This is interesting. It suggests to me that this is really just a debate between two kinds of player enjoyment. There are those who just want to play the game and learn by doing (aka trial and error), who rely mostly on their experience and practiced skills. And there are those who prefer to take a more meticulous/tedious approach, by planning and analyzing their gameplay with the help of data and graphs.
I don't think either way is better than the other. (I've enjoyed both playstyles myself, in different games/contexts.) But there is obviously friction when one type of player imposes their playstyle on others.
I've already made it clear that I hold a pro-combat tracker bias, so I think you could see where this is going: If both playstyles are equally valid, then why are people villainizing, and pushing for bans of, the number-crunching playstyle? To me, this is evidence that toxicity runs both ways. There are assholes inconsiderate people on both sides.
DPS meters aren't causing the problems, they just offer a clear marker between two playstyles (planning & analysis vs. practice & experience). It's just as easy to harass someone for poor DPS on a meter, as it is to harass someone for not moving quickly enough or using certain skills. Similarly, all of those can be valid criticisms (in the right context and using polite language). The only difference is that one of them uses data/numbers and the others use basic observations. So what's the point of banning the data/numbers, while the other type of criticism/harassment is left alone?
Toxicity comes from people, and how people talk to each other. Data/numbers are not the source of it.
So can we please stop with the tribal warfare and just let people play however they like, as long as they aren't pushing that playstyle on everyone else?
It is definitely a perspective issue. Between the Meta, min maxing, number crunching analytical, and the more subjective how a class feels. While the meters don't cause the problems per say, they are a useful tool. Which means you become expected to have them if they are more or less accepted. So already, people can't play the way they want to.
I've truly come to hate outside game resources like IcyVeins, and similar sites, parsing, and the majority of meters. I feel like they have contributed to the cookie cutter, everyone using the same specs/talents/gear because that's what they read online. To be fair though, maybe all those resources did was display bad balance work, in allowing one particular combination of things to be best in most situations.
I don't think there's really any way that anyone will convince someone on the differing perspective on this subject to change their minds. It's just too baked in by personal experiences at this point.
But with a combat tracker, you can just blame whoever is at the bottom of the DPS list (even if DPS wasn't the real problem). The fact that this is easier than every other problem-solving tactic makes it tempting and prone to abuse.
Although I do generally agree with the rest of your post, I take issue with the above. No decent raid lead is going to pick out the lowest dps and arbitrarily decide that is going to be worth scolding, when the vast majority of raids wipe due to mechanics.
Anyone with a lick of sense would use combat logs to find the person who keeps hitting the add that enrages when it takes too much damage. Or they’ll see the person they assigned to hit some switch or lever or something has been using it too late and that mechanics is wiping the group. Or they’ll see someone isn’t using a threat reduction ability and keeps dragging the boss away from the tank. Or they’ll notice the support hasn’t been using their cc on priority mobs so those enemies have been bashing away at the tank instead.
Usually when you’re having troubles with a dps race, it’s the raid overall that’s struggling to hit the needed numbers. If someone’s severely underperforming, then yeah they’ll probably have to be subbed out in order to clear the content, but I’m hoping pure dps races are the exception in Ashes.
My first point is that data tracking as a means for balance assessment is ultimately null as a reason. Development teams will inevitable disregard any data presented by players, and test the details themselves. Player feedback need not include "objective data", a simple "hey, this ability seems a bit weak and useless compared to it's cost and cast time" should be enough information for the team to reevaluate it.
I've seen it happen a good number of times.
Developers won't just take a random players word that something is right or wrong, this is correct. This is akin to a situation in another thread where a poster said they wouldn't give money to any game developer that wouldn't listen to them, and my reply was that game developers shouldn't listen to players.
I stand by that here. Game developers shouldn't listen to players.
They should, however, listen to numbers.
If a player is posting numbers, and doing so in an accurate, appropriate and objective manner, game developers should (and most do) listen. Not to the player, but to the numbers.
It is worth pointing out here that the average thread in the public section of a games forum is also not where developers will get much useful information from. The signal to noise ratio makes it near impossible to get useful information out of that kind of situation. Sectioned off areas of game forums though, the threads on the important topics here may manage to get all the way to 12 posts. Needless to say, it is basically all signal and no noise.
Even when developers do listen to numbers from players though, they don't act on that directly. The appropriate thing for them to if they see that what the numbers are saying could be an issue is to check those numbers themselves. It is only if their own check then turns out similar results that they should act on the issue.
Thing is, us players will always have more time to go through the games combat than any game developer ever will. We will always be able to find the small details that aren't working as intended (or even ones that aren't working as the developers thought they were). I've seen it in a number of games, and used combat trackers personally to point out issues with combat systems to developers personally.
Secondly, Archage cannot be verified as having little to no data tracker usage simply by searching for the number of data trackers made. If a GOOD data tracker is made, there is no need to make another or attempt to improve on the first.
That isn't the reason I suggested you google it.
If you google a DPS meter for WoW, the first link takes you to one.
If you google a combat tracker for EQ2, FFXIV, Conan or almost any other game, there will be one in the first or second result.
If you google a combat tracker or DPS meter for Archeage, you get a bunch of links to discussions on the games forums, a bunch of links to discussions on reddit, and then a bunch of links to DPS meters for other games.
What you don't get when you google either DPS meter or combat tracker for Archeage, is a link to a DPS meter or a combat tracker for Archeage.
While this isn't purely objective data, the simple fact that googling a term that would result in a combat tracker in any other game turns up nothing more than discussions when specifying Archeage says that combat trackers in that game are significantly less used.
Again, not purely objective data, but that simple google search paints a fairly vivid picture of the combat tracker use in that game.
And yes, the lack of usage of combat trackers in that game in relation to the general toxicity of the community are absolutely relevant. You can attempt to blame anything at all you want for the toxicity in that game, and in WoW, but the simple fact that these two games are at the opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of combat tracker use, yet are at the same end of the spectrum in terms of toxicity means there is absolutely no relation between the two.
Any method that allows for easy judgement of player performance is going to encourage a toxic environment.
Players that judge others, will judge others.
If not a combat tracker, they will judge on build. If not build, they will judge on class. If not class, they will judge on gear. If not gear, they will judge on character position.
In order to make a game where players can't judge each other, you would need to make a game where players can't see each other.
My argument here though, is that if players are being judged purely by the output of a combat tracker (which is not what I am advocating, exactly), then at least these players have the ability to objectively prove those that would judge them to be incorrect - assuming they are indeed incorrect.
None of the other things that a player would judge another for (if that first player were indeed the kind to judge) allows the player being judged the opportunity to prove themselves. in order to prove someone wrong, you need objective data - and a combat tracker is the only way to provide that.
Ultimately, the arguments FOR data trackers are similar to the arguments for gun control. They ignore the negatives rather than address them, or attempt to point out that those negatives will exist whether or not the control is in place. This is a very very silly argument.
My game play should not be dictated by some nerd with a calculator and a 3rd party program. That eliminates my personal agency and reduces me to following a cookie cutter build that some OTHER nerd will inevitably claim to have come up with. And that would be my personal objection to data trackers as a concept.
Actually, I addressed those negatives, many times now.
Build combat trackers in to the game, make them available as a guild perk, but make that perk one that is an option that only a PvE raiding guild would opt for, where as any other guild type would have something more suited to their play style.
Then you have a situation where a combat tracker only tracks players within your guild, so effectively every player that is able to have their combat logged by a tracker has opted in to such by joining a guild with a combat tracker.
This then allows those players to analyze the classes, post their findings and know full well that peer review will still happen on those findings. This means that those without access to combat trackers will still be able to get the same advantage from them that they get in every other game, it means the developers will still be able to get objective data from players when the situation arises that this is warranted, and it means that those not wanting to deal with combat trackers simply don't have to even think about them.
I am failing to see where I have not addressed the negatives here - feel free to inform me though.
This is interesting. It suggests to me that this is really just a debate between two kinds of player enjoyment. There are those who just want to play the game and learn by doing (aka trial and error), who rely mostly on their experience and practiced skills. And there are those who prefer to take a more meticulous/tedious approach, by planning and analyzing their gameplay with the help of data and graphs.
I don't think either way is better than the other. (I've enjoyed both playstyles myself, in different games/contexts.) But there is obviously friction when one type of player imposes their playstyle on others.
I've already made it clear that I hold a pro-combat tracker bias, so I think you could see where this is going: If both playstyles are equally valid, then why are people villainizing, and pushing for bans of, the number-crunching playstyle? To me, this is evidence that toxicity runs both ways. There are assholes inconsiderate people on both sides.
DPS meters aren't causing the problems, they just offer a clear marker between two playstyles (planning & analysis vs. practice & experience). It's just as easy to harass someone for poor DPS on a meter, as it is to harass someone for not moving quickly enough or using certain skills. Similarly, all of those can be valid criticisms (in the right context and using polite language). The only difference is that one of them uses data/numbers and the others use basic observations. So what's the point of banning the data/numbers, while the other type of criticism/harassment is left alone?
Toxicity comes from people, and how people talk to each other. Data/numbers are not the source of it.
So can we please stop with the tribal warfare and just let people play however they like, as long as they aren't pushing that playstyle on everyone else?
It is definitely a perspective issue. Between the Meta, min maxing, number crunching analytical, and the more subjective how a class feels. While the meters don't cause the problems per say, they are a useful tool. Which means you become expected to have them if they are more or less accepted. So already, people can't play the way they want to.
I've truly come to hate outside game resources like IcyVeins, and similar sites, parsing, and the majority of meters. I feel like they have contributed to the cookie cutter, everyone using the same specs/talents/gear because that's what they read online. To be fair though, maybe all those resources did was display bad balance work, in allowing one particular combination of things to be best in most situations.
I don't think there's really any way that anyone will convince someone on the differing perspective on this subject to change their minds. It's just too baked in by personal experiences at this point.
I also hate it when a game only has a few viable builds.
However, one need look no further than Archeage (again) to see that there is no need for a combat tracker to be used in order for players to stick to cookie cutter builds. Players will always post builds that they think are good, and the vast majority of players simply don't want to put the time in to the game to come up with their own build - especially since that means there is likely to be time when they are less effective.
If you have a complete objective data set, there will always be a single best. However, if a game is well designed, that single best would be based on things that could change. The best build for a given class should be different depending on whether the player has a specific support class to buff them or not, or be different if the player has a specific class defining item or not.
When you start having arbitrary things like this determine what is and is not the best build, you start to see players running builds that are on a scale between the extreme points. A player that has that support class half the time may go for a build that is right between the best build for if they have that support and the best build for if they don't have it - or they may go slightly closer to one specific end of that scale as they see fit.
Any game in which there is a single "this is the build for this class", and there are no asterisks associated with that have problems. Those problems are not combat trackers, combat trackers were just used to expose those problems - and to me, that is something we should all be thankful of.
I would much rather see a system like WoW's "Advanced Combat Logging" that exports a log file instead of an in game interface panel tracking combat in real time. This would, for the most part remove the toxic environment during a raid encounter while still allowing guilds and raid teams to perform a postmortem after the raid to help improve and progress over time.
This is what most people mean when they talk about a combat tracker. DPS meters are useful features of target dummies, in a raid setting they no longer accurately reflect an individual’s skill level due to the introduction of mechanics that disrupt damage dealing opportunities.
Are you saying that skill level is not tied to following mechanics in a raid? This enforces the idea that DPS is the most important thing, which is not
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NagashMember, Leader of Men, Kickstarter, Alpha One
Does anyone else find it odd that we have two DPS meter threads?
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I would much rather see a system like WoW's "Advanced Combat Logging" that exports a log file instead of an in game interface panel tracking combat in real time. This would, for the most part remove the toxic environment during a raid encounter while still allowing guilds and raid teams to perform a postmortem after the raid to help improve and progress over time.
