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Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest news on Alpha Two.
Check out general Announcements here to see the latest news on Ashes of Creation & Intrepid Studios.
To get the quickest updates regarding Alpha Two, connect your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
I love how you don't read post, whole paragraph on nothing, this guy loves to argue with himself.
Bad games like WoW with no teamwork required rely on DPS meters because the entire challenge of a boss encounter is how much health the boss has and how quickly you can reduce it, and because the only scaling that exists is just increasing the amount of health it has. Depending on how detailed the hitpoint numbers are for mobs, the idea of a "top dps" may not even be something they want to reveal to the players at all. I've heard Steven talk about obfuscating the HP meter so players aren't just staring at the meter and are allowed the freedom to actually be immersed in strategic gameplay.
Certainly players of all commitment levels will be interested in their performance, so there should be a way to track your personal statistics. Here are some things I think should be easy for any player to display about themselves. These should be able to be tracked with an overall that has a reset button, as well as one with a timer (next 10 minutes) and one that tracks the last fight. There should be a copy / paste that allows the data to be saved outside the game:
However, this data should not be made available to other people inside the game in real time.
Of course, if there is a way for a person to see this data, its possible for elite groups to ask players to tell them their numbers to qualify to join their group - that is their choice. But I believe only the most hardcore players will worry about this, and the goals they have will align with the types of people that want to join their groups, and those people will have no problem being honest with them about their statistics. But I still don't think teams should be forced to micromanage each other's performance by making real time DPS meters a normal part of the gameplay loop. If a group member doesn't appear to be holding up their end of the bargain, remove them, but if the group is succeeding don't disqualify people just because they're not hitting the DPS meta number the community has established as the standard all players must meet before being invited into certain content.
Steven describes dynamic encounters as adjusting to the performance of the group. Certainly a group leader can decide that the goal is to defeat a boss in under 30 seconds, and if that isn't happening they can start asking questions and scrutinizing their group, but I frankly hope this is only going to occur for certain types of players and groups and not ALL of them.
A combat tracker measures DPS, but it also measures heals, mitigation, blocking, CC, buffs, debuffs, and even who is successfully performing actions as required by the encounter, as well as many other things (it can include harvesting results, if you want it to).
Essentially, a combat tracker is a record of everything those present have done, including their DPS.
If the leader of a group or raid is then taking all of that information and only caring about DPS, that is because that is all the content requires him to care about.
If the encounter requires specifics in relation to CC, then the raid leader will all of a sudden care more about that than DPS.
Now, as to your suggestion, I do not think it is as good of an idea as you think it is.
First of all, top end players will have combat trackers. There is no ambiguity in that statement, because it is just a fact.
This means your suggestion isnt needed for top end players at all.
What your suggestion will do though, is make it so that people that want to be top end but aren't good enough will be asking for these numbers when forming groups. Essentially, every pick up group will require you to share this information - and no content for you if you dont.
Basically, by suggesting something you mistakenly think would assist top end players, you are really just ruining the game for people that want to play more casually.
This was one of the suggestions made years ago that led to me coming up with the solution of having Intrepid add a combat tracker to the game as a guild perk. Only guilds that value it would pick it, and since guilds are generally a collection of like minded players, everyone in the guild is likely to be on the same page.
Then you make it so that the combat tracker only works on people within that guild, and all of a sudden people wanting to play more casually simply have no way at all of getting those numbers, and that person running the pick up group cant simply use his guild combat tracker on that pick up group.
The idea is that since guilds are already a natural means for players to segment themselves in to groups with different playstyles, it is a viable way to add tools that are only really wanted by specific playstyles.
I mean, your post doesnt make much sense.
Getting denied joining a group because the guild wants extreme meta only? Were you joining a group, or a guild? If you were joining a group, the guild is irrelevant. If you were joining a guild, why would your guild come and fight?
More importantly, if they wanted extreme metas, you should have known this well in advance, so why are you not running the build the group or guild (still not clear on that point) want you to run?
I mean, if you are joining that group or guild as pure DPS, they presumably have everything else covered. They dont want you to run a tank secondary for survivability, because they have your survivability covered. They dont want you to take Bard secondary to bring some utility, because they have a full bard bringing all the utility they need. What they want is for you, a DPS spot in the group or guild (still not sure on that point) to bring as much DPS as is possible to bring, because DPS is all they want from you.
