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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
Instead of the player having a singular window that they are building up to, where everything is under their control, I'd rather have a system where the window is somewhat random. You prepare for the window as best you can, but you may need to fire off some of the cooldowns you would want to save for that window, and when the window does come, you may not have everything ready that you would have liked.
This will require players to have to think on their feet. The situation they find themselves in may not be the situation they had expected even just a few seconds ago.
The other thing I'd like to see that I don't see much in WoW is an alternative method to damage buffs. In most games, most damage buffs increase the damage of abilities cast by a flat percentage - so you save up all of your big hitters for those buffs.
However, if a damage buff instead added a significant flat amount of damage per ability cast, it changes things up. it adds value to faster casting abilities that may deal less damage, and potentially gives you two window types a player can attempt to alternate between (percentage increase window and flat damage window).
If you take this two window system in to account with the above somewhat randomness, then you have two windows that the player is kind of trying to make happen, but that kind of have a mind of their own (to an extent), and where the player will at times decide the best thing to do in a given situation may be a blend of the two windows.
This is basically EQ2.
And my question was whether your experience in non-wow games was similar to the one presented in that video. As in, "if you can't manage to maximize your window - your raid might wipe because the dps check was failed". And the tracker would be used before the fight to know your window's potential output and after the fight to see whether you matched that level or you failed and was the reason for the wipe (if I understand the tracker's application correctly).
Trackers give you the data of all the builds that you test. If you don't test the best build, a combat tracker isn't going to point you towards it.
Keep in mind, about 15 years in to WoW, top end guilds went through a fairly major change. Someone came up with a better raiding meta than what had been used. In the game with the most analysis (more analysis than many professional sports), it was simply a case of "no one thought of it" until that point. I didn't get that at all from the video.
There was no mention at all of wiping the raid due to not maximizing their window. The only negative they talked about (that I noticed) was not topping DPS for the pull (well, he did say "your raid wipes because of a failed DPS check", but I took that as being hyperbolic - he himself claims to be near the bottom of the pack in terms of DPS, you aren't going to fail a check because one of your worst DPS had a bad minute). That is literally just missing out on a feelsgoodman moment - nothing more.
However, as a more direct answer to your question; no, that is not my experience. In EQ2, the window is not as defined, and is somewhat random. Rather than the raid wiping due to low DPS if you miss your window, it is possible the raid may wipe (on a DPS check encounter - of which there were few) if you made multiple bad decisions in a row in terms of ability use.
WoW's combat is static. If you know the class, build and gear of a character, you know what their output should be for a given encounter. EQ2's combat is less static (I will not say dynamic - that has become a meaningless PR word to me). If you know my build and gear, you can perhaps get an expected range of my output, but the low end is about half of what the high end is, and where I fall in that range is a product mostly of my decision making, but also a bit of luck.
Or guild leader can check people's DPS before going into a raid, and have an officer see who is overhealing during any 'expedition'.
Tools that remove the challenge of leadership, organization, and cooperation, are simply cheap hacks.
Then, what happens is a member refuses because, as some people said on this topic, they dislike this tool ?
"Don't go in guild who wish to perform in high end if you don't want the use of tracker" yes... but if all people in the guild have the same mindset about this topic, there is no problem about the "bad" use people doing it.
The idea currently supported is :
-guild perk tracker => guilds need to chose to take it, and is not totally free
-track only guild members => You go on guilds with tracker if you are fine with it. it becomes a way to chose that is clear.
AoC will be a game where you chose guild also for their perk... and the best way to have a guild cohesion is a guild with the same mindset everywhere. so i think have tracker this way reduces a lot (totally?) the bad part.
Also, your idea is better than the situation we will have for now, where people can have their data tracked, without knowing it... and so their fight efficiency being analysed by other players without even speaking to them about it... which is for me a real big problem...
No, I hate this. This has nothing to do with analysis abilities in the way that I view them.
This is exactly what people complain about. Someone is telling you 'the way to maximize a situation that is almost always available to you'.
You're not adapting, and the optimal build is almost always 'figure out whether the window is more important than the between' (definitionally it is).
The whole thing is terrible for me personally, but the video creator does a good job of explaining that this IS also skill related, but the skill it is rewarding is 'relatively binary', so it empowers build so much more than actual skill of either of the other two types (coordination with others, and ability to notice what's happening).
