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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
So you are saying someone spent company time programing things that are not within the gsmes current scope? No wonder they keep missing dates, they have team members that dont follow the script.
This post says nothing about anything done on company time, though.
I mean, i was asking. There is a question mark. They are free to clearify
It was your second sentence that got that response from me, but yeah, I shouldn't have. Bad habit. Carry on.
I mean, you're fine. Im being a smartass.
What is a guild ? a group of players...
What is "group" when we speak here ? a group of players.
The first is for mid/long term relationship, while second is for mostly short term relationship.
Those durations impact how you manage it.
But both in the end can keep their group cohesion with people with a close mindset about how enjoy the game in it... You need some strong point that gather all people in each of those group of player, be it a guild, or a raid.
I answered to the message i quoted just before those lines.
buuut... if i understand well, you don't care about combat tracker, if they are not included in game files ?
For me people are against... totally, so i admit not sure to understand
Group = the players who have formally joined together for a dungeon or raid. There are tools that allow the group leader to adjust looting rights for the group and also allow the group leader to kick people from the group.
In Ashes, a dungeon group has a max of 8 player characters. A raid group has a max of 40 player characters.
Guild = Clan
I’m not aware of people being kicked from guilds because a guild leader did a DPS meter check and believed they under-performed in a dungeon or raid.
I have, many times, experienced people being kicked from a group during a dungeon or raid because the group leader did a DPS check and believed they under-performed in a dungeon or raid.
I’m not aware of an MMORPG that has a mechanism to remove an active guild leader from the guild.
Which MMORPG has tools that allow a group leader to be kicked from the group?
Can’t stop people from trying to create their own tools outside of the game.
If devs provide DPS meters, they will design content with the expectation that everyone is using DPS meters to defeat content.
And I don’t want devs to design Ashes content with the expectation that everyone is using DPS meters.
I want the devs to design content striving to provide the experience Steven envisions:
"Back in the day, when MMOs were great, you had to win your encounters through trial and error. You didn't have a DPS meter telling you, 'Oh! We need to get up to 67.7% damage in order to achieve the whatever!' It wasn't some mechanical bullshit experience where you got to look at a graph or chart and say, 'Oh! We need to do exactly this.' Instead, you actually had to be present, you had to watch what was happening, you had to help your fellow guild members learn how to play the game and you had to excel as a group."
Nope, it analyzes actual combat.
It just analyzes it from a video feed. As such, it can be used on people streaming, or on YouTube videos. This means you can use it on yourself while streaming - or just analyze the video feed directly without streaming it.
The only thing Intrepid could do to prevent this would be to say people are not allowed to capture video of the game - meaning no streaming or YouTube videos.
I have no issue with that kind of thing with only your own personal data for incoming and out going damage.
Current functionality is player only. However, this is because the current functionality is designed to parse developer livestream combat.
It will not remain this way. When the game goes live, the only chance you have of me not being able to parse you if I am standing near you (or potentially even just if I know how to spell your character name and the server you are on) is if Intrepid opt to take control of trackers, leading to the ones I am talking about no longer being needed.
The key argument pro trackers have, is "more data is more better". Cant argue with that.
The key argument against trackers is "this data is toxic"
And you know what, I cant seem to argue against that toxicity, but not for the reasons the anti tracker group claims.
I have never, once in over 20 years of gaming seen toxicity from tracker users, or log readers. I have seen gatekeeping, but it was never toxic. And gatekeeping is the right of any party leader, elite or casual, they get to decide what they want to bring with them, on any metric they choose to use, and that is not toxic. Meta builds, DPS from logs, guild politics, they just dont like you, anything.
Gatekeeping is **NOT** toxic.
I have seen toxicity, but from the casual crowd against the top performance crowd. One example is a few pages back in this thread even, when the casuals have no basis for argument anymore, they attack Naoomi personally. "Oh you must be the kind of person that only evaluates coworkers on data and has no social care at all" kind of thing.
I have seen toxicity from longtime friends of mine against me, this was recent in FF14, I am a 95-99% parser on average in savage and ultimate content there, I take the time to optimize my gameplay when I am doing raids. The thing is, if you look at how I spend my gametime, raidtime is the tiny majority of what I do. The huge vast majority of my time, comes from hanging out with casuals, just chatting, doing dailies, and roleplaying and storywritting.
