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
I think i have already mentioned the fact that IF Intrepid includes combat tracker in the game, i WILL use it. Because i like to be and stay competitive. (or at least keep up with a majority of top players)
But if Intrepid won't include a combat tracker, i am not worried as much because we all know that 3rd party trackers are not completely accurate.
My problem with having a tracker isn't in the advantage it provides, but with the toxicity it brings along with it (not with everyone tho, i need to be fair). Look at FFIXV as an example and the toxicity the tracker brought to the game (this problem is much deeper than anyone realise).
My solution to both of the cases if Intrepid includes the tracker or not:
-Guild or party leaders should have less control of who is accepted or kicked from a guild/party (since people claim to use the tracker for personal growth only).
-If a player is removed from a guild/party/raid/etc... leader should submit a reason why a certain player is being removed (example: -toxic behavior, afking, not following leaders directions, etc...). If a player needs to be removed from a guild, party, raid, etc... players within that group should vote on it and if 50% or 60% of players agree on removing that person, only then can a leader remove a player from a certain group.
-Any abuse of a combat tracker should be a bannable offense, if the tracker is not used for personal growth only. The abuser would get the account suspended twice for a certain period of time, third time it would be a permanent IP ban. Or if that seems a bit too harsh for Intrepid, they should at least deny the usage of the tracker to that account (at least).
... you get the idea, but i doubt anyone that uses a combat tracker will agree with this because we all know that most of them don't use the tracker only for personal growth.
I know that people will argue with this and say "ohh yea well how would you implement this system... it's not so easy to do that you know..."
To those people i would like to say this:
Shut up Snowflake. The game itself is much harder to make than a simple system that would keep combat tracker users in their place and prevent them from abusing it.
If Intrepid Studios decides to include a combat tracker in their game, it is also their responsibility to protect the playerbase from causing them harm.
Lets face it. You and i both know in what ways can a combat tracker harm a casual player.
So anyone that wants a combat tracker in this game, think of a way how could Intrepid Studios prevent players from abusing it, instead of just stating reasons why YOU need it included in a game.
I hope that with this comment, my involvment in this discussion is over because it's really not going anywhere.
Go create a new discussion where people can send ideas about how to keep toxic combat tracker users in check. And btw, i consider "i see in my combat tracker that this person is not performing well enough to be in our guild or party" as a toxic behavior.
Drinking refreshing snowflakes tears
English is not my native language, so i don't know how much of what i just said makes sense... If it doesn't make sense at all, i apologize. I tried my best xD
Drinking refreshing snowflakes tears
What if players would have the possibility to vote, just like electing the mayor, to allow or ban the usage of trackers?
Because citizenship is bound to all alts of that player, that would affect the player not the character.
Also how would it be if this vote would happen for the entire server instead of just a node?
Drinking refreshing snowflakes tears
Then there would be trackers/parsers that use streams/videos, and can't be stopped. It's just "What if they ban trackers?", but applied to servers instead of universally. External trackers will be written and used, instead of the game's provided tracker. You don't get the benefit of "tracker players will move to a different server" because no-one is going to start over from level 1 just because their server changed it's mind eventually. They'll just write the ACT (not Ashes Client) plugin, and start parsing their combat video (on their other PC, if need be).
Remember that the goal of the "Pro Tracker" group here is not to have trackers for themselves. It is to remove their own competitive advantage by letting everyone have them, so the game is more fair. The ones that just want their own don't bother to post here, because you can't stop them.
The other idea proposed by the "Pro Tracker" group here, as you know, is to have trackers be guild-based. This lets people who want to "not be tracked" easily group with like-minded individuals who are encouraged by the system to respect their preferences. This only works if there is an in-game tracker provided (which doesn't happen if a server, or even node, eventually votes to turn it off). This provides a protection against more powerful external trackers by making it not worth the effort to write one. As a result, the "I will join a guild without the tracker perk" means the tracker will respect your limitation.
This is possible only because of the convenience of having a tracker provided. If it is more convenient to join a guild with trackers enabled, than for one player in the world to write a tracker for Ashes, then that is what will happen.
If an in-game tracker is not provided, is later voted away by the node or server, or is made too difficult to access by players who are interested, then an external tracker will be created because it is no longer pointless to do so. This works for tracker players, but removes ability for others to avoid trackers by choosing to play in a guild without the tracker perk, because there is now an external tracker available will not respect that limitation.
