Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
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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
This number taken at face value is about half of the player base for ff14.
The problem with the third party parser still remains in ff14. Half the skills are no longer used by parser players. The game was not designed with a parser which was my earlier point. The fights become scripted and very repetitive. Both parsers and casuals are aware of the class changes/nerfs but casual players will still run the nerfs for most of the time whereas parsers will avoid the nerfs and simply utilise far less skills. I call them nerfs but we're talking about dps loss more than nerfs.
If we take the white mage as an example, lillies cause a dps loss and parsers won't use the white lillies. Then the parsers complain white mage lacks mana regeneration or struggles with mana, yet, lillies don't cost mana but the parsers won't use lillies due to the parser and wanting to top the dps charts. FF14 tend to call these parser players 'Speed Runners'. The climate is different than other games which consider parsers as 'optimal and required' like WoW and Mythic +.
I think the thing is that players like you I mean @Mag7spy and @NiKr for example in last 2 or 3 pages of discussions are over thinking that players like me maybe perhaps @Azherae and @Noaani included that who feels okay or support to have dps meter or trackers are the evil side and helpers to the toxic players and toxic environments.
But like I said in this thread way before, I think players like you @Mag7spy and @NiKr just too naively thinking that no trackers in the game you playing make your game and world better, I must say you are part right but you are part wrong, the part you right is yes you can reduce toxic by not allow player use trackers in certain degrees and that certain degrees players are not the real toxic players you guys really want to target it’s like if you can use law to stop people not to claim a crime they are not the real criminals, in my experience if a toxic player want to look pvpers or casual players like you @Mag7spy and @NiKr they even don’t need trackers what game give them was way enough for example I can shxt talking you about how your dps loop in which part of the pvp or mob or boss fight was incorrect or inefficient by just monitoring you constantly and my timer and you have no way to stop me, and you must aware that real toxic players are not stupid they usually smart than most of people because if you know they were wrong they are not real toxic players they are idiots who being toxic.
Then you @Mag7spy and @NiKr willing to sacrifice yours and other players’s convenient or say qol to max out the outcome of the existing of toxic players and it’s will be useless just like @Azherae said those players won’t discuss things like me and Noaani here for so long or even won’t bother to because they knew you are just lifting a rock to hit your own feet, why? because they will get to do what they want while Ashes come out no matter which feature is there or not, they already had what they need you know.
But there are lots of other kind of casual players or just say players who don’t willing to think and figure out which skill to choose to max out and how to make a build fit their play style which means players use guides a lot even say they just follow meta guides because the truth is people are not energetic after work and feel exciting to do the math themselves to have a good build for their play style, THEN the dps meter and trackers seems playing important roles here, why? because people like me or maybe perhaps include @Azherae and @Noaani make build depends on situations or different play style for those casual players and if there is a dps meter or tracker as a proof(?) or verification(?) will help the game environment a lot because we can provide build good as possible even causal players or unskilled players able to do a decent performance and that also help to decrease the chances idiots being toxic, AND players who want or say happy to have dps meter or trackers build in game so they can have easier life to know how to improve themselves without worry about get virus on internet or being banned by game company like myself for example, AND for high rank PVE guilds or the PVE team IN high rank guilds also happy to have dps meter or tracker build in game to help them max out their efforts, AND as I know in my experience as a pvper in GW2 lots of pvper use dps meter to help them practice and improve their dps loop and research the better dps loop in some special situations.
And just like @Azherae said that the game design of Ashes of Creation is competitive, so in this kind of game environment or any kind of game environment dps meter or trackers are just a tool not the evil itself, what you guys saying is a tool can lead to bad things so we don’t want it, but how is that things should be done? so can I say that knife can hurt so don’t make knifes? I ask why you willing to deal with tools instead of dealing with the evil itself, like I posted before I sleep I willing to pay another 5 USD monthly fee to support Intrepid to delete the toxic player’s account if the case is true or just make your price I probably accept it because a mmo that have a vision like Ashes of Creation is unicorn today, I see so many people play mobile games or mobile mmos which all pay to win and my friends spend like 66 USD per month to play it to stay a good shape to able to keep up to play with others in those games, so I’d love to pay more to help Intrepid to do what I and maybe them also think good to do which is punish toxic behaviors as it should be and as a player I’d love to make up the lost by paying more monthly fee.
