Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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
That early on in the games development, there was no point in checking up on literally every detail they planned on having in the game - so why would anyone ask them that early about their stance on combat trackers?
This is especially true when you consider that literally every MMO in existence (and every MUD in existence) had some form of tracker - so of course Ashes will as well.
The above becomes even MORE true still when you factor in some of the staff that were at Intrepid early on, many of whom are even more pro-tracker than I am.
Lastly, asking about trackers becomes a fairly stupid question when you factor in the notion that they can't actually stop their use.
This is the context behind "why wouldn't this game" - there was literally no reason to ask the question before backing, because not being at least ambivalent on the matter doesn't make any sense.
Yeah, I remember them wearing red "Make MMO's Great Again" hats.
The thing is, they never said anything about combat trackers being a thing they were concerned with. Add this to me having the knowledge that literally all MMO's at some point had a tracker, and it makes no sense.
If you are saying you want to make MMO's great again, that means you have a point in time when you think MMO's were great, and you want to make your game like they were back then. The thing is, that time - literally any time in MMO history - trackers existed.
As such, not having trackers is literally going against the "Make MMO's Great Again" ideal that Intrepid had (I use past tense here on purpose) for Ashes. As I have said, I have no doubt at all that I will be able to abide by any ToS that is legally binding. If Intrepid can't write a legally binding ToS to suit their position, they should probably adjust that position to match the ToS they are able to write. Keep in mind, a ToS is supposed to be a legal document, and as such needs to be precise and unambiguous. A comma in the wrong place can alter the meaning of a clause (look it up). There is no scope for 'spirit' with a legal document, it is black and white with the things it allows for and doesn't allow for - and as I said, it can't prevent me doing anything that isn't interacting with the client software.
As to community guidelines, since Ashes is a game where players can literally kill each other, take their stuff, then attack and destroy their hometown, the game is going to be absolutely filled to the brim with toxicity. It will make WoW's community look tame in comparison - and that is all without combat trackers.
Trying to put in place community guidelines that allow for that, but that then also claims that someone pointing out that your DPS is a bit low is a level of toxicity that the community simply wont stand for - that is just not possible.
You're allowed to not like this position, but what you can't do is say that the position is wrong. My position here is literally exactly the same as about 25% of the FFXIV population (best I can tell), where the developer has said in a similar manner to Steven here that they do not want combat trackers, but since they can't stop them and players want to use them, players do indeed just use them, to hell with what the developer "wants".
As I've said many times though, FFXIV is proof positive that what Intrepid are doing is to the detriment of players like yourself. If Intrepid maintain their current position, the game will literally end up with the same combat tracker paradigm that FFXIV has. Again, you may not like that, and you may think that everyone using them gets banned, but what you think doesn't actually matter - just as what Steven thinks doesn't actually matter.
What matters is what can be done.
A DPS meter won't be necessary if the difficulty and challenge aren't that big of a deal, but if you've people competing on various level whereas only lets say 1% are able to clear, I do think it's necessary if you want to push the ceiling of player skills. I can't remember the mmo on the top of my head (I heard it years ago), but the anecdote goes, that a bloke played an mmo back in the day, with no inherent dps meter and creating it as a mod was restricted. Some people found a workaround anyway and they made an improvised dps/healing meter, which only the top end guilds used. He thought he was decent at the game, but when he got acquainted with the program his output increased by more than 60%
It's an invaluable tool to discern what goes on around you, and how to improve yourself. Without it, you're blindsided. It seems to me, that Ashes of Creation will have multiple ways to play the game. It doesn't seem like AoC put all it's content in one basket, like raiding, and call it a day, and I'm sure, that there will be a home for everyone looking for it across all kinds of endeavors and levels and thereby, I believe, that the downsides of a DPS meter is inherently mitigated.
On a personal level, I don't know if I'm gonna compete in anything so far, I think I'm gonna mainly be a Merchant of some sort.. but I would still like to experiment and practice my skills, so I can be the best that I can be for my class, and I need some sort of feedback and data to provide me with the evidence instead of relying on ambiguity.
