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
I guess you want to say that breakpoints shouldn't exist in ashes?
Not having hard breakpoints is easy, but I have never seen any rpg with more than 1 dps stat and those rpgs not having soft breakpoints
So if a soft breakpoint exists and you itemise in mind of those then you get from the gear more value than if you don't respect those breakpoints
― Plato
― Plato
Proof is in the comments its like 130+ pages now top of the thread, and people still don't agree with you after you have been fanatically fighting for it for years.
Stop capping with that bs about limited to guilds, i see right through you its simply a way to convince some people to try to say ok if it doesn't effect them without realizing down the line. Typical manipulation people can see through it if they are paying attention, you can use the same arguments on you being for trackers here and then apply to down the road to all third party trackers since the features won't be enough for them. Or because they are losing points they can put into something else when they can use their own "better" tracker in their subjective mind.
More BS on guides I see trying to say you are getting kicked for not following a guide. Stop trying to create a comparison to move your point it isn't going to work. Guide and trackers are two completely different things. Yes people can be toxic for anything but trackers only confirm toxic behavior even more so as the image of players is less of a player and more of a numbers.
We can run it 500 pages if you want, you aren't going to bring anything new and its going to be the same old bs with disingenuous points, trying to manipulate what people say and what they want, and your same continued points that are not going to convince people. All you can go back to is saying the studio will never be able to stop us so you have to use trackers which is more bs.
You want to use a tiny element that is fine, yes people can naturally talk about them getting CC'd and figure it out and how it might help a fight.
Compared to someone looking at the tracker and telling people they are getting cc'd and waiting for the plan that follows next from the person.
"I don't respond to your point and here is my 100th rephrasing of my anti tracker manifesto, and no argument you ever write will not compel me to consider what you are saying"
― Plato
1) DPS meters, HPS meters, Damage Dealt Amounts, absolutely ANY form of assessment of hard numbers after a raid is utterly worthless to a well-run raiding group. If you need it, you're bad at running a raid. And I welcome you to come compete with my guild on whatever server I pick. Thank you.
2) There is nothing about efficiency or skill that a DPS meter can tell me. All it tells me is what your numbers are. And that for a small period of time, yours are the highest. The only thing total damage done tells me is that you did the most damage. The only thing an HPS meter tells me is that you healed some amount at interval times. None of this matters. Not for me, at least. It can certainly be good information for your improvement as a player, but I couldn't care less. For the group, it does not matter.
3) Why does numerical information not matter in Ashes of Creation? Because your DPS doesn't tell me how many shots you missed. Or how many shots you hit. Or how many shots were fired. How many abilities you used. What your mana situation was like. What your equipment durability is at. How much damage the tank took at any particular time, which might have meant a change in strategy was needed. There are SO many things in Ashes that make a situation completely devoid of contextualization via "Meters".
4) Your elitism is pathetic, and you should feel bad. Who cares if JimmyThreeToes has a consistently lower DPS Meter amount? Man might be a kiting genius who can pull the boss around to give the healers time to heal up the tanks after a particularly difficult mechanic. Or maybe he has an interesting off build that redirects ads. Or maybe he's good at hopping in front of backliners during certain mechanics. Or maybe he's just a consistent player who shows up on raid night, and him having 2k less DPS doesn't matter, because a cohesive amount of teamwork and skill is far more valuable than the esoteric number on a meter at any given time.
Now, with that taken care of, here are a few thoughts that could ACTUALLY help raid leaders organize and improve their raid teams, hopefully non-biasedly.
1) After-Battle Assessments based on THAT particular raid performance. We already know that each raid will have ramping difficulty the better you do on earlier bosses. I believe a "Group Assessment" at the end of each boss, that gives the entire designated raid body a letter-based assessment for the fields that game takes note of to determine raid difficulty progression would be far more helpful to a raid team. No one is singling out Jimmy because the entire raid party's DPS was B, instead of A. And the assessment shouldn't allow the influence of any single player, amazing or atrocious, to heavily influence the final group assessment. You raid as a group, you get assessed as a group, and it is up to the raid leaders and squad leaders to actually LOOK at their own teams, their own groups, and identify for themselves who isn't keeping up. If you can't do that, maybe you're not cut out for raid leading.
