Archeages lack of meta shift is one of my main concerns around not having a tracker. The meta the game had never actually involved the best classes, it just involved the classes people thought were best, and hardly any one had the tools to prove otherwise. Even if we did post what we saw using a tracker, because they were non-standard in that game, people wouldn't have understood what was being shown to them.
So yeah, now I'm almost sure the thing I said is the case. Both Steven's biggest inspirations didn't require you to have a tracker to clear content so he doesn't see a point in allowing them.
No doubt.
I've been saying for a while that Steven doesnt want them because he doesnt undrstand them. He doesnt understand them because he never used them in L2 or Archeage.
Him not understanding them means he should have deferred the call to someone on his staff that does understand them. The problem is, Steven went and ran his mouth (as he does) before he even realized that he doesnt understand the first thing about them.
It's a situation that isnt all that dissimilar to family summons, imo.
The main difference is - removing PvP 2I'll ruin the game. Allowing trackers stands to make the game better. Not by their direct use, but by the results of people like me and Azherae using them and sharing what we find.
You see it that way because you agree with Steven's views on pvp (or at least understand their reasoning), but disagree with him on the trackers. Any pve carebear will gladly tell you that pvp will destroy the game and that implementing opt-in features would be better than sliced bread.
But, if Steven is anywhere close to my thinking, the reasoning is "the game needs pvp to work properly, but it doesn't need trackers to work properly, so there's no reason to implement them". Yes, several people in this thread have made a good case for tracker usage, but a ton of people have bad associations with them so just saying "we won't have them" is already appealing to them. Now it could be argued that the same crowd might not enjoy a ton of other features in the game, but that's on Intrepid to figure out who exactly they're trying to appeal to with their designs and how they present them.
What is kinda obvious is that right now there's some confusion in terms of trying to appeal to pve players. Especially when it comes to the hardcore part of that community. So there's gotta be some disconnect between either just Steven, or maybe even most of Intrepid, and those hardcore players.
The main difference is - removing PvP 2I'll ruin the game. Allowing trackers stands to make the game better. Not by their direct use, but by the results of people like me and Azherae using them and sharing what we find.
You see it that way because you agree with Steven's views on pvp (or at least understand their reasoning), but disagree with him on the trackers.
To be clear, it isn't a case of agreeing - you are correct with understanding his reasoning.
Point in case - I disagree with Stevens decision to not give players the ability to not display cosmetics so that we can see the actual armor and weapons a rival will attack us with. However, I understand his reasoning. As such, I am fully on side. His game, his reasoning - I don't need to agree with the decision. All that is needed is logic in that reasoning - I will always argue against anything illogical.
And this is where the issue arises, Stevens reasoning is easily disproven- I've already done so (there is a reason Steven refuses to get in to discussions on trackers now - he knows he can't win).
It is an illogical reason, and as such, I will not - indeed can not - get on side with it.
You can't say that combat trackers cause toxicity when there are entire games (as in, plural) that don't support this perspective. The problem is, they are not games that Steven has played - even if they are games he has hired many developers from.
Only one issue there. Guild Based Trackers in a game where trackers are not needed, placates the MAXIMUM number of people.
I do agree that this argument will be one of the best to use once we see what kind of bosses Intrepid presents during Alpha2. Obviously there'll be several fan-made trackers during that time, so if you can completely destroy anything that Intrepid throws at you - you just say "Steven, your promise of <10% ain't working out. We get that you want to avoid trackers influencing partymaking in the game so just add it as a guild perk." At that point, imo, there'd be the highest chance of influencing the final decision on this matter.
With this quote in mind, I'd like to ask all those not wanting trackers- what kind of a game do you want Ashes to be?
I'm too much of a naïve idealist for my answer to matter. Back in L2 raids I invited people if they just said "my dps is fine, trust me bro". And due to those raids not being anywhere as hardcore as other game's, it would usually work out just fine, so my whole approach to Ashes would be the same "why do you need a dps meter to test people with, when you can just trust them when they tell you that their build should work".
But I realize full well that I'm a huge outlier when it comes to those kinds of situations. People either go full toxic or full practical (or full RP in Dygz' case ). And trackers would help both of those kinds of people to do what they would've done even if there were no trackers (toxic people will find something else to judge people by and practical people will find some other objective metric to properly calculate validity of someone's build).
While I still stand by my point, I will definitely agree that if it is truly impossible to detect 3rd party trackers, then they should be implemented so everyone can have access to them instead of only the few in the know. Thats just really disappointing to me though.
The main difference is - removing PvP 2I'll ruin the game. Allowing trackers stands to make the game better. Not by their direct use, but by the results of people like me and Azherae using them and sharing what we find.
You see it that way because you agree with Steven's views on pvp (or at least understand their reasoning), but disagree with him on the trackers. Any pve carebear will gladly tell you that pvp will destroy the game and that implementing opt-in features would be better than sliced bread.