It's not fun gathering 40 guildies and you can't progress, because you ain't provided with any feedback or data, and the accomplishment aint that fulfilled by pure obscurity... yay we killed a dragon.. how did we do it? .. I don't know, but we did it... it's vague, it's meh... imo. a couple of times is fine, but personally I want to improve as a player and I want to as best as possible. Maybe my role only allows me to be at 20th on the dps because I need to support in a different way.. but a voice inside of me, will always try to goat me into, both doing my objective, but also see if I can punch up to 19-18th. And that's a huge part of the fun for me in an mmo.
I don't think a DPS meter would have a devastating effect to the game at all, I actually think it'll have less downsides than most, due to how diversified the game seems to be.
"No DPS meters" is a game rule. Cheating in a game by playing against the rules is not going to land anyone in jail. Cheaters will not have to pay a fine to the government or to IS. Cheaters might get banned from playing the game.
Just because you don't like a game rule does not mean the rule is "wrong". It just means you don't like that rule.
You can cheat if you want to. You can risk getting banned if you want to. Sure.
It's not against the law to cheat in an MMORPG.
You killed the dragon by doing dps using your skills, figuring out the mechanics and know what to do at what times based on experience fighting it. There is no reason for you not to know how something dies or its simply too easy to worry about how it died. Also there is no reason why you can't progress in content, if you are wiping to the boss abilities figure out the mechanics and strategies, use the combat log to help you with some information if that is needed if you are unable to feel it out. A argument saying i can't figure it out is not a reason for including dps meters into the game, nor is saying you don't know how you killed the dragon when you clearly should have an idea having killed it and gained more experience.
How do you want to read this combat log after a wipe on a dragon that generated over 10 000 lines?
Do you use some filter? If so then that filter is basically the same thing as DPS meter - but it filters your custom input instead of only dps - so why not have that as a guild perk and have intrepid in power over who can filter this data? otherwise ppl will use 3rd party software and Intrepid will be kinda forced to a same position as ffxiv devs to enforce "dont talk about it or you're banned"
― Plato
You aren't going to read 10,000 lines there isn't a need to it is a pointless argument that makes 0 sense in people trying to use a pointless scenario of all actions as a point for DPS meters when it really isn't. It is akin to saying life is too complicated and counting every action down to the exact detail you have to do throughout the day to function.
If you wipe you find out why you died, was it to a mechanic, was it to something the boss did skill wise. You break things down and communicate with your guild / group and figure it out piece by piece and hear peoples suggestions. The more times you run it the more you understand and can share with your group and figure out a stronger strategy to being able to beat the boss. I understand people have been babied for so long in games and don't want to think or communicate as a group and want one person to tell them what to do so they can be brain dead and not social.
People can use hacks or try to do add-ons and other sorts of things and ignore consequences for as long as they can get away from it. People will try to multibox on the same computer with multiple clients running. Just because people can do things and ignore rules or TOS doesn't mean its ok to do. If there are rules set it will need to be enforced strictly to send a clear message. If people can hide it they will as with all things, and when they get caught they can't complain when they just lost their major account..
It is not because you says it, you think it, you pray for it... it is true... various people after you began to speak there came and said they are fine with combat tracker...
You said nooani is biased for saying games with long experience of combat tracker are more toxic than wow, and a game with low use is more ? But it is factual, go see the situation of each of those games...
and you spoke about FFXIV... you mean the game when at least before i left people whined because they were tank and kicked for not doing door to door pulls ? or people complaining about the stupid gatekeeping you can find in PF ? This is also a part of the reality of FFXIV (and friends still playing confirm to me those are always issues... One of them do nearly all Xpert run with pack per pack pull and he says that often heal/DPS complains if they not just pull themselves and blame tank to not take aggro back...)