People will play with the people they want to play with regardless of those metrics. It's not hard to tell when someone is a good or bad player when you don't have a bunch numbers in a box on your second monitor; they're still getting that invite or that kick.
Disallowing meters/trackers doesn't kill toxicity, it kills an avenue for reaching higher levels of play. "Here is exactly what you need to do to improve and why it is that way with numerical proof" vs a silent kick.
Also: I'd say dps meters allow more for off meta specs than not having one. Who cares if its not the meta pick if you can clearly see they pump damage? If all you have to go off of is word of mouth meta information, you'll be waay more hesitant.
You can put tons of hard mechanics, but if people can play as safe as they want, avoid risk, the fight will remain easier than if you force them to take risk while doing mechanics.
Take any fight that has DPS check, even tough fight like ultimate in FFXIV, or Arthas 25 HM (i take some famous one)... They become easy.
Takes any fight where difficulty is only doing mechanics, don't touch the fight, leave it as it is. and just add a soft enrage (most of time, it is boss doing more and more damages as time goes on), making now a need to kill those bosses asap, while still having those insane mechanics. and now you have a real tough fight.
The more DPS is needed, the more risk people will have to take to kill the boss. The more risk, the more mistake they can do. The more close to perfection they have to be. remove this need to take big risks, you reduce the difficulty...
@Sygmund
In what way are combat trackers a pest?
What is it you expect to not see if they magically did not exist in Ashes?
are meters being pests in terms of cluttering UI? I agree - meters shouldn't be visible during combat - it just detracts from actual gameplay
are meters being pests in terms of too much outside preparation? If so - aren't discord servers too much as well? aren't guides in general too much of outside preparation? Why is a tool that aids with understanding of game mechanics too much, but a tool that helps with running a guild is not? How is a walkthrough on achieving something in the game ok then? How is having a wiki about the game ok then?
― Plato
It is an easy target, and more, a target from the anger... This tools show, factually, objectively that you are bad... this is why it get hate, and on FFXIV forum, people against it are mostly in green-gray parse on FFlogs. . .
To be honest, personally, i would more about forbidding any kind of build guide, and have a combat tracker.
Guides makes people worse and worse. They stop to thinking by themselves. They go to icyveins, maxroll, or anywhere they can find their builds, follow what those guides says to the letter without even the will to understand.
Sure not all are just "dumbly reading guides"... But for most people "because this is a game" they don't want to invest the time dedicated to understand, they come play leave.
Because they consider that test themselves and time dedicated to understand is wasted. But doesnt change that without any effort to understand (which is what guides allowed) people never gets better.
This would actually resolve a number of the things many players have falsely attributed to combat trackers. They are all made up issues, but if there were no build guides posted, people wouldn't be able to complain about even those made up issues.
I see it the other way around: "Oh you see how this one class seems to now be pumping the biggest damage. Sorry Timmy as the raid leader I'm gonna ask you to go reroll this class, so that we can be optimal. No I don't care that it takes you a week to level your secondary archetype. Do it or you're out of the raid, because this new class we just saw parsing as top 1, is now the meta."
Whereas without a DPS meter, it would be: "Well, I have no idea if your class is met or not, because I can't check your numbers, so you play whatever you want, so long as I don't see you slacking off."
That's what personal and enough anecdotal evidence to become empirical has shown me over the years.
So, my guess is that there should be some core system in-game to really pay this off, like times in dungeons, etc. Would the game have this kind of stuff? Should it? idk
As that raid leader, I disagree.
If someone shows up to a raid with a spec I have not seen, if it performs, why would I care? It literally makes no sense at all for me to ask them to change. Sure, a spec may do 5% more DPS in a testing environment, but I dont care about that 5% from one character, and I am also more than aware that in a non- testing environment that 5% deficit could well go the other way.
Whereas without a combat tracker, if I have no idea of knowing if your build is 5% or 50% below what I consider to be par, you had better believe I would ask you to spec to a build I have had success with.
The fastest way to waste untold hours worth of player time is to take a raid of unknown builds along on to top end content.
From my position, it is actually irresponsible of a raid leader to do this, they risk wasting too much combined player time if things dont work
I mean, we both know that won't happen. Organized raid teams will find a way to evaluate the contribution of a player beforehand. With or without a combat tracker.
