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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
A single digit percentage of the population will be capable of defeating certain content.[9]
There will be some in-depth raiding that has multiple stages that will be extremely difficult and... It would definitely be in the single digits of population that will be capable of defeating certain content... It doesn't mean that there won't be content available for the larger percentages as well... There should be a tiered level of content that players can constantly strive to accomplish. If there is no ladder of progression and everything is flat and all content can be experienced, then there is no drive to excel.[9] – Steven Sharif
EDIT: This isn't so much a counterpoint as 'a reminder of what exactly is being discussed'. No harm in posting it again.
If Intrepid sticks with the open world boss goal and then the botters create bots that can both kill the difficult boss and anyone who comes to pvp them - at that point I'd just say let them, because there's literally nothing you can do.
I guess I'm a defeatist when it comes to that kind of a scenario? Cause I literally see no way where Intrepid could combat an untraceable bot raid that excels at both pve and pvp. Designing with trackers in mind would not change that situation, because the botters would be literally the same as you or Noaani. They'll figure out how to beat the boss, write the bot for it and go do it. And no one will stop them because the bots are literal best players in the game (allegedly).
So if the ultimate result is "botters will win no matter what you do", then I'd rather play w/o trackers in the game and enjoy it as long as I can for what it is. To me, those botters would be ruining the game in the same way the tracker people would if Intrepid stays with the "no addon/meter/tracker" rule, because both would be breaking the rules of the game to have their fun, completely disregarding what other people think about it. But maybe I'm just too big of a stickler for the rules, or just like the currently presented rules and want everyone to follow them and live happily ever after. Though I know that no one will, cause people don't care if their fun ruins someone else's fun.
Ir wont be a small group though.
If Ashes is a game people see themselves playing long term, even with the current difficulty of running a tracker, 25%+ of the games population will run one.
If it becomes easier, 50%+ will run one.
The thing is, most people dont give trackers a second thought. It's just a tool that MMO's have. If people get in the game and decide they want to stay for a while, googling to find a tracker is just a think most people will do at some point.
As to guilds clearing content with a tracker vs without a tracker, and Intrepid designing content for the guilds that struggle with it, I'm not sure this would ever happen.
With content being open world, I have doubts that guilds not using trackers would ever kill a top end mob.
I personally don't want that kind of design. If that leads to a "boring" encounter that can only be made more interesting through pvp (well, more fun for those who even care about pvp) - so be it. But Intrepid have talked themselves into a corner with their current promises so my current position doesn't mean shit really.
You're missing my point again I think?
If the boss is difficult, bots are hard, but Trackers are likely to be used.
If the boss/Mechanic is easy, Trackers are unlikely to be necessary but bots are easy.
If you must make a tradeoff between the supposed 'toxicity of a tracker' and the actual toxicity of 'bots that can win at the game', you'll choose the bots? You probably don't see it as being that binary, and it definitely is not, but as I've said before, this is 'being offered a solution to some of the real part of an otherwise illusory problem' and then 'choosing to perceive the illusion as the bigger problem than the flipside'.
Being defeatist is EXACTLY what you need to not do here, because this ISN'T a matter of 'Intrepid should just give up'. They can design bosses that are hard enough that bots are not worth writing (because the code for ACTING on information gathered is much more complicated), but the 'information gathering' part of the code is going to be written by SOMEONE (which affects content consumption speed, but if the content is fun, the 'problem' can be somewhere between 'elitists complaining that the game is too easy while they keep playing it' and 'harmless').
So I'm trying to convince people to NOT be defeatist. DON'T give in to Botters because some asshole said that someone's DPS wasn't good enough. Don't give in to RMT bot farmers because 'Intrepid will have a strong stance against botting'. There are design solutions to these things. They may not all be painless, but is it really just not worth it? Is it so hard to just believe the EverQuest player who tells you 'it's fine it's not all that toxic if the game is good'.
We are hoping for the game to be good, right?
ACT is more like what a spreadsheet is to a bunch of numbers on a page.
We will have those numbers. That is the information. The spreadsheet just makes that information easier to understand and digest. It means we can process it in our brains easier and faster.
The amount of information available to players hasn't changed at all, the only change is the way it is presented.
Edit; at least, this is how it is in most games. In Ashes, the tracker may need to find it's own information rather than rely on developer supplied logs (which is what trackers generally use as their data source).
It's not information you wouldn't have had otherwise generally, its information that overloads a normal person's cognition.
And here is my problem with that, precisely. Analogy time? This one's probably good.
