And how can a Raid Leader do his job without Meters? Same way we did back in the 90's, before we had all those meters.
2 points here.
First, games in the 90s were dead simple.
Second, combat trackers existed in the 90s.
Fun fact, combat trackers existed before MMO's - despite what you seem to think. They weren't invented for the MMO genre, they were redesigned for it.
You're confusing kicking people mid Raid with Gatekeeping. Raid is done, numbers are checked, names are marked off lists. You don't know the numbers fully until the Raid is done. What I said was, when it's done and numbers get looked at, those under a certain threshold get kicked. You don't kick people for lacking damage MID RAID, you kick people for pulling Mobs they aren't supposed to, or triggering Mechanics they aren't supposed to that lead to Wipes. Because just not doing a lot of damage, that's still more damage than an empty slot, so as long as they aren't actively wiping your group you wouldn't kick Mid Raid.
I mean, wouldn't you be kicking everyone if the raid is done?
So, you want to talk about gatekeeping as being the Big Bad Evil now. Cool.
If I run a raid with you and it is successful, why would I not welcome you back? Sure, your DPS may be a bit lower, but so what? We were successful, you didn't pull mobs you weren't supposed to pull, nothing at all like that.
You have so far failed to give me a reason as to why you think this gate keeping would even happen, you have just asserted that it would with literally nothing at all to back that up with.
I mean, if you had just basic logic to back it up, that would be enough. The problem is, you don't. If we were successful with you on a raid in the past, why would we not bring you again?
Also, take this into consideration. I spec my Abilities to lower Defense. I'm casting the same Fire Ball you are. Mine does less damage than yours. But because of this EVERYONE in the Raid now does more damage... more than offsets my lack of damage. But some lazy Leader looks, sees you have more Damage than me, doesn't understand the Team is doing more Damage BECAUSE of me.
A combat tracker will tell me what you are doing.
However, what if someone else in the raid has that debuff, and they do not stack? Or what if we have other debuffs that reduce defense against that damage type down to below the soft cap - or the hard cap? A combat tracker will also give me the information I need to work that out. Sure, you could ask, but then we have 40 people all needing to compare specs, and that would literally take longer than the raid itself.
You don't need Meters to be a Good Raid Leader. In fact, some would argue if you need Meters you can't be a Good Raid Leader.
A good raid leader is one that recognizes that a minute and a half of wasted raid time in a game like Ashes equates to a full hour of combined player time.
A good raid leader respects the time of the members of their raid.
As such, a good raid leader uses what ever tools are at their disposal - approved by the game publisher or not - and does what they can to not waste the time of the members of the raid.
Combat trackers are such a tool.
Fortunately, they already exist for Ashes - that part isn't up for debate.
Noaani is the kind of person that just micromanages at work based on metrics in a datasheet instead of watching his workers do their actual job and socialize with them to get to know them on a personal level 😮💨
Professional Skeptic, Entertainer, and Animal Enthusiast
I think you could incorporate some kind of way of testing builds (like combat dummies on your homestead) DPS meters in general though? I really don't think they are a good idea and I hope that Intrepid doesn't go the WoW route with raiding. It sucks.
Noaani is the kind of person that just micromanages at work based on metrics in a datasheet instead of watching his workers do their actual job and socialize with them to get to know them on a personal level 😮💨
Funny thing is - as I am reading this, I am planning the next social event for my team at work... deciding between paintball and bowling - though an escape room may be on the cards.
That said, I do have data on each person on my team. I go over it with each of them twice a year.
I get the feeling that you seem to think that these two things can't coexist.
0
DygzMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
Combat dummies don't help determine much because it's really about how well you synergize your abilities with the other members of your group - as well as the group's tactics vs the encounter.
Combat dummies don't help determine much because it's really about how well you synergize your abilities with the other members of your group - as well as the group's tactics vs the encounter.
Agreed.
Combat dummies are only any good for comparing a player in solo combat.
Even if you could get dummies that allow for multiple people to take them on, you are still only looking at comparing builds on blank targets.
There is no reason why you couldn't attack a dummy as a group and see the combat logs. It will give you and your group a general idea of DPS output and synergies but wouldn't allow an EXACT measurement for every encounter. This is a good thing IMO. General DPS meters lead to min-maxing and toxic meta gameplay.