But, if Steven is anywhere close to my thinking, the reasoning is "the game needs pvp to work properly, but it doesn't need trackers to work properly, so there's no reason to implement them". Yes, several people in this thread have made a good case for tracker usage, but a ton of people have bad associations with them so just saying "we won't have them" is already appealing to them. Now it could be argued that the same crowd might not enjoy a ton of other features in the game, but that's on Intrepid to figure out who exactly they're trying to appeal to with their designs and how they present them.
What is kinda obvious is that right now there's some confusion in terms of trying to appeal to pve players. Especially when it comes to the hardcore part of that community. So there's gotta be some disconnect between either just Steven, or maybe even most of Intrepid, and those hardcore players.
The difference is actually that Steven just is telling those players 'Ashes may not be for you'.
That's fine. Steven might be saying that from the 'We will make hard content and then use our built in surveillance equipment to monitor what other applications are running on your computer, all the way down to custom scripts you wrote yourself in C++" side...
Or from the 'Our content is not going to require this because it won't be hard enough/the numbers will be simple enough/the situations won't be the same type of challenge anyway' side.
Again, Steven's never actually said, that I have seen, that 'Hardcore PvE' is the way Intrepid intends to achieve that 'single digit percentage' thing. But the things we HAVE been told are things that would make me think 'Ok, sometimes we're going to want a Combat Log parser to verify something'.
Because, again, remember, the outcome of having NO parser, even by magic, is usually bad. The outcome of having hidden parsers that no one will talk about is worse:
"Sorry we've decided you're just not the right sort of player for our guild."
"Why not, I'm always ready, I'm helpful, I show up to basically everything, I don't make trouble with anyone..."
"We just feel the need to go in a new direction."
But that's worse for me if you allow me no tracker, because I still 'have to do this' if the content is hard. After the 7th 'sus' performance from someone, if I have the tracker I can go, objectively 'this thing here is the reason you are failing, are you okay with changing it?'
Some people want me to guess. Some people want me to 'figure it out later'. I'll give an example of 'figure it out later'.
FFXI's Hate mechanics were not known for YEARS. No 'parser' gave you a way to discover them. During those years, two really important things happened around the ability Provoke.
1. Some people claimed that if you were playing warrior as Main Job rather than Secondary, Provoke was just better, while others claimed it was improved by the Charisma stat.
2. People claimed that Provoke was vital for holding hate as a tank and anyone trying anything else was ruining the party in most cases.
The Meta breakers ignored this. Some built Warrior Tanks and continued to be successful (and mocked). Some built groups where there was no Provoke at all, and were somewhat successful (and mocked).
Then some crazy number crunchers, bless their hearts, spend 3 straight days deconstructing it, and then the Director had to 'cave' and make a big post explaining it. This information wasn't clear to people until they were working on FFXIV, mind you. We went years without understanding this.
The result was that nearly everything people thought they understood about Enmity, and Provoke in general, was wrong... except the Meta-breakers (Provoke does not, afaik, actually operate better on Warrior, but because of the WAY it works, plus the ROTATION of warriors, it is more effective).
"Upon usage, a large amount of time-volatile enmity (enmity that decays over time, but not with damage taken) is added to the user.
The amount of enmity added decays by 1/30 per second. After 30 seconds, all enmity gained from Provoke will have worn off."
Note that this has NOTHING to do with parsers. And I am sure that there are some people out there who will feel 'congratulations, that's so impressive that someone finally figured that out, I bet it made the game much better when you didn't know all that precisely'.
Nope. It sucked. Exclusionary behaviour, no way to prove certain tank builds worked so you had to literally get people to take it on faith that you could do the same thing as someone else, and lots and lots of frustrating battles where the 'obvious correct' decision would fail because of the PRECISE way Provoke works.
Just obfuscation.
I shouldn't care. I 'should' be a toxic elitist. I 'should' be taking advantage of the fact that I am confident that 'take longer' for ME is 2 months whereas 'take longer' for the average person just wanting a build that is good, but others don't believe in, is way longer, reducing competition.
No. I hate that shit, it's stupid. It didn't cause a better community, it didn't bring people together, the only reason it even came up as actual information is because the people doing it were so FED UP with it being unknown, and it's a PvE game that was later in its life by then.
If you have to hide information in a way that leads the average player to make the wrong decision until someone does a 3 day controlled trial, for your game to feel good and not 'get figured out quickly' in this era, then nah, you don't care about even mid-serious PvE players in terms of challenge, you just want to artificially extend the lifeflow of the game while rewarding the ones with the most understanding of statistics/math.
It isn't even that they specifically hid information about Enmity/Hate mechanics, because MOST of it works as you'd expect it to just from eyeballing. But I'm gonna call out that team on their BS too (they were the original developers of FFXIV also, we all know how the first release of that went).
I've just ranted as usual because it's good to vent sometimes, honestly. If I see any signs that Intrepid doesn't want people to 'understand abilities easily' or 'be able to reverse engineer their stat effects', I think I'm out. It's literally against my principles to play games where the designers have purposely pushed it so that my main competition is either 'cheaters' as some would say, or 'people with the same genetic aptitude as me' when it's not that type of game.