You can play Chess online. Chess is a very complicated game and sometimes you are 10 moves PAST the point where you made the losing move when you realize you are losing. On a computer you can probably review by quickly loading up and checking the previous few moves (yes, even while the game is going on). But you're still losing.
The 'information that the Tracker gives you' is equivalent to being able to VISUALIZE THE BOARD instead of 'having to do it all in your mind'. Imagine it. You have no board, you have no pieces, you're effectively 'in a room with the log of the game floating in front of you'.
I'm not saying 'this shouldn't be how games are'. I'm saying that someone who watches a Chessmaster figure out the right thing to do due to their ability to just visualize a chessboard, and can't do it, has more incentive to go 'that's unfair, I'm gonna go get a chess set so I can do it without being some kind of savant/spending 5 hours to do what they did in 10 minutes'.
And I BELIEVE that Noaani is saying the equivalent of 'Why would you bother to do it without a chessboard when there's going to be one within arm's reach of everyone else anyway?'
Harder bosses overwhelm 'normal people'. The 'purity' of the game might be retained if you could somehow make all those people unable to use a tool to help them, but you can't. So now you can probably be sure that some subsection of 'normal people who can't do it without the Tracker' will go get the Tracker. Because this is a competition, and they're losing it.
One of the main reasons developers don't ever know how difficult something is to do, is because the human brain is one of the best pattern matching systems we know to exist. So devs make errors like 'Well, no one can consistently do this 1-frame counter' or 'no one could notice the statistical variance structure of this' or 'no one could figure out that there's one frame on which if you stand right here the hitbox for this attack won't get you', and my favorite 'no one could keep perfect track of exactly how much damage they have done to this mob'.
Until someone does. And then others want to, and if they find tools to let them, they use those tools. But this doesn't mean Devs should give up on designing cool things. It means they should give up on designing what they think are 'hard' things and focus on making those things chaotic and fun so that no one even cares about the fact that using the tracker is part of the game at high levels for non-savants.
Noaani says that half the players will use trackers, even if they're forbidden. That might be the case, just as it allegedly is in FF14, but iirc someone (I think it was Aerlana) said that FF14's bosses haven't really increased in their difficulty too much throughout the years, even though top players all apparently use trackers for them. That leads me to believe that the difficulty of the game doesn't necessarily need to increase, even if people with trackers are able to beat it sooner rather than later. Which in turn leads me to believe that Intrepid's position can remain on the "no addons/meters/trackers" point w/o sacrificing anything really.
Ultimately I want Intrepid to work hard in their hinting designs rather than their dps checks designs. Have some patterns in the boss' mechanics that indicate why/how/when/where he will do another mechanic that leads to a wipe. If the tracker people see that hint through their trackers and not through the fight - good for them, they had their spreadsheet fun. But imo the tracker must not be required to notice that hint pattern.
But Noaani says that this kind of design is impossible to make truly difficult, so what do I know. Yeah, and like I said before, the speed at which the tracker allows you to go through all that information is my main issue with it. W/o a tracker you'd either need to record video pov of all players and then go through each and go through their battle logs and then match them up and probably know all the buff/ability/positioning information on top of that, just to properly reference all that info across each other.
The tracker presents all of that in a concise packaged form that lets you dissect the encounter immediately after it has happened. I personally dislike that, mainly because I'm a stubborn ram who wants to bash his head against the content instead, until the content finally breaks. But that's just my opinion on it, which seemingly happens to coincide with Steven's. And as I said already, discussing opinions is an endless activity, with this thread being the biggest proof for that.
Is everyone essentially saying:
1) Game is too easy = bots
2) Game is too hard = bots
3) idc about the game, I like programming = bots
I would like to hope IS have the foresight to find a good middle ground in balancing encounters and make them enjoyable enough this isn't the case.
This brings us back to who they balance the game content around, people using trackers or not; what elements make an encounter interesting; what tools should be available to players to properly prepare themselves and improve.
Regardless of it's detectable, I think the game would be garbage and pointless if it's just bots as far as the eye can see. I think discussing the possibility of bots and toxicity is a moot point and just derailing real discussion for the benefits and negatives of trackers; whether any should be added in any form to the game and when should players have access to them.
I'm only against trackers because I feel it gravitates most encounters to gear score number checks instead of skill based gameplay. But I can understand the reason for wanting them in some instances.
I just rant because I don't like when people don't understand the core aspects of arguments, so it's probably ignorable.