This is what most people mean when they talk about a combat tracker. DPS meters are useful features of target dummies, in a raid setting they no longer accurately reflect an individual’s skill level due to the introduction of mechanics that disrupt damage dealing opportunities.
Are you saying that skill level is not tied to following mechanics in a raid? This enforces the idea that DPS is the most important thing, which is not
e.e
To be be perfectly honest I have absolutely no clue how you read “dps meters stop being reflections of skill when in a raid setting” and got “dps is the most important thing”
Hey all, this is Kihra. I am the creator of multiple log sites for World of Warcraft, FFXIV, Elder Scrolls Online, etc. I'm fully prepared to support Ashes of Creation should a log file be made available. If there are projects that plan to try to produce a log file, I can take that log file and feed it into my engine.
Hey all, this is Kihra. I am the creator of multiple log sites for World of Warcraft, FFXIV, Elder Scrolls Online, etc. I'm fully prepared to support Ashes of Creation should a log file be made available. If there are projects that plan to try to produce a log file, I can take that log file and feed it into my engine.
I'll pass this on to the two people I know working on them. Not sure if they plan on generating a log file or not, but I'm sure they will be in contact if/when they have something usable
I'm just glad this topic continues to get brought up.
I personally view combat trackers as essential IF a game wants to feature tight high end encounters were you want to feel like you had to do nearly everything humanly possible to reach that mountain peak. In any other case it's a really useful tool.
If I don't have an objective feedback that can tell me that switching out fireball for ice shard halves my damage for the entire encounter I will never even realize that the synergy of some skill/buff/gear stat/non-disclosed enemy vulnerability/(...) actually made that much difference.
I'm studying math and slogging through the amount of data that goes through a single encounter is not something you can expect of an average person to draw an objective conclusion from. Especially since you have to do it a lot just to get a good grasp on averages. This is not a skill you develop for the game, this is a consciously placed barrier to obscure game systems.
I subscribe to the opinion that combat trackers help from a players perspective as well as a developers perspective.
If there are broken builds (under performing as well as over performing) it comes to light faster and can be fixed easier since the whole context is there why and when it is out of bounds.
The more complex the base is the more ridiculous it is to find those issues. WoW is a standing example of this. Overlooking synergies and outcomes. Molten core Living bomb pets somehow went on to develop into the zul'gurub blood plague even tho it has the same premise. It was overlooked twice.
Indalamar we trust. If you know, you know.
My point is Development is hard and not having to wait on a player making a video on it to showcase how botched it got is a positive in my opinion. It's a beneficial back and forth between players and developing balance.
Those are huge examples but it can be way more subtle. Having a 30% advantage is huge but with crit as a stat alone it could always just be considered bad luck on the reciever's end. With the immense diversity IS claims to aim for it will be a nightmare to compare what runs well and what is just out of bounds of intended design.
Well this turned into more than I intended so too round it off I will address only THE one claimed negative aspect that keeps getting brought up against combat trackers.
Getting kicked because you under perform according to the dps tracker.
If you really think, that a person that instant kicks you because you didn't do well just once, won't do the same thing because you were the first one to die then I have some bad news for you.
He will. You have them in WoW as well as in Tera as well as in any other game in existence ever.
Have you heard of LoL and it'S community? I am yet to see a combat tracker there. "You died twice you are absolute and utter garbage and ruin the game!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
It's called a shitty human being. They exist regardless of tools available.
Also, it works both ways, if I can find out early that the people I tried to group with are that sort, I can avoid them faster. Not using it as a tool to improve and offer criticism to someone but instead as an excuse to blame is an easy enough red flag to avoid. If you are salty about not being able to play with that sort of people well... right? I don't really see the issue here.
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I can be a life devouring nightmare. - Grisu#1819
I'm just glad this topic continues to get brought up.
I personally view combat trackers as essential IF a game wants to feature tight high end encounters were you want to feel like you had to do nearly everything humanly possible to reach that mountain peak. In any other case it's a really useful tool.
If I don't have an objective feedback that can tell me that switching out fireball for ice shard halves my damage for the entire encounter I will never even realize that the synergy of some skill/buff/gear stat/non-disclosed enemy vulnerability/(...) actually made that much difference.
I'm studying math and slogging through the amount of data that goes through a single encounter is not something you can expect of an average person to draw an objective conclusion from. Especially since you have to do it a lot just to get a good grasp on averages. This is not a skill you develop for the game, this is a consciously placed barrier to obscure game systems.
I subscribe to the opinion that combat trackers help from a players perspective as well as a developers perspective.
If there are broken builds (under performing as well as over performing) it comes to light faster and can be fixed easier since the whole context is there why and when it is out of bounds.
The more complex the base is the more ridiculous it is to find those issues. WoW is a standing example of this. Overlooking synergies and outcomes. Molten core Living bomb pets somehow went on to develop into the zul'gurub blood plague even tho it has the same premise. It was overlooked twice.
Indalamar we trust. If you know, you know.
My point is Development is hard and not having to wait on a player making a video on it to showcase how botched it got is a positive in my opinion. It's a beneficial back and forth between players and developing balance.
Those are huge examples but it can be way more subtle. Having a 30% advantage is huge but with crit as a stat alone it could always just be considered bad luck on the reciever's end. With the immense diversity IS claims to aim for it will be a nightmare to compare what runs well and what is just out of bounds of intended design.
Well this turned into more than I intended so too round it off I will address only THE one claimed negative aspect that keeps getting brought up against combat trackers.
Getting kicked because you under perform according to the dps tracker.
If you really think, that a person that instant kicks you because you didn't do well just once, won't do the same thing because you were the first one to die then I have some bad news for you.
He will. You have them in WoW as well as in Tera as well as in any other game in existence ever.
Have you heard of LoL and it'S community? I am yet to see a combat tracker there. "You died twice you are absolute and utter garbage and ruin the game!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
It's called a shitty human being. They exist regardless of tools available.
Also, it works both ways, if I can find out early that the people I tried to group with are that sort, I can avoid them faster. Not using it as a tool to improve and offer criticism to someone but instead as an excuse to blame is an easy enough red flag to avoid. If you are salty about not being able to play with that sort of people well... right? I don't really see the issue here.
There are a number of points in this post that are things I've been trying to say, but have been unable to put in to words quite as well as this.
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I have said in previous threads that combat trackers allow content to be much harder, more precisely designed than it can be in games where there is no expectation of combat tracker use.
Stevens response to that was that he wants players in top end raid guilds to progress on content via trial and error.
This leads me to believe he has never taken part in top end PvE raid content in an MMORPG. Trial and error exists in all top end PvE content any time the game developers don't simply give the answer to the encounter directly to player base.
In games like WoW, by the time the content hits the live servers, the strategy for the encounter is already well known. This kills off any trial and error.
In almost all other games, a new encounter hits the live servers with players having no idea at all how to tackle it. Players spend days taking the encounter on, figuring out what it does and then working out a strategy to kill it. Literally the definition of trial and error.
The thing is, if these encounters are actually difficult, the results from your trials are so small that you only ever even notice the difference via searching combat trackers.
If encounters are going to be made so that a tweak to a strategy can be seen without a combat tracker, then the encounter itself is not going to be all that hard.
So not having a combat tracker either means we have encounters that don't require a specific, detailed strategy, or we will have content that requires such a detailed strategy, in which case players will literally just luck their way in to getting the right strategy as there is no real indication as to whether we are on the right track or not with each minor change we make to how we do things.
I mean, the key thing with trial and error is that if you get a thing right, you need feedback to that effect. If the feedback is able to be noticed without a combat tracker, then that feedback would need to be tenfold larger than it would need to be without a combat tracker.
Again, the notion of players using pure trial and error in end game PvE sounds to me like it came from someone that has never participated in PvE content at the top end.
This is probably why Jeff Bard seems somewhat keen on combat trackers.
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Another major point I have tried to mention that you've bought up here is that not having a combat tracker in a game is like trying to pull a blanket over the games combat systems.
It is literally hiding the internal workings from players, leaving us to assume thing work the way we assume they should work - with no way to check if either our assumption as to how things work is accurate, nor any way to check if things then do work as we assume they should work (both distinct different things that could be wrong).
Players having the ability to show developers when (not if, but when) they get things wrong without having to either post a video of a major exploit in action or cause server wide (or indeed game wide) disruption in order to get the developers attention is unarguably and objectively a good thing. Combat trackers are not a silver bullet in this cause, but are by far the single most useful tool to aid in this objective.
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The other thing I have been saying for many years is that yes, players that kick people don't need a combat tracker to do that. My argument that these players will kick others out based on either objective or subjective data was met with people suggesting removing all subjective data from the situation, as well as all objective data. They seemed to not understand that subjective data in this situation includes class, build, gear, character position and - as you pointed out above - death.
You could remove all ability for players to see what class you have, what build, what abilities you use, what gear you have, but as soon as you get in to combat, if you are standing in the wrong place, or if you are the first to die, you will be kicked. Chances are, if all of that information was removed from players, the instances of kicking others would become more prevalent, not less. It would become the norm to boot the first player to die in any group, as you are being literally starved of any other information to make any actual decisions with. I mean, if I am in a situation where I have no other information at my disposal, I'd probably start booting the first player to die in any groups I am running - and in 20 years of playing MMO's I have booted exactly one player with combat trackers running.
To me, the notion that removing all objective and subjective data from players will see fewer players booted from groups is comical. It's not just wrong, it's comically wrong. It's so far from the truth that it's like the Mr. Bean of wrong suggestions.
The logical thing to then do is to bring back all of that subjective data - class, ability use feedback, gear etc. When you do that, you are back at the point where we started which is that adding the objective data from a combat tracker back in to that equation is not going to make any change to the person that would kick someone from their group.
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MeowsedMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
edited May 2020
Eh, I was gonna make another bullshit rant about helping PUGs and player behavior and other lofty nonsense. Deleted it. Instead I'm just gonna say, that if Intrepid doesn't want combat trackers to be used, then they better make sure that the feedback for every mechanic is crystal clear.
If a certain mechanic keeps killing Brad the bard, and I'm not watching everything Brad is doing, and I ask Brad "What's the problem?", and he says "I have no clue. On my screen it looks like I'm safe. I don't even know what hit me."... Then the game is not a good game for "trial-and-error" learning. If we keep running trials, and getting lots of errors, but the errors aren't visually or audibly obvious, that is a problem with the game. And I'm going to fix it with a combat tracker to make errors obvious.
If I have to run a 10-minute fight five times, just to figure out who is dying to what (not how to solve the mechanic, literally just figuring out what mechanic is killing people), that's a tedious waste of my time. Instead, I'm just going to spend 5 minutes installing a combat tracker, 5 minutes figuring out how it works, 10 minutes running the fight a SINGLE time, and 5 minutes looking through the logs to find out what each player died to.
If this is a common occurrence in the game, then lucky me, I've already got the combat tracker set up, and I'm going to use it all the time. Hopefully I'm allowed to discuss the output of that combat tracker in-game, so that I can help other people figure out the awful encounter/visual design.
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Of course, we don't know if AoC will be like that. I've seen it in other games, though, so it's a significant possibility. My point is, if Intrepid doesn't want people relying on or abusing combat trackers, then the game needs to give enough feedback that I can figure it out, on it's own. If combat trackers save me half the time I would otherwise be wallowing in confusion, then it's a pretty easy choice to pick one up.
I suppose a screen-recorder would help in a similar way (showing mechanics we've seen already, without having to do the whole fight over again). But I'd rather comb through definitive logs, than comb through a video which might not even show what I'm looking for. Plus video recording takes more processing and storage resources than a combat tracker. Or I can use both to get different perspectives.
So not having a combat tracker either means we have encounters that don't require a specific, detailed strategy, or we will have content that requires such a detailed strategy, in which case players will literally just luck their way in to getting the right strategy as there is no real indication as to whether we are on the right track or not with each minor change we make to how we do things.