The reality is : both camp contain lot of people, and i am not a politician personally, i won't pretend on which camp is majority. And to be honest i don't care, the democratic solution is not the solution of majority for everything, sometime, a solution that is good for BOTH side is even better...
Instead of crying about how bad combat tracker are, night and day,
What are your arguments against nooani suggestion : limit combat tracker to a guild perk. Guild perk have to be selected, at a cost by guild leaders.
What are your arguments against this, why do you think it will generate toxicity inside the game ?
My answer : nothing, people like you who prefer to play without combat tracker (and you are absolutely right to do so) just have to join/lead guilds that will not use it, and not take this guild perk, in favor of others guild perk... And people who want to use it will take this perk, and play a fun game as you do.
You can keep trying to tell yourself that, or trying to skew peoples comments on being ok with trackers done in a very certain way where people cant' see stats of of other party members. Being ok and wanting something is two different things, the majority do NOT want that garbage it is clear in the comments, and even clear in the poll someone created how much you are in the tiny majority.
You are trying to push for something the community does NOT WANT, and your goal to be pushing for it to only track yourself is actually bs. You simply would use that as an excuse to further push it to be able to track all party members using the excuse its int he game so its not against TOS. Go play WoW of FF if you want a dps meter to track your members and be toxic about it. Again and again people jump in and say they don't want it and/or it is toxic.
Steven plans for Ashes to not support the use of combat trackers -not even as a guild perk- so, yes - we can expect to join/lead guilds that will not use combat trackers.
If you wish to cheat and risk being banned, you can cheat if you want to.
Most importantly, the devs will not be designing content with the expectation that most guilds will be relying on combat trackers to defeat content.
What you are describing here is my experience of raiding using combat trackers.
I am unsure which part if it you think wont exist if we all use them.
You don't be using them as they aren't going to be permitted, and you can do content without them just fine.
As such, if top guilds breeze past the initial content, Intrepid will kick it up a notch and see how they do.
Thus, if those top guilds are using trackers, top end content will be designed around people using them, even if Intrepid doesnt realize it.
Not having combat trackers would still see a meta created. The problem is, the meta will be subjective based rather than objective. This will mean that even if you are able to come up with a better build, people wont accept it because they do not recognize it. They would rather run with someone they know works than something they are unfamiliar with.
A combat tracker is the best way to prove an off-meta build works.
As to toxicity, there is no connection at all between combat trackers and toxicity levels in MMO's. There are games with high toxicity and hugh use of combat trackers (WoW), games with high toxicity and very little combat tracker use (Archeage), and games with high combat tracker use and low toxicity (EQ, EQ2, Rift, LotRO, and many more).
The common thread between games with high toxicity is a lower reliance on community, whereas games with low toxicity have a greater reliance on a smaller community.
It isnt a case of knowing or not. I mean, they wont know, but that isnt the point.
I will be running a combat tracker on a second computer. However, there is nothing Intrepid can do about that. They can not ban my account.
Now, they can try and say I am not allowed to talk about it in game, just as FFXIV does. That's fine, Discord exists.
So, what is it you expect Intrepid to do?
Would you, at that point, see the game as boring? Cause at that point the content's general difficulty didn't change, while you yourself brought the boredom onto the content through the use of a tracker.
We'll see how good they are at catching cheaters.
Since you've already said that you will be cheating, I also expect them not to use your data to increase their raid design difficulties.
Difficulty can scale in other ways besides increased damage and hp. They simply can rely more on action combat which will throw trackers off on getting effective data.
But what if the 90% of players still couldn't beat the bosses, but the 10% that were using the meters could beat them easily? The generally perceived difficulty would remain the exact same, while the "true" difficulty for the 10% would now be super low, because they made it easy for themselves with their objective super meta.
And what if that wasn't the case and people with meters were not as good in other raids because of the action elements and meters not reading as effective.
We can do what ifs all day but a game shouldn't be built on what ifs when it involves people wanting to cheat int he game rather than socialize and figure things out over time.
