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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
Not first game or software i see such lines...
I don't see the point here. I know they can ban me just because they want it. This is not a proof i have to obey about Steven's will on tracker, it is a proof, that any other, they try to get as much thing as possible if they end up in front of a judge...
If you try to say "so they can ban for tracker use" yes
they can also ban you... because ... don't care they just ban you.
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As i said "not first game i see this"
ToS try to get the law on their side, and often more,
It happens quite often to have companies getting sued, and lose for "abusiv clause"
I don't see why you try to show their aside that gaming companies are like other companies...
yes they can totally ban you without any explanation, or even care about you. This is nothing new. Because peopel will always find way to do new illegal thing that devs would never think about, without such line, they wouldn't be able to ban them so...
You send this, without any link to what we said before, except if you want to say "if it is not allowed, so it is forbidden" but in such case... i invite you to consider that "not allowed" does not mean "forbidden"... those are clearly differnt things... And i think you are not a teenager, so you know it very well...
Now lets get simple : legal is IS work not yours
Prove me i broke a rule, and i will admit to be bannable, but it will be hard if there are no rule published and no action from me against such rules
do don't try to do IS work... you are bad at it, If they want to ban me, they would already do it, or will do it in due time, this is their matter and mine. not yours.
If you think they will just ban tracker you don't need to defend your PoV here, because ... why losing time to fight against a thing that will make people ban ? this will be enough to avoid people using it no ?
and go back to the subjectif of this topic : tracker in the game / tracker along the game, good or bad, negatively impact game experience or positively, how to keep most good part and avoid bad part.
And even more, with the consideration it could be a simple guild perk (which limit already a lot many bad use of it)
if you forgot, this topic is made by... Steven itself, so he allowed us to speak about it. maybe it won't be allowed in game, but we are allowed to speak about it at least
The degree to which you are cheating is debatable.
Imagine trying to debate the term allow because you have a ego and are toxic. All you two are doing is showing how toxic some of these people that use trackers are. Keep trying to argue with every post against you and the devs saying it is not allowed.
As well being toxic and trying to weasel around the devs and telling people they can use trackers when you have been told they are not allowed.
you are ok this topic exist to debate around tracker ? because it seems that you even want to deny this... just forcing us to just become silent, like... if us defending tracker existence was a problem for you...
This is what i don't understand on your post, it doesnt feel that you want to discuss around tracker, but want us to be silent... Which is... contrary to the first post of this topic...
Friends shared it already (not this link but... same thing) And we laughed about it a lot.
Yoshida speaks, and never act or just partially act, most top end that were banned got their banned removed and account reactivated. while their use was always more than obvious.
He gave more tools ingame also to check your own DPS like dummies to test if you have enough DPS for each high level content (Xtrem primals and savage)... The funniest part is those dummies were used to test if the trackers were accurate or not ! Those dummies are used by FC to test people.
They could try to close fflogs site, but don't even try to touch it.
Yoshida always was a pure hypocrit, (and on more subject than this... the list of lies for housing is long)
So yes, he speaks and ? It happens sometime, when people complain about top end players and content too difficult. to say "ok we listened you" while... doing nothing after
it would be easy to modify game to check if the player is running parser currently ... because the parsers for FFXIV interact with the game... Question : why moving only now ? because he didnt care... And as time pass, the numbers of top end activity of FFXIV is decreasing, proving that this part of the game is less lucrativ... so he can try to strike but... hey not to strong for sure... Because they still prefer keep them in the game. (money money... one of the most greedy company currently)
Database... like there are for everygame... using mostly datamining (which is... illegal in most ToS)
WoWhead or garlandtools for example.
For me cheating is... or breaking rules (no rules currently i just speak about tracker, and we don't know what rules will be) or getting an unfair advantage (guides, database gives as much advantage as a tracker )
Not obeying anyone saying "i don't want it" (and i am currently not disobeying, right ? or have to prove it ? ) is not cheating, it is disobeying...
But you are sure all you want to continue on legal side of the topic ? you really don't have anything else about tracker itself to say ? it was, i think, far more interesting speaking about it that "you can/can't" while there are no ToS published yet, making the "can/can't" only speculations...