When one of my friends decided they wanted to do extreme content, and decided to download and use the parser for that game (ACT), they saw I was vastly outperforming everyone else in the group, even another ultimate raider that was their friend. (I was playing MCH at the time and outperforming SAM as the other high end raider). They decided they went through my logs (in the ACT program itself and not the webtool fflogs designed to interpert and go through an encounter to optimize), and the only conclusion was that I was cheating or hacking somehow.
They did not look at all of the contributing factors to my performance at all, how I aligned all of my burst damage within raid buff windows, how I maintained higher uptime, had more total skill usage, etc etc, they only looked at damage done, skill use damage, etc, and decided I was cheating, and they became quite toxic about it. None of my explanations on how they can perform the same if they adjust a few parts of their gameplay, (which I pointed out using a combination of logs and video capture) mattered. My casual friend just decided I was cheating and became very spiteful to me for a long time until they figured out that I wasnt cheating until later. This was sad for me because she was a very good friend for a long time before this, (we are friends again now too, and still roleplay and hangout)
Toxicity does come from combat trackers existing, but its from the casual crowd, the underperformers, who do not like gatekeeping, and who do not want to understand how to perform better themselves. The minmaxers don't go around ruining casuals day to be toxic just because they are better.
Just face the music everyone, combat trackers will exist with or without Intrepid support. They will not be able to tell who is or is not using them to hand out bans. My question on this topic of DPS meters is, and always has been, and always will be how can we as a community address being better neighbors to each other.
Sort of like people getting highscores at the punching machines, or other fair/carnival/arcade games.
That way you still get a meta read on pure DPS and survivability, burst DPS and sustained DPS etc. People compete and perfect their rotations and get a highscore.
This could still be used as a tool for selection of raid members, but at the same time it's not a complete enough assessment of a player's skill, that it can be used to entirely discriminate.
I envision this as being Military Node related/exclusive
I mean, if the ToS says "No Trackers", we could be a better community to each other by observing and honoring the ToS.
So when you say, whether Intrepid wants them or not, that they WILL happen... that person is already disrespecting the Community by intentionally breaking the ToS to begin with.
What kind of way is that to start "addressing being better neighbors to each other"? I can't wait to hear this explanation.
Why is THIS breaking of the ToS okay, but others are not? How are you going to qualify that?
We do not know trackers will be against the ToS.
What we do know is Steven doesnt like them, but he doesnt like them because he thinks they inherently lead to toxicity.
As such, he is already well and truly involved in that disrespecting of the community. In fact, he is leading that charge.
Saying that it is disrespecting the community to not respect a rule that is itself based on disrespecting the community is not a sound position.
If Steven had respect for his community - all of it - he would find a way to allow trackers (my suggestion is BY FAR the best option). The fact that he is not is the root cause of disrespect here, and the community at large should not be surprised when those of us that feel disrespected by that stance reply with disrespect of our own.
They are a blessing in the sense that to people who actually know how to read them correctly and what they are looking for like people who actually can read a fight log and are looking at when you use abilities, what's going on at that time, etc they provide a lot of valuable information and insight into whether your players are actually doing their job or not. When it came to Classic WoW, if I instructed specific rogues to interrupt on a fight, their loot priority was at my discretion as the rogue officer of my guild. I would open my damage meter and see what rogues used their kick ability at all in the fight. I didn't look at interrupts because if three people interrupt one target, only one of them is getting it. So I looked for casts of kick to see if they at least attempted it. This is important because it being 25 energy and how rogue energy worked in Vanilla meant they were giving up a use of Sinister Strike more or less to interrupt. There were a lot of rogues who didn't even bother to interrupt targets, fixated solely on "muh dps" and were upset when they didn't get the item they wanted, and in a lot of cases I rewarded rogues I NEVER assigned to interrupt a target who did so anyway just to guarantee it got done.