It's work to write an external tracker, but it's not that much work, and once one exists it will be shared. If you make it more convenient to not bother, you can do thing like have tracker-free guilds. If you don't, you lose even that option.
And so to finally address your question directly:
If a guild has a choice between "leave a node we have each invested hundreds of hours in, because they now voted to ban trackers" and "our programmer spends 30 hours writing a tracker as this week's hobby project", they're not gonna choose "abandon our node".
If a guild has a choice between "leave a server we have each invested thousands of hours in, and maybe have world firsts on, because they now voted to ban trackers" and "our programmer spends 30 hours writing a tracker as this week's hobby project", they're not gonna choose "abandon our server".
In any case where you say "no trackers allowed", or even "we'll only give you one if you give up your home" (node/server/etc), you're going to have external trackers that you don't control. The only "lever" you get is the temptation of convenience. It's not that hard to write an external tracker.
We have gone over this you have said that already lmao. You are forgetting other discussions about content which is fine.
I get you are mad and are missing the "in cells" part. Like i said we have gone over this in action combat to tab about having other people help call things out and work together, rather than just the main raid leader calling things out. You deemed you can't do that, which is naïve at best.
I've played more mmorpgs then you, and honestly if you are looking at trackers data most the time i don't view that as playing a mmorpg.
You have so many bad takes you don't realize what you are saying. and there are hundreds of pages, not going to go find the post where you start arguing you cant do that and saying it is stupid lol.
You are right, a server wide setting, decided by players would be bad.
But if only 30 hours are enough to make a tracker then I think 3rd party trackers will happen anyway. 30 hours is a really short time.
Not everyone's addiction is so high that they cannot take a break from the game for 30h.
And if Deadfool is correct
then an in-game tracker would help increasing the accuracy of the 3rd party ones, which would have more features anyway than the game offers.
The common view is that trackers help players to get better gear. The ones without trackers will get it later or not get it at all, depending on gear uniqueness and raid difficulty.
That means there is no way or obvious way to balance the game for both tracker and non-tracker players and many non-trackers will switch to be trackers because that is what the game rewards with better items.
Is worse than the pinned thread about the PvP-ers vs gatherers where at least the winner side is supposed to be more skilled (unless he got the gear using trackers).
Anyway, until AoC comes out we will see other attempts too, like the Throne and Liberty mmo. Maybe they have new ideas about this. Or maybe they delayed the release because they follow this thread and we found no solution yet
Why would Throne and Liberty bother to make Trackers unavailable though?
For a game to do this, they would have to think it matters for some reason. Since that's not actually an obvious conclusion to everyone (particularly not Korean MMO creators), they might just... not care at all about parser/tracker options.
Maybe they might be like the kind of managers I hate the most.
I wonder if Steven will kick that developer out from his guild, who made those birds not be scared of him and not fly away.
I was watching the League of Legends stream https://lolesports.com/vod/108998961199240256/1/vnEYQS4k1nM
That's how players should earn their unique legendary gear
In special rooms with computers prepared in advance and watched by the entire world. (I wonder if they test them for how much coffee they have in their blood.)
These rooms would also solve the problem when owning intelligent androids sometime in 100 years will be a common thing... until genetically modified players will be created.
But maybe Throne and Liberty will not want to have a competitive raid system where the most skilled will get good items, but the ones who can afford buying something from an in-game shop too for real money. Which is also a competition but with real life skills.
We'll see on that end.
The Combat in TL is a different skilltype requirement, though, so they probably won't care as much about these.
I parsed their latest data for Frames, not damage (though the damage numbers do appear in a cleanly parse-able way).
I really don't think TL is going to care who parses what, given their game design.
Your suggestions for ways to make it so a person can tell what is going on just by looking around all amount to "let's make the game shit".
If you were put in charge of Nascar or something, and you were given a problem to solve, your solution would be "lers just make the cars all drive slower". That is the equivalent of what you have suggested here.
You may accept that as a solution, I do not.
As to "hacking the server", not quite. The point I was making there was that removing all numerical feedback from players would simply see players leave - but still wouldn't stop people getting information if they really wanted it. I guess that went well over your head.
This is why some guilds run a server where all guild members have their log sent to, and it merges all logs in to one in order to run through a tracker.