2) Transparency about the statistics needed to advance difficulty. This can act as a "Stat Check" esoterically. I don't need to know JimmyThreeToes held back our group's DPS with a meter. I need to know our group was supposed to hit 50k damage in 1:48 to unlock the highest assessment to get the best possible rewards at the end, and we failed to do that. It's up to me as raid leader to work with my raid team and figure out how we can make that happen. That responsibility shouldn't fall on to anyone else. Especially not the individual members and their meters. If I know what A, B, C, and D ratings mean for the group as a whole in each assessed area, I know where my group needs to improve, and that's ALL the information I need to lead a raid successfully over time.
And here's a crazy opinion I have that might be unpopular: You don't need all the information. It's okay to fail. A raid shouldn't be a set-in-stone guaranteed success because you "Parsed the numbers" and "Weeded out the weak" and "Made preparations". All of that is just par for the course. Especially with ramping difficulty raids. Skill matters. And even the absolute best team can slip up sometimes. Should that slip up get someone kicked out? No. Grow up and gain some maturity. Maybe Fred had a rough week, and just needed to relax and raid with his group he's spent months growing with, and he happened to slip up a bit. It's not the end of the world to fail a raid. It's not the end of the world to not know whether you can "Guarantee" passing the stat check bosses. You should NEVER have guarantees going in to an AoC raid. You should have hopes, dreams, and aspirations. And you should strive to make them reality.
Riiiight did you ever see a dps player that is purposefully not interrupting and after a wipe telling everyone "Hey I didnt' feel like interrupting so I just didn't - sorry not sorry"
you can argue that raidleaders should be monitoring every raider with some responsibilities and then I'd outright say that you should get help
― Plato
And is say you are prob a bot that doesn't say much and waits for someone to tell you what to do else you aren't capable of doing content without hand holding.
This meant that you could see when DPS players didn't care to dodge boss mechanics and blamed the healers for not healing properly.
DPS done, Healing done, Cleanses done and Damage taken and totals done for all of these were some of the most useful features available to a raid leader.
With this info you could figure out why you failed on an encounter because regardless of who blames who for not doing their job the data doesn't lie.
It's better if a DPS meter is included inside the game, if it's not someone will make a site you have to pay money to join to use some sort of dps calculator that may or may not pull data from the game to do it's calculations.
The one problem with a dps meter is that people who don't know what they are talking about rely too much on it to show how good they are at dps which leads to elitism.
I too can do uber dps if I don't move from the fire that dragon has farted on the ground, if I die I blame the healers for not doing their job, if I pull agro I blame the tank for sucking...
Performance is a touchy subject to you huh? Don't worry ashes is welcoming to all ranges of skill
― Plato
Players should not need to see the numerical breakpoint values in order to succeed.
You shouldn't need to rely on a combat tracker to determine the value of your gear or abilities.
what I wanted to aim for is to illustrate that having more than 1 damage item stat leads to changes in those stat real values - meaning that for example you have crit stat and strength stat - then each point in crit makes every strength point have more value and every point in strength makes every point in crit have more value
lets say without any stat your attack does 100 damage
with 100% crit and 0 bonus strength you do 200damage on average
with 0% crit and 100 bonus strength you do 200damage on average
however with 50% crit and 50 bonus strength you do 225damage on average
― Plato
And... what does that have to do with relying on combat trackers to evaluate the efficacy of crits?
Agreed, Steven h as said there won't be a dps meter but the game will have a combat log for people so they will have that information.
It is a small handful of the same people posting yelling for their trackers trying to say it makes the game more fun. People are just tired of arguing with them for years in a circle. They haven't realized and won't accept the large majority of the community agrees and doesn't want a dps meter.
Yeah but will they allow mods/addons? Then the people will make their own dps meters and it will have the same effect.
They aren't allowing Add ons.
Won't be the same effect because the devs will not be designing content with the expectation that everyone will be relying on DPS meters.
