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
Stagnant for at least 4 years.
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.
I have literally no doubt the same happened in L2 - but 99.9% of players wouldn't have known.
Indeed.
Steven has already blatantly said they think they can detect most common forms of trackers.
This is blatant bullshit designed to placate people that dont know better. Cant detect something on a computer that has a damn air gap between you and it.
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.
Sort of, but then you'll still get the uninitiated THINKING 'Well, we don't need them' even if the benefit of them would be HIGH and the problems that might arise from NOT having them could be negative for the game. Which then leads to all sorts of situations I don't even want to think about.
You've already seen from just this thread how relatively easy it is to convince someone 'these are bad, you don't need them' without even actually finding out what those people care about.
Meta-followers don't need trackers, Meta BREAKERS need trackers. And if neither matters, then trackers don't matter, but I do accept that in that case, the 'I don't believe in Trackers' while knowing that nothing can be done about them, would placate more people.
Only one issue there. Guild Based Trackers in a game where trackers are not needed, placates the MAXIMUM number of people.
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?