I NOT trying to say players like you @Mag7spy and @NiKr are wrong about you don’t like dps meter or trackers in game, what I trying to say is that what you want to archive can’t be done by banning dps meter or trackers it’s just beyond reach just like I said before those toxic you guys mentioned already exist back in lineage 1 and it’s 1998 mmos are just begin to grow and we don’t have the tools you guys said but I already saw bunch of toxic players in game so why you think banning tools make your guys’s world better? I mean there are so many way to be toxic like I gank a random strange player in game and T bag him to humiliate him and I switch characters and accounts to kill and humiliate him again and again and only show myself when he is alone and I basically make him can't play or level or enjoy for months in game and when I was reported my argue is this is the way the game being designed and I get my way out of it then I keep kill and ruin anyone's life as I wish and how do you stop this toxic behavior and this is one example in my experience in any game base on pvp or pvx.
We are talking about BDO stating they have 40 million accounts. The point was made that this is the total number of accounts ts ever made, not active accounts.
As such, any account made in the history if the game counts to this 40 million number.
My comment was that when I played it, years ago, it was viable for people to have up to 8 accounts.
Your retort to that is that it is no longer viable.
Do you not understand that since we are talking about the number of accounts ts the game has ever had, what is happening now isnt th wpoint. The point is what has happened over the life of the game - and during that time there were reasons to have many accounts.
You really do some strange mental gymnastics at times.
The main reason for pointing out the download number was to illustrate that people using trackers are not the tiny minority that some people (well, one Mag) try to claim.
The specifics, rario of users to total players, all these things - they aren't actually that important.
All that is important is for people to understand that those of us that use trackers are not a minority at all (keep in mind, that download count was for one tracker, not for all trackers).
My biggest point on meters is the increase in content consumption speed. But as we've discussed here already, no matter what Intrepid do, people who will use meters will consume that content as fast as possible either way and will then influence other people who can't yet consume said content.
And while the first batch of pve might be exciting and interesting, if Intrepid don't keep up with tracker people's pace of content consumption and don't constantly increase the difficulty/variety of pve - all the tracker people will get bored, which in turn will influence others. So my point there is useless and I just hope Intrepid can somehow avoid this situation, even if seems almost impossible to do so.
And as we've discussed with Azherae today, the influence of trackers on pvp will mostly depend on a ton of different game design part, so it's kinda early to say how big the impact will be (though obviously the potential is quite big). Though my pov on the issue is just "there'll be several other influences, so presence of trackers doesn't imbalance the scales at all".
As for guides and stuff. That's where my selfishness and stubborn elitism shines the brightest. I'm gonna be figuring my builds w/o any additional tools outside of the combat log. Intrepid doesn't want to have trackers, so I'm just gonna use the info that they give me. If guide makers need additional tools for their job - they can get them themselves. I won't be reporting them for use of trackers, but I wouldn't argue against their ban if, for some reason, Intrepid goes that hard on their rules enforcement.
In other words, the "toxicity" argument is mainly Mag's. I'm sure that the game will definitely have toxicity that's based on meters/trackers, purely because Ashes will be a competitive game. It'll probably be the ff14's flavor of toxicity though, so I doubt we'll see much of "your dps was shit so you're kicked" as the main reason for kicking people. But even that wouldn't really matter to me because I'll either be with a constant party who'd be fine with how I play the game, or I'll be the leader of the party and I just wouldn't care how others play the game.
Thanks for your reply. : )
And sorry about misunderstand your standpoint, sorry about that.
