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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
Sorry about the spam as I read and reread your reply, more thought are coming to my mind!
How can we help each other and learn, if the game is obfuscate information from us? We need feedback from the game and if we have feedback, we can use that information for good and bad.
Wrong on the first point, EQ1 had detailed combat logs. You can parse them using 3rd tools. You knew exactly what the other person was doing.
Yes we have more elitism now than before, but this has nothing to do with DPS meters etc. Its separate topic. ESO, GW2 and STRO does not have DPS meters yet elitism is big thing in those games.
1. It will not happen as often though. Also why give those players another tool to exclude players?
2. You do have combat feedback. You will see your damage when you hit a mob and you have combat logs. You just wont have a meter than distills everyone you did down to a DPS number. You'll have to guage for yourself how to improve and now have your computer do it for you.
3. Same as above really. Figure it out on your own. You have combat logs and will just have to guage your performance on your own.
Combat logs I think we're said to be available in AoC unless I misread. Which is why I specifically mentioned DPS meters, not combat logging.
And true, DPS meters weren't the sole cause of elitism. However I strongly agree with Steven that DPS meters are not a necessity for end game, and do contribute to toxicity.
DPS meters can contribute to toxicity. I don't think anyone disputes that. The issue is how much toxicity they contribute and I think not much compared to PvP and related systems in the game.
If you are really worried about toxicity, then PvP game is the wrong type of game to play.
If you have combat feedback, you have indirect DPS meters.
Toxicity is always going to be a thing. It doesn't mean we shouldn't combat it or minimize it. And to be honest i think I'll be fine with PvP with the current design of the corruption system. We are taking about DPS meters and raiding anyway, not pvp
if the biggest argument against DPS meters is toxicity, then it does not fly in a PvP game since the amount of bad player behavior PvP bring to the game will be huge compared to the bad behavior DPS meters will bring. That's all I am saying .
Also DPS matter in PvP as well.
Np!
I think this tends to be a standard misconception that acts in essentially this manner.
Supposition; Eliminating DPS meters will not stop all exclusionary activities related to performance data gathering.
Therefore; We should not try to stop any exclusionary activities related to performance data gathering
I think it's important to remember, my decision is not intended to stop all toxicity relating to meters. We will be providing combat data for individual players in their chat window, that players can filter and analyze for themselves. The goal is to mitigate and make the toxic practice less prevalent through the ease that DPS meters provide. Also to place actionable enforcement for players who attempt to circumvent the decision by use of 3rd party programs, for which we will be monitoring.
Long before the advent of DPS meters, players were completing content through creative strategies and collective learning/observations. This type of content progression is the desired means of success in Ashes. It is harder, yes.
They wont
The corruption system is designed to work against bad PvP behavior.
"We will be providing combat data for individual players in their chat window, that players can filter and analyze for themselves."
This pretty much clears everything up.
The losing group will know they did less dps because the received less loot. Trials and error friend.
Its not like other games haven't had combat logs. The problem is certain people want more than Combat Logs, which is why we go in circles. Some say 'It has combat logs so we can easily create third party applications from these logs'. I don't imagine we won't continue to go around in circles despite the clear attempts to stop the cyclic behaviours.
Edit: Sometimes we can help others, and, sometimes others don't want to be helped (Except by a DPS Meter).
Once again thank you for your reply. I should be mad at your reply but I am pleasantly happy due to the way you answered
Whats wrong in excluding other players based on performance? I am not saying I am such a player, but I am curious why you think its wrong?
You say we will get combat data in the chat window. Is this only for the player in question or can we see other players data in our chat? such as raid or party members?
Thanks
It’s just like how people are worried that we can’t eliminate all cheaters, gold farmers, etc. So why bother? You bother because if you can stop most of them, or at least a significant proportion, then it’s worth doing.
If you consider them indirect DPS meters then you already have what you want.
Yeah this is my question. There’s literally no way to tell who’s struggling without objective detailed feedback, in this case you need pretty immediate feedback to catch such a player while you’re in the dungeon. They could appear to be doing a full rotation, could be doing mechanics, but if they’re actually in beefy tank gear and they’re doing 10% of the average dps, how in the world is anyone supposed to realize this to help them?
Also AoC is not the only "hyped" game that is not allowing meters.. Pantheon is another that will not be allowing meters. What we are seeing is a tiring of how MMOs have, and I will use the world evolve though in some cases I should said "de-evolved", in the past 15 years and a resurgence to want to being back what truly made MMOs explode as they did.