AoC is not a old style mmorpg with how it will play it is going to be modern, things will be different. The reason why DPS meters were so effective is because you can play a game blind folded and tap the right buttons and hit your target. AoC will be designed different as the combat is different and it will create different elements of challenge. Assuming things will work with a game like EQ2 with relic 20 year old combat is not how AoC will play. And trying to use arguments that related to older mmorpgs shouldn't apply to this one.
This is exactly why meters a toxic like look at this chat someone literarily saying i will do what I want and not care about your rules, i will do what i want in attempt to try to ruin the experience for other and base my argument off of it. I will ignore the fact the community doesn't want meters and try to force it on them. This is all I hear while the same few people say meters aren't toxic. Game hasn't even released and we already have a toxic mentality here lmfao.
Honestly thankfully its just a small group but you never know when that group can ruin it for everyone. By release they might decide to now show dmg numbers and simply shows, hits, miss, crits and when certain effects go off so there is no information for them to even attempt to track.
the top server will clean due to a far better masteries of their class/build, a far better understanding of the game, and a better visual analysis of the fight event (which can only be seen directly, no tool can show it... )
This is how top players are first, even in FFXIV/WoW. they have a far better way to understand boss mechanics while discovering it, and adapt to it (and also, faaaar more gametime so far more try)
Those information are mostly visuals : visual sign, like size of AOE, a mark on a player before a bad things or good thing happens around him etc etc.
Then, guides will be produced and people with a lesser understanding will be able to clean.
Also, guides will be produced for each of 8 primary archetype, saying what to play for easy gameplay but high efficiency.
With those 2 kind of guides, and sure, some time, people will get thru more and more content, except those who don't care to do hard contents.
The problem here is so clearly guides... right ?
Combat tracker will help to do guides, more accurate... but guides will come out, With or Without combat tracker. it will be a thing
and people without personnal thougt, no will to learn, to improve themselves will try to follow it, and will try to force other to follow guides... With or Without combat tracker this is what will happen...
This is were we will have to face the "META" law... and it will happen even without combat tracker, because people don't care about the mathematics behind guides... they just follow guides
And this is a real problem i always disliked... and was always one even in "old good time"
So, nothing?
But even outside of that. Why do you need meters then? If boss difficulty comes from visuals, you have no need for meters. But meters will allow you to figure out the best objective approach to the boss, so the boss will become trivial much faster and now you'll require Intrepid to make a "more difficult" boss, otherwise the content becomes easy for you.
Also, guides don't give every viewer the ability to beat the boss because there's still the high physical requirement to be able to push buttons correctly, move in a timely matter and have the ability to track everything and remember the whole guide. So even with guides, bosses could be <10% cleared.
But once the "meter people" clear them - they'll need better faster harder bosses or it'll be boring. Absence of a meter for the masses would delay this boredom. But obviously people will still use them and get bored and leave, if Intrepid doesn't make content just for them. I'm fairly sure that's the situation with WoW's current bosses, where most people don't even clear basic difficulty bosses cause after years of making bosses for "meter people", the skill floor was way too high.
Now obviously that's more of a WoW issue than an EQ2 (or maybe some other pve mmo) one, but even here Noaani said that people with meters will just clear difficult content and will need more.
This is unlikely to happen.
Top end content is developed with a very specific target audience - a much smaller target audience than regular content.
For better or worse, top end content can basically be looked at as being bespoke.
Since the idea of top end content (I Ashes, according to Steven) is to be aspirational (as in, people not running it aspire to run it), the entire function of that content relies on those that are running it actually enjoying it.
If Intrepid is not tuning it to the people that are running it, it will not succeed in its function.
I think a more accurate statement here would be that combat trackers and the existence of guides are unconnected.
If guilds dont want others knowing how they killed a mob, they wont let anyone do a guide on it. If they dont care, they will let people do a guide.
Combat trackers have no real impact on this.