Maybe to Steven it IS that type of game, though. A real Yoo Byung Jun. But I'm no Weed, as inspiring as he is.
I'm too much of a naïve idealist for my answer to matter. Back in L2 raids I invited people if they just said "my dps is fine, trust me bro". And due to those raids not being anywhere as hardcore as other game's, it would usually work out just fine, so my whole approach to Ashes would be the same "why do you need a dps meter to test people with, when you can just trust them when they tell you that their build should work".
I'm curious, I'm L2, what did you doing the person was wrong - if their DPS was actually lower than it should be. Did you even know?
In terms of PvE, I am making the assumption that Ashes will offer some form of content derived challenge at some point - as opposed to both L2 and Archeage where all challenge seems to derive from PvP.
If Ashes doesnt have some content derived challenge, the the game is essentially Lineage 4 (Archeage being L3). This is going to essentially doom the game to having an initial population boom, and then settling in after 6 months with a population of between 5 and 10% of that initial boom (most PvE games tend to settle around 50 - 60% of the initial population).
This isnt a case if me saying "if the game doesn't have trackers it will die" which we all know is the takeaway someone like Mag will have from the above. It isnt even a comment directly on trackers. It is a comment on content, and why I assume trackers will have value in a PvE setting.
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akabearMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
Yes, in L2 it was quite easy to see if DPS was lower than it should be.
Simplistically, when a raid could not complete a boss or content was unusually harder or party wipes.
Say in a group, there were usually only 1-2 dps`s.. tank, healer and 1-2 classes that did stat improvement modifiers.. so each role quite defined and any one role not played well, timing for some, gear for others, and skill use for select few.
Classes were not so flexible, so picking the right class combination for a group was important for certain raids and there was often a solid relationship between the roles in each group.. Larger raids sometimes had a number of ideal group combinations.
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akabearMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
Did a raid over 3-4hrs one time, a raid that should have taken 1-2hrs.. and got to a point where ran out of expendables, so had to quit.
Nope. It sucked. Exclusionary behaviour, no way to prove certain tank builds worked so you had to literally get people to take it on faith that you could do the same thing as someone else, and lots and lots of frustrating battles where the 'obvious correct' decision would fail because of the PRECISE way Provoke works.
I think one of the reasons why I'm against trackers, while completely supporting the supremacy that comes with people figuring out stuff on their own, is that I love the struggle of figuring out smth through your own abilities rather than with a tool, but I'm also completely fine with trusting people when they say that they've figured something new out and that thing is as good (if not better) than the currently accepted one.
I guess that's just projection fueled by naivete and gullibility. If I see someone with a completely new build, the first thing I think "oh damn he probably spent a ton of time figuring it out". I then respect the time he spent and believe that the build could work out.
But because I'm a stubborn (and probably too stupid) person, I always try to rely on my own abilities first before I turn to any outside tool. And so if I see someone who says "I ran my build through a dps meter and it's much better than anything else out there", I'd value that accomplishment way less than the potential lie of someone going "just trust me bro"
The desire to obfuscate (or make less prevalent by not offering this feature) so that groups are encouraged to grow together and help one another become better by more old school/organic methods of trial and error, efforts in watching other people during the raid, by failing repeatedly until success is possible. Now, could people use meters to aid in this task? Yes, but in my experience it isn’t used in this way..more often it is an exclusionary tool designed to separate players.
seems to indicate that he values the same kind of "do it yourself through sweat and tears" attitude.
At this point I'm starting to feel like L2/AA players had a completely different mentality when compared to most other mmo players.
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akabearMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
L2 gear was pretty standard per class and level.. for the average player they were enchanted up to say (I forget) +3 without risk, +4 with say 20% chance of destroying your gear, and an exponential scale of increasing risk with higher dps on the gear. The average player might shoot for +3 or maybe +4.. but only the very wealthy and risk takers would try higher.. +16 gear with 1% chance of not exploding existed and were very overpowered in game.. early game development nobody could visually differentiate higher enchanted gear from average.. but mid game they introduced various visual effects, so you could see.. but clans were largely insular, so you knew who in your clan was strong or not.. and from pvp or joint raids other clans would learn who was strong or not.. and my case, because an indemand class for certain raids, I would sometimes do raids with an enemy clan, war tags up.. and be left untouched for the raid and share the rewards.
I'm curious, I'm L2, what did you doing the person was wrong - if their DPS was actually lower than it should be. Did you even know?
In terms of PvE, I am making the assumption that Ashes will offer some form of content derived challenge at some point - as opposed to both L2 and Archeage where all challenge seems to derive from PvP.
Pretty much what akabear said. You'd just see if the raid was going better or worse than your average run of that boss. The top dps classes were usually the same, so when someone said "I'm telling you, my build of this non-regular class is as good as that regular one you know", you'd be very skeptical of that. And then during the fight you'd see if your rough timings were met. And due to there being no timers on bosses (as far as I remember), your base goal was always to just kill the boss. Doing it faster usually meant that you wouldn't run out of resources (as akabear pointed out), so it was definitely welcomed, but there was no race or sudden wipe mechanics due to a timer running out which meant that you could go off "optimal time" by a few minutes due to a non-standard party member and be just fine.