They'll evaluate the build, the gear and do a short combat test the same way we have seen in a plethora of other games. They take you to certain mob type/miniboss and watch how quickly you can murder it, then they compare it to the speeds they know from other players.
The same way, they will to try to optimize their build, whether there's a DPS Meter or not. We have seen this dozens of times in the past.
The omission of DPS Meters won't matter much to the organized guilds. It will matter a lot to pugs and unorganized ones. It will widen the gap between players significantly.
Metas will appear the same way through the testing of influential youtuber and streamer dedicated to parsing and theory crafting
Yes, but it is the person deciding what 'mediocre' is. And why should they settle for 'mediocre'?
All this does is lead to people being kicked in the search for the Elites. Now that doesn't mean this is the wrong perspective, as a Team Leader you really should want the best you have available.
What I'm arguing with is, this will never be used to find out who is doing 'less than mediocre'. The bar will be much higher than that, and everyone under it will be getting cut unless they fill a different role/function.
And to be fair, any Group Leader NOT doing that is actively hurting their entire Group. But I thought the idea of Ashes was to kick it a bit old school, breath some fresh air into the Genre, and not be an 'Open Guide, Read How To Dungeon, Then Go Dungeon' MMO... it was meant to be a 'Go Dungeon' MMO. All the Guides and Min/Max were the things people were blaming for ruining MMOs in the first place, for leading to Elitists being Gate Keepers of Content.
This doesn't mean Leaders shouldn't be looking to actively improve their group, but maybe the skill in that is being able to see and understand what is going on instead of looking at a meter and kicking everyone under a certain number. Maybe not having such info spoon-fed will separate those that have skill, from those that read spreadsheets prepared by others.
Maybe not everyone should not be a good Team Leader (though all should strive to be), just like everyone should not have the most Epic Flying Mount. We don't want this to be a Game where everyone does the same 3 Builds over the same 3 Classes, and we don't want this to be a game where every Dungeon is ruled by the same static set up.
There will be losses. There will be Dungeons and Raids dropped and failed. And there will be those that find the right people and put them together to make it past such hardships. That's part of what is supposed to set Ashes apart. It's supposed to be tough. Looking at DPS Meters and saying "That video said everyone under this number goes... so, they go" isn't very tough.
It could be something simple... Weakness to my Element, or Heavy Armor. Or it could be that it's wrong and broken, and I need to report it.
It does also allow me to find my sweet spots. I may be sacrificing Damage for some other things, but that doesn't mean I don't want any damage. I still want the damage I do to come out efficiently and effectively. For instance, I may have an Ability that does Target Damage, but has a Splash Effect that heals Friendly Units that are in a Melee Range of the Target. So a Heal for my Front Line that procs when I Damage their Front Line, or a Heal for my Rouge who has dove their Wizard in the backline... while still being aggressive toward the Target. I wouldn't expect this to be a Nuke, since it has a Heal... it's Utility. But I'm still going to want to build for my Utility to either be "Damage First" (especially if the Heal scales off the Damage dealt), or "Utility First". And if it's Damage First, then I'm looking for all the other things I might can do (Procs, Crit, Armor Pen, etc.) to elevate that Damage DESPITE knowing next to your Ability that is the same but took Splash Damage instead of Splash Heal, I'm not going to keep up in the DPS (and you shouldn't keep up in the Healing).
So absolutely DPS Meters can be a good thing, for these two reasons. But it's these two reasons COMBINED. Because I can just eyeball this with skill, go back and change ONE thing in the build, same target. See what the difference is. But then I can't spot a Bug as easily that could lead me to the wrong answer (well, correct at the time but only correct because of a bug... which will be wrong once that is fixed).
Firstly I will address WoWs Recount tool because that is the tool I'm most familiar with with reference to Warcraft Logs as relevant. WoWs tools are great for what WoW is and that is to day WoW has always been a numbers game, because WoW started off simple enough mechanically that the way your guild would clear things faster wasn't by having mechanically inclined players but by having bigger numbers. So in this vain Recount was great. It provided real time, accurate, and meaningful measurements to make sure you were parsing well. Meanwhile Logs provided the necessary information for things like what waves of incoming damage were leading to player deaths and what members were struggling mechanically and exactly why they might not be parsing where expected (through monitoring exact rotations and CD usage.) This is all amazing information for the most competitive and the most numerically inclined in a numbers game.