I mean, the key thing with trial and error is that if you get a thing right, you need feedback to that effect. If the feedback is able to be noticed without a combat tracker, then that feedback would need to be tenfold larger than it would need to be without a combat tracker.
Again, the notion of players using pure trial and error in end game PvE sounds to me like it came from someone that has never participated in PvE content at the top end.
Having or not having a combat tracker does not inherently mean either of these things. The boss literally has a shiny red bar somewhere that tells you how well you did. If the boss goes to 80% on attempt one, then on attempt 2 it's at 60% you've made progress, and whatever you did is working. Maybe now there is a boss transition. Maybe a group of adds is now coming in that needs to be put into your strategy.
The encounter needs only to give you what cues you need for transitions abilities, or changes to the environment. So i don't know where you get feedback needing to be 10x larger. Did the boss roar and say come my minions? There are probably adds on the way. Is the boss immune, or shielded by something that isn't reacting to damage? There's a mechanic around you you need to use, or an ability on the boss you need to see. Fire on the floor, graphics before dangers are actually present, boss interaction, and small scale versions of the boss fight in previous lesser mobs are all perfectly acceptable conveyors of vital information, and in a much more organic fashion.
I don't know of a single other genre we also feel the need for parses, meters, or trackers. Regardless of PvP or PvE. You are given the abilities, what they do, and you are given your enemies cues. If an ability is not working, i do not need an outside system to tell me the ability that says, stun for 3 seconds and does x damage, is not doing one of those things. Nor do i need it to communicate this to the devs, especially if it is a systemic problem.
Because every other genre is extremely limited and curated by what ressources you get to takle said encounter with.
An FPS doesn't need parsers. You need to hit the enemy with whatever weapon you have. Whoever hits better wins. You can increase the difficulty of being able to hit by picking a different weapon and get more damage in return for the glorious oneshots, but nothing in any of this has additional factors in it.
There are no random crits, no damageboosting abilities, no attackspeed increases, no offstats, no elemental vulnerabilities, no crossclass synergy, no ability procs, no shortbuff boosts, no item effects, no potions for whatever it gives. Nothing whatsoever.
Pick a weapon, learn it, improve. That's the most basic loop after that obviously comes strategy of positioning and depending on the fps objective movement patterns, level design and so on.
I'm not going through all genres to make this point.
An MMO PvE encounter hinges on a group of players stats and skill vs the Encounters stats and script.
What you are describing is a fallacy in an mmo. Moving from 80% to 60% in itself isn't yet improvement because every boss has to have a limiting factor. Wether it's time or strain on your healer/tank survivability.
So going to 80% with an average of half your healers mana but going to 60% with no mana whatsoever or the boss going into a rage means you didn't improve squat.
Going from 80% with half mana to 80% with 75% mana THAT is improvement.
If it was as straight forward as you said then you can cheese every encounter in existence. Take more tanks and more healers and just out-sponge the enemy...which isn't exciting or engaging at all. That's basically the whole of Cataclysm in a nutshell. It was a weaksauce boring shitfeast compared to the tight encounters that Burning crusade and Wrath offered, for the most part. Only thing that changed was Actiblizzards philosophy of making it more casual focused.
And WoW had a huge community behind it that cranked those numbers hard over thousands of cummulative hours of running those parsers and theoretical outputs giving us the results showing us how no matter how well and good you play as a(example given) beastmaster, you will always fall 30% short of a half decent Marksman in this patch rotation cause Blizzard just can't fine tune it at times further. Having 5 Beastmasters could spell doom for your raid since you will never get those last 10% off the boss and that's still with relatively limited ressources to fuck around in your class and gear build.
If we hadn't had that, you would have a very wide array of experiences from horrifyingly impossible boss encounters because the group took those 5 beastmasters in and never coming closer to the kill and no possible gear upgrades left and no way of knowing why it wont move forward even tho noone dies any noone has any idle time.
To the groups that just happen to have the strong combinations and breeze trough it without feeling any challenge at all.
Beating a bosses ragetimer by 5 seconds vs beating it by 5 minutes is a very very different feel of accomplishment and difficulty. If it's supposed to be hard, you need a curated encounter to a targeted skill/gear curve.
Intrepid wants to go way beyond what WoW offered in diversity. I would like them to prove me wrong, but fact is, balance is really really hard with even a 10th of the variable Ashes wants to have.
Edit: GW2 is a closer example of what IS wants to do and they failed horrible as well(I played it until close to the first expansion arrived, I dropped it at that point so I talk about that period of time). There is no game in existence that is on the heavier rpg side that is also balanced through and through. There is a reason why GW2 had very prominent Class tier list. On paper a thief oneshots cloth wielders with dual daggers, so you can't really buff it outright or anything that would buff that, but anything else is too tanky for them. Switching weapons that underperform compared to dual dagger doesn't help either and when they are more skirmish style when you have the lowest hp pool at the same time without offering compensation. Congratz you developed yourself into a pigeon hold. . Better just play S-Tier classes like Warriors or Mesmers, they just autoattack you to death. Oh all the stat combinations that literally noone uses.
Balance is hard and unforgiving.
I can be a life fulfilling dream. - Zekece
I can be a life devouring nightmare. - Grisu#1819
My first point is that data tracking as a means for balance assessment is ultimately null as a reason. Development teams will inevitable disregard any data presented by players, and test the details themselves. Player feedback need not include "objective data", a simple "hey, this ability seems a bit weak and useless compared to it's cost and cast time" should be enough information for the team to reevaluate it.
I've seen it happen a good number of times.
Developers won't just take a random players word that something is right or wrong, this is correct. This is akin to a situation in another thread where a poster said they wouldn't give money to any game developer that wouldn't listen to them, and my reply was that game developers shouldn't listen to players.
I stand by that here. Game developers shouldn't listen to players.
They should, however, listen to numbers.
If a player is posting numbers, and doing so in an accurate, appropriate and objective manner, game developers should (and most do) listen. Not to the player, but to the numbers.
It is worth pointing out here that the average thread in the public section of a games forum is also not where developers will get much useful information from. The signal to noise ratio makes it near impossible to get useful information out of that kind of situation. Sectioned off areas of game forums though, the threads on the important topics here may manage to get all the way to 12 posts. Needless to say, it is basically all signal and no noise.
Even when developers do listen to numbers from players though, they don't act on that directly. The appropriate thing for them to if they see that what the numbers are saying could be an issue is to check those numbers themselves. It is only if their own check then turns out similar results that they should act on the issue.
Thing is, us players will always have more time to go through the games combat than any game developer ever will. We will always be able to find the small details that aren't working as intended (or even ones that aren't working as the developers thought they were). I've seen it in a number of games, and used combat trackers personally to point out issues with combat systems to developers personally.
There's still no difference. Both "hey this feels off" and "hey, I'm doing X per second with this ability against this mob with these stats" will typically result in the same disregard for the player's post and possibly internal testing.
What these posts typically do is incite arguments and disagreements. Data tracking only makes all of it messier. It absolutely does not help the development team at all.
Secondly, Archage cannot be verified as having little to no data tracker usage simply by searching for the number of data trackers made. If a GOOD data tracker is made, there is no need to make another or attempt to improve on the first.
That isn't the reason I suggested you google it.
If you google a DPS meter for WoW, the first link takes you to one.
If you google a combat tracker for EQ2, FFXIV, Conan or almost any other game, there will be one in the first or second result.
I did this, and found out why there are no trackers for Archeage.
Apparently SOMEONE said: "Archeage doesn't create log files, which are used by DPS/healing parsers as their source of information. Without log files, all you can do is use the combat chat window, which I imagine would be far too resource intensive to run. If Archeage had log files, Advanced Combat Tracker would have had a plugin for this game in early alpha.
As far as I know there are no parsers that are even remotely successful with this game."
Anyway, there are still issues with this argument. First off, there's no such thing as "half objective" statements. A thing is either there and verifiable, or it is not. Secondly, correlation does not equal causation, meaning Archeage's apparent lack of data tracking is not proof that data tracking does not contribute to or is involved with community toxicity.
City of Heroes did not allow 3rd party programs, and the only data trackers I found simply read the combat data on the chat screen and interpreted it for you. It didn't allow you to monitor other player's damage output, for example.
And City of Heroes had a relatively great community, from what I remember. So there's your far end of the spectrum with a more positive community and no tracker.
So, aside from one cherry picked game as an example, how is this argument actually proof of anything?
Any method that allows for easy judgement of player performance is going to encourage a toxic environment.
Players that judge others, will judge others.
If not a combat tracker, they will judge on build. If not build, they will judge on class. If not class, they will judge on gear. If not gear, they will judge on character position.
In order to make a game where players can't judge each other, you would need to make a game where players can't see each other.
I'm well aware of what and how judgy people judge. I am one. However, data trackers make these things easier. As I said, it's awfully hard to JUSTIFY kicking someone based solely on where they stand or what they're doing.
Breaking down the data into something easily seen and understood makes the toxicity easier over all. This argument attempts to direct the causation of toxicity in a community to the ease of which it is to discern good or bad builds.
As long as such things remain subjective, toxicity will ultimately be limited. At least in regards to judgement.
Basically, yes judgy people will judge, but data tracking allows lazy people (who otherwise might not judge) to judge and makes it easier for judgy people to judge.
Ultimately, the arguments FOR data trackers are similar to the arguments for gun control. They ignore the negatives rather than address them, or attempt to point out that those negatives will exist whether or not the control is in place. This is a very very silly argument.
My game play should not be dictated by some nerd with a calculator and a 3rd party program. That eliminates my personal agency and reduces me to following a cookie cutter build that some OTHER nerd will inevitably claim to have come up with. And that would be my personal objection to data trackers as a concept.
Actually, I addressed those negatives, many times now.
Build combat trackers in to the game, make them available as a guild perk, but make that perk one that is an option that only a PvE raiding guild would opt for, where as any other guild type would have something more suited to their play style.
Then you have a situation where a combat tracker only tracks players within your guild, so effectively every player that is able to have their combat logged by a tracker has opted in to such by joining a guild with a combat tracker.
This then allows those players to analyze the classes, post their findings and know full well that peer review will still happen on those findings. This means that those without access to combat trackers will still be able to get the same advantage from them that they get in every other game, it means the developers will still be able to get objective data from players when the situation arises that this is warranted, and it means that those not wanting to deal with combat trackers simply don't have to even think about them.
I am failing to see where I have not addressed the negatives here - feel free to inform me though.
This does nothing to address the negatives. Addressing the negatives isn't "think of a way to make the thing work with less ill effect", it's "prove the ill effect is not a product of the thing".
This is effectively "give teachers guns". It does little to assure players that "good guys have data trackers, bad guys don't".
Archeage apparently doesn't allow for data trackers to work, period. And as you've pointed out, it's all but impossible to not have data tracking in the game, at least as long as the game logs that data. Data tracking requires no feedback from the tracker, and it simply reads the information and feeds it into a UI, making detection impossible.
So how do you ensure data tracking capability for select individuals who acquired the perk, but deny it to anyone using a 3rd party app?
I won't say data trackers are the penultimate evil in games. There's no data to support that assertion. However, it stands to reason that any tool or device that makes an illicit act easier is going to serve as encouragement of that illicit act. Especially in situations where you factor in anonymity.
The decision is ultimately in the hands of the development team.
Because every other genre is extremely limited and curated by what ressources you get to takle said encounter with.
An FPS doesn't need parsers. You need to hit the enemy with whatever weapon you have. Whoever hits better wins. You can increase the difficulty of being able to hit by picking a different weapon and get more damage in return for the glorious oneshots, but nothing in any of this has additional factors in it.