That being said, they are a curse because the amount of people who know how to properly read a damage meter for actual information are incredibly small compared to the monkeys that don't know anything about a damage meter and just proceed to beat each other over the head with the bars. They don't take into consideration class balance, or whether that person didn't have nearly as much uptime on the boss, etc. FFS in TBC Classic we had an argument in a Karazhan because our "shadow priest doesn't do damage", first of all the spec in general isn't meant to do damage compared to competent people. Then second of all, the guy wasn't damaging for half the fight yes, but he instead realized a healer had died, immediately stopped doing damage, dropped Shadowform and started healing as best as he could so our group could stabilize. To morons, he made the pull harder than it needed to be because he didn't do damage. To anybody with a brain that could read a log in our group, we realized he actually saved us from a wipe and basically carried a scuffed pull on a boss to completion by doing something he wasn't necessarily there to do, but could, and had the common sense to realize when he needed to deviate from his assigned role and flex. He was not told to do this at all, he just did it. THAT is an incredibly good player you want on a roster, but if you're a meter monkey on that pull you'd assume he's the worst shadow priest on the planet.
So ultimately here's what I would suggest if they were to do a damage meter. . . Make it something literally only visible to the party leader and they have a button that will open it up for everyone else if they choose, and it shows after either a boss kill, or a boss wipe. Do not allow it to be present during the fight. This way people wanting to compete for damage done can see so at the end of the fight rather than focusing on an element of their UI over the actual boss, and in the event of a wipe allow it to come up so the party leader (who should have responsibility for the success of the group rather than just being the guy who was willing to fill the party) can hopefully discern what the problem might be. Like if it's an enrage timer thing and one of the players clearly isn't pulling their weight on damage, they'll know and can act accordingly with that knowledge. However, do not leave it up to every random player because as I said, most people have absolutely zero idea how to actually read a log or a damage meter, they only know how to read bars which any idiot who is more intelligent than an eight year old can do, it's not hard to figure out what number is bigger or what bar is longer, but it's a completely different animal to understand why that number is bigger or why that bar is longer.
Looking at your dps is fun and all, but, imo, if that action prevents you from knowing what the fuck is going on around you during the encounter - you're a bad player, and the meter itself doesn't really have anything to do with that.
Communities being better neighbors is not a thing in MMORPGs. Which is why they typically have separate PvE-Only servers and why they also typically have separate RP servers.
"If Steven truly accepted his community, ALL OF IT, he's say screw those guys and do what I say."
Cool story, bro. Got time? Tell it again?
But that wasn't in response to Noaani, and Noaani is always right. Their idea is the best idea, and anything that doesn't observe this is disrespecting the entire community, to include the portion (which this thread strongly suggests to be the majority) of the community that doesn't want Trackers.
No logic like Noaani Logic, it can not be defeated.
Being better neighbors to each other has literally nothing to do with DPS Meters.
There was a time when Gamers got crapped on by everyone. It's why the playing in small groups in the basement thing exists, why the 'anti-social gamer with anti-social friends' thing exists. So we created an accepting community that was social with each other.
Fast forward 30+ Years, and now the 'cool thing' is to be that Sigma Gamer that craps on other gamers. You don't game hard enough. You don't put in enough hours. You don't drink the right juice. You don't follow the right streamer. You play candy crush, what a punk! You play the right genre, but the wrong game in that genre. I'm right, you're wrong, that's how it is.
Somewhere along the way, it became far more accepted by Society. And in our acceptance we now find the very bullies we escaped by gaming, have become gamers themselves.
The amount of "ESports" Players I know that can not function in sports on any level, not because of a lack of skill, but because as soon as it goes bad they blame everyone else, start fighting their team, and walk off the court mid-game. They don't understand the concept of 'Sport' or 'Team', but demand to be respected as a 'Athlete'.
And this type exists in every Multi-Player Genre. They are right, you are wrong. They know better than you, whether they know anything or not. Gaming isn't a place for people to meet socially and enjoy time together, it's a realm to dominate and that is the only thing to be respected. Anything other than that, and you're a filthy casual.
Okay, cool. But we're playing an MMO. You don't WIN an MMO. You don't LOSE an MMO. You LIVE an MMO. MMOs ARE the Metaverse that Facebook is trying so hard to create right now... sorry bro, you're only decades behind. But we have people bringing a MUST WIN AT ALL COST mentality to an MMO, and then wondering why people are like "Dude, you have zero chill.".
Yes, we want to get better. But we get better by exploring, by learning, by grouping together to achieve more than we can alone. We don't have to Min/Max to get better, or to enjoy the content. Hell, it's an MMO... most of the time we create our own content. Everyone of us is a Story in this Game, some of us want to show and share our Story. Since, again, you LIVE an MMO. You don't Win or Lose it.
