in an even worse position than DPS in terms of figuring out if they did a good job or not.
And as pointed out above, not only are these classes then unsure of how well they are doing, but actually attempting to discuss it with others would be seen as taboo if the TOS did state that Intrepid would ban players for using combat trackers.
Thus, even though players will have them, open discussion about DPS and support builds will be limited to guesses and theories, with no one able to provide actual proof of claims. People will be able to prove or disprove if a build is good, they just won't be able to talk about it.
Thus, new players wanting to find a build for their class will be stuck wading through the mountain of crap builds posted by idiots and/or trolls, see that no one has said that the builds are rubbish, and so make the obvious assumption that they must be good.
I don't see how anything good could come from removing the possibility of players engaging in objective, fact based discussion on classes and builds - and such discussion is only possible when hard facts are available without repercussion.
After someone ponies up $30 million and invests it in the game, they would probably have a say. But not until then.
Imagine you are in a group with an elitist dick like this.
They will claim to be the hero regardless of if they have data to back it up or not. If things go wrong, they will blame other players regardless of if they have data to back it up or not.
In the absence of actual data, claims made by players like this are far more likely to be believed than if that data were there for everyone to access.
Surely, the best thing for the other players in that group would be to have actual, objective data to either back up what that elitist is claiming, or - more likely - blatantly prove the opposite is correct.
If anything, this kind of player is an argument for why combat trackers should be available to all players, all the time - though that is not something I am advocating.
Maybe I should though...
The only prove or disprove of if a build is good should be if a player likes it, and the group, or that player solo, finds success. In the same way you can hit a roadblock in any game, you should be going with your group, "what isn't working. Are we missing a mechanic, is someone unsure of what we do know? Maybe we should come back with higher level gear. What in particular is killing our tank, or killing our group before our tank." or my personal favorite "guys i just got a crazy idea for a new strategy" I think that's what Steven was getting at when he described wanting people to puzzle it out, learn, and adapt.
Except that has not in been the case in any such situation i have ever been in, or have heard from other people irritated with a similar exchange. By giving that same ass some number he can tout as oh look i'm doing x nope, i have no fault, i'm top of the list, you just give him a standing point that much of the community of mmo's have just come to accept. regardless of his actual performance. I am in agreement with you that the meters can be a useful tool, especially in full guild raids and content, where you already have (hopefully) a good relationship with the others, open communication, synced up teamwork, and the knowledge you can always ask if you need guidance. This is not the reality for most.
And you know the best way to see if players that died did so because of standing in the fire, or if the tank didn't make use of their mitigation abilities correctly?
Combat trackers.
Without them, people will simply assume that if someone died, it was probably the healers fault. With them, players can look and see what killed the player. If the player that died was taking floor fire damage in the seconds leading up to their death and didn't get any heals, you can say "well done" to your healer for not healing the idiot while the idiot was doing the idiotic thing.
Without that objective data, there is a lot less you can do.
A proper combat tracker will tell you literally everything that happened in the encounter. If someone died from standing in the fire, it will tell you they died from standing in the fire. If the encounter was 5 minutes long, and 2:16 in to the encounter a healer cast a heal on the tank that only healed him for half it's potential HP due to that bringing the tank up to full HP, the combat tracker will tell you that the healer over healed. It will tell you every ability used by everyone in your raid, and it will tell you exactly when those abilities were used.
There is nothing at all left to hide behind if a good combat tracker is being used. There is no excuses for blaming the wrong person if a combat tracker is being used, and if there is no one to blame for a situation, a combat tracker is the only real way to conclusively be able to state that.
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Your comments about builds being good or not only applies to people that raid or group often. If you are a solo player that picked a build from the official game forum - and you were diligent to be sure there were no comments about how bad the build was, you would have every reason to assume the build is good. If you then have trouble in game, you would blame everything else other than your build, because you did all you feasibly could to ensure you had a viable build.
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In terms of puzzling it out, all of those things happen when a combat tracker is present.
EQ2 is a perfect example of this. Raids in that game were an actual puzzle before they become a test of players in game ability. You pull a new encounter a few times one night, get the logs, and then spend weeks going over it, looking at what it did, trying to find connections between mechanics, and then coming up with crazy ideas for how to beat it.
If that isn't what you seem to be saying you want, I don't know what is.