Competitive games cause some people to want to catch up to the naturally talented by any means necessary.
You can say that you don't like some of those means, but if you can't detect them to ban them, doesn't matter.
Might as well even the playing field while finding some way to keep all the people who don't care about catching up from associating with all the ones that want to catch up and causing toxicity.
Yay for summaries.
As for the chess analogy, I'm too content with the unfairness of the world to compete with the savants. In my ideal world the rules of unfairness would be perfectly upheld, so that the savants are always at the top because they should be, while everyone else is lesser. But obviously that doesn't apply to the real world, so people will always use tools to equalize the playing field. If Intrepid manage to outdesign either of those approaches - awesome. If they just go "fuck it, do whatever you want and we'll give you our own trackers too", I won't necessarily care all that much and just won't use a tracker out of principle.
But they can't. So all I want is for the conversation to stop being about 'should we have trackers or not?' and move to being about 'how can we keep toxicity low, given that trackers will exist?'
I hope you find like-minded people who also want to ram their heads against the content tracker-less. I don't know what you will do if you find out your GuildMates are using them and giving you advice based on parsing you, but I believe you will always aim to be...
The GOAT.
But because I AM THE GOAT! (jk) I usually have pretty big and successful guilds (well, relatively speaking). Though I'd mainly chuck that up to my social skills and not really gameplay prowess or anything of that sort.
This si how content is suppose to be, people want to be consumers and do all content instantly as fast as possible and not spend time to figure it out and learn through experience. So they make tools to make games easier for them, then complain there isn't enough content or the game is to easy. Part of this issue relates to old school mmorpgs with skill rotations as well as players figuring out the puzzles making the content easier as they know what to do. (this is why pvp will always be more challenging than pve content). AoC content just needs to be what its content is and not be made around the 1% of tracker people. It needs to be made to make as much of their tracker information as useless as possible so there is less reason for people to care about it.
In this thread with the same people are trying to have it be the other way around and make more reason to care about trackers, that is why you won't see them talking about ways to make content that will make trackers less effective and not nearly matter as much. Their goal here is to have content work around trackers at the end of the day and copy their game so they can relive it everquest 2 for example.
No clue what they are talking about, its fluff to confuse people to try to confusing convince people of their point. Very weird way to go about it, doesn't really matter though.
Bots are not going to be a thing for hard content, I didn't see a single bot in raid content for lost ark and that game was infested. People are just exaggerating what bots can do in a game.
There is a difference between people using trackers because they are there and no one cares and people that are supporting and wanting trackers. So i throw them in the 1% as well as it is a certain type of player.
If people want to see their DPS if it is improve or not they simply can test that out in game it doesn't need to use of trackers for seeing if your damage is better or not or your rotation.
now if the game hides all dps numbers, and exact damage done than it is even more difficult to find out though not impossible.
If it is just a different format of the combat log then they should have no issue simply using the combat log. They want to track all dps and actions around them, party, players, mobs, and have detailed information on what is going on more than normal.
What has actually been requested is an IS Combat Tracker placed in the Guild Buffs, or, my request of just having an IS Combat Tracker for one and all.
You might only get the rebellious side of the equation because you exaggerate the issues somewhat.
Technically they do say this...
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/System_requirements
I'm still gaming with a GeForce 7100 and 800x600 CRT.
We have already gone over combat trackers in guilds and how that is pointless as only a way to push for use of combat trackers int he game overall. People wouldn't use the guild perk and simply use third party trackers now that is already in the game. Which I'm sure they can adjust and improve on it gain even more information if they are locked off knowing certain kinds of information.
The back isn't being designed and built for trackers so it doesn't need to be implemented in the game nor supported.
Again the point was anyway if it really was the same as the combat log then they can simply use the combat log.
The system recommendations haven't changed. UE5 can be rendered much easier by lower spectrum machines. I wouldn't worry about the requirements until launch period.
I'm aware of these issues which is why I've requested a tracker for all made by IS. The game does have a tracker - what do you think a combat log is? The combat tracker issue remains a UI issue.
Furthermore, guilds will spec into a perk if the perk is an advantage. The IS Combat Tracker should cover everything that's allowed. People could then be penalised for information gleaned outside the combat log parameters.
Right now, you'll just force people to push the limits further because if an ice cream cone breaks the rules you may as well add ice cream.
That was just a joke
The card I linked is from like 2006 and I don't think anyone has been playing on CRTs since the late 90's. (Unless you're a really dedicated rhythm games player)