This was especially visible when the gear OE lvls were still fairly low on the server (or weapon augments/special abilities weren't acquired yet), so someone like a summoner or even a spoiler class (usually just a sub-dps support) with a well-equipped wolf pet could do as much dmg as a supposedly top dps Destroyer. So you'd easily invite them to the raid, clear it and probably even farm more stuff with them because they'd be much more reliant in day-to-day farming because their dps output was way more stable than a Destroyer's one, which mainly only worked for a 30sec-2min due to super strong buffs.
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akabearMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
Classes were not so flexible, so picking the right class combination for a group was important for certain raids and there was often a solid relationship between the roles in each group.. Larger raids sometimes had a number of ideal group combinations.
And having that right combination in group, with such a diverse range of classes in AoC, worries me.. meaning should an optimum grouping of different classes be discovered for particular content, then chances are many players who do not play those classes will get left out
I think one of the reasons why I'm against trackers, while completely supporting the supremacy that comes with people figuring out stuff on their own, is that I love the struggle of figuring out smth through your own abilities rather than with a tool, but I'm also completely fine with trusting people when they say that they've figured something new out and that thing is as good (if not better) than the currently accepted one.
Completely understandable, but I have been taught by many people over the years, people who do not use trackers and would never think to do so, that it's discouraging when a game or competitive thing is so tuned to a certain ability type that others can't do much.
We're quite literally talking about being able to read and do addition in your head faster, quite a lot of the time. If the general consensus of others is that they 'want me to win', then I'll graciously accept their support. Just as long as they understand they are also saying to "Hypothetical Raider who has been playing for years but doesn't add or track lines in a combat log as quickly" that their years of tactical ability built up through analysis of logs and trackers is now:
"Nah, you better learn to READ faster and pay attention to more things at once, my friend. It's better for the game organically."
I'm not being sarcastic or having much feeling here.
Sorry, my native language is Erlang.
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DygzMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
Trackers/meters will still be made if there's a combat log. And I'm fairly sure it'd be made if there even wasn't a log. And Intrepid can't do anything about it. And as specifically Noaani's comments point out, there can't even be an assumption of "good faith" when it comes to the tracker ban, because someone somewhere will use them. Someone else will see (or at least assume) that the other person is using them and will use one themselves. And it'll just snowball from there.
And then there's people like Azherae who can just extrapolate way more stuff from simply the combat log itself, to the point where some people might accuse her of using a tracker. And this would start the same snowball effect as someone really using one.
All of that is fine. Although, I doubt Azherae using a parser will get her in trouble with IS.
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DygzMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
As such, if they see after a month or two that x build is the meta build for a given primary class (because it is the best one found so far), to them, that is the meta. They will think that is the only acceptable build for that primary class for months, perhaps even years. The worst part of all of this, and the hardest part to fix (indeed, this may never be able to be fixed if we get to this point) is that their bias towards a mono-build meta in the game has been confirmed, and so to them, the game has a mono-build meta.
To me, we never want to be at a point where there are only one or two builds for a class (let alone for a primary class) that are considered meta. We want to come out of the gate with no less than 24 viable builds for each primary class, so that there is never any reinforcing of a mono-meta in the game.
This will literally be impossible without combat trackers.
Um. It won't be a thing in Ashes, due to the class design and due to the dynamic raid content design.
As such, if they see after a month or two that x build is the meta build for a given primary class (because it is the best one found so far), to them, that is the meta. They will think that is the only acceptable build for that primary class for months, perhaps even years. The worst part of all of this, and the hardest part to fix (indeed, this may never be able to be fixed if we get to this point) is that their bias towards a mono-build meta in the game has been confirmed, and so to them, the game has a mono-build meta.
To me, we never want to be at a point where there are only one or two builds for a class (let alone for a primary class) that are considered meta. We want to come out of the gate with no less than 24 viable builds for each primary class, so that there is never any reinforcing of a mono-meta in the game.
This will literally be impossible without combat trackers.
Um. It won't be a thing in Ashes, due to the class design and due to the dynamic raid content design.
I didnt say that o.o
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DygzMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
So what are the chances that Steven is somewhat like me in thinking "why would you need trackers? All I've heard from a lot of other people is that they've had bad experiences with them and that FF14 is against them. And all content I've cleared in my past never needed you to parse out your dps to clear it".
This would explain why there hasn't been a concrete reason for forbidding their use and the overall negative stance on them from him. And considering that Steven is the main face we see when we ask our questions, we wouldn't really know whether there's anyone in Intrepid that would wholeheartedly support trackers (iirc Margaret mentioned them in the past in a somewhat positive light?).
Um. In order to be hired by Steven, you have to have previous experience working on MMORPGs and a love for playing MMORPGs, so...