General DPS meters lead to min-maxing and toxic meta gameplay.
No they don't.
Min-maxing and a meta are things that will happen anyway.
One needs to only contrast Archeage and EQ2 to understand how wrong this statement is.
EQ2 had high combat tracker use (ACT was developed for EQ2). The game has no real class specific meta, people generally run which ever build they think it best for them at the time - often just a build they will enjoy.
More to the point, EQ2 was one of the least toxic games I have ever played.
Archeage, on the other hand, has very low combat tracker use. I am the only player I know for sure to use one.
However, the game had a fairly strict meta - one that didn't shift at all for about 5 years. The game is also incredibly toxic.
So, based on these two games, your assertion that combat trackers lead to toxicity or meta gameplay are just outright false.
A game will have a strict class based meta if players feel there are no real options for how to best play a class. If you have combat trackers, and they show that classes only have one build that is viable, then that will become the meta.
Basically, a game having a class based meta is a result of the game not balancing builds within classes overly well.
Toxicity to me seems to be a result primarily of games that treat players as disposable, and so players treat each other as disposable. Archeage has a lot of content that has groups automatically form, and as such you don't really need the people on your server to particularly like you.
In games where groups for content are only ever formed by players, where players decide who to invite, people tend to be less toxic, because the more toxic they are, the less content they will be able to run.
1
DygzMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
Archeage, on the other hand, has very low combat tracker use. I am the only player I know for sure to use one.
Did you use it mainly for pve or for both pve and pvp? I dunno how classes worked in AA, but in L2 the pve meta never really changed because devs never even tried changing it, so using a tracker for pve wasn't really important. And in pvp you mainly just looked at what did most dmg and which CCs were the most successful and mainly used that, because there wasn't much of a rotation in L2.
If AA is anywhere close to that, I'd understand why barely anyone used trackers. Though I remember you saying that your friends used trackers in L2, so maybe you just missed the people who did the same in AA (just as I never met any trackers in L2)?
So everybody knew which is the meta?
That could AoC do too. Just show a list with the metas in game and make those 3rd party sites redundant
I mean, maybe it was because I came into the game a year late and never played on the official servers with the big bois, but the party setup for top dps was always the same. Throughout ~6 years of updates only maybe 2-3 classes got added into the rotation and only because they got a new cool debuff that was useful in pve. So anyone who wanted to farm bosses used the same classes pretty much all the time.
I personally hope this is not the case in Ashes cause I'd love the game to have such a deep variety of class/augment interactions that you can't just have "the best party setup". Mainly because in my experience you just had to level up the characters required for particular bosses if you wanted to farm them and get the chance to get the loot (cause guilds split that up by farm involvement).
Min-maxing and a meta are things that will happen anyway.
Yes, there will be attempts and Intrepid should fight it every step of the way, as they have stated they will, with their 0 tolerance policy towards add-ons.
One needs to only contrast Archeage and EQ2 to understand how wrong this statement is.
and I only need to pick two other games with completely different experiences to show how utterly redundant this point is and how utterly wrong you are
So, based on these two games, your assertion that combat trackers lead to toxicity or meta gameplay are just outright false.
Yeah, and based on two examples that I could choose, from the thousands of games I have played over 3 decades that, your claims are outright false. See how this works?
Elitism is inevitable. People are competitive by nature. Access to stats and meters will definitely lead to min-maxing. Who doesn't like bigger numbers?
If it exists as a 3rd party tool, people will use it regardless of it is punishable or not. It might as well just be in game as standard otherwise you end up with GW2 balancing issues.
The players in GW2 that actually look at DPS value can do do triple or double with their rotations vs the average player which the game is balanced around. This makes the story content either trivial or overtuned.
I still think a good solution is to give more information to military node citizens. That's why they choose to be that kind of citizens: a certain play style which is different from the economic node citizens' style.
This would just make the meta be "you gotta be a military citizen if you wanna pve at the top", which is shit imo.
Or at least the leaders would have to be, if the stat info can be applied to all the raid members. I do like specialties and limited availability based on different characteristics and stats. But I feel like this kind of feature being limited would be wrong.
3
DygzMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
Archeage, on the other hand, has very low combat tracker use. I am the only player I know for sure to use one.