You are toxic this isn't a debate. Forum post are there for people to give their feedback, not just for you to argue with every single post someone makes, if it is against what you want since they don't want trackers for like the last 2 years.
If the devs say they don't want people using stuff that's outside of the game and you use that stuff they say they don't want you to use, you are cheating. Cheating doesn't necessarily mean you will be banned. Also, doesn't necessarily mean what you're doing is illegal. Not being in the ToS mostly means you probably won't be banned.
You could still be cheating.
I dunno what "disobeying" can possibly mean in the context of rules.
"I'm not cheating; I'm just disobeying the rules."
What does that even mean??
Translation if it isn't TOS IS can't stop us and we can do whatever we want. Typical toxic mentality.
I never kicked people from team but when a kick was initiated, once in a while I approved.
This was happening in dungeons where my purpose was farming items.
And I was not using any DPS meter.
Else I was spending my time in other dungeons which I loved, where I had a lot of patience with anyone, even playing alone and just enjoying being there.
So I understand that urge to kick somebody from team when things do not work fast enough.
I really blame the games because they create repetitive content. And I see no solution, even if the bosses will adjust their behavior dynamically and not every run will be exactly the same.
In case of legendary gear, this behavior becomes even more pronounced. People blame each other, drama happens or maybe they just politely stop playing and avoid each-other.
Maybe fewer players will use DPS meters in AoC. But they will use the logs:
"We will be providing combat data for individual players in their chat window, that players can filter and analyze for themselves."
Filtering that data will probably not happen in their brain but they will use some other 3rd party program.
Again, I have no idea how modern DPS meters are.
Do they help winning in PvP combat too?
If not, those who have legendary gear will have to be very nice and never get corrupted because the risk of loosing those items.
I would not be surprised if Steven will make the legendary items a very high chance drop when the corrupted is killed by a team of bounty hunters.
And if PvP happens close to those raid bosses then things will sort themselves out in a way or another.
But here you don't speak about rules, we don't know if it will be rules or not.
Yoshida, Steven or anyone saying "don't use it please" doesn't creates a rule. Rules are on ToS.
If i use tracker while no rules forbid it, i break no rules.
There are LOT of differences between AoC and FFXIV/WoW that will lead to far less kick (with or without tracker)
Remove any tracker in WoW and kick will still happen at same rate. Because people will find a way to filtrate others. As i said, on FFXIV they don't even need tracker, if they want, they just use the dummies the dev team give to players to test their DPS for each savage/primal extrem bosses.
And we can remember the marvellous *cough* addon "gearscore" during WOTLK on WoW (what a silly way to filtrate).
Now, why on WoW/FFXIV we see more often people getting kicked
1) as you said, spamming some content, the time to kill is a thing... when we farmed light, garuda was 2 minutes to 2 min 30(including getting in/out with loading, retag etc) it means 20 to 25 kill per hours. and if i remember well, we needed 500 garuda kill this way to finish the nexus weapon. so 20 hours. lets get to 3 min or 4 min per kill and... ... Remove to chain contents, and you reduce the need of efficiency.
2) it is easy to find anyone else... The worst of the worst being "duty finder", but with party finder + being teleported to where the fight is happening, kicking is a really low loss of time... in the previous example, it would lead to 3-4 minutes... at worst to find another one (and if DPS can aim to 1 minute) not hard to see the difference
3) the travel time : as i said, teleport, so no travel time, no time lost. If there is long travel time to get the new guy, you prefer to continue with the bad one. even if there is a risk of wipe...
All is about time efficiency mostly.
Also, all those thing, and more in the game environment changed between "old good time" and now.
On wow it happened in WOTLK, with the addition of the worst tool in MMORPG in my opinion : Duty finder...
It transformed other player in "random unknown dude i will never see again" you can more easily kick (no risk to have a bad reknown or what else). I saw far more kick when it appeared than before... like day and night... I was enthousiast for duty finder, cool tool to do faster dailies... ... how stupid i was...
Back in "good old time" we did far less "pick up", more play with people from guild or friendlist. So... suddenly, extremly less problem of kick or worse of toxicity of any kind... This is what i hope the most for ashes : back to a situation where the pickup is just used to fill few missing slot, and where the pickup you invite can be a bad players for sure, but can also become an excellent one you add in your friendlist.