Now here's why I think AoC should not have a dps meter of any kind. Ashes is not a numbers game. It's design and pillars are not intended for e-sports, or for world firsts, or for minmaxxing. That is something the community will just have to come to terms with when it comes to the design direction the team has repeatedly mentioned. This is a community focused game from its cities to its crafting to its dang world building. This is why they aren't focused on balancing every class to within an inch of one another. This is why they have set difficulty bosses. This is why the dungeons are built into the world and very rarely instanced for controlled precise full clears with defined resets. This isn't a numbers game. Even at the very top level game play it's going to be more reminiscent of Vanilla and TBC raiding where everyone has the correct resistances and you have the right class compositions for specific fights. Your team makeup will make a far greater impact than %5 damage.
There will always be minmaxxers, people that race world/region/server firsts, and people that will insist they need to know exact numbers so much to optimize that %1-%5 damage output that they will create/use 3rd party meters. Intrepid does not need to design around this minority of players. As Intrepid have stated they do not want or intend on allowing 3rd party add-ons to the game so the latter people mentioned above would be breaking ToS and it is the communities responsibility to report these players. As for the others mentioned they will use the following very typical method of optimization...
For those that want to optimize there's a simple solution. Find you a training dummy and hit it. This could be a mob in the same creature type as the boss you intend to fight. It could be the mobs you farm for your trade skills (help your local skinners and tailors). Or it could be your friend, they can swap into whatever resist gear or provide a worthy mechanic challenge whatever.
If you can't tell the difference when you hit your training dummy with one specialized skill vs another, guess what! You have this magical thing called 🌈Personal Choice🌈
Trust me, as a Heroic level raider who has lead my own guilds, if you are smart enough to stay alive and hit the fire boss with anything but a fireball then I have no reason to be mad. The thing will die eventually.
Optimization does not mean you need a DPS meter to squeeze every percent out of a build.
Lastly I do not think DPS meters are worth the social pressure and anxiety it falsely injects into the game for the %95 of players who truly do not need to worry about being the best of the best. I have had many players come to me saying that their own numbers (that are good enough for me and my co-gms) are too low for them personally and they either had to change their gameplay entirely or leave the team because they were too stressed or anxious about their numbers to enjoy the game. This is heartbreaking for me as someone who loves the social aspects of MMOs and feels they are best with people who mesh well and not just the made for the competitive players.
TL:DR This pretty much sums up my thoughts on how I think Ashes and Intrepid should approach a DPS Meter. While it is a useful tool, and not necessarily inherently toxic it is not worth the cost to the vision of this game. Though I think a Logs level detailed explanation of fights for the raid leader could be useful to expedite progress on encounters if that is the desired outcome.
Professional Skeptic, Entertainer, and Animal Enthusiast
For those for whom group cohesion is more important than uber-efficiency, obsessing over efficiency actively hurts the entire group.
True.
Exactly.
True.
If you are talking about raid guilds, then not necessarily.
We will recruit someone based on their personality and performance. We dont much care what build they are running with, though we will take their gear in to consideration (if they join the guild, the assumption is that their gear will improve). If they are able to perform well with their gear, we will let them in, happily.
From there, if they want to experiment with a new build, they are more than welcome. Even WITH a combat tracker, you cant accurately assess a new build on raid content without taking that build along on raid content - as combat does function differently in raids - even if only slightly.
As such, a guild run ing combat trackers will often have someone running an untested build. In EQ2 we were probably running 3 or 4 untested builds per week. Some worked, some didnt. The thing us, each untested build we ran meant we learned something new.
The notion that top end guilds lock players in to a hyper specific build is just false.
@GethOverlord
Ashes is set to have a system whereby an encounter has its difficulty increased based on how well you did on previous encounters. This increase in difficulty will also come with an increase in loot.
You must know that all metrics that relate to how well you do on content are basic numbers that a combat tracker can communicate.
WoW has no such system, I am sure you are aware.
Based on this one piece of information, it seems to me that raiding in Ashes is even MORE of a numbers game than raiding in WoW is.
At the very least, it can be said that numbers are as important in each - but absolutely no less important in Ashes. I mean, could you imagine running a raiding guild in a game where the loot you receive is based on how well you do, yet you are given no indication as to how well you are doing?