Totally agree with you on gear score, its a stupid concept in an MMO.
The amount of games where I've seen tanks running round with caster or healer gear simply because it gives them the gear score they needed to be invited along to the content they wanted to run...
As to a games meta (limiting the viable classes), a combat tracker will break this, rather than make it.
The first point to make here is that the game will have a meta. All games develop one, combat trackers or not. Archeage is a perfect example of a game similar to Ashes with low combat tracker usage, yet a very strict meta where if you were not one of three classes (out of 56) you were not coming along on a good amount of content.
With that in mind, there are two major causes for a game having a single build per class meta. The first is that the developers create the game that way - either purposefully or accidently. WoW is built this way on purpose, as an example.
The second barrier are players. Most MMO players have spent years - or indeed even decades - in games with monolithic metas. Essentially, it is what players will default to. This is actually the biggest barrier, as it is players that create the meta and so if is going to be created with the expectation of a monolithic structure.
So, two issues - developers and player expectations.
For developers, I personally believe that Intrepid have the desire to build their class system in a way where many builds per class are viable. I also believe they have the ability to pull that off.
This just leaves player expectation. The only real way to break decades of built up monolithic meta expectation is to show - with hard, objective data - that many builds are viable in different situations. The only way to do this, is to use a combat tracker.
It should stand to reason that if the game does indeed have builds that are viable in different situations, and if players have objective data on those builds, a multi-build meta would be accepted. The only way a game can have both trackers and a monolithic meta is if the game actually has class balance that only leaves one viable build.
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As to the point about add ons, they are indeed against the rules. However, an add on is something that you add to the game client. Applications that are their own thing are not covered on the add on rule. Combat trackers such as ACT are their own application, and thus not add ons, and so not covered under the no add on rule.
Combat trackers have already been used to parse develop livestream footage - so essentially trackers for Ashes already exist that are not against any currently stated rule (and not able to be covered by any future rule).
I would still like to know, based on your understanding, if someone I know DOES write a Combat Log Parser in Perl, if they are breaking the rules or cheating.
How do you know its cheating?
Intrepid have said they dont want them used, but have not stipulated any actual rules to that effect (largely because they kind of cant).
I am debating the statement that it isnt permitted.
In order to be considered "not permitted", it would need to be in the ToS, and be binding. If there is nothing about it in the ToS (or it is in the ToS, but kot binding) then you cant claim that it isnt permitted.
It may be that Intrepid dont want trackers, but in order to claim it isnt permitted, it needs to be expressly stated as not permitted in the ToS.
It really is that simple.
Since there is no statement at all from Intrepid that trackers will be expressly banned in the ToS (which - again - they cant really do), then it can not be claimed to be not permitted. As such, it cant be called cheating.
At the absolute minimum, that claim can not be made until the release version of the ToS is shown.
Until then, using a tracker is discouraged, but permitted.
Proofs ? 130 page of topics doesnt mean people are against, even when some of people during topic changed their mind.
You are here telling your own reality... or totally lying.
What you don't understand, because you are blind, focus in your own dreamworld...
If i have a tracker that gives me all information i need, what should i bother take a third party program ?
Limited to guild : so you, that dislikes it can go on guild that won't use it, and you will NEVER get your data recorded.
The current state you are defending we already know what will happens, and there are proofs of it :
FFXIV, and the site fflogs ... And while i defend combat tracker, i have a problem with people getting their fight data recorded without they aknowledge it...
The stance that was said here, and that people like you defend here is the same stance that FFXIV has... Do you really think that doing the same thing will do a different result ?
I was getting kicked for playing what was considered out of meta, and what was considered meta was not what combat tracker showed, but what guides were saying.
Another example ? LoL... famous place where you can be reported for "trollpick" because you didnt took one of current meta character for your lane, or to counter the ennemy, (while you still take a character that can deal the lane, just a less strong one in current balance)
Follow guide, don't think by yourself, or get reported/kicked/flamed
Those are the problem with guides
Guides have nothing to do with "social between people" there are 0 social relationship thru guide. When you read a guide, you have no interaction with anyone. And this is a problem when reading guide becomes mandatory.