Did you use it mainly for pve or for both pve and pvp?
Mainly for PvP actually.
In Archeage, it didn't really matter what class you bought along in PvE. Even with the Red Dragon, if you had some tanks and some healers, and then just a bunch of other players, you were good.
The main thing I used it for was to find gaps. Some bugs, some poor design, some undocumented aspects about specific builds - things like that.
This is the sort of thing I do in every MMO, and then generally compile a report on them and pass it to the developers. I didn't do this last part in Archeage, because XL had already well and truly proven that they thought they knew everything about the game and how people would play it - their arrogance makes Blizzard even at their worst look fairly tame.
Instead, I just took advantage of what I found out myself. I saw that all three classes that people ran for the games PvP meta (Daggerspell, Darkrunner and something else I can't remember now) all had similar flaws that a single specific build was able to exploit. Since about 80% of the player base ran one of those three classes, and since it didn't matter what you had in PvE, when I ran the off-meta build I came up with, I was able to take on 3 or 4 better geared, better "skilled" players with ease.
Interestingly, the build I used to run is the new meta.
I said recently in another thread that on the topic of risk vs reward I would not compromise. A game which has no risks is boring to me.
Risk comes through variation, doubt, unpredictability, uncertainty, not knowing things.
People who come with the answers destroy the fun part of the game for me.
That's the thing.
If a game is well designed, there is no one size fits all answer.
WoW has one size fits all, because the game is designed to have it.
If Ashes is well designed, and combat trackers are heavily used, if someone tells you "this is the spec you should use", the only thing you should assume is that the spec they are talking about is probably not one you should use - unless you are in exactly the same situation they are in.
With a combat tracker, the only way I could give you actual answers (as opposed to recommendations) is if I look over your gear, what gear is easily available to you that you do not have, what your situation typically is in groups and raids, and what content you are going on.
Without all of that taken in to account, I can't give you answers, and I wouldn't attempt to give you any.
I guess another question relevant to the DPS meters and meta builds is how reactive AoC will be to nerfing or modifying pvp because players find something that works well in pvp.
I'm not a fan of over "balancing" pvp. I'd rather see new skills added than continuously making effective builds rebalanced to do less damage. Too much balancing leads to a bland pvp experience where it doesn't particularly matter what role or class you play.
0
DygzMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
What part of PvP would the devs nerf?
Ashes is a PvX game.
Indeed it is - and different people derive fun from different activities.
Are you trying to push your version of fun on to everyone?
This....this is the infuriating part of this conversation. You're trying to insinuate everyone's fun needs to be a priority, while also putting yourself above the logical point:
This MMO has a design philosophy in mind to be a social first MMO and a majority of social players derive no enjoyment out of having numbers shoved in their face to play a significant portion of the game. Yet, because you want to have numbers it's encroaching on your fun if it isn't there.
You know what, this whole experience is collectively someone's ideal version of fun. It could be Steven's, it could be you, it could be some random sap who shows his ball sack on YouTube. But if it has to be someone's I hope it's someone who cares about the mental health and wellbeing of the players and makes life maybe a little bit harder for the people who need to be the best at everything.
Then more people will play the game and more people will enjoy playing the game. More people will have fun without this feature than with it. Even if it isn't you.
Professional Skeptic, Entertainer, and Animal Enthusiast
What part of PvP would the devs nerf?
Ashes is a PvX game.
They've pretty much already said PvP is going to be a mess balance wise because they are going to focus on the PvX element and personally I hope they stick to that. Balancing games around PvP never really ends well.
Though this might be worth a separate thread.
Professional Skeptic, Entertainer, and Animal Enthusiast
i agree 100% that a DPS meter, and a Healing Meter needs to be added to the UI customization bar. No respectable guild will play a game without being able to manage dps output, rotation, healing output, and single healing output. So, the game from the beginning needs to have this meter available.
Everyone wants it, needs to see it, and needs to improve in rotation, animation canceling, and so on to get good.
You already customize the dmg on mobs, to the left and right, and able to customize the UI and this is beautiful.
Thanks, the PC Gods for this concept, now for the output meters and you will be the God Creators !! hehe
Indeed it is - and different people derive fun from different activities.
Are you trying to push your version of fun on to everyone?
