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.
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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
But - a combat tracker doesn't allow you to avoid the work of improving.
You want old style MMO, want Tab, say my suggestions are "hardcore" and "not ashes of creation" yet talk about skill and grandmasters
LMAO
OK, so a combat tracker makes things easier. Let's go with this.
What that means is that developers can then make things harder, as a form of compensation for trackers making things easier.
As such, a game is able to have harder, more complex content with trackers than without. Harder, more complex = better.
Yeah, someone wanting an old style MMO probably shouldn't bother with a game that literally had the promotional tagline "Make MMO's Great Again". Clearly this is a concept that says old games were shit and we want nothing to do with them.
LMAO indeed.
There are ways around this if they really wanted to and do it in a way that the tracker wouldn't be able to get good information. While also still showing the number clearly when you damage a mob.
But this is getting into the much smaller subset of people doing it rather than the norm.
I was going to comment on this about old mmorpg combat, but ill just link this.
So far, we are talking about an add on for ACT.
Since you would need to download a game specific plugin for ACT anyway, making that an add on instead isn't much of a stretch.
We already understand that you are absolutely willing to insult Steven's team, Steven's Vision, and technically Steven himself.
We are having this conversation using the 'limitations' of avoiding those things though.
Steven says "I don't want Trackers, but I also want an MMO with a Combat Log and Tab Target as a somewhat viable playstyle."
And all we are doing is saying 'Uh... Steven, that doesn't work, how about trying this instead...'
You going "Steven your vision sucks there's no real skill in it lol change it and make sure there's no Trackers" is fine, but the point is we're not even trying to have the same conversation at that point.
At the same time I hear from your side with trackers that you will use trackers no matter what and don't care what devs say or want.
So are you and Sapiverenus that far apart really?
It's kind of like saying that building things in an MMO is shit, because of this game.
So how do you profit from this? Where does cash enter the picture?
You're making $$$ somehow
It's me that said that, not Azherae.
More to the point, what I said was that regardless of what the developers want, combat trackers will not be against the rules.
What they want doesn't matter. What matters is what rules they are able to make. If I follow all applicable rules, I fail to see why I would then also need to follow requests.
All old mmorpgs combat is out of date, that one is just one i can meme on. Though some of the older mmorpgs have improved a bit by adding some action combat like GW2
This is not true, I will go right ahead and explain why.
I can write a script that, at the 'hardware' level, takes a 'screenshot' of a part of my screen that I specify every time a specific thing happens. That can be 'every X frames', 'every time I press ANY button or move my mouse', etc.
This can save the 'screenshot', but it doesn't have to, it just stores the image information in the program I'm running (which, again, I can write myself, it's easy, and while you could probably detect it, you could not 'prove what it is doing is related to Ashes' in any way).
This image information then gets fed into the Character Recognition code/software in a multitude of extremely easy ways OR...
I write even simpler code to do the 'Character Recognition' (this is my usual preference because it's easier and takes less processing).
Logs are now read from the game real time as it is played. Now, the obvious concept from there would be 'well that would create a program that Intrepid could detect because of some other stuff'. No, you'd just have it write the results to the text file.
See the problem? I ran a script that 'reads a small part of my screen for an image, and puts the text from that into a text file' or WORSE, NOT a text file (because then you can't check for any evidence of the text while Ashes is running even if you had super-surveillance).
A person doing this is not going to be the sort of person who calls this program 'AoCScreen2Log_ver2.sh'.
Then there are those that use and/or create trackers because they make $$$ somehow from the market
Trackers are most useful for games that don't require the work of improving.
As such you prefer games that don't require skill and hope Ashes of Creation is easy to get good at.
Player skill can never be identical.
I agree. MMOs were never good. Nostalgia wears off fast when you're dropping millions though.
Also, the tracker I would suggest people to use (should anyone ask me for a recommendation) is free.
The reason you can't find where the 'money' is, is because there isn't any.
Who is 'we'? The Summit?
What is the 'instead' you have suggested? No logs?
Make sure there's hostile patterns built into stuff to screw visual recognition software.
You know you seems dumb with your "lmao" and attack ?
i never said i wanted old mmorpg... I could play BC classic (my favourite period of play on wow was BC) but... nope.
But some feelings i had back then... I already expressed on various thread what i meant about it. and... oh miracle, most if not all thing i want to remove in modern MMORPG won't be a thing in ashes, like duty finder for example (one amongst other).