There are no random crits, no damageboosting abilities, no attackspeed increases, no offstats, no elemental vulnerabilities, no crossclass synergy, no ability procs, no shortbuff boosts, no item effects, no potions for whatever it gives. Nothing whatsoever.
Pick a weapon, learn it, improve. That's the most basic loop after that obviously comes strategy of positioning and depending on the fps objective movement patterns, level design and so on.
So there aren't potions, buffs, ability procs, or damage boosts in literally every rpg in existence? Also your fps comparison really only applies to call of duty or battlefield. Pretty much every other has some sort of buff, class, boost or other interplay.
And yes going to 60% rather than 80% is a huge step forward. You see more of the fight, more of the mechanics, and if your healers are dead on mana at that point, you already know that either your group isn't following the mechanics, or your tank or healers are undergeared, if you are playing a heavy gear capped game. And both of those last two points are easily checked. Nothing in this required a meter.
Also, having played WoW since vanillas end to BFA and completed every raid in the game Burning Crusade onward, gonna have to call bs on your beastmaster comparison. They were very undertuned at the time, and marksman where more powerful, and could maintain a much more reliable damage, but by no means would all the encounters suddenly become 'impossible' because you had 5 of one undertuned class. All it changed was how much you could stick your chest out because you beat an encounter faster.
And WoW had such a balance problem not because they had some huge scope, But because Blizzard is shit at balancing. They love power creep, in both classes and abilities, often to drum up attention for a new class, or expansion. This caused them to shatter whatever balance they had struck every new level tier, and every new class introduced. This is a problem across pretty much every IP they have created. Now, it is possible Intrepid will fall down the same path. I hope not, and they manage to keep as much horizontal progression as possible, and that they will respond promptly with what they believe is the best fix to any hiccups that might occur. But only time and alpha/betas will tell that tale.
There's still no difference. Both "hey this feels off" and "hey, I'm doing X per second with this ability against this mob with these stats" will typically result in the same disregard for the player's post and possibly internal testing.
I mean, a player just complaining about their DPS will be ignored, for sure.
But that isn't what I'm talking about here, and if you think it is, you've not been paying attention.
I'm talking about things like "When I damage mob#7 with this ability is does exactly Y damage, which means when I reduce that mobs resistance by Z, the damage that mob#7 takes from that same ability should be Y+. However, the ability is still dealing Y damage. Curiously, when I reduce mob#7's resistance to this other damage type, that same ability is now doing Y+ damage, this leads me to believe that this ability is flagged to use the wrong resistance type".
This is another example of things that I have seen players bring up with developers, that have then promptly been fixed - I mentioned two others in either this or one of the other threads. They are all things that need a large sample size to be able to be actually informed on (Y damage is actually a range that needs to be averaged out), and without a combat tracker, you are looking at days worth of effort to get the same result that can be obtained in hours with a combat tracker.
Based on your posts and assumptions, this is not the kind of thing you are that in to, it may not even be the kind of thing you would notice in game. Perhaps you wouldn't even pay attention to it in a game update when it is fixed (note, most small changes to class abilities like this are a result of players informing developers that things are not as they should be).
Honestly though, that's fine. You don't need to notice these things, nor do you need to be the one that figures these things out - because others (like myself) do these things for you.
In order to do them though, we need a combat tracker.
It was in response to that very post that I had someone that was developing a combat tracker for that game get in touch with me. He developed one that used the in game chat window's combat feedback as a means of gathering information.
I spent the rest of my time in that game with an out-of-screen UI chat window displaying all combat info I could, and had a my combat tracker running off of that window (this allowed me to still use my main chat window for actual chat). It proved somewhat less useful in PvP combat (as is the case with all combat trackers), and the game had no PvE content to speak of, this is why it was never actually popular - as I have said before.
Incidentally, the person that developed that is one of the two people I know that is developing a combat tracker for Ashes.
I'm curious how far down the search results you had to go to find that though. I assume you also passed through a few discussions that mentioned that combat trackers exist, but went in to no further detail.
Either way, I'm sure you now agree that your previous assertion that a google search can't be used to determine how much the population of a given game use a combat tracker is untrue.
City of Heroes did not allow 3rd party programs, and the only data trackers I found simply read the combat data on the chat screen and interpreted it for you. It didn't allow you to monitor other player's damage output, for example.
And City of Heroes had a relatively great community, from what I remember. So there's your far end of the spectrum with a more positive community and no tracker.
So, aside from one cherry picked game as an example, how is this argument actually proof of anything?
CoH has always had a combat tracker for it. It wasn't always allowed, but it was always there.
However, lets work with your reasoning here. To be clear, I have never said a combat tracker is needed for a good community, I have said that a combat tracker has no influence on whether a community is good or not.
So you have WoW, Archeage, CoH and I am going to throw in EQ2. In that order, we have the following.
A game with combat trackers and toxic community.
A game without combat trackers and a toxic community.
A game without combat trackers and a good community.
A game with combat trackers and a good community.
My takeaway from all of that is that combat trackers have no actual influence on the quality of a games community, as a game can have a toxic or a good community either with or without them. If you look at that list and take something else away, I'd really love to hear your reasoning.
As I said, it's awfully hard to JUSTIFY kicking someone based solely on where they stand or what they're doing.
it is only hard to justify that if you have nothing else to go on.
If you are able to look at a players gear, then you are more likely to judge based on that gear than on their position. If you are able to look at a players achievements, then you are more likely to judge on that than on their gear. If you are able to look at a players performance, you are more likely to judge on that than their achievements.
If you are unable to look at any of that, including their position, you will likely fall to judging based on who dies first.
The common thing here is that those that judge will judge. Getting rid of a combat tracker isn't going to stop that judging. The best argument here is that people judging based on a combat tracker are actually judging accurately, rather than potentially inaccurately.
Honestly, that is the best argument against a combat tracker in terms of players judging each other - and I don't consider that an overly strong point to debate from.
This does nothing to address the negatives. Addressing the negatives isn't "think of a way to make the thing work with less ill effect", it's "prove the ill effect is not a product of the thing".
I think you are getting the words "address" and "eliminate" mixed up here.
Stating a negative exists and I consider it acceptable counts as addressing it. Suggesting ways to greatly reduce that negative is going far beyond addressing it.
I haven't eliminated it, nor do I think that should be the bar that is set to determine if a combat tracker is worth it or not.
I mean, I'm sure you wear your seatbelt when in a car - even though people still die with seatbelts on. They address vehicle deaths, they greatly reduce them, but they do not eliminate them. They are, however, worth it.
Now, my expectation is that you will look at the above and think to yourself "well, the option of not having a car was never there, the only two options in regards to seatbelts are to have them or to not have them, and obviously it is better to have them".
To this, I would say the same is true with a combat tracker in Ashes. They will exist - this is not a point that is up for debate. The debate here is whether they should exist with or without the safety measures attached to them.
So how do you ensure data tracking capability for select individuals who acquired the perk, but deny it to anyone using a 3rd party app?
As I said above, that is how combat trackers all worked 6 years ago. They don't all work like that now, they can take information directly from the client display.
However, even assuming that is how combat trackers all still work, you are totally forgetting a really important fact.
The need for a log is not an inherent need that all combat trackers have - it is simply the easiest means of getting data from the game client program to the combat tracker program. If the combat tracker is a part of the game client, there is no need for this log file to pass that information from one program to the other, as it is only being used in the one program - the game client with the built in combat tracker.
However, it stands to reason that any tool or device that makes an illicit act easier is going to serve as encouragement of that illicit act. Especially in situations where you factor in anonymity.
This is something I actually agree with, I just don't see combat trackers as a tool that makes that easier.
I see players using them in conjunction with said acts, but that doesn't mean those same acts wouldn't exist without these tools - and as explained above in the comparison with four games, this happens just fine with or without a combat tracker, and also doesn't happen with or without a combat tracker.
The one factor that the two games we talked about above that have good communities have in common that the two games with shit communities don't have is the need for community interaction.
Most worthwhile content in Archeage and WoW are essentially automatic to join. Most worthwhile content in CoH and EQ2 require friends that chose to group with you.
As I have been saying all along (for years, in fact) this is the key to a good community in an MMO. Make a game where people need others to accept them in order to participate in the content they want to participate, then you automatically have a community that treats each other with a bit of respect.
The encounter needs only to give you what cues you need for transitions abilities, or changes to the environment.
I assume you are limiting the discussion here to overly simple encounters, rather than to all raid encounters.
if you are talking about all raid encounters, then for the sake of Ashes having a lively top end PvE scene I hope the game content doesn't just throw us cues to follow all the time.
It is perhaps worth pointing out here that if WoW's raiding was in a game with less mass market appeal, it would be universally considered the laughing stock of MMO content. Rift attempted to follow WoW's raiding content style, and that didn't go so well for them.
I don't know for sure that you have raided in WoW, but your comments do make me think it is the only game you have participated in top end PvE content in.
Honestly, all of the things you are talking about here (boss announcing adds, boss not taking damage etc) are all the kinds of things I would expect in entry level raid content. It is all overly simple, and is the kind of raid content that makes PvP players think that all raid content is easy (and if that is all the raid content that exists, they would be right).
I am more concerned about the content that comes after that, the content that sometimes takes full damage and sometimes doesn't, yet is smart enough to not yell out what you need to do to kill it. You know, content that leaves you to figure it out for yourself.
Remember, Steven wants trial and error in his combat, listening to what the mob is yelling at you isn't trial and error - nor is it compelling content.
@Ventharien I am voicing my opinion and offer a few arguments, I am not writing a thesis here, so I would suggest your reign yourself in a little.
I will not expect anyone to know (including myself) that it was patch 2.1.3, on the dot, 7years and 4 months ago where it was that beastmasters were lacking by a huge amount. (this is again, just a random number to illustrate what i mean)
I also noted <<<for one patch>>> you might have missed that detail. Otherwise I don't know how you can jump to the conclusion that I did not participate in high end PvE. I played and cleared everything from BC back when some raids still needed questchains completed to be able to even enter some of the raids all the way through to Dragonwing in Cataclysm. We cleared everything before the nerves made it more accessible in each patch cycle.
I played mainly hunter and druid in all its variations pve and pvp wise, some holy pala in Cata too, but neglectable. I went on to play Restrodruid - Firemage to a 2.5k rating. Not amazing but still up there with an oddball combo. I still grew up with stutter stepping to the sound of my bowstring. I went through marksman-Survival-beastmaster- support survival. Half leather/ half chain builds and gear optimization. I still know that hunters where the only class that used corrupted potions since they gave more mana and we didnt use spellpower so the debuff didn't affect me at all.
It was a random number examples to illustrate the problem, but since you brought it up I will say You havent been in Sunwell. Because if you want to tell me you could do that with subpar classes at the time, I wont ever take you serious. Doesn't feel good to have your sentence ripped out of context right?
Your arguments about buffs in fps games still don't change the fact. It's still extremely lowscale comparatively. You can math that out by hand wether oyur dmgboost is enough to shave off one bullet hit to kill someone or if it's useless, there is no in between.
That is, if you have access to said information. Which again supports my argument that it should be transparent and not artificially hidden. This is true for every twitch shooter out there. I also don't need it in warframe because of that. It's all ready to grab and look at with ease and again it's on such a low scale you don't need something to keep track of hundreds of variables. You can optimize that with 8th grade math.
WoW had (and probably still has) issues and they will never be balanced. Their own policies prevent it. They went on record saying they don't want to separate pve and pvp values on skills because having two sets of numbers is too much for the average player. I am aware of that, again I only gave a quick example.
I also gave GW2 as an example, noone can deny that it wasn't balance, you had clear superior classes and GW2 is another example of how that shit doesn't work. World bosses were a zerg feast, nothing else. It's not engaging in the least and you could cheese every single dungeon because of their design philosophy. It didn't matter how much dps you could crank out, just stay out of some very silly projected attacks and hit at times. It was as boring as it can get. I only ever went in begrudgingly to get some currency or whatever when needed.