I can see that point if you mean it in the way "if the hardcore top people leave - everyone else will follow", but definitely disagree with the aspirational part of the equation.
People with a bigger experiment on the game (with the various element i said) will clean first, and faster they master their class and the game mechanics the faster they will clean harder content.
This is where the combat tracker is the most efficient help (as i uses it a lot to help people to improve in their gameplay... even if some here call helping others "toxicity" it seems)
But except if they don't share the knowledge this will spread...
Now lets see about this knowledge :
The class mastery one, the build to do (be it the really efficient one or the one people think is) it will exist in any kind of way. People in PU will try to focus on it... like it happened in EQ, wow vanilla and after until now... from "old good time" to our days.
The general guide about how game works : same, will be shared... Will be fun to have some drama here or there because people are not playing efficiently to grow the node :')
For hard boss : sure we can have a situation like EQ2, but in fact, it will be more real the harder those fight are.
The more people manage to kill it, the more risk some guild decide to share the information.
Also my message could look as "guides are bad" : in reality my thought is "how people use them are bad"
Too many (far too many) people follow them blindly... and THIS is a problem. Like some people for sure, read combat tracker, and says "lol you are low DPS LMAO" ...
And i think those are the exact same people, they are not only toxic, but are in my opinion a plague for the game. Misleading younglings forcing them to play "what they have too".
This is the same problem...
Because while i love to find out strategies on bosses, i dislike to spend too much time to find out how to maximize my DPS. I will use combat tracker because it will avoid to spend minutes and minutes (ending to be hours and hours) to compile all datas to then compare from one cycle/build to another. I prefer to try, and see fast differencies, than spending hours to just compile data. And this is exactly what do a combat tracker, no more no less.
In fact, the combat tracker simply allows me to... play more the game. In EQ or WoW vanilla i didnt use them (didnt know it exist while... some friends on both already used it ^^') i did all with my little hand and it was NOT FUN AT ALL...
Then in BC i used combat tracker... i did the exact same work, but the non fun part was now reduced to 0 second spent. My joyce to find way to improve myself was the same
Back in Vanilla, i rarelly helped other to improve themselves : didnt wnat to spend hours to have the data in a format i can easily read to understand what was the problem. in BC was the moment i began to help people, to the point that even now, as casual, some people still are happy to see me back in wow, remembering all mentoring time i spent with them.
This was how i had fun in game before i had internet... improving myself, at what i am playing. And also, gathering knowledge in the game. to share it after
And Combat tracker don't give every user the ability to beat the boss.
But while combat tracker gives informations that could help to understand part of bosses (never all) and help players to have a better rotation for this specific fight, it still ask them to use their brain to discover how to deal with the boss. (and then need to apply the strategy they found)
The guide remove all the brain step. and people are directly at the "apply strategy" step
People toxic with the "combat tracker says you are bad" will be toxic saying "all guides says that you are playing summoner bad" (even if the guy just do a non conventionnal build... that remain really efficient) And will be also toxic complaining that many other people in their node are dumb because are not doing the most efficient activities to increase faster the node... And they also will be toxic because...
Toxicity is just the only way people have to say "combat tracker is bad" even when we suggest a way to have a combat tracker without toxicity (like the idea of nooani, that mag7spy avoid to read ... didnt even answer about "why are you against guild perk combat tracker that is limited to the guild members" ...
One of the reasons why people blindly follow guides and try to push any non-top-dps person from the party is because they're trying to clear the content as fast as possible. They want to consume the content immediately and then, I dunno, do some other shit and complain that the game become boring cause they already beat all the interesting content (even if they just followed a guide instead of figuring it out themselves).
Now, if Intrepid can prove to me during alpha2 that they can pump out several super complex bosses, that also can be farmed in the context of open world pvp, every other month - I'd have fewer problems with dps meters speeding up content clearing, just because there'd always be enough of it. But until then, I'll keep thinking that meter people are just ruining the game for themselves.