But about social : tracker allow people to gather informations. and then, when you see theorycrafters communities (heavy users of combat tracker for obvious reason) they communicate A LOT, share all they find, discuss about all those discoveries, share ideas to what test next, how to test it (when it is not so simple) etc.
And combat tracker just reduce the time to get the data in a way easy to read, to
1) spend more time playing (which include social with guildmates... )
2) spend more time sharing datas, reading other's data, discussing about it (so social)
With your "do it without tracker" you just defend the "more math, less play and social"
See what are proofs ?
I pointed a game and a site proving what i says (FFXIV/fflogs) and for tc communities, i can say for example warcraftpriest site. LA got also huge TC community. Even FFXIV where there is far less to calculate.
And before you say "we didnt need it back in good old days" false... FFXI : the players complained a lot about lack of informations about how class, stats or other things works in it. while in everquest... there was some tc.
Oh, and i have a question :
You seems to KNOW the truth that no one wants combat tracker, and will be forbidden, third party will be detected and insta banned.
Why do you feel the need to defend this so if it is already a reality ?
Maybe you are not sure yourself of those statements...
Just here prove you know nothing about the subject...
A combat tracker does not only show your DPS...
it shows what each of your skill did as damages all along the fight.
It shows how many hit/miss, how many critical damage each of your skills did all along the fight (and so, the total number of time you used the skill... being the sum of miss + hit)
It shows the lowest damage and biggest damages each skill did all along the fight.
It also shows damages received... by what skills, etc etc
It shows each heal given for sure, but also all heal received, again with detailed informations.
It allows you to have your heal per second, but also an important one, heal per mana. again all along the fight, and... also shows overheals (not easy to judge on multitarget healing, HOTs or some mechanics like the prayer of mending)
And because here are just list of datas, like any spreadsheet you could spend long minutes to fill (more than the time spend on the fight ) You can see information about how was your DPS/HPS/HPS/damage taken all along the fight. . .
But what is more fun, you post is mainly about "useless, what is needed is working together, with good strategy"
People here don't defend combat tracker to find "how to kill this boss" ... many even rejected this argument while defending combat tracker/... Because yes, all of what i listed, including damage received, are not so usefull for the global raid strategy. BUT it is usefull for the individual part of each of the members of the raid. You can have the best strategy ever with a perfect raid full of love and obedience to raid leader. if your healers suck, they suck, boss will kill you. individual efficiency of each of raid member is as important a good strategy, a good team cohesion, and people doing their part of the strategy.
If fight are hard enough to be doable only by a single digit, you will need people able to create strategies, to apply it perfectly, while also playing their character at full efficiency. I never found a single fight that was a tough and hard fight, without needing strategy AND efficiency
You are so lost, all the bs you are talking about has already been debunked, if you actually read what people were saying and understood instead of only caring what you wanted you would understand what people want. The thread is open to read you are free to go through every post and read what people are saying and not look at it in a combative way.
Mobas are generally toxic and have nothing to do with mmorpgs please don't bring that up. I am the father of mobas i understand them better than anyone having been playing Warcraft 3 reign of chaos.
Knowing your stats has nothing to do with trackers, stop bringing up pointless information that relates to another topic. If you want to talk about knowing how your stats affect your skills then ask for that information to be shown not for a tracker to be used.
You will bring up any point and say you need trackers for it when you clearly don't you are just desperately wanting them and will refuse to acknowledge what people want. Then create weird arguments as if you have changed someone's mind because you don't want to accept the fact people disagree wit you so you try to nullify peoples thoughts or what they want.
It is funny you are mentioning guides are bad when trackers are the next level what toxicity and greatly enhances guides in a undeniable way to support them and speed up their process. The meter is the "guide" you will always have with you to gauge people at any point you want. A guide is simply someone's thought on what works best for them and they share it.
And yes until there is a official ToS anything is possible in open development. Though there is a big difference in we aren't making trackers and we aren't allowing trackers Though we know they aren't developing the gameplay for trackers as it doesn't make a game better he goal of a tool is to make things easier gameplay wise.