It's the Elitist Idea of how they are going to group together and 'Win' the MMO that is the direct point of the toxicity beginning. That's it, that's the seed.
You know what you CAN win? You can Win, at least for that Season, the PvP Arena. You can. That can happen. In this Game, you CAN win a Node System. You can Lose a Node System. That's not the game. It's not Game Over if you lose or win a Node System, the game keeps playing, you keep playing in it... and you can take it back or lose it again later.
MMOs are not a Win/Lose kind of thing. Playing them like they are, is part of the fundamental problem.
This Game is being made in Steven's image, in what he imagines makes an MMO great. He can be very wrong, this is true. But you know what, we've tried it other ways for decades now and we're pretty unsatisfied with those results. It's why we're here.
I'm giving this game a chance because the person who envisioned it is Steven, and their outlook in many ways matches my own. It's why most of us are here. That is the version of the game I want to see and experience.
If you want something else, go back to those other games that offer that. Stop trying to push what you want onto Steven's vision. Especially when being such a colossal butt about it.
"My way is the best way." "You disrespect the entire community when you don't agree with that."
Screw who?
No one has given an actual value reason as to why others shouldnt have combat trackers, the only thing that has been said that has any validity is that they dont want people able to parse them.
As such, if I have a combat tracker that u can use on myself and my guild (all of whom will be running the same tracker, because like most guilds, we are like minded players) then how does that have any impact on you at all?
Can you explain to me how my position is "screw you do what I say" when I am going out of my way to make suggestions that dont affect you at all? Surely that is a better description of people that are against them. They are literally saying screw you, i dont want one so you shouldnt have one - where as I am saying I want one, you dont want me to use it on you, so give me one I cant use on you.
If you are looking at these two positions and labeling the second one as being " screw you, do what I want", then you really need a mirror.
As to your claim that I am always right, not necessarily - but I am on this point.
I am not right because it's my idea and thus the greatest- it wasnt even originally my idea. I did, however, advance it and alter it based on comments by others. It is essentially a crowd sourced solution.
Now, if you want to trash said idea, or say it isnt the best, great. All you need to do is come up with a better solution.
If you try and say "a better solution is to not allow them" then look at FFXIV, as that is the solution they originally ran with.
If you can honestly come up with a better, realistic solution, I'd love to hear it.
If you cant, then you are effectively admitting that my suggestion is indeed the best - or at least better than anything you can come up with.
You already stated earlier that even if the Tracker were against ToS, that there would STILL be people using them. People are going to use them, regardless. You've stated that.
Now the post has shifted to "Being Better Neighbors". How can we even start that if we have people that will refuse to follow the ToS that they agree to follow? That's automatically starting off being a bad neighbor. Now we're supposed to reach out and Good Neighbor to that?
So yeah, that is saying "Screw you" to the rest of the community, when you come in Day 1 and agree to terms you have no intentions of following, and then breaking those terms to have it your way.
Do you understand how that works? How the topic shifted, and I responded to, 'Better Neighbors", and how those that will intentionally agree to a ToS and then intentionally break it are not and can not be 'Better Neighbors"?
But that is who we are supposed to work with to create a better and less Toxic community? The people that hold the ideal that the ToS doesn't mean them, that will intentionally violate that? You don't see how that is disrespectful to the rest of the Community?
Now yes, all of this is under the theory that the ToS says 'No Trackers', since Steven has said the game won't have them. That's where that stems from. And when you said, 20 or so pages back, that even if it's in the ToS people will still do it... how does that lead to a 'Better Community'? How is that not Toxic? How is that not disrespectful to Intrepid and the Community?
Now, you were smart to not say YOU would do this. So good on you there. You didn't directly include yourself with that group. That you admitted such a group exists.
My point was, to be a better Community, we have to realize MMO isn't a Genre one Wins or Loses. We have hyper competitive people coming in trying to Win at something that can not be Won. That's the root of toxicity right there. Steven already said there was a time before Trackers, and this game isn't going to have them. That's a concept, that's the idea. You can dislike that, fine. But that's the direction of the game. Be prepared, if the game comes out, and this happens.
Because it doesn't sound like you give a damn if that happens, since you already know there are players that won't honor that. Which is toxic. Which is disrespectful to the community and Intrepid.