I dunno who the "a lot of other people" are supposed to be.
The desire to obfuscate (or make less prevalent by not offering this feature) so that groups are encouraged to grow together and help one another become better by more old school/organic methods of trial and error, efforts in watching other people during the raid, by failing repeatedly until success is possible. Now, could people use meters to aid in this task? Yes, but in my experience it isn’t used in this way..more often it is an exclusionary tool designed to separate players.
Considering that his biggest experience was in L2 and AA (iirc), and those games don't really use trackers, I'd assume that quite a lot of "his experience" here is through hearing other people say it.
Nope. It sucked. Exclusionary behaviour, no way to prove certain tank builds worked so you had to literally get people to take it on faith that you could do the same thing as someone else, and lots and lots of frustrating battles where the 'obvious correct' decision would fail because of the PRECISE way Provoke works.
I think one of the reasons why I'm against trackers, while completely supporting the supremacy that comes with people figuring out stuff on their own, is that I love the struggle of figuring out smth through your own abilities rather than with a tool, but I'm also completely fine with trusting people when they say that they've figured something new out and that thing is as good (if not better) than the currently accepted one.
I guess that's just projection fueled by naivete and gullibility. If I see someone with a completely new build, the first thing I think "oh damn he probably spent a ton of time figuring it out". I then respect the time he spent and believe that the build could work out.
But because I'm a stubborn (and probably too stupid) person, I always try to rely on my own abilities first before I turn to any outside tool. And so if I see someone who says "I ran my build through a dps meter and it's much better than anything else out there", I'd value that accomplishment way less than the potential lie of someone going "just trust me bro"
The desire to obfuscate (or make less prevalent by not offering this feature) so that groups are encouraged to grow together and help one another become better by more old school/organic methods of trial and error, efforts in watching other people during the raid, by failing repeatedly until success is possible. Now, could people use meters to aid in this task? Yes, but in my experience it isn’t used in this way..more often it is an exclusionary tool designed to separate players.
seems to indicate that he values the same kind of "do it yourself through sweat and tears" attitude.
At this point I'm starting to feel like L2/AA players had a completely different mentality when compared to most other mmo players.
Which I agree with it makes it more a social experience. But some people don't' care and are like others that want instanced dungeons.
Anyone saying you need trackers to break the meta is lying to you, you can break the meta without trackers and do your own test and show people. They will say anything to try to convince you trackers are a good thing lol.
Anyone saying you need trackers to break the meta is lying to you, you can break the meta without trackers and do your own test and show people. They will say anything to try to convince you trackers are a good thing lol.
Yes, you can, but you'll need way more time and effort to convince others that your build really works, while tracker would show that objectively. I've seen countless L2 parties deny other people just because their class didn't put out enough dps or they didn't have good enough gear. And as I said before, there were quite a few cases where those things didn't really matter, but you'd only know that they didn't matter if you were open enough to change. And a ton of people aren't. I totally get the desire to have an objective tool to prove to others that your build works. I disagree with having that tool in the game for my own stubborn reasons, but I can definitely see its benefit.
Yes, in L2 it was quite easy to see if DPS was lower than it should be.
Simplistically, when a raid could not complete a boss or content was unusually harder or party wipes.
So, in order to know if someone is competent or not, you first need to fully understand the encounter.
This may work in a game where new encounters are few and far between, but not so much in a game where new encounters are added an average of every second week (26 encounters a year is on the low end).
This falls back again to whether or not Intrepid is making L4, or if they want a truly PvX MMO.
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akabearMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
What is the driving desire for a tracker?
If there is an open market then you can obtain wealth without leaving town.
If gear is not bound, then you do not probably need to raid to get gear, just buy it when the guilds get saturated with gear and start selling
If there is a cap on xp, you do not need to raid for level
Only thing that you would need to build to focus on is pvp skill?
This may work in a game where new encounters are few and far between, but not so much in a game where new encounters are added an average of every second week (26 encounters a year is on the low end).
It's even less that and more just quality over quantity. There wasn't much to learn about the encounters in the first place, because most encounters were meant to be run dozens and hundreds of times, because either the chance to drop smth really good was low or because you needed a shitton of items from the boss, while he dropped only 1-2 of them per death and had a respawn timer of 2-5 days.
How did gear/loot distribution work with EQ2's pace of boss release? Or were they somewhat disconnected from the gear treadmill? Cause each L2 boss (at its lvl) was very valuable, due to it dropping full pieces of gear and a ton of mats for the same pieces. And when crafting a single piece could take days of mob farming - you sure as hell wanted to kill that boss and speed up the process. And when you have upwards of 400 (sometimes even more) members that all need gear, you reaaaally want to speed the process up.
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DygzMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
The only confusing thing about it is that by now, Steven must know that trackers are functionally undetectable, so what's the point of implying they 'won't be allowed' outside of aiming at an FFXIV outcome?
Add-Ons are not allowed in Ashes. It's pretty much the same stance as FFXIV.
