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.
Meters, why say no?
DaddySaucy
Member
Now hear me out before you instantly start replying that i'm a toxic elitist who just wants to call others bad. This is an mmorpg. The dungeons are attuned for 8 players, and raids can go up to 40 players. You're saying that meters are toxic and shouldn't be desired at all. But how are you supposed to find the players that could be better helped to learn their class? Example: You're in a 40 man raid that your guild has been up against for about 3-4 weeks and you cant get any progress done on it. Something is wrong, and you cant figure it out. Lets say suddenly you had meters, and you can now see that a handful of your 40 players needed some guidance with their class. With no meters, this would be impossible to figure out. Without meters we're expected to bash our head against a brick wall for god knows how long until people start leaving or quitting the progression due to frustration. I believe the decision to not include meters because it "promotes a toxic elitist behavior" is unjustified and shouldn't be left to the decision of just a couple people. I find that meters can help improve the game by helping your group improve and grow together, which will in return help people enjoy the game to its fullest. If you don't add meters to the game itself, please consider making addons or plugins for meters a non-bannable offense at the very least.
2
Comments
Good guild leaders use DPS meters to help, teach, train members of their guilds to be better at their jobs. This is 100% absolutely true.
Shitty guild leaders use it as an exclusionary tool to remove "scrubs"
PUG raid leaders use it as an exclusionary tool to remove "scrubs"
Now, in all honesty which do you think is true:
The majority of people using DPS meters are using them for good reasons to help teach and train their guild members/raid members
or
The majority of people using DPS meters are using them to keep scrubs out of their raids
Now as far as
That's a mighty find opinion to have, but when one of the people who says no is the Creative Director who has kicked in $30,000,000 and the other is the Lead Game Designer, well those two aren't just a couple of people. They are THE people.
The question is: will they controll the meters or will they leave them uncontrolled?
Oh lord, ignoring the issue of everyone's opinion being equal (which has never been the case, nor will ever be the case), here is my problem with dps meters. On top of what @Jahlon said, the majority of people take data in the simplest form and often make irrational judgements from incomplete information. In the case of dps meters, when a raid wipes, a lot of players will look at the dps meter, see who has done the lowest dps and immediately conclude that the reason for the wipe is because of the low dps.
I have done progression raiding in a number of different mmorpgs and there have been very very few occasions where we have failed to kill a boss due to low dps. Most of the time a raid wipes because people fail at the fight mechanics, getting both themselves and their teammates killed. Yes having higher dps on a fight will help because it shortens the fight, but at the end of the day if you can't do the mechanics it doesn't matter how high your dps is, you will fail.
The thing about a simple dps meter is that it assumes everyone is equal, which is never the case. Different classes have different damage outputs based on a situation. If a boss fight requires constantly switching to different targets and bursting them down, a class with a long ramp-up time on its damage-output will inevitably do less overall damage than a class that has a lot of upfront burst.
Then of course on top of that you have the issue of RNG. It's quite common for raid fights to have debuffs that go onto random players, forcing them to stop dps'ing for a period of time. A player who is unlucky enough to get such a debuff lots of times is probably going to do less damage than a player who never gets the debuff.
With this in mind, you can't just look at a dps meter and immediately tell what the problem is. It's not that simple. Unfortunately most players who rely on dps meters don't understand this concept and start barking up the wrong tree because of it.
You are making 2 very wrong assumptions in that example:
1. That the raid fight is so tightly tuned that the only way to win is through higher dps output (as noted in my previous post, this is rarely the case)
2. That the reason why the Dragoon is doing less damage than the Dancer is because they "don't know how to play their class".
It's got nothing to do with dps meters being "demonised" but rather that the meters, for the most part, aren't necessary.
Now, your first reply to me was:
Its not a few people, and you aren't really looking for any discourse you are trying to advance an agenda. I asked a question in my post:
Do you really think its only a few people that are going to mess up? Really? You think there are more good guild leaders that are going to use DPS meters to help people figure out the builds and rotations?
No, they are going to be raid leaders who want to clear content. They aren't going to give a shit about helping people. They are doing it for themselves.
Now
Well, it works like this. If the creators of the game say you aren't going to have a DPS meter, you are going to have a DPS meter. The people making the game don't have a massive say, they have the ONLY say.
Finally
This is actually incorrect. Square Enix does not do active enforcement on the use of DPS meters, but if you kick someone from your raid/party and in game you say "Your DPS sucks, goodbye" or something to that extent, if the person files a ticket against you, you will in fact get banned.
SE allows people to use 3rd party DPS meters simply because they have no way to stop it, but they do enforce the bad behavior of people kicking new players out if they employ it.
I've used DPS meters, I've seen games like Revelation Online incorporate them into the game, but I'm not going to die if we don't have them in Ashes of Creation.
So how about we only put them in the hands of good guild leaders?
The way to do this is, as I have said in other threads (many of them, at this point), to make them a guild perk for reasonably high level guilds, but as one of several options that would only be taken by a guild that raids PvE often. And when chosen, that combat tracker (I do hate the term DPS meter, it is so one dimensional) only works on players in that guild.
Thus, the pug leader simply doesn't have access to a DPS meter, and even if they were in a guild that had one, it would only work on people in his raid that were also in the same guild.
Additionally, the shitty leader is unlikely to have one. Shitty guild leaders don't tend to stay in charge of guilds that raid PvE. Either the leader gets told to leave, or the players leave.
The good leader though, that person now has access to a tool that they can and will use to better the players in their guild, and potentially other players if they desire such help.
Now, you may disagree, but to me, if you have a thing that has good points and bad points to it, then you have to weight up whether those good points out weigh the bad.