Tera doesn't need a parser, it's extremely streamlined. You have one set of gear and very direct skill set that went into rotation mode very easy.
So yeah now there are more examples supporting my standpoint. What a waste of time.
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I can be a life devouring nightmare. - Grisu#1819
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I would much rather see a system like WoW's "Advanced Combat Logging" that exports a log file instead of an in game interface panel tracking combat in real time. This would, for the most part remove the toxic environment during a raid encounter while still allowing guilds and raid teams to perform a postmortem after the raid to help improve and progress over time.
I would much rather see a system like WoW's "Advanced Combat Logging" that exports a log file instead of an in game interface panel tracking combat in real time. This would, for the most part remove the toxic environment during a raid encounter while still allowing guilds and raid teams to perform a postmortem after the raid to help improve and progress over time.
I don’t see the point of linking one person being a dick about dps, while quoting a discussion about combat logs.
We‘ve already established toxicity communities stem from a lack of need to make friends. Any instant-queues or random group finders automatically makes a community more toxic than one that requires you actively recruit because there’s no consequence for it.
Anyone with sense also knows that kind of person would be no different even if he didn’t have a dps meter going, which again, is entirely different than a combat log.
Suggestions already would keep combat logs in raid leaders’ and guild leaders‘ hands as a guild perk. There’s no way to completely eliminate dicks from being dicks, but when community actually means something, you absolutely will see a lot less of them. And removing information will do comparatively nothing to reduce it.
In ESO, it was years before there was an official DPS meter in the game, but we were still able to get an accurate reading of one's DPS. We would go into an instanced dungeon and have the person in question kill a low mechanic boss. Divide the health pool by the fight duration and you got your DPS. I understand not wanting to provide an in-depth log system but denying a simple counter just makes life harder for those who want one. Try hards will try hard, can't stop that.
@Ventharien I am voicing my opinion and offer a few arguments, I am not writing a thesis here, so I would suggest your reign yourself in a little.
I will not expect anyone to know (including myself) that it was patch 2.1.3, on the dot, 7years and 4 months ago where it was that beastmasters were lacking by a huge amount. (this is again, just a random number to illustrate what i mean)
I also noted <<<for one patch>>> you might have missed that detail. Otherwise I don't know how you can jump to the conclusion that I did not participate in high end PvE. I played and cleared everything from BC back when some raids still needed questchains completed to be able to even enter some of the raids all the way through to Dragonwing in Cataclysm. We cleared everything before the nerves made it more accessible in each patch cycle.
I played mainly hunter and druid in all its variations pve and pvp wise, some holy pala in Cata too, but neglectable. I went on to play Restrodruid - Firemage to a 2.5k rating. Not amazing but still up there with an oddball combo. I still grew up with stutter stepping to the sound of my bowstring. I went through marksman-Survival-beastmaster- support survival. Half leather/ half chain builds and gear optimization. I still know that hunters where the only class that used corrupted potions since they gave more mana and we didnt use spellpower so the debuff didn't affect me at all.
It was a random number examples to illustrate the problem, but since you brought it up I will say You havent been in Sunwell. Because if you want to tell me you could do that with subpar classes at the time, I wont ever take you serious. Doesn't feel good to have your sentence ripped out of context right?
Your arguments about buffs in fps games still don't change the fact. It's still extremely lowscale comparatively. You can math that out by hand wether oyur dmgboost is enough to shave off one bullet hit to kill someone or if it's useless, there is no in between.
That is, if you have access to said information. Which again supports my argument that it should be transparent and not artificially hidden. This is true for every twitch shooter out there. I also don't need it in warframe because of that. It's all ready to grab and look at with ease and again it's on such a low scale you don't need something to keep track of hundreds of variables. You can optimize that with 8th grade math.
WoW had (and probably still has) issues and they will never be balanced. Their own policies prevent it. They went on record saying they don't want to separate pve and pvp values on skills because having two sets of numbers is too much for the average player. I am aware of that, again I only gave a quick example.
I also gave GW2 as an example, noone can deny that it wasn't balance, you had clear superior classes and GW2 is another example of how that shit doesn't work. World bosses were a zerg feast, nothing else. It's not engaging in the least and you could cheese every single dungeon because of their design philosophy. It didn't matter how much dps you could crank out, just stay out of some very silly projected attacks and hit at times. It was as boring as it can get. I only ever went in begrudgingly to get some currency or whatever when needed.
Tera doesn't need a parser, it's extremely streamlined. You have one set of gear and very direct skill set that went into rotation mode very easy.
So yeah now there are more examples supporting my standpoint. What a waste of time.
1. You clearly barely read my response to you, as i never said you didn't play wow, nor did i specify that this was because of some arbitrary point in time that you mistook. I said that your example was unfounded. You made it sound like without meters, people wouldn't have known a particular class was not doing well enough, and that it would be impossible to complete the content if you had a bunch of those players. This is false, and i described to you why. Also yes, i did complete Sunwell, and any group with the baseline expected knowledge of WoW PvE content, and most of the group being in Tier 6 had an even shake at success. I went with my 2 friends and a guild we were friendly with as the content was gated open.
2. It is literally, empirically, the same thing you find in any mmo. Damage boosts, Armor, Resistance, damage received debuffs, attack speed increases. These and more have appeared and intersected in several fps titles, let alone rpgs where it's much closer to being even the same complexity. Now if you were making the argument that while many titles of various genres have abilities and effects just as complex and interconnected as MMO's, many MMO titles have them in a greater volume; and for whatever reason the in game checks for damage or synergy were insufficient, i'd say that's a fair argument. I'd disagree on the second point, but still. You were not making that argument, and instead were asserting that other titles did not need them because their abilities were simplistic and rudimentary, while mmo's where far beyond that. "You can optimize that with 8th grade math" was your comparison. Give me a break.
3. In what world does the statement "Noone can deny that it wasn't balance(d)" and "You had superior classes" exist in the same sentence? The fact that as a mesmer, you could wipe the floor with most everyone, along with the utility to nope out of an engagement if it was getting too hot, is a perfect example of a not balanced class list. And yes, PvE content was pretty spotty in the beginning of Guild Wars 2. It's almost like it was a pvp game with small levels of PvE content, and World Bosses to progress narritives. Oh wait, that's exactly what it was. It wasn't until later living seasons that they introduced systems like Fractals to bring more of a PvE outlet to the game. Regardless, class balance isn't really the focus of this thread.
4. Also, don't tell me to reign it. I responded to an a post and response in which you put forth arguments i found unfounded and circling around the arguments of others. So i'll respond how i please.
if you are talking about all raid encounters, then for the sake of Ashes having a lively top end PvE scene I hope the game content doesn't just throw us cues to follow all the time.
It is perhaps worth pointing out here that if WoW's raiding was in a game with less mass market appeal, it would be universally considered the laughing stock of MMO content. Rift attempted to follow WoW's raiding content style, and that didn't go so well for them.
I don't know for sure that you have raided in WoW, but your comments do make me think it is the only game you have participated in top end PvE content in.
Honestly, all of the things you are talking about here (boss announcing adds, boss not taking damage etc) are all the kinds of things I would expect in entry level raid content. It is all overly simple, and is the kind of raid content that makes PvP players think that all raid content is easy (and if that is all the raid content that exists, they would be right).
I am more concerned about the content that comes after that, the content that sometimes takes full damage and sometimes doesn't, yet is smart enough to not yell out what you need to do to kill it. You know, content that leaves you to figure it out for yourself.
Remember, Steven wants trial and error in his combat, listening to what the mob is yelling at you isn't trial and error - nor is it compelling content.
I am talking about every mechanic that has ever been. You will always be given some cue, whether fast, or persistant, obvious or subtle. It might be a cast bar, or a boss animation, or a floor graphic, or a buff, or a debuff upon your team. I used the boss shouting something as an example, not the rule. Let's not confuse the issue.
As to it being entry level raid content, I'd really love to know of an encounter that doesn't use some cue to give you a hint towards proper strategy. And while WoW does have my highest hours logged for MMO's, I ran Operations in SWTOR, The first raid of Guild Wars 2, and was starting to enter into Archeage Raids as well, but didn't put many hours in. Along with plenty of other, in my opinion; easier mechanically lighter raid content, Like Destiny 1 & 2, Atlas, Ark, and others.
And yes, Steven wants trial and error, like in the middle of the fight 3 crystals start glowing at different points of the room, and need to be broken or the boss will receive some new power that stresses the raid, or just kills everyone outright. Or every ranged character is given a debuff that forces them into melee distance while the reverse is affects melee, till the raid figures out how to use the tools given to alter or survive it, however the encounter is setup. Not every boss yelling "im now going to use super laser, run behind the rock ten steps behind you" Don't be facetious.
I did, but at some point I must have mixed content up with another post while writing. My bad.
Noone can deny that it wasn't balanced /-\ you had superior classes go hand in hand. :thinking.
It wasn't balanced so logically implication you had some classes that were stronger than others. :thinking.
I even gave the example of Mesmer literally autoattacking you to death. LeL
Fractals were the same as dungeons. useless, unimaginative, filler content to keep you busy, shit wasn't hard. You just had to grind some resistance to be able to stay alive, that's all.
Not every pve content was driving narrative and howsoever that would excuses the weaksauce implementation is beyond me.
I made my points, I even gave more specific examples, but apparently you are as bad as reading context as I'm at keeping different posts apart atm so. <shrug> suit yourself.
If you seriously can't math out warframe with 8th grade math than I am seriously concerned for you.
I can be a life fulfilling dream. - Zekece
I can be a life devouring nightmare. - Grisu#1819
Comments
It is definitely a perspective issue. Between the Meta, min maxing, number crunching analytical, and the more subjective how a class feels. While the meters don't cause the problems per say, they are a useful tool. Which means you become expected to have them if they are more or less accepted. So already, people can't play the way they want to.
I've truly come to hate outside game resources like IcyVeins, and similar sites, parsing, and the majority of meters. I feel like they have contributed to the cookie cutter, everyone using the same specs/talents/gear because that's what they read online. To be fair though, maybe all those resources did was display bad balance work, in allowing one particular combination of things to be best in most situations.
I don't think there's really any way that anyone will convince someone on the differing perspective on this subject to change their minds. It's just too baked in by personal experiences at this point.
Although I do generally agree with the rest of your post, I take issue with the above. No decent raid lead is going to pick out the lowest dps and arbitrarily decide that is going to be worth scolding, when the vast majority of raids wipe due to mechanics.
Anyone with a lick of sense would use combat logs to find the person who keeps hitting the add that enrages when it takes too much damage. Or they’ll see the person they assigned to hit some switch or lever or something has been using it too late and that mechanics is wiping the group. Or they’ll see someone isn’t using a threat reduction ability and keeps dragging the boss away from the tank. Or they’ll notice the support hasn’t been using their cc on priority mobs so those enemies have been bashing away at the tank instead.
Usually when you’re having troubles with a dps race, it’s the raid overall that’s struggling to hit the needed numbers. If someone’s severely underperforming, then yeah they’ll probably have to be subbed out in order to clear the content, but I’m hoping pure dps races are the exception in Ashes.
That's the dream.
Developers won't just take a random players word that something is right or wrong, this is correct. This is akin to a situation in another thread where a poster said they wouldn't give money to any game developer that wouldn't listen to them, and my reply was that game developers shouldn't listen to players.
I stand by that here. Game developers shouldn't listen to players.
They should, however, listen to numbers.
If a player is posting numbers, and doing so in an accurate, appropriate and objective manner, game developers should (and most do) listen. Not to the player, but to the numbers.