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DygzMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
Anyone saying you need trackers to break the meta is lying to you, you can break the meta without trackers and do your own test and show people. They will say anything to try to convince you trackers are a good thing lol.
Yes, you can, but you'll need way more time and effort to convince others that your build really works, while tracker would show that objectively. I've seen countless L2 parties deny other people just because their class didn't put out enough dps or they didn't have good enough gear. And as I said before, there were quite a few cases where those things didn't really matter, but you'd only know that they didn't matter if you were open enough to change. And a ton of people aren't. I totally get the desire to have an objective tool to prove to others that your build works. I disagree with having that tool in the game for my own stubborn reasons, but I can definitely see its benefit.
Most likely, it will not be a build problem, rather it will be a tactics problem.
People just need to figure out to synergize the abilities they've brought with the abilities of the rest of the group. And that should be fairly straight forward in a manner that does not require DPS Meters.
It's not about the deficiency of the chosen class.
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DygzMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
"The desire to obfuscate (or make less prevalent by not offering this feature) so that groups are encouraged to grow together and help one another become better by more old school/organic methods of trial and error, efforts in watching other people during the raid, by failing repeatedly until success is possible. Now, could people use meters to aid in this task? Yes, but in my experience it isn’t used in this way..more often it is an exclusionary tool designed to separate players."
---Steven
Considering that his biggest experience was in L2 and AA (iirc), and those games don't really use trackers, I'd assume that quite a lot of "his experience" here is through hearing other people say it.
That is a poor paraphrase because his "experience" with MMORPGs is not limited to the games he's played.
And nothing in that quote indicates that "a lot of people" is restricted to MMORPG players who are not also MMORPG devs... which is what your paraphrase implies.
He only hires people who have worked on other MMORPGs and also enjoy playing MMORPGs, so... I dunno why he would be simply acting on the hearsay of rando players and ignoring the imput of his dev team.
Most likely, it will not be a build problem, rather it will be a tactics problem.
People just need to figure out to synergize the abilities they've brought with the abilities of the rest of the group. And that should be fairly straight forward in a manner that does not require DPS Meters.
It's not about the deficiency of the chosen class.
And if the game has enough variety and depth to do this, then, yes, trackers would be less valued.
The only confusing thing about it is that by now, Steven must know that trackers are functionally undetectable, so what's the point of implying they 'won't be allowed' outside of aiming at an FFXIV outcome?
Add-Ons are not allowed in Ashes. It's pretty much the same stance as FFXIV.
Well, alright, I'm disappointed to hear the same thing considering that I don't like the outcome that FFXIV encounters, but I really do trust your 'inside knowledge' enough to give weight to your words in ambiguous situations especially.
As long as the people who don't want to be excluded and told it is because of something from a tracker are truly getting what they want, I have no route to complain.
Comments
No doubt.
I've been saying for a while that Steven doesnt want them because he doesnt undrstand them. He doesnt understand them because he never used them in L2 or Archeage.
Him not understanding them means he should have deferred the call to someone on his staff that does understand them. The problem is, Steven went and ran his mouth (as he does) before he even realized that he doesnt understand the first thing about them.
It's a situation that isnt all that dissimilar to family summons, imo.
I'd like to vote for this as "Quote of the Thread".
With this quote in mind, I'd like to ask all those not wanting trackers- what kind of a game do you want Ashes to be?
But, if Steven is anywhere close to my thinking, the reasoning is "the game needs pvp to work properly, but it doesn't need trackers to work properly, so there's no reason to implement them". Yes, several people in this thread have made a good case for tracker usage, but a ton of people have bad associations with them so just saying "we won't have them" is already appealing to them. Now it could be argued that the same crowd might not enjoy a ton of other features in the game, but that's on Intrepid to figure out who exactly they're trying to appeal to with their designs and how they present them.
What is kinda obvious is that right now there's some confusion in terms of trying to appeal to pve players. Especially when it comes to the hardcore part of that community. So there's gotta be some disconnect between either just Steven, or maybe even most of Intrepid, and those hardcore players.
Point in case - I disagree with Stevens decision to not give players the ability to not display cosmetics so that we can see the actual armor and weapons a rival will attack us with. However, I understand his reasoning. As such, I am fully on side. His game, his reasoning - I don't need to agree with the decision. All that is needed is logic in that reasoning - I will always argue against anything illogical.
And this is where the issue arises, Stevens reasoning is easily disproven- I've already done so (there is a reason Steven refuses to get in to discussions on trackers now - he knows he can't win).
It is an illogical reason, and as such, I will not - indeed can not - get on side with it.
You can't say that combat trackers cause toxicity when there are entire games (as in, plural) that don't support this perspective. The problem is, they are not games that Steven has played - even if they are games he has hired many developers from.
But I realize full well that I'm a huge outlier when it comes to those kinds of situations. People either go full toxic or full practical (or full RP in Dygz' case
The difference is actually that Steven just is telling those players 'Ashes may not be for you'.