I don’t think meters/trackers can increase in content consumption speed. It’s a issue just like not the tools make people toxic, we can already see lots of footage on youtube and twitch that players already trying to find shortest and efficientest way to leveling up in alpha 1, I will say it’s because the competitive mentality cause the fear about other players are faster so slower players not only lose on game progression but also experience less game contents than faster players kind of mentality cause these behavior in the past and become a normal or usual or passive on mindset now, but to me I already accept and know that it’s impossible to control this kind of behaviors even for developers, because if developers limit player’s progression in order to not let players to consume contents too fast means the game meant to be bad because when developers need to use any way to control the speed of player consume contents means they already failed on player driven replayability, and what you worry about is part of reason I once asked in stream will there be any game master or dungeon master and tools on their end to controls something and play with us so even the contents was completely consumed we still have opponents to play with, and I say don’t worry about slower players if Ashes of Creation is what they promise, slow player can have similar experience like faster players, just faster players will have the glory.
And guides, you are good, I’m happy to see players like you because part of me would like to do the things like that, but I’m thinking about providing something that casual players can easily link the guides and the calculations they referenced to people who trying toxic talk about causal players can’t do good dps or not have efficient enough build and able to shut those people’s mouth up with proofs that calculate by authority official provided tools because there is nothing has more power to convince people than official provided(of course in ideal situations like official doesn’t suck or you are dealing with reasonable people but if they still argue they just being stupid just block them).
And for "your dps was shit so you're kicked" things, I not so sure, because I believe it depends on how Intrepid design their game if you know what I want to say, in my opinion pve or lets say boss fight can be designed to make max out dps build or dps worship become nothing by design archetypes/classes and AI very well and what they said about boss AI are already can achieve this, so it’s just we never had a game with pve designed that well and most of games are so flat I guess it is the word I want to use.
And I think you’re right about the rest.
And if Intrepid manages to design their builds in such a way that there's dozens of different ways to have the same amount of dps output - the "dps check" for any given party invite could just be done with some random mob, even w/o a tracker, so you don't really need an objective tool to tell a toxic dude off. And if that dude still doesn't believe that your "off-meta" build has the same dps (even though we'd know that there's dozens of equal builds) then fuck him.
And as you said yourself, it will also come down to boss design. But I'd say that this whole 126+ page thread exists purely because Steven said that he wants to have difficult pve in the game and even some time-based competition on top of that. If he had said "nah, we don't really care for pve", then I doubt that this whole dps meter discussion would've gone this far, cause it mainly stems from all the pve people. Yes, obviously there's some pvpers who use trackers to try and be better than others, but I find it interesting that boss of Steven's inspirations barely had any tracker use.
But…I’m pretty sure that Steven will tell you that he doesn’t want the game to be about who can crunch the numbers the best.
He wants the game to be about the characters’ experiences more so than the players’ experiences:
Roleplay rather than rollplay.
We shouldn’t need to rely on tracking the numbers to know that we should have an advantage over a Fire mob if the Fighter/Mage stacks their Ice augments with the Ice Active Skills of the Mage/Bard.
Indeed.
If obvious things are obvious, no need for a tracker. No need for much at all, to be honest. See fire, cast cold, take loot.
Boring.
On the other hand, if the content is good, if the combat system has depth, a tracker is the only way to work out just how deep it is.
Combat trackers v “super-obvious” synergy/tactics is a false dichotomy.
LFR (Looking for raid). To those inexperenced with WoW LFR is where you can que into a raid group of 25 players (i believe it was 25) so everyone is pretty much a stranger who got ported into this instance and there is pretty much no communication of any kind from explaining / designating mechanics to just casual conversation. It is almost at all times purely silent. Up until wipes happen then you have the chat explode into finger pointing, and blaming. Eventually and very commonly you'll have people say "Kick the lowest dps people from the group" the way to do is this is look at your DPS meter addon, and find the top 5 lowest players and vote to kick them. Doesn't matter if they were healers, tanks, or dps as people don't care and they aren't paying attention cause why should they, everyone is a stranger in there that they may or may not ever see again, let alone remember them.