It is worth pointing out here that the average thread in the public section of a games forum is also not where developers will get much useful information from. The signal to noise ratio makes it near impossible to get useful information out of that kind of situation. Sectioned off areas of game forums though, the threads on the important topics here may manage to get all the way to 12 posts. Needless to say, it is basically all signal and no noise.
Even when developers do listen to numbers from players though, they don't act on that directly. The appropriate thing for them to if they see that what the numbers are saying could be an issue is to check those numbers themselves. It is only if their own check then turns out similar results that they should act on the issue.
Thing is, us players will always have more time to go through the games combat than any game developer ever will. We will always be able to find the small details that aren't working as intended (or even ones that aren't working as the developers thought they were). I've seen it in a number of games, and used combat trackers personally to point out issues with combat systems to developers personally.
That isn't the reason I suggested you google it.
If you google a DPS meter for WoW, the first link takes you to one.
If you google a combat tracker for EQ2, FFXIV, Conan or almost any other game, there will be one in the first or second result.
If you google a combat tracker or DPS meter for Archeage, you get a bunch of links to discussions on the games forums, a bunch of links to discussions on reddit, and then a bunch of links to DPS meters for other games.
What you don't get when you google either DPS meter or combat tracker for Archeage, is a link to a DPS meter or a combat tracker for Archeage.
While this isn't purely objective data, the simple fact that googling a term that would result in a combat tracker in any other game turns up nothing more than discussions when specifying Archeage says that combat trackers in that game are significantly less used.
Again, not purely objective data, but that simple google search paints a fairly vivid picture of the combat tracker use in that game.
And yes, the lack of usage of combat trackers in that game in relation to the general toxicity of the community are absolutely relevant. You can attempt to blame anything at all you want for the toxicity in that game, and in WoW, but the simple fact that these two games are at the opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of combat tracker use, yet are at the same end of the spectrum in terms of toxicity means there is absolutely no relation between the two.
Players that judge others, will judge others.
If not a combat tracker, they will judge on build. If not build, they will judge on class. If not class, they will judge on gear. If not gear, they will judge on character position.
In order to make a game where players can't judge each other, you would need to make a game where players can't see each other.
My argument here though, is that if players are being judged purely by the output of a combat tracker (which is not what I am advocating, exactly), then at least these players have the ability to objectively prove those that would judge them to be incorrect - assuming they are indeed incorrect.
None of the other things that a player would judge another for (if that first player were indeed the kind to judge) allows the player being judged the opportunity to prove themselves. in order to prove someone wrong, you need objective data - and a combat tracker is the only way to provide that. Actually, I addressed those negatives, many times now.
Build combat trackers in to the game, make them available as a guild perk, but make that perk one that is an option that only a PvE raiding guild would opt for, where as any other guild type would have something more suited to their play style.
Then you have a situation where a combat tracker only tracks players within your guild, so effectively every player that is able to have their combat logged by a tracker has opted in to such by joining a guild with a combat tracker.
This then allows those players to analyze the classes, post their findings and know full well that peer review will still happen on those findings. This means that those without access to combat trackers will still be able to get the same advantage from them that they get in every other game, it means the developers will still be able to get objective data from players when the situation arises that this is warranted, and it means that those not wanting to deal with combat trackers simply don't have to even think about them.
I am failing to see where I have not addressed the negatives here - feel free to inform me though.
I also hate it when a game only has a few viable builds.
However, one need look no further than Archeage (again) to see that there is no need for a combat tracker to be used in order for players to stick to cookie cutter builds. Players will always post builds that they think are good, and the vast majority of players simply don't want to put the time in to the game to come up with their own build - especially since that means there is likely to be time when they are less effective.
If you have a complete objective data set, there will always be a single best. However, if a game is well designed, that single best would be based on things that could change. The best build for a given class should be different depending on whether the player has a specific support class to buff them or not, or be different if the player has a specific class defining item or not.
When you start having arbitrary things like this determine what is and is not the best build, you start to see players running builds that are on a scale between the extreme points. A player that has that support class half the time may go for a build that is right between the best build for if they have that support and the best build for if they don't have it - or they may go slightly closer to one specific end of that scale as they see fit.
Any game in which there is a single "this is the build for this class", and there are no asterisks associated with that have problems. Those problems are not combat trackers, combat trackers were just used to expose those problems - and to me, that is something we should all be thankful of.
Are you saying that skill level is not tied to following mechanics in a raid? This enforces the idea that DPS is the most important thing, which is not
e.e
To be be perfectly honest I have absolutely no clue how you read “dps meters stop being reflections of skill when in a raid setting” and got “dps is the most important thing”
A little. I'm sure we had three going not long ago.
Yeah i thought so too. Can't find the third though. I think it may have started as a different post and morphed lol.
Yes, especially since Sandal God already told these toxic people where to go with their opinions, there shouldn't be any threads on this. 🤷🏼♂️
If you’ve ever looked up class guides, you’ve used a combat tracker.
If you’ve ever looked up a boss strategy, you’ve used a combat tracker.
If you’ve ever checked how much damage an ability does and how much it scales with offensive stats, you’ve used a combat tracker.
Stop pretending these tools are some evil boogeyman, because anyone who’s played any MMO has benefited from the information combat trackers provide.
I'll pass this on to the two people I know working on them. Not sure if they plan on generating a log file or not, but I'm sure they will be in contact if/when they have something usable
I personally view combat trackers as essential IF a game wants to feature tight high end encounters were you want to feel like you had to do nearly everything humanly possible to reach that mountain peak. In any other case it's a really useful tool.
If I don't have an objective feedback that can tell me that switching out fireball for ice shard halves my damage for the entire encounter I will never even realize that the synergy of some skill/buff/gear stat/non-disclosed enemy vulnerability/(...) actually made that much difference.
I'm studying math and slogging through the amount of data that goes through a single encounter is not something you can expect of an average person to draw an objective conclusion from. Especially since you have to do it a lot just to get a good grasp on averages.
This is not a skill you develop for the game, this is a consciously placed barrier to obscure game systems.
I subscribe to the opinion that combat trackers help from a players perspective as well as a developers perspective.
If there are broken builds (under performing as well as over performing) it comes to light faster and can be fixed easier since the whole context is there why and when it is out of bounds.
The more complex the base is the more ridiculous it is to find those issues. WoW is a standing example of this. Overlooking synergies and outcomes. Molten core Living bomb pets somehow went on to develop into the zul'gurub blood plague even tho it has the same premise. It was overlooked twice.
Indalamar we trust. If you know, you know.
My point is Development is hard and not having to wait on a player making a video on it to showcase how botched it got is a positive in my opinion. It's a beneficial back and forth between players and developing balance.
Those are huge examples but it can be way more subtle. Having a 30% advantage is huge but with crit as a stat alone it could always just be considered bad luck on the reciever's end. With the immense diversity IS claims to aim for it will be a nightmare to compare what runs well and what is just out of bounds of intended design.
Well this turned into more than I intended so too round it off I will address only THE one claimed negative aspect that keeps getting brought up against combat trackers.
Getting kicked because you under perform according to the dps tracker.
If you really think, that a person that instant kicks you because you didn't do well just once, won't do the same thing because you were the first one to die then I have some bad news for you.
He will. You have them in WoW as well as in Tera as well as in any other game in existence ever.
Have you heard of LoL and it'S community? I am yet to see a combat tracker there. "You died twice you are absolute and utter garbage and ruin the game!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
It's called a shitty human being. They exist regardless of tools available.
Also, it works both ways, if I can find out early that the people I tried to group with are that sort, I can avoid them faster. Not using it as a tool to improve and offer criticism to someone but instead as an excuse to blame is an easy enough red flag to avoid. If you are salty about not being able to play with that sort of people well... right? I don't really see the issue here.
I can be a life devouring nightmare. - Grisu#1819
There are a number of points in this post that are things I've been trying to say, but have been unable to put in to words quite as well as this.
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I have said in previous threads that combat trackers allow content to be much harder, more precisely designed than it can be in games where there is no expectation of combat tracker use.
Stevens response to that was that he wants players in top end raid guilds to progress on content via trial and error.
This leads me to believe he has never taken part in top end PvE raid content in an MMORPG. Trial and error exists in all top end PvE content any time the game developers don't simply give the answer to the encounter directly to player base.
In games like WoW, by the time the content hits the live servers, the strategy for the encounter is already well known. This kills off any trial and error.
In almost all other games, a new encounter hits the live servers with players having no idea at all how to tackle it. Players spend days taking the encounter on, figuring out what it does and then working out a strategy to kill it. Literally the definition of trial and error.
The thing is, if these encounters are actually difficult, the results from your trials are so small that you only ever even notice the difference via searching combat trackers.
If encounters are going to be made so that a tweak to a strategy can be seen without a combat tracker, then the encounter itself is not going to be all that hard.
So not having a combat tracker either means we have encounters that don't require a specific, detailed strategy, or we will have content that requires such a detailed strategy, in which case players will literally just luck their way in to getting the right strategy as there is no real indication as to whether we are on the right track or not with each minor change we make to how we do things.
I mean, the key thing with trial and error is that if you get a thing right, you need feedback to that effect. If the feedback is able to be noticed without a combat tracker, then that feedback would need to be tenfold larger than it would need to be without a combat tracker.
Again, the notion of players using pure trial and error in end game PvE sounds to me like it came from someone that has never participated in PvE content at the top end.
This is probably why Jeff Bard seems somewhat keen on combat trackers.
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Another major point I have tried to mention that you've bought up here is that not having a combat tracker in a game is like trying to pull a blanket over the games combat systems.
It is literally hiding the internal workings from players, leaving us to assume thing work the way we assume they should work - with no way to check if either our assumption as to how things work is accurate, nor any way to check if things then do work as we assume they should work (both distinct different things that could be wrong).
Players having the ability to show developers when (not if, but when) they get things wrong without having to either post a video of a major exploit in action or cause server wide (or indeed game wide) disruption in order to get the developers attention is unarguably and objectively a good thing. Combat trackers are not a silver bullet in this cause, but are by far the single most useful tool to aid in this objective.
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The other thing I have been saying for many years is that yes, players that kick people don't need a combat tracker to do that. My argument that these players will kick others out based on either objective or subjective data was met with people suggesting removing all subjective data from the situation, as well as all objective data. They seemed to not understand that subjective data in this situation includes class, build, gear, character position and - as you pointed out above - death.
You could remove all ability for players to see what class you have, what build, what abilities you use, what gear you have, but as soon as you get in to combat, if you are standing in the wrong place, or if you are the first to die, you will be kicked. Chances are, if all of that information was removed from players, the instances of kicking others would become more prevalent, not less. It would become the norm to boot the first player to die in any group, as you are being literally starved of any other information to make any actual decisions with. I mean, if I am in a situation where I have no other information at my disposal, I'd probably start booting the first player to die in any groups I am running - and in 20 years of playing MMO's I have booted exactly one player with combat trackers running.
To me, the notion that removing all objective and subjective data from players will see fewer players booted from groups is comical. It's not just wrong, it's comically wrong. It's so far from the truth that it's like the Mr. Bean of wrong suggestions.
The logical thing to then do is to bring back all of that subjective data - class, ability use feedback, gear etc. When you do that, you are back at the point where we started which is that adding the objective data from a combat tracker back in to that equation is not going to make any change to the person that would kick someone from their group.
If a certain mechanic keeps killing Brad the bard, and I'm not watching everything Brad is doing, and I ask Brad "What's the problem?", and he says "I have no clue. On my screen it looks like I'm safe. I don't even know what hit me."... Then the game is not a good game for "trial-and-error" learning. If we keep running trials, and getting lots of errors, but the errors aren't visually or audibly obvious, that is a problem with the game. And I'm going to fix it with a combat tracker to make errors obvious.
