Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
I did and I never used a tracker, that game wasn’t stat complex. There wasn’t a whole lot of options in gear, in that regard it was straight forward and bland. There was 1 max PvE set and one max PvP set when I played.
Most of that game was timing and reaction, there wasn’t variety. People just looked for windows of their “womb combos” and that was it.
But the combat part in that game was incredibly tactical and strategic, reactive.
You are getting to hung up on 10% and i feel you are making the assumption when you say "tuning" they will make it more difficult dmg / stats wise. There are other ways to up difficulty of content not revolving around a tracker using skill based methods.
Tops guilds also aren't the top 10% of population that is a faction of a faction them using trackers wouldn't effect anything. Further more not being able to view your teammates dmg means such trackers aren't going to be useful taking away from your point on these top guilds using trackers when they can't get the full picture. The more hoops they add of difficulty the les people will be using them or have a care for them at the end of the day.
Your reality is really based on assumptions, it is more fantasy until the game is out and we see how the game paly is, amount of people and what happens exactly.
So, just to be clear, you would prefer that the game did not make it possible to see your teammates' damage numbers at all (or that they could turn it off so that you couldn't see them while in their group)?
What is what id expect if they said there will not be damage meters else if you can see all information about your team and the people around you it is going to be apparent meter or not.
I hope this doesn't seem like I'm trying to insult you, I promise not, but I really couldn't parse this line at all.
I don't want to make assumptions, but I'll just derail in a specific way.
Combat Trackers are for checking statistical level interactions without manually putting every datapoint into a spreadsheet. This is why I mentioned Accuracy and Evasion earlier. Those are the things I am referring to. ACC and EVA in a game with 10+ minute TTK on a boss becomes statistics, not 'observation', in terms of build changes and adaptations.
You can ignore the paragraph above if it seems like I'm trying to make a point that isn't relevant to your line.
I think this is roughly correct?
And I think he means that we won't see out mates' numbers, because Intrepid don't want meters. And even if we did see all those numbers, meters wouldn't be required because... well, we see all the numbers.
And if I'm right in that assumption, I think your reply applies.
The first part of that pretty much since they don't want things being shared you will see your own stats int heir combat tracker not allies.
If you can see allies then its hard to stop that element since people will have all the data they need to create whatever they want or can still view allies dmg / skills and be toxic. Which means they aren't fully trying to prevent the use of all those tools and the elements them bring.
I'm simply saying if they are preventing the use of such tools being effective hiding all stats / skill use on allies should be the reality. Meaning the tool is only effective for yourself, but not a grand picture of all details. Without more hoops someone has to jump through increasing the barrier to entry to attempt it.
They are the same thing, just a different term. Combat trackers are the term that people know their full utility call them, DPS meters are what those that do mot understand them call them.
There is no DPS meter for any game that isn't able to be a full combat tracker (that I have seen), and no combat tracker that isn't a DPS meter.
You still seem to not be getting it.
It seems perhaps you are unaware that developers actually never know what kind of power level top end players are going to have. They make the game, but players very quickly come to understand it better than the developers do. We take advantage of things developers never considered, combine effects and classes in ways developers didn't foresee.
Literally the only way developers have of seeing how hard a new piece of content will be is to put it on live and see how hard players in top end guilds find it.
Based on the above, would you please explain to me, good sir, how Intrepid are going to fine tune content to be a serious challenge to players, but without taking combat trackers in to account, when they have no means of telling who is and who is not using combat trackers?
It is worth pointing out that the tracker I have right now connects to a server, so I can get everyone in my guild/raid to join the same server. Rather than parse each individual player locally, all clients connected to the server are collated in to a single log file which is then simply run through ACT.
Yeah, got it.
My experience with games like that is general toxicity, but it's not like the Trackers actually stop that, since the sort of person who is toxic because they don't have objective data isn't usually less toxic once they get it from a third party.
Honestly if I thought for a minute that a better game would result from 'not showing damage' I'd be all for it.
Now I need to review something from my Alpha-1 footage...
So would I.
Fact is, it doesnt work that way.
The least toxic game I've played happens to have the most combat tracker use, and the most toxic game I've ever played had the least combat tracker use.
There is literally no over all correlation between tracker use and toxicity levels in a game.
Sure, someone may point to data from a tracker and be toxic using that data, but there are other factors causing that toxicity from happening in the first place.
In a game where you want to be in good standing within your community, toxicity drops to near zero - that is the actual key.