It doesn't matter if you were doing all the mechanics correctly, if you were off healing to save the tank because the healer died or went afk, if you weren't near medium to top of the dps charts you were getting booted. So what we end up having is everyone who tunnel visions the boss getting them big dps numbers on dps meters and ignoring mechanics (which is the number 1 reason wipes happen) we are targeting the people not tunnel visioning and either doing the mechanics or proving valuable support. LFR is considered by many in WoW to be a joke that "killed the game" because it reinforces tunnel visioning the boss and doing what ever you can for big numbers. Blizzard (dev's of wow) also puts 1-3 mechanics at most per boss so more times than not you can just power through LFR without learning mechanics.
Now you can say kick lowest dps is to kick the afkers or non contribution players which is fair but in my experience who only does lfr and no other difficulty form it was uncommon to find a afker in any group. And when it did happen it was 1-2 people at most in a 25 man group. It was uncommon because people were so overzealous about afkers that anyone not contributing for even a full min (doesn't matter if you went up for a drink or bio break) your name was plastered all over the chat box as someone to kick for afk, and the group herd mentality did just that.
So all in all DPS meters while publicly shared for anyone to look at is more harmful than good. However having access to your own dps meters for self improvement and only self improvement is a good thing. And if groups are asking for screen shots, then they are doomed to fail for prioritizing numbers over skill or mechanical knowledge and you shouldn't associate yourself with that group anyways.
And while yes, there's more options that just "tracker" or "super obvious easy" one, the discussion around dps meters mainly talks about the harder side of pve and especially the "<10% clearable" stuff. In context of any other discussion it might've been way more than just 2 choices, but in context of trackers you either have no use for them or there's potential use for them. Yes, not everyone would even want to use them, but the potential use is still there.
Well unfortunately with or without tools those players you said just will do what they want, because I was that kind of players when I was young so yeah no tools is nothing, and I feel what we discussing is also part of leader board gameplay to me it's like about 80%+ and being world first is just a beginning like world record you know so many years players try to short the time in every Mario Kart race track you just can't stop that kind of play style. So to me Intrepid is already cover this and I don't worry about players squeeze or speed run contents what I worried is contents can be speed ran easily for most of players by copy paste how those hardcore players did(but I think it's not easy because most of contents are open world, and the open world is the content not boss to me today, have the bis gear is just a bonus of proof that I can do it, but the fun is in open world the connections between players and I really hope people can have this idea in their mind.) because those players you talk about are the minority beside the exist of hardcore players maybe a benefit for other players that want feel the world of the game is alive and love to see drama or story.(Sorry, I just simply call them hardcore players because I lack of words and I feel it quite fit.)
Yeah, I aware that, that's why I said that toxic can't be stop anyway so what you or we really want to or can stop is people trying to be toxic but still can be reasonable,(I'm not sure I said it right hope you get it.) and others really toxic just ignore them or the toxic too heavy like the example I gave camping player for months just delete their account it's like how our civilization deal with crime those can be cured we cure those can't be cured put into jail.(But I always think that human need to face that we are not god and we can be evil so just face the necessary evil and stop treat those who commit crimes that can't be forgive as human.)
Well that's maybe the middle ground I tried to reach if I'm not misunderstand you and to me with or without tools at least we tried to be reasonable to those players and that's enough to me the further thing to do is block him or "if turns out he is a real toxic player just report him and delete his account" is the most important thing to do in my opinion.
Again to me there is or isn't a official dps meter or say tracker to me is just a thing make life a litle easier, good to have, it's just like show or not show dmg numbers, it's a further joy to be able to see the number grows like how Asmongold once said on his stream watching videos about Ashees of Creation he would like to see big numbers and see dps meter just make himself feel good nothing to do with toxic just that simple.
Yeah you're right, my point is always that tools make life easier and about improve myself, not to objectively and heavily monitor real time in whole fighting boss maybe time to time look for a second, it's more like playing a ghost race in Mario Kart if you know what I saying, I'm fight the ghost of myself to be a better me, that's the joy of to have dps meter.