If I have to run a 10-minute fight five times, just to figure out who is dying to what (not how to solve the mechanic, literally just figuring out what mechanic is killing people), that's a tedious waste of my time. Instead, I'm just going to spend 5 minutes installing a combat tracker, 5 minutes figuring out how it works, 10 minutes running the fight a SINGLE time, and 5 minutes looking through the logs to find out what each player died to.
If this is a common occurrence in the game, then lucky me, I've already got the combat tracker set up, and I'm going to use it all the time. Hopefully I'm allowed to discuss the output of that combat tracker in-game, so that I can help other people figure out the awful encounter/visual design.
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Of course, we don't know if AoC will be like that. I've seen it in other games, though, so it's a significant possibility. My point is, if Intrepid doesn't want people relying on or abusing combat trackers, then the game needs to give enough feedback that I can figure it out, on it's own. If combat trackers save me half the time I would otherwise be wallowing in confusion, then it's a pretty easy choice to pick one up.
I suppose a screen-recorder would help in a similar way (showing mechanics we've seen already, without having to do the whole fight over again). But I'd rather comb through definitive logs, than comb through a video which might not even show what I'm looking for. Plus video recording takes more processing and storage resources than a combat tracker. Or I can use both to get different perspectives.
Having or not having a combat tracker does not inherently mean either of these things. The boss literally has a shiny red bar somewhere that tells you how well you did. If the boss goes to 80% on attempt one, then on attempt 2 it's at 60% you've made progress, and whatever you did is working. Maybe now there is a boss transition. Maybe a group of adds is now coming in that needs to be put into your strategy.
The encounter needs only to give you what cues you need for transitions abilities, or changes to the environment. So i don't know where you get feedback needing to be 10x larger. Did the boss roar and say come my minions? There are probably adds on the way. Is the boss immune, or shielded by something that isn't reacting to damage? There's a mechanic around you you need to use, or an ability on the boss you need to see. Fire on the floor, graphics before dangers are actually present, boss interaction, and small scale versions of the boss fight in previous lesser mobs are all perfectly acceptable conveyors of vital information, and in a much more organic fashion.
I don't know of a single other genre we also feel the need for parses, meters, or trackers. Regardless of PvP or PvE. You are given the abilities, what they do, and you are given your enemies cues. If an ability is not working, i do not need an outside system to tell me the ability that says, stun for 3 seconds and does x damage, is not doing one of those things. Nor do i need it to communicate this to the devs, especially if it is a systemic problem.
An FPS doesn't need parsers. You need to hit the enemy with whatever weapon you have. Whoever hits better wins. You can increase the difficulty of being able to hit by picking a different weapon and get more damage in return for the glorious oneshots, but nothing in any of this has additional factors in it.
There are no random crits, no damageboosting abilities, no attackspeed increases, no offstats, no elemental vulnerabilities, no crossclass synergy, no ability procs, no shortbuff boosts, no item effects, no potions for whatever it gives. Nothing whatsoever.
Pick a weapon, learn it, improve. That's the most basic loop after that obviously comes strategy of positioning and depending on the fps objective movement patterns, level design and so on.
I'm not going through all genres to make this point.
An MMO PvE encounter hinges on a group of players stats and skill vs the Encounters stats and script.
What you are describing is a fallacy in an mmo. Moving from 80% to 60% in itself isn't yet improvement because every boss has to have a limiting factor. Wether it's time or strain on your healer/tank survivability.
So going to 80% with an average of half your healers mana but going to 60% with no mana whatsoever or the boss going into a rage means you didn't improve squat.
Going from 80% with half mana to 80% with 75% mana THAT is improvement.
If it was as straight forward as you said then you can cheese every encounter in existence. Take more tanks and more healers and just out-sponge the enemy...which isn't exciting or engaging at all. That's basically the whole of Cataclysm in a nutshell. It was a weaksauce boring shitfeast compared to the tight encounters that Burning crusade and Wrath offered, for the most part. Only thing that changed was Actiblizzards philosophy of making it more casual focused.
And WoW had a huge community behind it that cranked those numbers hard over thousands of cummulative hours of running those parsers and theoretical outputs giving us the results showing us how no matter how well and good you play as a(example given) beastmaster, you will always fall 30% short of a half decent Marksman in this patch rotation cause Blizzard just can't fine tune it at times further. Having 5 Beastmasters could spell doom for your raid since you will never get those last 10% off the boss and that's still with relatively limited ressources to fuck around in your class and gear build.
If we hadn't had that, you would have a very wide array of experiences from horrifyingly impossible boss encounters because the group took those 5 beastmasters in and never coming closer to the kill and no possible gear upgrades left and no way of knowing why it wont move forward even tho noone dies any noone has any idle time.
To the groups that just happen to have the strong combinations and breeze trough it without feeling any challenge at all.
Beating a bosses ragetimer by 5 seconds vs beating it by 5 minutes is a very very different feel of accomplishment and difficulty. If it's supposed to be hard, you need a curated encounter to a targeted skill/gear curve.
Intrepid wants to go way beyond what WoW offered in diversity. I would like them to prove me wrong, but fact is, balance is really really hard with even a 10th of the variable Ashes wants to have.
Edit: GW2 is a closer example of what IS wants to do and they failed horrible as well(I played it until close to the first expansion arrived, I dropped it at that point so I talk about that period of time). There is no game in existence that is on the heavier rpg side that is also balanced through and through. There is a reason why GW2 had very prominent Class tier list. On paper a thief oneshots cloth wielders with dual daggers, so you can't really buff it outright or anything that would buff that, but anything else is too tanky for them. Switching weapons that underperform compared to dual dagger doesn't help either and when they are more skirmish style when you have the lowest hp pool at the same time without offering compensation. Congratz you developed yourself into a pigeon hold. . Better just play S-Tier classes like Warriors or Mesmers, they just autoattack you to death. Oh all the stat combinations that literally noone uses.
Balance is hard and unforgiving.
I can be a life devouring nightmare. - Grisu#1819
There's still no difference. Both "hey this feels off" and "hey, I'm doing X per second with this ability against this mob with these stats" will typically result in the same disregard for the player's post and possibly internal testing.
What these posts typically do is incite arguments and disagreements. Data tracking only makes all of it messier. It absolutely does not help the development team at all.
I did this, and found out why there are no trackers for Archeage.
Apparently SOMEONE said: "Archeage doesn't create log files, which are used by DPS/healing parsers as their source of information. Without log files, all you can do is use the combat chat window, which I imagine would be far too resource intensive to run. If Archeage had log files, Advanced Combat Tracker would have had a plugin for this game in early alpha.
As far as I know there are no parsers that are even remotely successful with this game."
Got a clone, Noaani?
Anyway, there are still issues with this argument. First off, there's no such thing as "half objective" statements. A thing is either there and verifiable, or it is not. Secondly, correlation does not equal causation, meaning Archeage's apparent lack of data tracking is not proof that data tracking does not contribute to or is involved with community toxicity.
City of Heroes did not allow 3rd party programs, and the only data trackers I found simply read the combat data on the chat screen and interpreted it for you. It didn't allow you to monitor other player's damage output, for example.
And City of Heroes had a relatively great community, from what I remember. So there's your far end of the spectrum with a more positive community and no tracker.
So, aside from one cherry picked game as an example, how is this argument actually proof of anything?
I'm well aware of what and how judgy people judge. I am one. However, data trackers make these things easier. As I said, it's awfully hard to JUSTIFY kicking someone based solely on where they stand or what they're doing.
Breaking down the data into something easily seen and understood makes the toxicity easier over all. This argument attempts to direct the causation of toxicity in a community to the ease of which it is to discern good or bad builds.
As long as such things remain subjective, toxicity will ultimately be limited. At least in regards to judgement.
Basically, yes judgy people will judge, but data tracking allows lazy people (who otherwise might not judge) to judge and makes it easier for judgy people to judge.
This does nothing to address the negatives. Addressing the negatives isn't "think of a way to make the thing work with less ill effect", it's "prove the ill effect is not a product of the thing".
This is effectively "give teachers guns". It does little to assure players that "good guys have data trackers, bad guys don't".
Archeage apparently doesn't allow for data trackers to work, period. And as you've pointed out, it's all but impossible to not have data tracking in the game, at least as long as the game logs that data. Data tracking requires no feedback from the tracker, and it simply reads the information and feeds it into a UI, making detection impossible.
So how do you ensure data tracking capability for select individuals who acquired the perk, but deny it to anyone using a 3rd party app?
I won't say data trackers are the penultimate evil in games. There's no data to support that assertion. However, it stands to reason that any tool or device that makes an illicit act easier is going to serve as encouragement of that illicit act. Especially in situations where you factor in anonymity.
The decision is ultimately in the hands of the development team.
So there aren't potions, buffs, ability procs, or damage boosts in literally every rpg in existence? Also your fps comparison really only applies to call of duty or battlefield. Pretty much every other has some sort of buff, class, boost or other interplay.
And yes going to 60% rather than 80% is a huge step forward. You see more of the fight, more of the mechanics, and if your healers are dead on mana at that point, you already know that either your group isn't following the mechanics, or your tank or healers are undergeared, if you are playing a heavy gear capped game. And both of those last two points are easily checked. Nothing in this required a meter.
Also, having played WoW since vanillas end to BFA and completed every raid in the game Burning Crusade onward, gonna have to call bs on your beastmaster comparison. They were very undertuned at the time, and marksman where more powerful, and could maintain a much more reliable damage, but by no means would all the encounters suddenly become 'impossible' because you had 5 of one undertuned class. All it changed was how much you could stick your chest out because you beat an encounter faster.
And WoW had such a balance problem not because they had some huge scope, But because Blizzard is shit at balancing. They love power creep, in both classes and abilities, often to drum up attention for a new class, or expansion. This caused them to shatter whatever balance they had struck every new level tier, and every new class introduced. This is a problem across pretty much every IP they have created. Now, it is possible Intrepid will fall down the same path. I hope not, and they manage to keep as much horizontal progression as possible, and that they will respond promptly with what they believe is the best fix to any hiccups that might occur. But only time and alpha/betas will tell that tale.
But that isn't what I'm talking about here, and if you think it is, you've not been paying attention.
I'm talking about things like "When I damage mob#7 with this ability is does exactly Y damage, which means when I reduce that mobs resistance by Z, the damage that mob#7 takes from that same ability should be Y+. However, the ability is still dealing Y damage. Curiously, when I reduce mob#7's resistance to this other damage type, that same ability is now doing Y+ damage, this leads me to believe that this ability is flagged to use the wrong resistance type".
This is another example of things that I have seen players bring up with developers, that have then promptly been fixed - I mentioned two others in either this or one of the other threads. They are all things that need a large sample size to be able to be actually informed on (Y damage is actually a range that needs to be averaged out), and without a combat tracker, you are looking at days worth of effort to get the same result that can be obtained in hours with a combat tracker.
Based on your posts and assumptions, this is not the kind of thing you are that in to, it may not even be the kind of thing you would notice in game. Perhaps you wouldn't even pay attention to it in a game update when it is fixed (note, most small changes to class abilities like this are a result of players informing developers that things are not as they should be).
Honestly though, that's fine. You don't need to notice these things, nor do you need to be the one that figures these things out - because others (like myself) do these things for you.
In order to do them though, we need a combat tracker. Nope, that's me.
It was in response to that very post that I had someone that was developing a combat tracker for that game get in touch with me. He developed one that used the in game chat window's combat feedback as a means of gathering information.
I spent the rest of my time in that game with an out-of-screen UI chat window displaying all combat info I could, and had a my combat tracker running off of that window (this allowed me to still use my main chat window for actual chat). It proved somewhat less useful in PvP combat (as is the case with all combat trackers), and the game had no PvE content to speak of, this is why it was never actually popular - as I have said before.
Incidentally, the person that developed that is one of the two people I know that is developing a combat tracker for Ashes.
I'm curious how far down the search results you had to go to find that though. I assume you also passed through a few discussions that mentioned that combat trackers exist, but went in to no further detail.