That's fine. Steven might be saying that from the 'We will make hard content and then use our built in surveillance equipment to monitor what other applications are running on your computer, all the way down to custom scripts you wrote yourself in C++" side...
Or from the 'Our content is not going to require this because it won't be hard enough/the numbers will be simple enough/the situations won't be the same type of challenge anyway' side.
Again, Steven's never actually said, that I have seen, that 'Hardcore PvE' is the way Intrepid intends to achieve that 'single digit percentage' thing. But the things we HAVE been told are things that would make me think 'Ok, sometimes we're going to want a Combat Log parser to verify something'.
Because, again, remember, the outcome of having NO parser, even by magic, is usually bad. The outcome of having hidden parsers that no one will talk about is worse:
"Sorry we've decided you're just not the right sort of player for our guild."
"Why not, I'm always ready, I'm helpful, I show up to basically everything, I don't make trouble with anyone..."
"We just feel the need to go in a new direction."
But that's worse for me if you allow me no tracker, because I still 'have to do this' if the content is hard. After the 7th 'sus' performance from someone, if I have the tracker I can go, objectively 'this thing here is the reason you are failing, are you okay with changing it?'
Some people want me to guess. Some people want me to 'figure it out later'. I'll give an example of 'figure it out later'.
FFXI's Hate mechanics were not known for YEARS. No 'parser' gave you a way to discover them. During those years, two really important things happened around the ability Provoke.
1. Some people claimed that if you were playing warrior as Main Job rather than Secondary, Provoke was just better, while others claimed it was improved by the Charisma stat.
2. People claimed that Provoke was vital for holding hate as a tank and anyone trying anything else was ruining the party in most cases.
The Meta breakers ignored this. Some built Warrior Tanks and continued to be successful (and mocked). Some built groups where there was no Provoke at all, and were somewhat successful (and mocked).
Then some crazy number crunchers, bless their hearts, spend 3 straight days deconstructing it, and then the Director had to 'cave' and make a big post explaining it. This information wasn't clear to people until they were working on FFXIV, mind you. We went years without understanding this.
The result was that nearly everything people thought they understood about Enmity, and Provoke in general, was wrong... except the Meta-breakers (Provoke does not, afaik, actually operate better on Warrior, but because of the WAY it works, plus the ROTATION of warriors, it is more effective).
"Upon usage, a large amount of time-volatile enmity (enmity that decays over time, but not with damage taken) is added to the user.
The amount of enmity added decays by 1/30 per second. After 30 seconds, all enmity gained from Provoke will have worn off."
Note that this has NOTHING to do with parsers. And I am sure that there are some people out there who will feel 'congratulations, that's so impressive that someone finally figured that out, I bet it made the game much better when you didn't know all that precisely'.
Nope. It sucked. Exclusionary behaviour, no way to prove certain tank builds worked so you had to literally get people to take it on faith that you could do the same thing as someone else, and lots and lots of frustrating battles where the 'obvious correct' decision would fail because of the PRECISE way Provoke works.
Just obfuscation.
I shouldn't care. I 'should' be a toxic elitist. I 'should' be taking advantage of the fact that I am confident that 'take longer' for ME is 2 months whereas 'take longer' for the average person just wanting a build that is good, but others don't believe in, is way longer, reducing competition.
No. I hate that shit, it's stupid. It didn't cause a better community, it didn't bring people together, the only reason it even came up as actual information is because the people doing it were so FED UP with it being unknown, and it's a PvE game that was later in its life by then.
If you have to hide information in a way that leads the average player to make the wrong decision until someone does a 3 day controlled trial, for your game to feel good and not 'get figured out quickly' in this era, then nah, you don't care about even mid-serious PvE players in terms of challenge, you just want to artificially extend the lifeflow of the game while rewarding the ones with the most understanding of statistics/math.
It isn't even that they specifically hid information about Enmity/Hate mechanics, because MOST of it works as you'd expect it to just from eyeballing. But I'm gonna call out that team on their BS too (they were the original developers of FFXIV also, we all know how the first release of that went).
I've just ranted as usual because it's good to vent sometimes, honestly. If I see any signs that Intrepid doesn't want people to 'understand abilities easily' or 'be able to reverse engineer their stat effects', I think I'm out. It's literally against my principles to play games where the designers have purposely pushed it so that my main competition is either 'cheaters' as some would say, or 'people with the same genetic aptitude as me' when it's not that type of game.
Maybe to Steven it IS that type of game, though. A real Yoo Byung Jun. But I'm no Weed, as inspiring as he is.
I'm curious, I'm L2, what did you doing the person was wrong - if their DPS was actually lower than it should be. Did you even know?
In terms of PvE, I am making the assumption that Ashes will offer some form of content derived challenge at some point - as opposed to both L2 and Archeage where all challenge seems to derive from PvP.
If Ashes doesnt have some content derived challenge, the the game is essentially Lineage 4 (Archeage being L3). This is going to essentially doom the game to having an initial population boom, and then settling in after 6 months with a population of between 5 and 10% of that initial boom (most PvE games tend to settle around 50 - 60% of the initial population).