You cited toxicity in FFXIV around trackers, but that toxicity was caused by the developer. People thought they were against the rules, and so thought people using them were cheating. While they were technically against the wishes of the developers, they never had any rules (that were able to be acted upon) against their use.
Looking over this thread, we already have a whole lot of that. We don't even have the rules to read yet, and already people are claiming that because Steven has said he won't support trackers, those of us stating we will use them are breaking those same rules we don't even have.
In this situation, there absolutely is toxicity around trackers, but that toxicity is coming directly from those not using them and mislabeling those using them as cheaters.
This segues in nicely to my thoughts about your rules on trackers. They are all one sided. Every rule there is about limiting what people using trackers can do, and how they are sometimes - in some games - toxic towards others. There is nothing at all there going the other way.
With your rules, if I join a group of players that I know want to be efficient, and I purposely slow them down, your rules prevent them from doing anything at all about it. They can't boot me from the group, because that is not using the tracker for "personal growth".
Further, if I start up a group and decide I want to boot someone because they are annoying me, I shouldn't need to justify that to anyone. Nor should I need the approval of the rest of the group (however, they are free to make their own decisions on if they leave or stay). Your rules make it so that I need to justify this decision to *someone*, and put my account at risk if the answer given was not acceptable.
I think your whole concept of rules are being based on the notion of automatic group formation (LFG/LFR type situations). They kind of make some sense in that regard (though only if content lockouts are involved), but make absolutely no sense in terms of a player looking for people to join a group to run a piece of content.
To me, if any action taken with data from a tracker would be within the rules if no tracker were involved, I see no reason at all why the presence of a tracker would suddenly make it against the rules. The rules around toxicity should involve the act of being toxic, not the method for getting there.
That said, Ashes is going to be a toxic game. People should be more concerned with being kicked from a group in a dungeon so that the people they grouped with can kill them and take some of the stuff they gained as drops, rather than being concerned that they are being booted because of poor performance.
You can't break a raid up in to "cells" in most content, because people need to be moving all over the place.
In top end content, if there is someone calling out every ability that an encounter uses, then no one would be able to hear a damn thing over the sound of everyone yelling shit out. What you do is you work out what abilities the boss has that NEED to be called out, and you task someone with calling those abilities out - someone that doesn't have other tasks they need to perform that could see them rendered unable to call out said ability.
Since each guild is different in terms of what abilities they want called out (in games that are not WoW, at least), you need to work out what each ability is actually doing before you work out which ones you want called out.
The way to work that out is to see what each ability does, and how often it does it, and the easiest way to do that is to use a combat tracker.
You seem to think combat trackers do more than what they actually do. You seem to think they are performing all of the tasks above, rather than just the initial task of assisting the raid in working out what each ability does. It is comments like these that make me think you have never played an MMORPG at all - and your constant statements of "I've played more MMO's than you" simply makes me think you are a school kid, telling us all how your dad could beat my dad. Neither do I.
I never look at data while I am playing the game. I've said that AT LEAST a dozen times in discussion with you. I mean, there are tools to make finding it easier. All you need to do is remember a single word that either you or I said in regards to that discussion and search the thread for it.
"Getting it if they really wanted it" -- From the servers. Yes. . . right. . . with tools such as one would use when hacking I bet.
Depends on the dev team and analyst team whether you'll reverse engineer it though.
Point is it should be grounded enough without numbers that people can figure out how it works and be effective.
And without server side info, dynamic content and high variability to mobs there is no "reverse engineered tracker" LMAO you just have to look at what's happening and figure it out. Sure you can get an add-on but it would be useless compared to what the game already provides in the way of information.
Do you understand that yet?
Does repeating it make it true yet?
Just making sure.
Just making sure you understand.
If you remove all numerical combat feedback from players, the only players that would be left playing the game are those that are completely un-invested in said game. Anyone invested in the game, or even just wanting to improve at the games they play - would simply go elsewhere.
Sure, YOU may play, but you've spent a few weeks telling us all how you don't even like games and don't even play them. You are exactly the kind of un-invested player that may stick around.
We can even go one full step back from this and point out that all of this is simply nothing more than you having a fantasy about the game. We know the game will have a combat log - yet you keep repeating this fantasy of yours where it doesn't.
Next I will suggest some "numerical transparency" that amounts to some UI or visual update of damage done, healing, whatever.