I have so many complaints about this, that it would become essays again. I am deeply saddened by the fact that WoW has made this the standard for so many MMO players, because it means that it's harder to have conversations, as you've seen.
You've just made me realize that people might just be expecting Ashes to do something like 'force the Window to synergize over multiple players', which would be a step in the right direction, but is only a quarter (in my estimation) of what needs to be fixed for this to be good.
But trying to explain it all...? It would literally be faster to gift you Monster Hunter World on Steam (you want it?) and even if I did, you'd have to find someone to play it with. Then again, you are tenacious enough to just work it all out over time, as you've said.
tl;dr this is not analysis to me, this is bad design propped up by meters which then in turn reinforces the need/use for the meters. WoW is the antithesis of what I like in game design.
This is also a problem with the perception.
In the simplest sense, the thing you need for WoW isn't even meaningfully similar to the thing you need in EQ2. So while people consider them the same thing because they CAN do the same functions, you use practically separate functions of the tracker for the two games if you are 'using the meter correctly' in EQ2.
This comes up because of a deeper game design problem. When a 'copycat' studio (even a big one), looks at a genre they don't have much experience with, they copy the parts of the experience they can understand, which is often NOT the whole thing.
This is partially how we got New World. There's nothing explicitly wrong with New World other than badly coded auth, it's just 'only part of what an MMO is'. That's why so many MMOs 'suck' while still being viable enough products to hold attention. They are 'unfinished games' but sometimes conceptually.
The Tracker's purpose in a "Whole Game" would not be to measure anyone's DPS against anyone else's at any point. You'd almost always only measure your DPS against your own previous, but the tracker gives you all the options to see 'what external factors over the course of a long fight were affecting it'.
Yes... and no.
This is true if you consider that top end fight can be finished with unlimited amount of people... being designed for 40 people (a raid) but if yo uwant to bring a whole big guild of 300 people ? fine go on.
but at this point the fight is easy... you have 7,5 time the amount of people... so anyone on each server can kill any boss going this way. . . Far from the "single digit" promised.
So you can then do a dynamic balance : the more people are in the fight, the more damages and life the boss has. but then the amount will just reduce the lack of effectivness of some people, and reduce the impact of personnal mistakes, but the need to minmax the personnal gameplay and the teamplay stays the same
Teamplay is a thing i want in AoC... and because of it, to maximize (and even min-max) the synergies between the forty characters of the raid, there will be needed test, tons of tests, tons of log line to analyse, to dissect, and also to compare with other tons of other log line from another test...
the simple "ok, because it is more teamplay there is no need for minmaxing" is just out of topic... you can minmax thru teamplay. I do Pen & Paper RPG... it is a lot around teamplay... and i can totally confirm that 4-5 average character but with excellent teamplay are far less good that a team of 4-5 optimised character, with excellent teamplay... and even this can still be even more improved when minmaxing the teamplay.
WoW did everything better then EQ, that is why EQ died. This has nothing to do with meters...
I agree that WoW did everything you can understand better than EQ.
WoW is a better game, numbers speak for themselves back then (during that time) and pushed the mmorpg genre forward.
If you think eq was that good i hear Patheon is looking for more pledges though if that is the content you want to play. In fact id expect you to already have pledged with your attitude, else you are talking out of your ass with the "understand".
Thank you for your input as always. It's always enlightening to see different perspectives on the genre.
Thank you for constantly being passive aggressive, I'm sure my equivalent exchange still doesn't hold a handle to the purity of your style.
You're projecting a little. I definitely don't like your opinions. I definitely don't agree with them.
But disregarding them would also be foolish. You are right, a lot more people like WoW. Working out exactly why without compromising would be extremely important.
Your information told me something unexpected, so I thanked you for it. I don't usually thank you or engage at all. Being passive aggressive with you is generally a waste of time. But I don't auto-discard everything you say because I disagree with it.
If in that era, having more players was important and the way to judge success in the Genre (your given premise) WoW wins hands down. You say it moved the genre forward. I don't know the correlation there, but I can't dispute it either, so I'll take your word for it until someone else who might know better brings a better argument.
The discussion here is about the video NiKr gave. What do you think of the design principle in that video?
I think you left out important context to the point I was trying to make. The initial context was about providing log files to players in game. I don't care HOW the software tracks this data...I don't want to think about it. If someone asks me to provide this data...I'm not going to even bother, because I don't care...it is not why I would be playing the game.