Yeah, I don't doubt that it would be another tool, but it is a tool in an already toxic persons hands.
The fix for the problem isnt removing tools from toxic people - as the only tool a toxic person actually needs is a communication channel. The fix is to make it so toxic people cant succeed in the game.
Going to have to break with you here dude, that's like saying weapons kill people. They need energy already produced by their wielder to be effective.
And combat trackers can be utilized in a way to further grief people, but the chances are the person causing undo grief to others is already a piece of shit.
Reality, not only are people going to farm up their weapons to kill things, they're going to get the data for the most effective and efficient way to do it.
I still dislike meters because they speed up the difficulty curve of the game and soon enough either lead to the majority of content being completely unclearable by your normal player or the top skill players leaving the game because devs can't keep up with their demand, at which point the initial difficulty spike that was supposed to keep those top skill players was kinda pointless and a waste of dev time.
But we've already discussed this in this thread before, so I don't think that repeating that discussion would bring us to any new place. Which is why I avoided bringing this up in that initial comment.
Devs will always decide how difficult their game is, which I'm hoping for advanced AI.
So a theoretical guild (or a dozen of them) with people like those two can easily clear anything that Intrepid would find difficult. And those guilds would do so with the help of trackers (even if Intrepid say that they're banned). And Intrepid would now have a hugeass dilemma in front of them: do they keep making even harder content to keep those top players in the game or do they say "ya see, there's your <10% who managed to beat it! We succeeded in our goal".
If they go the first route, they're now concentrating a ton of their dev time on coming up with unique and super hard content that only those top guilds will be able to clear. And this will be repeated for each new content release. And Intrepid will either need to release new abilities or gear to help everyone else beat the last top difficulty content or they can say "fuck you" to 90% of the playerbase and keep the power creep at a slow pace. There's a third way of "let's make a ton of easier content too, so that 90% can play as well", but at some point you'll hit the devtime limit wall and will need to choose a path.
If they go the second route, they keep the difficulty at what they consider a perfect lvl, but lose the top 10% of players in the process (cause they got bored). And now there's a question of "will the other players follow them", because majority of normal people follow trends. And if there's a new trend from the trendy people (the strong dudes at the top and the content creators that work with them) of "we're leaving cause this shit is boring now" - there's quite a high chance that the majority will start doubting whether the game is really fun, which usually destabilizes the community and snowballs to "death of the game" sooner or later.
So overall we have a choice of "power creep the fuck out of your game if you don't want to lose players" and "disregard the top players that you attracted with a silly promise, which can potentially lead to failure". Imo both are kinda bad, so what would be the solutions?
The easiest solution would be to backtrack the difficulty promise as soon as possible. You'll lose some nerds now, but you won't risk losing a ton of people on release. And we all know how popular WoW was back in the day, due to it being waaaay easier than the competition, so this might be a winning strat. The other solution is "ban meters" and pretend that top players won't just still use them (the ff14 way). But, as Noaani says, Intrepid would still need to balance their bosses around the people who'll most likely use meters, so the ban wouldn't matter either way, which just brings us back to sped up power creep.
Now my personal solution to this is to tell those top players "just don't use meters 4Head", but I understand that this would the same as them telling me to shut the fuck up about corruption balancing, so it all would be a pointless discussion either way.
So the only true solution imo is Intrepid removing the promised difficulty from the game, but I somehow doubt that Steven would do that. As I see it rn, we'll either get a game that lied to top pvers and lose those pvers in the process or we'll hit a pretty fast power creep within the first 1-2 years of the game. I hope I'm just being too pessimistic here, but I really don't see another result coming from this.
Their claim was that they wanted content that a single digit percent of the population were able to defeat. I have no doubt that they will make content that a single digit percent of the population WILL defeat, but not content that a single digit percent of the population would be able to defeat.
What will happen (feel free to save this to quote in a few years) is that they will make content that 500+ people will fight over, and since the "kill" only goes to the raid that is awarded loot rights, that means only 40 people will "get the kill".
Thus, not only is it content that less than 10% of the population killed, it is content that less than 10% of those present for the attempt got credit for killing.
All of a sudden, Intrepid can claim success, and players like me will leave just as we did with Archeage, and I heard recently also happened in early BDO).
I mean, it is abundantly clear that Intrepid (or, to be fair, specifically Steven) do not want actual objectively good players in the game - so maybe that's the goal.