This isnt a case if me saying "if the game doesn't have trackers it will die" which we all know is the takeaway someone like Mag will have from the above. It isnt even a comment directly on trackers. It is a comment on content, and why I assume trackers will have value in a PvE setting.
Simplistically, when a raid could not complete a boss or content was unusually harder or party wipes.
Say in a group, there were usually only 1-2 dps`s.. tank, healer and 1-2 classes that did stat improvement modifiers.. so each role quite defined and any one role not played well, timing for some, gear for others, and skill use for select few.
Classes were not so flexible, so picking the right class combination for a group was important for certain raids and there was often a solid relationship between the roles in each group.. Larger raids sometimes had a number of ideal group combinations.
I guess that's just projection fueled by naivete and gullibility. If I see someone with a completely new build, the first thing I think "oh damn he probably spent a ton of time figuring it out". I then respect the time he spent and believe that the build could work out.
But because I'm a stubborn (and probably too stupid) person, I always try to rely on my own abilities first before I turn to any outside tool. And so if I see someone who says "I ran my build through a dps meter and it's much better than anything else out there", I'd value that accomplishment way less than the potential lie of someone going "just trust me bro"
And Steven's quote here seems to indicate that he values the same kind of "do it yourself through sweat and tears" attitude.
At this point I'm starting to feel like L2/AA players had a completely different mentality when compared to most other mmo players.
This was especially visible when the gear OE lvls were still fairly low on the server (or weapon augments/special abilities weren't acquired yet), so someone like a summoner or even a spoiler class (usually just a sub-dps support) with a well-equipped wolf pet could do as much dmg as a supposedly top dps Destroyer. So you'd easily invite them to the raid, clear it and probably even farm more stuff with them because they'd be much more reliant in day-to-day farming because their dps output was way more stable than a Destroyer's one, which mainly only worked for a 30sec-2min due to super strong buffs.
And having that right combination in group, with such a diverse range of classes in AoC, worries me.. meaning should an optimum grouping of different classes be discovered for particular content, then chances are many players who do not play those classes will get left out
Completely understandable, but I have been taught by many people over the years, people who do not use trackers and would never think to do so, that it's discouraging when a game or competitive thing is so tuned to a certain ability type that others can't do much.
We're quite literally talking about being able to read and do addition in your head faster, quite a lot of the time. If the general consensus of others is that they 'want me to win', then I'll graciously accept their support. Just as long as they understand they are also saying to "Hypothetical Raider who has been playing for years but doesn't add or track lines in a combat log as quickly" that their years of tactical ability built up through analysis of logs and trackers is now:
"Nah, you better learn to READ faster and pay attention to more things at once, my friend. It's better for the game organically."
I'm not being sarcastic or having much feeling here.
I didnt say that o.o
I dunno who the "a lot of other people" are supposed to be.
Considering that his biggest experience was in L2 and AA (iirc), and those games don't really use trackers, I'd assume that quite a lot of "his experience" here is through hearing other people say it.
Which I agree with it makes it more a social experience. But some people don't' care and are like others that want instanced dungeons.
Anyone saying you need trackers to break the meta is lying to you, you can break the meta without trackers and do your own test and show people. They will say anything to try to convince you trackers are a good thing lol.
This may work in a game where new encounters are few and far between, but not so much in a game where new encounters are added an average of every second week (26 encounters a year is on the low end).
This falls back again to whether or not Intrepid is making L4, or if they want a truly PvX MMO.
- If there is an open market then you can obtain wealth without leaving town.
- If gear is not bound, then you do not probably need to raid to get gear, just buy it when the guilds get saturated with gear and start selling
- If there is a cap on xp, you do not need to raid for level
Only thing that you would need to build to focus on is pvp skill?How did gear/loot distribution work with EQ2's pace of boss release? Or were they somewhat disconnected from the gear treadmill? Cause each L2 boss (at its lvl) was very valuable, due to it dropping full pieces of gear and a ton of mats for the same pieces. And when crafting a single piece could take days of mob farming - you sure as hell wanted to kill that boss and speed up the process. And when you have upwards of 400 (sometimes even more) members that all need gear, you reaaaally want to speed the process up.
People just need to figure out to synergize the abilities they've brought with the abilities of the rest of the group. And that should be fairly straight forward in a manner that does not require DPS Meters.
It's not about the deficiency of the chosen class.
And nothing in that quote indicates that "a lot of people" is restricted to MMORPG players who are not also MMORPG devs... which is what your paraphrase implies.
He only hires people who have worked on other MMORPGs and also enjoy playing MMORPGs, so... I dunno why he would be simply acting on the hearsay of rando players and ignoring the imput of his dev team.
Well, alright, I'm disappointed to hear the same thing considering that I don't like the outcome that FFXIV encounters, but I really do trust your 'inside knowledge' enough to give weight to your words in ambiguous situations especially.
As long as the people who don't want to be excluded and told it is because of something from a tracker are truly getting what they want, I have no route to complain.