You know what, this whole experience is collectively someone's ideal version of fun. It could be Steven's, it could be you, it could be some random sap who shows his ball sack on YouTube.
LOL shout out to this guys AoC content - I'm watching his vids now.
I want a DPS meter to be added to Ashes, just to see someone trying to analyze the DPS logs of a 4 hour encounter with a boss that was interrupted 10 times and each attempt done under different circumstances with half of their guild killed and other half being on half HP, missing important cooldowns due to having to constantly use them to fight off other players contesting them for the same boss
I swear, some of these forum threads should be renamed to "Hey Intrepid, can you guys just make a game like WoW, so that we have another WoW to play while waiting for an expansion in WoW?"
i agree 100% that a DPS meter, and a Healing Meter needs to be added to the UI customization bar. No respectable guild will play a game without being able to manage dps output, rotation, healing output, and single healing output. So, the game from the beginning needs to have this meter available.
Everyone wants it, needs to see it, and needs to improve in rotation, animation canceling, and so on to get good.
You already customize the dmg on mobs, to the left and right, and able to customize the UI and this is beautiful.
Thanks, the PC Gods for this concept, now for the output meters and you will be the God Creators !! hehe
* Checks Guild Recruitment sections on Forums and Discord *
Funny how there are so many who have already invested into the game and care not for DPS meters.
I want a DPS meter to be added to Ashes, just to see someone trying to analyze the DPS logs of a 4 hour encounter with a boss that was interrupted 10 times and each attempt done under different circumstances with half of their guild killed and other half being on half HP, missing important cooldowns due to having to constantly use them to fight off other players contesting them for the same boss
i agree 100% that a DPS meter, and a Healing Meter needs to be added to the UI customization bar. No respectable guild will play a game without being able to manage dps output, rotation, healing output, and single healing output. So, the game from the beginning needs to have this meter available.
Everyone wants it, needs to see it, and needs to improve in rotation, animation canceling, and so on to get good.
You already customize the dmg on mobs, to the left and right, and able to customize the UI and this is beautiful.
Thanks, the PC Gods for this concept, now for the output meters and you will be the God Creators !! hehe
* Checks Guild Recruitment sections on Forums and Discord *
Funny how there are so many who have already invested into the game and care not for DPS meters.
I mean, are you surprised that the places where scrub guilds advertise recruitment are filled with scrub guilds?
I said recently in another thread that on the topic of risk vs reward I would not compromise. A game which has no risks is boring to me.
Risk comes through variation, doubt, unpredictability, uncertainty, not knowing things.
People who come with the answers destroy the fun part of the game for me.
That's the thing.
If a game is well designed, there is no one size fits all answer.
WoW has one size fits all, because the game is designed to have it.
If Ashes is well designed, and combat trackers are heavily used, if someone tells you "this is the spec you should use", the only thing you should assume is that the spec they are talking about is probably not one you should use - unless you are in exactly the same situation they are in.
With a combat tracker, the only way I could give you actual answers (as opposed to recommendations) is if I look over your gear, what gear is easily available to you that you do not have, what your situation typically is in groups and raids, and what content you are going on.
Without all of that taken in to account, I can't give you answers, and I wouldn't attempt to give you any.
"the only way I could give you actual answers is if I look over your gear"
Reading this post I realize that you might be the main source of information on those web sites which youtubers will read, to be able to make decent content and influence their followers who will then come to me (with your answers)
This may well be true.
The thing is, all of that will happen with it without combat trackers.
Someone will come to with what they think is the best build and post it. Others will read that and go to you with those answers.
The difference is, if combat trackers exist, you can prove to those people that they are wrong. If they do not exist,it is tour word vs the word of someone that posted it on the internet (so it must be true).
The idea that combat trackers cause a meta to exist (which is what you are talking about here) just isnt true.
Comments
First, games in the 90s were dead simple.
Second, combat trackers existed in the 90s.
Fun fact, combat trackers existed before MMO's - despite what you seem to think. They weren't invented for the MMO genre, they were redesigned for it. I mean, wouldn't you be kicking everyone if the raid is done?
So, you want to talk about gatekeeping as being the Big Bad Evil now. Cool.
If I run a raid with you and it is successful, why would I not welcome you back? Sure, your DPS may be a bit lower, but so what? We were successful, you didn't pull mobs you weren't supposed to pull, nothing at all like that.