However, if you are able to almost completely remove those bad points from the situation, without affecting the good points, then it should be a given that it is worth having under those circumstances.
Are you for real with this statement?
I literally made a better argument for them then you did. I spelled out the helpful use better than you did.
And, its always interesting when someone has lost an argument so they become flippant. Your horse thing is so ridiculous is almost not worth mentioning, except i will mention it because you basically just said
"I'm taking my ball and going home"
These are all good points, but I don't know many guilds that would want to give up a bonus or perk for a DPS meter, when, we all know there's no way to stop them anyway. They just won't be sanctioned.
As long as you aren't kicking people out of PUG raids and telling them in game they were kicked because of their DPS, there's no way to prove anything.
I believe that unless you are aiming for world firsts and are really undergeared for the raid (i.e. you're in the top 1% of players) you don't need a dps meter to beat the content you are aiming at.
Both have told me outright that they would rather Intrepid have control over what is and is not in a combat tracker for Ashes, as long as it meets the basics of what raiders want (note; it doesn't even need to be real time, getting information when an encounter is finished would be fine, successful or not).
Put in the ability for people to pick a meter in game instead of a crafting perk, or a PvP perk, and they won't even bother finishing the meters they are working on.
Others may, but I kind of doubt it. It is a lot of work to make one for a game that isn't designed to have one, and the only reason it is worth it is if the basic functionality isn't available any other way. If those basics are there, then it isn't worth the work required just to add in any additional features that may be desired.
And yeah, with the meters being developed, the only way anyone - including Intrepid - would know they are being used is if players using them outright state they are using them.
Even that is unlikely to be enough to ban a player though - just because I booted you and said your DPS is too low, doesn't mean I am using a meter. I may have just seen you standing in a corner not casting for 30 seconds during an encounter.
Have you got a quote for that?
The following is the only quote I have found direct from Intrepid
That is all I can find. This was three years ago, and so it safe to say that it would not be fair to hold them to that, in either direction.
Nothing in that says anything about a built in combat tracker. If anything, it would support it, as that is the best way to ensure there is no situation where a player has a mod that allows them to play the game on a different level.
Now, if you can find a specific quote that says anything else, I am absolutely more than keen to be pointed towards it. I mean, I may have managed to not find it, and I am all about having as accurate info as is possible.
However, in all the discussions on this topic on these forums, the above is the only discussion I can find from Intrepid.
So you're using the game that incorporated DBM, and Threat Meters, and dps meters in response to calls that the raiding scene needed them, as an example of a failed raiding scene? Also how well did it work out for wow? Because last i checked even as the shadow of it's former self, it's still the largest mmorpg currently in existence.
Then you will have plenty of other games to play as we keep playing Ashes.
Steven today pretty much said no DPS meters
They've said it a number of times on a number of occasions
They've specifically said they won't be including the API hooks for DPS meters
https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/42183/library-livestream-discord-qna-transcriptions It's not on there yet but I'm sure @Shaze will update it very soon.
So, I just went and watched it.
Basically, this is what I got from the whole thing.
Steven doesn't like combat trackers, and so the game won't have them. Cool, I've said many times that I want them to develop the game that they want to develop. It isn't how I would personally want them to do it, but I would rather they do it how they want than how I want.
Next, Steven sees constant repetition of the same single encounter in an attempt to get a kill as being valid end game content, and that players wanting to play end game content in Ashes should be ok with that. I think he will find that end game players disagree with him here. End game players will have a limit on how much time they are willing to put in to a single encounter. I may be wrong, but I doubt it.
We are likely to never know though, due to the next part.
When he said that he would prefer players learning curve be based on experience rather than a data table, but then says you can take that experience and convert it to a data table, well, that is what third party combat trackers do.
It may not have been intentional, but to me, this is tantamount to admitting that third party combat trackers are likely to exist in some form. Since a number of his statements are referencing things I have directly bought up on these forums (even if he disagrees with me), that would suggest he is also aware that there are indeed combat trackers being developed for the game already.
Now, others may well have taken something different to that away from what was said, but that is what I got.
Edit; so what this means is that we will end up with the same situation as every other game - where third party tools become essential for competitive play. Those tools may not be on par with the likes to DBM - due purely to not having API support - but they will exist, and players with them will have an absolute edge over players without them in both PvE and PvP content.
I'm fairly sure this is the eventuality that literally no one wanted.
A third party program policy is only as good as the detection put in place.
Detection can only work on the PC that the client is running on, and both of the combat trackers I know of work on other devices. Thus, policy is completely irrelevant. One could argue that is why Margret was interrupted - no point bringing up an irrelevant point, and Steven would know for sure that it is indeed irrelevant.
Players will happily fight the same encounter once a week for several months, for sure. Even spending several nights worth of attempts figuring out an encounter is enjoyable, if the difficulty of the encounter is designed in a good way.
What they won't do is bang their head against an encounter dozens of times in a pure trial and error situation.
If a change is made to what the raid does, there should be a way to quantify the effects of that change. Without a combat tracker, a raid could make a change to how they do things, but some other aspect of the encounter may then cause a situation that the players in the raid attribute to being caused by what they did differently. This could well be compounded by the fact that some aspects of encounters in Ashes will change from session to session - not only are you now unaware of if a new aspect of an encounter is in response to what you did differently or not, but you are unsure of if that aspect of the encounter will even be there still next week.
The combination of things turns raiding in to a roll of the dice as much as a case of efficient problem solving.
Raiders are all for puzzles and trying to solve them, and trial and error is indeed a part of that. However, Intrepid seem content with offering that up as the only available option should players wish to follow the TOS.
That won't fly.