EQ2, by the way, is the game that Advanced Combat Tracker was originally made for (if you are unfamiliar, a google image search will likely give you an idea of the amount of data that program was able to give players). All of that puzzling was only possible because you could look at the data in a clear and understandable way.
Not having that data is like trying to solve a puzzle with the pieces upside down - sure, it's possible, but the people that made the puzzle would offer up a 50 piece puzzle as being equal to a 500 piece puzzle if they knew the 50 piece was being done upside down and wanted an equal challenge. It is also much less satisfying doing that smaller puzzle, even if it is the same level of challenge. Rather than being all of these seemingly unconnected pieces that you eventually put together in to a picture that may not always be as you thought it would look, with the upside down puzzle, you end up putting together pieces in a random haphazard way until things just fall in to place due to pure randomness.
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I was going to edit my previous post, with the following, but I'll add it here instead.
That elitist player, the one that thinks they are all that, there is a really easy way to counter them.
When I play MMO's, I often run PUG's on alts, looking for players that are good at their class and may want to move on to raiding. As such, I always run a combat tracker.
If I am in a group with one of those elitists, all I do is post my parse data in the group chat. These players then realize that they do not hold a monopoly on data in that group, and so they can't make claims as to what is and is not true.
They very quickly either shut up or disconnect.
100% agree
When I played lord of the rings online, we didn't have combat trackers or add-ons in general. To defeat bosses, clear dungeons or raids we had to communicate, work together (trail and error) and yes for some raids it took even the top raiding guilds weeks to months to clear them. This was a thrill for many players.
We tried some of the weirdest strategies you can think off to kill some bosses and had a laugh doing it. Even if we didn't clear a raid we were happy and cheery. This is what makes mmo's so great, we analyzed the strategy we used.
- played healer and lore master (CC class) all the time and never had issues with people blaming me (for real - as a joke yes
The only way we could know someone was good enough was:
- The persons gear
- traits (passive stat increases)
- Skill of the player + Class trait setup (passive increases to your skills)
DPS Meters for many players become an excuse or a tool for people to hide behind. They often become an obsession with people and yes also create conflict saw this happen plenty of times in guilds in other mmo's.
They often spend 1 min discussing the tactic and 9 minutes the dps numbers. The communication in a guild becomes that of a corporation , not a a video-game.
DPS meters are also there because of bad game design in my opinion, a lot of mmo's including wow and etc have made bosses just damage blobs which justifies a meter for many players.
What Ashes has hinted at is exactly to opposite; bosses are about strategy, tactic, trail and error and not a rage mode oooo we got to down him in under 2 minutes. I rather spent hours per week doing the same raid but learn while doing it then have people analyze a combat tracker. For me the communication and community aspect + trail and error is what makes MMO's so great something that many devs have forgotten in my opinion.
I personally feel that people expecting this game to be another WoW with a raiding community in a similar fashion are not fully aware of what this game is. looking at the 80% open world dungeons, raids, bosses and 20% instanced which include single player instances and story.
@noaani I have said it before, honestly you are the first pro-dps meter guy that is actually nice and reasonable and makes some really valid points
I am sure there will be a solution that will please everyone
If you ask most long term posters on these forums, they would (I hope) tell you that I do reply to reason with more reason. So if you consider my replies to you to be reasonable (or unreasonable) that is, in my opinion, a reflection on your own posts.
I feel it is worth pointing out that LotRO has had combat trackers since beta. They were less common until around 2012, but top end players had them. The ones developed back then are less useful now, as data is no longer shared between players (about the only thing developers can do to halt combat trackers). However, there are other trackers that work around this and so they still exist for that game.
What all that sound to me like though, is that you had a good experience in a game that had combat trackers. There is no reason all of that can't or won't be repeated in Ashes with combat trackers.
This is the difference between experiences in LotRO and other titles vs games like WoW and it's ilk (ilk is about the only word appropriate do describe the pollution of WoW-like clones that have been plaguing this genre for 10 years).
In a game like LotRO, your reputation matters. Your guildmates matter. Your alliances matter. Your friends list matters. Without these things, you don't participate in content.
In WoW, these things don't matter, you get to participate in group content simply by clicking a few buttons.
A combat tracker is not what cases the difference between these two games, because both games have them.
Ashes will be more like LotRO - except even further in that direction due to the PvP element in Ashes. People here will treat each other well, because they need each other.
A combat tracker will not change that.