To quote a Brad McQuaid (RIP in peace my friend) "I think the big ambition was to make a game we could be proud of, that we would enjoy playing, and where hopefully there were enough other people out there that would feel the same way." MMOs were built to be inclusive and bring people together. Not to exclude.
How about allowing players to monitor their own dps, and their own dps only? This way players can share their results with their friends and guild members for comparison and research, while at the same time not being able to exclude other players.
Steven said you have combat log on your chat window for individual players. What I'm assuming is that you won't see "Player X did Y damage to you, using H ability".
If you agree with Steven and is against this tool I suggest you no longer feed the discussion. It eventually starts being pointless.
I heard a bird ♫
Also recently I started theorycrafting without the use of meters. We picked our best toons and duked it out. We tested a wide variety of different set ups and weapon combinations. I actually really enjoyed this a lot.
That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die.
Steven said you have combat log on your chat window for individual players. What I'm assuming is that you won't see "Player X did Y damage to you, using H ability".[/quote]
in PvE a combat log will show you the damage of each ability you use, but won't show you the total damage on a certain target or your DPS. atleast that's my experience with combat logs from GW2.
My brother and I spent a decade playing EQ2, and in that game, the notion of excluding someone for poor performance simply didn't exist. In 10 years of top end raiding, we booted one player from the guild - and that was for something that we didn't need a combat tracker to tell us about.
I then moved on to other games, while my brother went to WoW. In WoW, the kind of thing you talk about here is commonplace, and I can understand and even respect any attempt to prevent it.
However, as I have argued in the past, the issue in WoW was not combat trackers. The issue there was that they could boot someone mid-dungeon, and know that a replacement would be ported in.
If you take that same situation - group mid-dungeon, one player underperforming - and you remove the combat tracker, people are still likely to realize which player is underperforming. Players in this situation will always take the easy way out, which in the case of WoW was to just replaec that player.
In EQ2, that wasn't an option. The easiest way out was to try to help the player in order for the group to get through the dungeon. To me, this seems to be how you would want Ashes to be.
The issue I have is that in Ashes, in this same situation, the easiest way out would seem to be to find someone in the group with a family member on, boot the obviously underperforming player, and summon that family member to join the group - leaving the player that was just booted alone in the middle of a group dungeon.
To me, this seems to be the worst of all options, not the best. The only time this change would prevent anything is if a person is only slightly underperforming - a situation no one would exclude anyone else from unless there was a readily available replacement that was known to be better.
Early EQ raids - pre combat trackers - were as much about how many hundreds of players you could throw at an encounter, rather than being about how good those players were at working together.
There are no examples of raids designed without combat trackers where the appropriate strategy is not to simply throw more players at it.
I really hope this isn't a case of wanting to go back to "the good ole' days" here, since those days never actually existed, as these encounters were not actually enjoyable affairs for anyone involved. All they were was a thing players did because that is what the game at the time suggested the best thing to do was, and MMO players didn't yet realize they could stand up and ask the developers to put content in that was actually enjoyable in and of itself.
I guess this now means my biggets fear in Ashes is that the only raid content will be non-instanced encounters where the most logical thing to do is to simply throw more players at it, rather than trying to get better at the game in general.
Sounds like Archeages "raid" content, which was so boring I spent my time in that game growning trees instead.
Edit; I just hope you are looking at decisions others have made in the industry you now find yourself, looking at the situation they were in, why they made teh decisions they made, and the results of those decisions. If not, you stand to make all those mistakes over again - which would be a shame for all involved.
The older games were very "zergy". These were the early days so they didn't have the benefit of years and years of multiplayer game development experience to draw on. So the concept of complex mechanics had not been "considered" at that point and even if it was, they were limited by the game engines at the time plus they never expected or had no real idea of what a "playerbase" would do. For a good example of this watch this interview with Lord British and how the players destroyed this complex ecology of Ultima Online overnight.
https://massivelyop.com/2018/01/06/richard-garriott-talks-about-how-players-destroyed-ultima-onlines-ecology/
This is now 2020. Better game engines, better understanding of the mindset of a player, better understanding of complex mechanics using those engines, etc. With the "meters" and "addons" you can get in todays "modern" games, you are taking the challenge out of it. I remember in Rift we had macros and addons that would tell you when to run, when to jump, what skill to use, when to stop DPS, etc etc.. We did nothing more than circumvent those mechanics with addons making it easier for us as players.. I remember tanking in Hammerknell in Rift while eating a pastrami sandwich at the same time at one point.
I for one am hoping that AoC brings back challenging dungeons and PvE and based on what I am hearing Steven say with not allowing meters and I assume along with this are addons, and mix this with the experience of now understanding the mind of a MMO player and complex mechanics, I do believe it will.