The next steps after this from you are, "any amount of numerical transparency, such as UI that updates from reaching certain thresholds of damage, will make the game easy to reverse engineer"
Then after all the various ways I suggest the game can be difficult to reverse engineer while still providing information, you say, "dead game"
Yet this process could continue on and on until it is both difficult to reverse engineer and transparent enough to players to be understandable and enjoyable.
All the while adding in new mechanics, grounding feedback, immersion, so on and so forth.
Even resulting in a game that counters bots and braindeadness, while also rewarding deep and grounded intuition, which would make insights and excellence more impressive. . .
Fin
This is still just your fantasy where the game doesn't have a combat log.
I'm sure that you will - one day - join the rest of us in reality.
The problem is... if you give players information, then trackers also have that same information. The days when there were things that are easy for humans to read and properly hard for computers to read are long past. And this doesn't apply only to text.
You have you can look through your old post it is there.
Your most goes by to your typical mind set make makes sense on wanting to control people and situations, right in line with listen to me or get booted out of the guild or dungeon kind of toxic mentality.
When did I say a tracker tells you what is going on in the middle of combat, i haven't. That would be the next step where you have combat assistance though.
When did i say ever member is speaking over each other, pretty bad assumption there.
Funny you should talk about school kids and this is your got to insult about mmo expereince, this is the pattern of things you constantly say so you can agree with me how childish and toxic you act. We have already been here before but maybe you wilkl start to realize ignoring my mmo experience is stupid for you to just blatantly say actual nonsense. -
I could most likely find more quotes of your go to talking about mmo experience as you say it is chidlish by your own words
ANYWAY....
for action camera players you can communicate with each other and share information it isn't a problem.
Only things you know you've been handed by others.
There's no point speculating nonsense based in ignorant incompetence.
It's a project by a dude. In reality. In reality -> people aren't Laws of the Universe outside of anyone's reach.
Do you think the prospect is good, or bad? Is the goal itself bad to you?
Fin.
You may have assumed it, but that is a result of your pre-conceived opinion on trackers and people that use them, an opinion that is not formed on any actual knowledge.
That is why you can't find it - and the fact you can't find it is why you can't quote it.
This is incorrect.
A combat assistant would perform an action in game for you.
If you are suggesting that people call out abilities without actually having a good idea of what abilities they need to call out, you are saying exactly this, just without knowing you are saying it.
There are so many abilities going off so often, that it would absolutely be a case of players talking over each other.
This is why the only abilities a raid calls are the abilities that the raid has decided they need to coordinate in order to overcome. Again, this is different per raid, and depends on things like class, gear, build and specific player skill of those present. Raids decide which abilities need to be called based on how they decide to tackle each ability. They make that call based on hard data about each ability a boss has.
Bring this back to your assertion that I would use a combat tracker in place of communication. Explain to me how that holds any truth at all to you when I am using a combat tracker to make sure clear communication is able to happen.
Steven has said the game will have combat logs.
Until he says otherwise, we work on the assumption the game will have combat logs.
Any time you say "how about we ignore this aspect of the game that Intrepid have talked about" you may as well be talking about another game.
When you start stringing many such things together (as you have done), you are talking about a fantasy game.
Talking about the genre as a whole and a small part of it is plenty appropriate in its scope and subject.
All I've strung together is a somewhat cohesive design choice that may feature in an MMORPG, that would fit in Ashes of Creation while shitting on many problems the genre, game, and players would otherwise face.
Of course, it would also be more immersive and open up gameplay opportunities.
Do you think it's good as part of the genre or not.
Do you think it's good as part of the game's direction or not.
You'd still have to define exactly how the design gives players any information at all. UI gotta start somewhere.
Basically you're talking about a theoretical game where a player can see something that my UICore code can't. Which doesn't exist.
You have a choice, talk about the MMO genre as a whole in a thread about the MMO genre as a whole, or talk about Ashes specifically in a thread about Ashes specifically.
I may answer your question if it is in the correct place - I may not. I absolutely will not answer it if it is in the wrong place.
Why are you replying the same way. . .
Do you think this is good, or not?
Given it's a question about how numbers and number transparency is handled it's in the right place.
Now answer the question.
I can't debate the merits of impossible things. Probably one of my great weaknesses, this whole 'being tethered to reality'...
This is a thread about combat trackers in Ashes as we understand the game to be.