If trackers are mainstream...to where the AVERAGE player is requesting logs from the people they play with...I don't want to play that game. (again, if I were looking to join a top guild, I wouldn't complain about this)
Yes/No....it DOES increase the number of people who ATTEMPT to analyze the game. And most of those people will do it poorly, leading to the situation I described above, of the AVERAGE player requesting this data when they don't need it for the content they are doing.
But I will agree that it doesn't necessarily change the number of players who are already using this data correctly.
You are literarily creating fantasies in your head with your own imagination to create what you want because of your more stubborn personality.
There are multiple points in WoW with its long history and the direction it lead to as well when it was bought and the effects it had.
What will never stop surprising me is your desire to take words and just create things in your head over having a honest conversation. Like it is 100% talking to someone that doesn't care what people they dislike think and trying to mold discussion into something you want.
The reason for our negative view points at each other comes from you btw. Just going to let you know that.
Ok, but do you have an opinion about the video?
EDIT: Realized I just did it again, yes. I tried to mold the conversation into being about the video and the thing NiKr was asking about, whereas you were trying to have a conversation about how WoW is just better and that has nothing to do with meters. Point proven, so no need to engage, ignore me.
Yes has nothing to do with the video, personality i don't find that as good content for gameplay. It shouldn't be about buffing up and dealing damage with set rotations and if that gets messed up then you need to wait.
It is a boring cycle of just doing the same patterns on your keyboard over and over again. There is no feeling of a fight when it comes to that or really skill.
I am trying to decide which side would be a nicer community for AoC: those who use trackers or those who don't. That is more important for me than obtaining the legendary materials. But of course I want those legendary materials too.
So if you say you demand logs from people, it makes me feel like you are the type of person who expects obedience. You take the logs, maybe you say a "thank you" and then that's it.
If people who use trackers want to be in control and they are more likely to take other people's freedom away, is that a good community?
I don't understand if there is a relationship or not. All I know is that the game tries to bring the community together and Steven for some reason decided against trackers. Maybe his decision is not related to community cohesion but to other aspects.
This is making an assumption about me that I feel is valid but not true in my case.
Most people I've encountered who would ask for logs are the type to push hard, expect obedience, etc.
I can claim that I'm not but it doesn't matter, except that I'm of the same opinion as you are. I am now claiming that I don't like the behaviour of most other people who would ask for logs. It's therefore my perspective that the issue is unavoidable without there being no logs and no concept of anything complex enough where any equivalent of logs is important. You can either extend it to 'me admitting I'm that sort of person' or not, the point stands that the solution to the problem of 'people who ask for logs' is to make it not-complex. Just 'removing logs' doesn't solve it, nor does 'removing trackers'.
The only thing I believe one could do is separate the player groups. I have other concerns about this, because as you said, the type of person who asks for logs often also takes the freedom away from others. But in a PvX game, they don't just take away your freedom to play the way you want in their groups or influence the meta so that you're less free in the community at large... they can take more than that.
Community don't want trackers that was most of the post of unique people. Or some are only ok if only they can view it themselves and people can view their logs.
A handful are trying to push for people to view anyone's logs under the guise of being in the same guild.
If you are in a guild that doesnt really do anything, barely talks in chat, never plans to run content, then the whole games community has a specific feel about it.
On the other hand, if you are in a guild that plans things multiple times a week, that runs impromptu groups every day, that assists each other etc, then the whole game has a totally different feel to it.
This is why I consider it valid to put this decision at the guild level - that is the point where most of the community feel of the game is held.
When you join a guild, you are generally picking one that is a community you wish to be a part of.
I fully agree that it would be bad for the game to be in a position where players are asking for access to your combat log for any reason, whether via first or third party utilities, but I dont see it being an issue if you join a guild knowing full well what kind of community feel that guild has.
Actually, that is technically not true.
If there is a guild combat tracker, it wouldn't be viewing other players logs - it would be creating a log for individual guild groups and raids. Rather than it being a case of others looking at your log, it would be a case of you contributing data to the guilds log.
This seems like a small difference, but when you consider what a log contains in most games (literally everything, including all conversations), sharing logs is something that I would never want to see happen.
I'm not talking about anything else, I'm talking about EQ and WoW. Trying to compare food makes no sense.
^this guy above will 100% eventually push for logs everywhere. What is he saying makes it even worse than I thought talking about a data base of logs in a guild.
From a quick calc, I`d say this is very true.