You are making assumptions based on a system you don't know the eccentricities of. You assume that everything Ashes is considering for performance on previous encounters is based on things tools can tell you and not things you can see with your eyes. A DPS meter is the least mandatory thing to a current raid environment, even to WoW. If the boss is a damage check either you go in for the week and you play it perfectly you either beat it or you don't. If you don't then everyone goes and gets more gear for the week and you do it again. But have you progressed in high level raid content? Because %90+ of progression, in WoW specifically is getting your raid to the point where 25 people perfectly execute on patterns and mechanics. If you have a guild that %100 slams mechanics out of the park every time then it doesn't matter what your gear is for all fights sans maybe one or two a tier.
Mechanics are more important. And I don't claim to know how AoCs system for rewarding performance is going to work. But I guarantee they can design a system that promotes more teamwork and communication over caring about some uptime. I would be shocked if the system rewarded a kill that was faster by ~15 seconds over a group that killed the boss in 5-10 less attempts in the first place.
Professional Skeptic, Entertainer, and Animal Enthusiast
@TheClimbTo1
Tell me WoW is your only real MMO experience without telling me WoW is your only real MMO experience.
First point, a group leader will only kick those under a specific number - as you suggest - if they know they are able to easily replace them. This is why this is an issue in WoW and not in other MMO's - other MMO's simply do not allow for players in groups to be replaced that quickly. This is why it is blatantly obvious that WoW is your only real MMO experience.
Based on this one fact alone, assuming Ashes has no family summons, the phenomenon of groups booting people mid content to replace them simply won't be a thing in Ashes. Any arguments against combat trackers that are based on this are simply unfounded.
So, let's just ignore them, shall we?
As to the basics of the rest of your post, you agree that it is up to a group leader to work out why a failing group is failing.
Cool.
How do they do that without a combat tracker?
I mean, it's rare a group is failing because someone is standing there doing nothing, or not doing something that is easily spotted during combat. If a group leader is looking out for players not performing well, chances are the group failed because the group leader was too busy looking around to actually do what they need to do. The way a group leader finds what is going wrong is by looking at a combat tracker for the issue.
So, if we now assume that in Ashes, group leaders will not use combat trackers to boot players mid content because they no real way to replace them, and also that group leaders will use a combat tracker to find what is wrong with a group and attempt to fix it, what are the issues with combat trackers?
Well failures could be a number of things.
Tank didn't use the right mitigation skills, sucks at blocking, has bad positioning, steps into every AoE.
Healers don't use the right healing spell. Healers die because Tank pointed the boss the wrong way. Healer simply had bad positioning and couldn't hit his heal from too far away.
Now tell me how a DPS meter tells you about this?
Non min maxed damage is the least of the reasons why a raid fails, unless there is an absolutely draconian DPS check.
We currently have no way of determining whether no fast travel in shes is enough of a deterrent for replacing unwanted raid memembers who's performance seems sub-par to a Group Leader obsessed with pursuing the META.
But, yes... doesn't have to be about just one person being a failure at something, it can be about the group as whole adjust how they synergize their abilities and tactics.
Especially since the types of mobs in a raid are designed to change from session to session.
Look at the incoming damage the tank recieves, if every AoE is on there, you know he is being hit by them. If the tank is getting hit by larger amounts of physical mitigation than he should, or doesn't have periods where it is substantially lower comparatively, you know they are not using mitigation skills properly. If the tank has a low rate of successful blocks, you know they are not blocking properly.
If the healers are using the wrong healing spell, well, you can see the name of every healing spell in ACT, so that's a no-brainer. If the tank has the mob positioned incorrectly, you can see the people being hit by the attacks that positioning is intended to prevent. If only one non-tank group member is getting hit by those same attacks, you know it was that one group member, not the tanks positioning.
I mean, these are all basic combat tracker use cases. These are LITERALLY the things a combat tracker is created to communicate to players.
What we do know is that without a means of fast travel, a person in a group or raid can not be easily replaced. I mean, open dungeons have this habit of respawning mobs between where the entrance is and where the players are.
Thus, the leader has the decision to make, is the group or raid better off with an empty spot, or with this underperforming person?
If the person is so bad that the group is better off with an empty spot, I'd like to see any kind of defense of that person.