Either way, I'm sure you now agree that your previous assertion that a google search can't be used to determine how much the population of a given game use a combat tracker is untrue. CoH has always had a combat tracker for it. It wasn't always allowed, but it was always there.
However, lets work with your reasoning here. To be clear, I have never said a combat tracker is needed for a good community, I have said that a combat tracker has no influence on whether a community is good or not.
So you have WoW, Archeage, CoH and I am going to throw in EQ2. In that order, we have the following.
A game with combat trackers and toxic community.
A game without combat trackers and a toxic community.
A game without combat trackers and a good community.
A game with combat trackers and a good community.
My takeaway from all of that is that combat trackers have no actual influence on the quality of a games community, as a game can have a toxic or a good community either with or without them. If you look at that list and take something else away, I'd really love to hear your reasoning. it is only hard to justify that if you have nothing else to go on.
If you are able to look at a players gear, then you are more likely to judge based on that gear than on their position. If you are able to look at a players achievements, then you are more likely to judge on that than on their gear. If you are able to look at a players performance, you are more likely to judge on that than their achievements.
If you are unable to look at any of that, including their position, you will likely fall to judging based on who dies first.
The common thing here is that those that judge will judge. Getting rid of a combat tracker isn't going to stop that judging. The best argument here is that people judging based on a combat tracker are actually judging accurately, rather than potentially inaccurately.
Honestly, that is the best argument against a combat tracker in terms of players judging each other - and I don't consider that an overly strong point to debate from.
I think you are getting the words "address" and "eliminate" mixed up here.
Stating a negative exists and I consider it acceptable counts as addressing it. Suggesting ways to greatly reduce that negative is going far beyond addressing it.
I haven't eliminated it, nor do I think that should be the bar that is set to determine if a combat tracker is worth it or not.
I mean, I'm sure you wear your seatbelt when in a car - even though people still die with seatbelts on. They address vehicle deaths, they greatly reduce them, but they do not eliminate them. They are, however, worth it.
Now, my expectation is that you will look at the above and think to yourself "well, the option of not having a car was never there, the only two options in regards to seatbelts are to have them or to not have them, and obviously it is better to have them".
To this, I would say the same is true with a combat tracker in Ashes. They will exist - this is not a point that is up for debate. The debate here is whether they should exist with or without the safety measures attached to them.
As I said above, that is how combat trackers all worked 6 years ago. They don't all work like that now, they can take information directly from the client display.
However, even assuming that is how combat trackers all still work, you are totally forgetting a really important fact.
The need for a log is not an inherent need that all combat trackers have - it is simply the easiest means of getting data from the game client program to the combat tracker program. If the combat tracker is a part of the game client, there is no need for this log file to pass that information from one program to the other, as it is only being used in the one program - the game client with the built in combat tracker. This is something I actually agree with, I just don't see combat trackers as a tool that makes that easier.
I see players using them in conjunction with said acts, but that doesn't mean those same acts wouldn't exist without these tools - and as explained above in the comparison with four games, this happens just fine with or without a combat tracker, and also doesn't happen with or without a combat tracker.
The one factor that the two games we talked about above that have good communities have in common that the two games with shit communities don't have is the need for community interaction.
Most worthwhile content in Archeage and WoW are essentially automatic to join. Most worthwhile content in CoH and EQ2 require friends that chose to group with you.
As I have been saying all along (for years, in fact) this is the key to a good community in an MMO. Make a game where people need others to accept them in order to participate in the content they want to participate, then you automatically have a community that treats each other with a bit of respect.
if you are talking about all raid encounters, then for the sake of Ashes having a lively top end PvE scene I hope the game content doesn't just throw us cues to follow all the time.
It is perhaps worth pointing out here that if WoW's raiding was in a game with less mass market appeal, it would be universally considered the laughing stock of MMO content. Rift attempted to follow WoW's raiding content style, and that didn't go so well for them.
I don't know for sure that you have raided in WoW, but your comments do make me think it is the only game you have participated in top end PvE content in.
Honestly, all of the things you are talking about here (boss announcing adds, boss not taking damage etc) are all the kinds of things I would expect in entry level raid content. It is all overly simple, and is the kind of raid content that makes PvP players think that all raid content is easy (and if that is all the raid content that exists, they would be right).
I am more concerned about the content that comes after that, the content that sometimes takes full damage and sometimes doesn't, yet is smart enough to not yell out what you need to do to kill it. You know, content that leaves you to figure it out for yourself.
Remember, Steven wants trial and error in his combat, listening to what the mob is yelling at you isn't trial and error - nor is it compelling content.
I will not expect anyone to know (including myself) that it was patch 2.1.3, on the dot, 7years and 4 months ago where it was that beastmasters were lacking by a huge amount. (this is again, just a random number to illustrate what i mean)
I also noted <<<for one patch>>> you might have missed that detail. Otherwise I don't know how you can jump to the conclusion that I did not participate in high end PvE. I played and cleared everything from BC back when some raids still needed questchains completed to be able to even enter some of the raids all the way through to Dragonwing in Cataclysm. We cleared everything before the nerves made it more accessible in each patch cycle.
I played mainly hunter and druid in all its variations pve and pvp wise, some holy pala in Cata too, but neglectable. I went on to play Restrodruid - Firemage to a 2.5k rating. Not amazing but still up there with an oddball combo. I still grew up with stutter stepping to the sound of my bowstring. I went through marksman-Survival-beastmaster- support survival. Half leather/ half chain builds and gear optimization. I still know that hunters where the only class that used corrupted potions since they gave more mana and we didnt use spellpower so the debuff didn't affect me at all.
It was a random number examples to illustrate the problem, but since you brought it up I will say You havent been in Sunwell. Because if you want to tell me you could do that with subpar classes at the time, I wont ever take you serious. Doesn't feel good to have your sentence ripped out of context right?
Your arguments about buffs in fps games still don't change the fact. It's still extremely lowscale comparatively. You can math that out by hand wether oyur dmgboost is enough to shave off one bullet hit to kill someone or if it's useless, there is no in between.
That is, if you have access to said information. Which again supports my argument that it should be transparent and not artificially hidden. This is true for every twitch shooter out there. I also don't need it in warframe because of that. It's all ready to grab and look at with ease and again it's on such a low scale you don't need something to keep track of hundreds of variables. You can optimize that with 8th grade math.
WoW had (and probably still has) issues and they will never be balanced. Their own policies prevent it. They went on record saying they don't want to separate pve and pvp values on skills because having two sets of numbers is too much for the average player. I am aware of that, again I only gave a quick example.
I also gave GW2 as an example, noone can deny that it wasn't balance, you had clear superior classes and GW2 is another example of how that shit doesn't work. World bosses were a zerg feast, nothing else. It's not engaging in the least and you could cheese every single dungeon because of their design philosophy. It didn't matter how much dps you could crank out, just stay out of some very silly projected attacks and hit at times. It was as boring as it can get. I only ever went in begrudgingly to get some currency or whatever when needed.
Tera doesn't need a parser, it's extremely streamlined. You have one set of gear and very direct skill set that went into rotation mode very easy.
So yeah now there are more examples supporting my standpoint. What a waste of time.
I can be a life devouring nightmare. - Grisu#1819
This happened to me today. Thought I'd share https://ibb.co/DP2X9v3
I don’t see the point of linking one person being a dick about dps, while quoting a discussion about combat logs.
We‘ve already established toxicity communities stem from a lack of need to make friends. Any instant-queues or random group finders automatically makes a community more toxic than one that requires you actively recruit because there’s no consequence for it.
Anyone with sense also knows that kind of person would be no different even if he didn’t have a dps meter going, which again, is entirely different than a combat log.
Suggestions already would keep combat logs in raid leaders’ and guild leaders‘ hands as a guild perk. There’s no way to completely eliminate dicks from being dicks, but when community actually means something, you absolutely will see a lot less of them. And removing information will do comparatively nothing to reduce it.
1. You clearly barely read my response to you, as i never said you didn't play wow, nor did i specify that this was because of some arbitrary point in time that you mistook. I said that your example was unfounded. You made it sound like without meters, people wouldn't have known a particular class was not doing well enough, and that it would be impossible to complete the content if you had a bunch of those players. This is false, and i described to you why. Also yes, i did complete Sunwell, and any group with the baseline expected knowledge of WoW PvE content, and most of the group being in Tier 6 had an even shake at success. I went with my 2 friends and a guild we were friendly with as the content was gated open.
2. It is literally, empirically, the same thing you find in any mmo. Damage boosts, Armor, Resistance, damage received debuffs, attack speed increases. These and more have appeared and intersected in several fps titles, let alone rpgs where it's much closer to being even the same complexity. Now if you were making the argument that while many titles of various genres have abilities and effects just as complex and interconnected as MMO's, many MMO titles have them in a greater volume; and for whatever reason the in game checks for damage or synergy were insufficient, i'd say that's a fair argument. I'd disagree on the second point, but still. You were not making that argument, and instead were asserting that other titles did not need them because their abilities were simplistic and rudimentary, while mmo's where far beyond that. "You can optimize that with 8th grade math" was your comparison. Give me a break.
3. In what world does the statement "Noone can deny that it wasn't balance(d)" and "You had superior classes" exist in the same sentence? The fact that as a mesmer, you could wipe the floor with most everyone, along with the utility to nope out of an engagement if it was getting too hot, is a perfect example of a not balanced class list. And yes, PvE content was pretty spotty in the beginning of Guild Wars 2. It's almost like it was a pvp game with small levels of PvE content, and World Bosses to progress narritives. Oh wait, that's exactly what it was. It wasn't until later living seasons that they introduced systems like Fractals to bring more of a PvE outlet to the game. Regardless, class balance isn't really the focus of this thread.
4. Also, don't tell me to reign it. I responded to an a post and response in which you put forth arguments i found unfounded and circling around the arguments of others. So i'll respond how i please.
I am talking about every mechanic that has ever been. You will always be given some cue, whether fast, or persistant, obvious or subtle. It might be a cast bar, or a boss animation, or a floor graphic, or a buff, or a debuff upon your team. I used the boss shouting something as an example, not the rule. Let's not confuse the issue.
As to it being entry level raid content, I'd really love to know of an encounter that doesn't use some cue to give you a hint towards proper strategy. And while WoW does have my highest hours logged for MMO's, I ran Operations in SWTOR, The first raid of Guild Wars 2, and was starting to enter into Archeage Raids as well, but didn't put many hours in. Along with plenty of other, in my opinion; easier mechanically lighter raid content, Like Destiny 1 & 2, Atlas, Ark, and others.
And yes, Steven wants trial and error, like in the middle of the fight 3 crystals start glowing at different points of the room, and need to be broken or the boss will receive some new power that stresses the raid, or just kills everyone outright. Or every ranged character is given a debuff that forces them into melee distance while the reverse is affects melee, till the raid figures out how to use the tools given to alter or survive it, however the encounter is setup. Not every boss yelling "im now going to use super laser, run behind the rock ten steps behind you" Don't be facetious.
Noone can deny that it wasn't balanced /-\ you had superior classes go hand in hand. :thinking.
It wasn't balanced so logically implication you had some classes that were stronger than others. :thinking.
I even gave the example of Mesmer literally autoattacking you to death. LeL
Fractals were the same as dungeons. useless, unimaginative, filler content to keep you busy, shit wasn't hard. You just had to grind some resistance to be able to stay alive, that's all.
Not every pve content was driving narrative and howsoever that would excuses the weaksauce implementation is beyond me.
I made my points, I even gave more specific examples, but apparently you are as bad as reading context as I'm at keeping different posts apart atm so. <shrug> suit yourself.
If you seriously can't math out warframe with 8th grade math than I am seriously concerned for you.
I can be a life devouring nightmare. - Grisu#1819