You have so far failed to give me a reason as to why you think this gate keeping would even happen, you have just asserted that it would with literally nothing at all to back that up with.
I mean, if you had just basic logic to back it up, that would be enough. The problem is, you don't. If we were successful with you on a raid in the past, why would we not bring you again? A combat tracker will tell me what you are doing.
However, what if someone else in the raid has that debuff, and they do not stack? Or what if we have other debuffs that reduce defense against that damage type down to below the soft cap - or the hard cap? A combat tracker will also give me the information I need to work that out. Sure, you could ask, but then we have 40 people all needing to compare specs, and that would literally take longer than the raid itself.
A good raid leader is one that recognizes that a minute and a half of wasted raid time in a game like Ashes equates to a full hour of combined player time.
A good raid leader respects the time of the members of their raid.
As such, a good raid leader uses what ever tools are at their disposal - approved by the game publisher or not - and does what they can to not waste the time of the members of the raid.
Combat trackers are such a tool.
Fortunately, they already exist for Ashes - that part isn't up for debate.
And toes! Don't forget toes!
Professional Skeptic, Entertainer, and Animal Enthusiast
Funny thing is - as I am reading this, I am planning the next social event for my team at work... deciding between paintball and bowling - though an escape room may be on the cards.
That said, I do have data on each person on my team. I go over it with each of them twice a year.
I get the feeling that you seem to think that these two things can't coexist.
Agreed.
Combat dummies are only any good for comparing a player in solo combat.
Even if you could get dummies that allow for multiple people to take them on, you are still only looking at comparing builds on blank targets.
Min-maxing and a meta are things that will happen anyway.
One needs to only contrast Archeage and EQ2 to understand how wrong this statement is.
EQ2 had high combat tracker use (ACT was developed for EQ2). The game has no real class specific meta, people generally run which ever build they think it best for them at the time - often just a build they will enjoy.
More to the point, EQ2 was one of the least toxic games I have ever played.
Archeage, on the other hand, has very low combat tracker use. I am the only player I know for sure to use one.
However, the game had a fairly strict meta - one that didn't shift at all for about 5 years. The game is also incredibly toxic.
So, based on these two games, your assertion that combat trackers lead to toxicity or meta gameplay are just outright false.
A game will have a strict class based meta if players feel there are no real options for how to best play a class. If you have combat trackers, and they show that classes only have one build that is viable, then that will become the meta.
Basically, a game having a class based meta is a result of the game not balancing builds within classes overly well.
Toxicity to me seems to be a result primarily of games that treat players as disposable, and so players treat each other as disposable. Archeage has a lot of content that has groups automatically form, and as such you don't really need the people on your server to particularly like you.
In games where groups for content are only ever formed by players, where players decide who to invite, people tend to be less toxic, because the more toxic they are, the less content they will be able to run.
If AA is anywhere close to that, I'd understand why barely anyone used trackers. Though I remember you saying that your friends used trackers in L2, so maybe you just missed the people who did the same in AA (just as I never met any trackers in L2)?
I personally hope this is not the case in Ashes cause I'd love the game to have such a deep variety of class/augment interactions that you can't just have "the best party setup". Mainly because in my experience you just had to level up the characters required for particular bosses if you wanted to farm them and get the chance to get the loot (cause guilds split that up by farm involvement).
Yes, they do.
Min-maxing and a meta are things that will happen anyway.
Yes, there will be attempts and Intrepid should fight it every step of the way, as they have stated they will, with their 0 tolerance policy towards add-ons.
One needs to only contrast Archeage and EQ2 to understand how wrong this statement is.
and I only need to pick two other games with completely different experiences to show how utterly redundant this point is and how utterly wrong you are
So, based on these two games, your assertion that combat trackers lead to toxicity or meta gameplay are just outright false.
Yeah, and based on two examples that I could choose, from the thousands of games I have played over 3 decades that, your claims are outright false. See how this works?
If it exists as a 3rd party tool, people will use it regardless of it is punishable or not. It might as well just be in game as standard otherwise you end up with GW2 balancing issues.
The players in GW2 that actually look at DPS value can do do triple or double with their rotations vs the average player which the game is balanced around. This makes the story content either trivial or overtuned.