I am convinced that toxicity doesn't come from DPS meters, but more many tools to casualise game (casual are NOT source of toxicity, tools to make the game more friendly to them is the source, those are really different things ! ) Because all i said is meant, first to allow casuals to have more content : shorter dungeons, teleport, easy way to find party. It was always show mostly for them, because hardcore have friendlist/guild list long enough to rarely need a pick up, just the travel time was a thing for them.
If you used recount.skada back in BC/WOTLK it is still the same thing
Do you have time on PvP to lose some second of focus on your ennemy to look at datas ? no... wil tracker help you ? if you can't watch it, not even need to see if information can be usefull, you can't have time to watch them.
PvP was, is and will be the place where tracker will give the less help of any kind.
Tracker is a tool to study, analyse what happened in fights. as you said, it is just taking combat log, and have a way far easier to process for the brain, instead of hundreds of line... but it is for after fight... PvP is too chaotic.(far more than any PvE chaotic design fight)
What you need to progress for PvP ? video-record of fight, to then, study it.
Without going in to any real detail, all I will say is - keep in mind, most of the world has legislation that put people first, not organizations first. Organizations are free to write things like that in to their ToS. Writing it is never an issue - enforcing it can be though.
The fun thing about clauses like that though - lets say they wanted to kick some random person because they suspect that person is use a combat tracker - do they then kick everyone that is better than that player?
More to the point, what do they do when the plug ins required for combat trackers to work in Ashes has millions of downloads?
As a point to make - I have never kicked anyone from a group.
Not even one time.
I have, however, kicked exactly one player from a raid (and thus the guild). That is one player in 20+ years.
That player was kicked for cleansing something we needed not cleansed, and had told him time and again to not cleanse it, and his inability to follow basic instruction caused around 55 raid wipes over a number of weeks on a mob we had not yet killed.
First after booting him from the raid (where I logged in as a similar class to him on my 5th alt), we killed that mob first pull.
We didn't need a tracker to tell us what was going on - we could see what was happening on screen just fine.
This is actually a story I have told at least two other times on these forums - if you search for it you may be able to find mention of it from years ago.
Your notion that everyone uses trackers to boot people from groups or raids is just unfounded. I'm sure some people do - and I am sure you have been booted from groups and/or raids in the past, but that doesn't mean it is what everyone does.
I agree.
And if Ashes has a built in tracker as well as a family summons, the family summons will be more responsible for people being kicked than the combat tracker will be.
This is a dumb take.
If you think family summons is the same as LFG you would be in the same boat. Are you aware what family summon is?
If you can summon a family member to you, you’re more likely to kick someone who isn’t doing well vs having to stall the group waiting for a replacement.
Unless I’m mistaken on a part of that, of course.
Tell me how family summons acts the same as LFG.
Instant and available replacement of a group member, via a summon.
While the above post from Biccus is absolutely correct, I never actually equated the family summons to LFG in WoW.
All I said the summons will see more people booted from groups than a combat tracker.
Imagine I am online with 6 other friends. Our 7th friend will be online in an hour. Wr can wait for him, sure - or we could get started on the content we want to run, picking up a random to fill his spot.
Then, the second he logs in and is ready, we boot the random (perhaps kill him too) and summon our friend.
That absolutely is a situation that will happen all the time if a family summons is in the game.
In fact, it is basically the reason to add a family summons - you can start content while waiting for your friend to log on, and then pull them directly to you.
Never in 6 years saw missused as suggested above.
Fantastic tool to invite an individual to group when a party position became vacant to the depths of a dungeon avoiding all the party exiting to pick up that player, and fighting your way in again to your spot. No down time.
Great for morale.
Excellent for planting an alt summoner in remote areas to summons a group of players to traverse the map quickly for pve, pvp.
ToS gives you the bannable offenses.
A singular document, in this case a Terms of Service, cannot outline an infinite range of possible infringements and/or action semantics.
The shortest and simplest manner to workaround that issue is the default of providing the capacity within the ToS to ban without reason.
But if you don't tell that rando that he'll be replaced in an hour, imo, you a dick. Neither lfg nor the family summon has any influence on that.