And I don't know that "that boss of Steven's inspirations barely had any tracker", because I only use it at beginning and I usually don't need dps meter after I get used to a game, I use casually to show my friend the idea behind the situational dps loop I choose to use, if you say need or not I don't really need, but to people still learning I think they need and it's handy to have dps meter or tracker to do the teaching and learning in my experience because not every one can understand thing just by imagination there are people who can't imagine things means while they imagine they only able to picturing a blank screen if you can understand that are truly there, one of my friend is one of them.
UPDATED:
I'm not sure I understand you correctly, I just say what I want to say, I think that dungeon boss fights in Ashes are meant to be hard to learn but not mean hard to do, it's about learning recognize which AI tree we deal with now more like control a action game AI to play the AI but in Ashes of Creation might be recognize AI and boss move and keep the form of raid to be able to deal what's incoming so basically guessing recognizing and reacting, easy for players play every type of games but not easy for players only play mmos I guess. So yes it's independent 2 things to me too, I mean it's dps meter not DBM.
You have forgotten the point you said there is incentive to make other accounts, I'm saying that is the thought of someone that didn't understand or play BDO well enough as you picked the worst game to try to throw that out there. You are wrong and are making things up at this point
You have a insane bias for trying to get trackers into the game so you don't care about how games are or people you simply want to say anything even if it doesn't make sense to try to make it seem like you are in the right. You are not in the right, you say insane absurd things that are not normal experiences and you take them as if they are what normally happens in a game like you found a ace.
You are the minority and you are missing the point, you desperately don't want to accept that is the case, no one is coming to back up in waves here but a handful of people.
This is the classic I'm going to skew false numbers to prove my point, and not taken into account what people want. If people didn't use or experience trackers they couldn't judge if it was toxic or not and there for there wouldn't be as much push back.
Trackers are toxic, the mentality is toxic and that is simply just one of the bad elements of them. You are trying to push for trackers through lies, manipulation and false truths. Simply using a toxic mentality mixed with lies to support trackers doesn't surprise me.
Nooani says he has never seen once dps meters being used in toxic way in all his many years of mmorpg gaming. Yet when anyone else talks about it they understand what can happen lol.
Depending how strong a stance they take and if you have direct multiple pieces of proof of someone using trackers its not hard to get someone banned then. It will make some people think twice, especially with the grind the game should be.
What grind do you refer to? The game should only take time. The devs don't like grinders/grinding. If the stance has changed and grinding is indeed doable, I will be a happy camper.
Everyone grinds a mmo or atleast people that are trying to get up there gear wise. Think you are reading too deep into it. If you are playing the game you are grinding it.
You literally and looking to deep into it, any game you play four hours on end you are grinding it. Why are you trying to argue semantics with me with words?
Also you have no clue what you will be doing in the game as everyone else.
I know full well what I will and won't be doing. Spending mindless hours in repetition will not be one of those things as I'm a hardcore gamer and I will have better things to do with my time. You claimed that life skilling was pointless compared to grinding in BDO. Thus, your knowledge is something I do not require. You can take my advice or leave my advice. You'll be the one wasting time. I doubt you will be able to defeat the seasoned veterans who have played every rendition of the combat system to date. Alas, I am not one of those people.
Not is, was.
These are vastly different statements.
However, that isn't the point - that is just the part you are latching on to in an attempt to "win".
The point is that the 40 million accounts Pearl Abyss have claimed is not 40 million unique players, it is simply 40 million accounts.
Since I have had three BDO accounts in my time, and am in no way someone that you would consider a BDO player, that 40 million number needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
That is the point.
I have two questions for you, if you have the time.
The first is - in WoW, in LFG/LFR content, do you think people would have been so quick to remove others from the group or raid if there wasn't a system to automatically replace them?
The second question is - do you think the issues would have persisted if the game had have implemented a combat tracker directly in to the client, but restricted it's use to only people within your own guild?