MMORPG for me began in 1997 with ultima online, EQ, DAOC were 2 strong basis that defined the genre. And then, it continued to evolve as any genre. it evolve thru decisions of design...
Modern MMORPG became more solo game with some coop system because this is what gather more customers (so more money). And lot of people love this kind of design.
But me i prefer the "old design" where all those thing are not there... this is why i said speaking about "old good time" ... note i used the quote when i said it. for a simple reason : the MMORPG from "old good time" had lots of flaws... and i would be far from complaining to not have the modern flaw... but also remove the old one.
And i think i can speak about highend content after the time spend on them on other MMORPG... and not only mmorpg.
Your idea is not the hardcore of "hardcore player" but the "hardcore playstyle" ... as hardcore in POE which is just a "definitiv death mode" ... but still totally enjoyable for casual gamer. Such kind of game design is far from what was promised for AoC... and i personally doubt it could fit MMORPG (the "game over server" idea for example is, imo, contrary to MMORPG that are for me games which have no ending at all)
Top end players in any game, (so the "grand master") are good not only because they train hours and hours each day... they also watch lot of data (how they watch it may vary depending game genre)
For MMORPG, the datas are... pure data, huge list of numbers. and only way to watch it is... spreadsheet. Combat tracker function is ... to display the spreadsheet without spending tons of hours just to create it.
Combat trackers have many uses. Among those uses is to track the progress of a players skill improving over time.
I believe that 'no logs' would work (to stop most people).
The instead was 'make it so that the people who want trackers only group with each other for anything serious while making it obvious to everyone else so that they can avoid those people'.
The downside of no logs is that it means those of us that do still run trackers would have a far greater advantage over those that do not, if those that do not literally have no access at all to logs.
It is my opinion that this would be the worst single path the game could take in this regard.
When you are against PvE Pressure, reduced level power scaling, reduced XP to Max, more weighty resource management, XP on Use it seems, extra PvP, deeper action combat. . . against everything that increases skill ceiling. . .
Yeah what is anyone suppose to believe. Your bullshit or your opinion?
If they can detect things they very well could take action even if the name of text file is not obvious but they can pick something up.
I'm not doubting what you can do, there are people that made hundreds of thousands of bots on lost ark and found ways around to exploit for awhile and still now I'm sure.
But you are going through so many loops at this point not just in reading the information but having to decipher the information as well so it makes sense to put it on a tracker. (this is where the combat log does its math different than the number on the screen). Then trying to decipher everyone stuff base don different key bindings and the issues you will run into it will make it such a hassle most people won't be doing that at all.
On top of having skill based gameplay where people have less care for trackers and simply use combat log to min max some of their damage.
There will be less need or desire for trackers.
Easy data acquisition informs the development of scripts, programs, bots.
Yes tracking has many uses.
And you get better at fighting games by playing them rather than tracking them because you have a damn brain and mind that can absorb and recall information without a tracker.
I have spoken about 'no logs' and several other ways to make the game that would be hostile to scripts, bots, and tools such as trackers, and lean into engaging design.
If 'no logs' and 'put the shame label on others' is your backbone: it's jelly.
Crush the exploits. Crush the exploiters.
I agree with what you are saying, but the only way to make ANY display that my code can't read is to make it so that a HUMAN can't read it.
You think of this as going through loops. I'm telling you that this code is not only easy, it doesn't even require understanding of it to run.
As for deciphering the information, I'll give you an example.
"Azherae used Castigation. The Desert Scorpion took 189 points of damage."
^(?P<player>.+?) used (?P<ability>.+?)\. (?P<enemy>.+?) takes (?P<damage>[0-9,]+) points of damage\.$
This is the regex required to parse that line.
You could give me a text file with 1 million lines. I will type ONE line into a command prompt containing the above and it will give me output of all abilities used by all players in the log on all enemies including other players and damage done, in a file, in less than ten seconds on my current computer.
It is EASIER to parse logs now than it is to install a parser.
If you are suggesting 'the Combat Log should just lie to players then', I accept your point. There isn't much the average player can do if the developer tries to avoid parsers by just straight up misrepresenting the information in the game's UI.
But as the spartans didn't quite ever actually say...
"If they can detect things they very well could take action even if the name of text file is not obvious but they can pick something up."
"If."