How are we to be 'good neighbors' to that?
Why are you saying that those wanting combat trackers are the ones needing to be good neighbors, when those not wanting them (including Steven) are the ones starting out being bad neighbors?
Sure, YOU may not have done anything, but if there is a rule against combat trackers in the ToS, that is the initiation of not being good neighbors, not those refusing to follow that rule.
As such, if you want to talk about good neighbors on this topic, we start with that potential rule, not the reaction to it.
What I am saying, and this is the final time, is if it is the ToS then follow the ToS. If you don't, you're toxic and a bad neighbor who should not be courted to.
That's it. That's my statement.
You have to AGREE to the ToS to play. If you have an issue with the ToS, don't agree. It's that simple. What is hard to understand about that?
You are saying "We agreed, but screw that, we do our own thing." And then saying "How is the not respectful, we're respectful... what do you mean?"
You have a choice, to agree or not to agree. If you agree, then honor that agreement. You're blaming the rule, instead of the role you played in agreeing then breaking.
You don't like a Rule. So you say screw it. Yes, the epitome of respecting the Game and the Community, surely. How could I ever have been confused there?
I'll put it in a way you can understand.
Raid Leader says the rule is you need X Damage Output.
You say "I agree." Then you grab a build that does much less than X, because you don't like that rule and that rule is a bad neighbor.
What a horrible Raid Leader. I'm just in my actions here, and he's the bad neighbor!
Well, he's going to Kick you from the group. And Intrepid is going to Kick you from the game. And in both cases, that fault belongs to you, for agreeing to something you had zero intention of following, because you didn't like the rule.
But to you, because you don't like the rule, it's their fault. And you can lie all you want, and then do what you want, and that's fine.
Weird logic, bro. Yeah, you're the Bad Neighbor there. Because you could just say "That is a horrible rule, and I'm not participating in that". That would be morally just, that would be the 'good guy' or the 'right thing'.
Your idea is "Infiltrate, get past that silly ToS... then do what I want!". You start off shady.
But it does sort of explain a lot, this being your view.
Where I live, software ToS's can only involve discussions about how you use that software directly. Anything removed from that invalidates the entire ToS.
Since I am able to use a combat tracker in association with Ashes without needing to actually be running Ashes at all (and in fact can run my tracker on a computer that doesnt even have Ashes installed), there is literally no legal way I am breaking the ToS - regardless of how it is written.
If you want to say this amounts to infiltrating past the silly ToS, then I guess you can. At best, I would call it malicious compliance. I'll absolutely put my hand up for that one.
So really, if your argument is "if you agree to the terms of service, you should stick to them", then all I can say is that under literally every scenario I have talked about (bar 1 extreme scenario), I have met my legal obligations under those terms - it just so happens that I am not as bound by them as some others may be (living in a place that puts people's rights ahead of company rights is fantastic).
This is why I didnt bother discussing the ToS angel. I'm following the ToS to the level that I am required to follow it, regardless of what the ToS actually ends up saying - simplybecause everything I have talked about falls outside of what a software ToS can prevent me from doing.
Now, going back to the point about good neighbors. Who is the better neighbor here - the person that wants to do an activity they are perfectly entitled to do, but who knows that the activity may upset his neighbors and so attempts to find a means by which said activity wont impact his neighbors, or the neighbor that wants to attempt to make it against the rules for the person to ever do that activity, despite there being no actual legal path to do so?
Given this scenario, I know which of the two I would rather live next door to - clearly the person trying to make it work for both.
Perhaps a better question is, which of these two people would you rather be yourself?
As a possible example, the summoner class could do less damage no matter what since with their summons they are prone to having more survivability than other caster types. That entire class and combinations could be taken out of dungeon runs and the like just because of a DPS meter. That is worst case and even if that wouldn't happen completely, it would still make finding groups outside of friends much harder and less worth playing that class in general.
If anyone played much of Lost Ark and got to end game in it, could you imagine how much worse some classes would be to find groups with if there was a DPS meter in that game?
In games without them, a meta still forms. People still have classes or builds they want, and classes or builds they do not want.
Since all a combat tracker does is give you information, if that information then suggested to you that an entire class in Ashes wasnt worth bringing along on raids, then that is an issue to do with the development of the game, and is absolutely not a combat tracker issue.