Or at least the leaders would have to be, if the stat info can be applied to all the raid members. I do like specialties and limited availability based on different characteristics and stats. But I feel like this kind of feature being limited would be wrong.
Mainly for PvP actually.
In Archeage, it didn't really matter what class you bought along in PvE. Even with the Red Dragon, if you had some tanks and some healers, and then just a bunch of other players, you were good.
The main thing I used it for was to find gaps. Some bugs, some poor design, some undocumented aspects about specific builds - things like that.
This is the sort of thing I do in every MMO, and then generally compile a report on them and pass it to the developers. I didn't do this last part in Archeage, because XL had already well and truly proven that they thought they knew everything about the game and how people would play it - their arrogance makes Blizzard even at their worst look fairly tame.
Instead, I just took advantage of what I found out myself. I saw that all three classes that people ran for the games PvP meta (Daggerspell, Darkrunner and something else I can't remember now) all had similar flaws that a single specific build was able to exploit. Since about 80% of the player base ran one of those three classes, and since it didn't matter what you had in PvE, when I ran the off-meta build I came up with, I was able to take on 3 or 4 better geared, better "skilled" players with ease.
Interestingly, the build I used to run is the new meta.
Indeed it is - and different people derive fun from different activities.
Are you trying to push your version of fun on to everyone?
That's the thing.
If a game is well designed, there is no one size fits all answer.
WoW has one size fits all, because the game is designed to have it.
If Ashes is well designed, and combat trackers are heavily used, if someone tells you "this is the spec you should use", the only thing you should assume is that the spec they are talking about is probably not one you should use - unless you are in exactly the same situation they are in.
With a combat tracker, the only way I could give you actual answers (as opposed to recommendations) is if I look over your gear, what gear is easily available to you that you do not have, what your situation typically is in groups and raids, and what content you are going on.
Without all of that taken in to account, I can't give you answers, and I wouldn't attempt to give you any.
I'm not a fan of over "balancing" pvp. I'd rather see new skills added than continuously making effective builds rebalanced to do less damage. Too much balancing leads to a bland pvp experience where it doesn't particularly matter what role or class you play.
Ashes is a PvX game.
This....this is the infuriating part of this conversation. You're trying to insinuate everyone's fun needs to be a priority, while also putting yourself above the logical point:
This MMO has a design philosophy in mind to be a social first MMO and a majority of social players derive no enjoyment out of having numbers shoved in their face to play a significant portion of the game. Yet, because you want to have numbers it's encroaching on your fun if it isn't there.
You know what, this whole experience is collectively someone's ideal version of fun. It could be Steven's, it could be you, it could be some random sap who shows his ball sack on YouTube. But if it has to be someone's I hope it's someone who cares about the mental health and wellbeing of the players and makes life maybe a little bit harder for the people who need to be the best at everything.
Then more people will play the game and more people will enjoy playing the game. More people will have fun without this feature than with it. Even if it isn't you.
Professional Skeptic, Entertainer, and Animal Enthusiast
They've pretty much already said PvP is going to be a mess balance wise because they are going to focus on the PvX element and personally I hope they stick to that. Balancing games around PvP never really ends well.
Though this might be worth a separate thread.
Professional Skeptic, Entertainer, and Animal Enthusiast
Everyone wants it, needs to see it, and needs to improve in rotation, animation canceling, and so on to get good.
You already customize the dmg on mobs, to the left and right, and able to customize the UI and this is beautiful.
Thanks, the PC Gods for this concept, now for the output meters and you will be the God Creators !! hehe
LOL shout out to this guys AoC content - I'm watching his vids now.
* Checks Guild Recruitment sections on Forums and Discord *
Funny how there are so many who have already invested into the game and care not for DPS meters.
That sounds like a Tuesday.
I mean, are you surprised that the places where scrub guilds advertise recruitment are filled with scrub guilds?
This may well be true.
The thing is, all of that will happen with it without combat trackers.
Someone will come to with what they think is the best build and post it. Others will read that and go to you with those answers.
The difference is, if combat trackers exist, you can prove to those people that they are wrong. If they do not exist,it is tour word vs the word of someone that posted it on the internet (so it must be true).
The idea that combat trackers cause a meta to exist (which is what you are talking about here) just isnt true.
Players cause a meta to exist.