I also doubt their ability to keep adding hundreds if not thousands of top quality bosses into the game too, so even if they did go for the "proper" difficulty, I don't think they'd be able to keep up with people coming from EQ2 or FF11 (cause Azhe said it was somewhat similar to EQ in this respect).
There is something of a misnomer here.
A game like EQ2 has thousands of boss mobs, for sure. However, it only has a handful that are "top quality".
That is all you need.
While some people think that players like me are asking for the world from game developers, we are really only expecting 2 or 3 encounters a year targeted at us.
Sure, a raiding cycle will have about 60 - 70 boss mobs. However, assuming the developers have done an adequate job in fostering a raid community, 95% of that content will be for 50%+ of the player base. It is only a few bosses that could be considered just for top end players - and even then the next tier of players below will probably still run that content at the start of the next combat cycle.
A specific boss in EQ2 was only actually killed by 2 guilds game wide before the release of the next expansion. Within a month of that new expansion though, over 100 guilds had killed it.
So, it really is something of a misunderstanding that people have when they talk about top end content, and a game developers ability to keep top end raiders happy.
Ashes was never for the instanced raider or the PVP arena player, people should not hold out hope for it. The best we can get is dynamic AI that creates challenging fights in the open world which you compound on top of PvP to create an intense PvX experience, which is where some of the difficulty will lie.
*If* they can create a good and meaningful AI, then it'll be just as much tactics as it will be short term strategy in those scenarios, so DPS will matter, but it'll be just as much as the mechanical execution as it will be the preparation.
Keep in mind, Intrepid can also tie boss spawns and drops to the other systems that take place, so you may have to war and change the map in terms of nodes and nodes levels to even get to certain bosses.
Tack on long term and short-term strategy from logistical operations and apparatus' and that's going to be what Ashes is in a nutshell.
You have to *get* to the end game, I don't think it'll be as easy as people think.
And with meter use, those new top lvl bosses would have to be even harder, cause more people would have better gear and more people would've progressed in their gameplay skill. So you have ever-growing difficulty and ever-growing power creep on a pretty big scale.
Maybe you can avoid direct relation between difficulty and gear/char stats, but unless I misunderstood you, that's kinda how it was in EQ2, right? New bosses would give new gear that would let people farm new bosses. But even if you do avoid stat-dependence, how long would the design uniqueness last in the race against the meter-supported groups. There's only so much stuff you can add to a boss that would keep it super difficult w/o making it impossible.
Rng mechanics could probably do that, but at that point how effective would a meter even be, if the boss has enough rng on it to create completely new encounters each and every time.
And, as I'm sure Noaani would tell you, that pvx experience would be considered a trash lvl difficulty for any pve-centric player. And only pve-centric players care about meters to a ridiculous degree. Sure, some pvpers might care about it to check for builds and stuff, but 1v1 pvp will be RPS and any group pvp could vary from 8v8 to 8vX, at which point your meter wouldn't really matter, so the impact gets diluted a bit too much imo.
But the main point would still be "the difficulty is too low, so top pvers are gone, which might pull other players with them". And even before that, if pvx is what's bringing the difficulty - Intrepid would've kiiiinda lied? Yes, effectively it'd be what Noaani described, but I'd assume that most pvers would just call Steven on his bullshit at that point and call him a liar.
Yeah, but I already said that the game isn't for the end game raider, especially if they don't enjoy PvP.
This game is for those who truly enjoy PvX and logistics. Not even the arena or battlegrounds player will play this game.
Maybe the answer is to restrict and filter heavy amounts of statistical data and make the guessing that much harder. Who knows, we have to see how challenging the AI is.
In MY experience this is a misunderstanding of what Trackers are for.
Trackers in FFXI do two things.
1. Help you confirm that your build/gearset is achieving the goal you built it for.
2. Make sure everyone is on the same page without having to save and scroll through every combat log (game provided) for long battles.
While an FFXI boss is not exactly 'a new encounter every time', because just as Steven says, you need to be able to plan your builds, and your team composition, beyond that you can get some wild streaks. I believe I've mentioned it before but some days Jormungand acts like a Mage, constantly using AoE and blasting out paralysis, and some days it acts like a brawler Warrior, attacking an insane amount, building lots of TP, and shredding the Alliance with TP attacks such as Spike Flail and the hate reset Horrid Roar.
People literally argued about the best way to defeat it because group A had a long streak of 'Mage Jormy' and groups B and C mostly met 'Warrior Jormy'.
So the Tracker in that case would be telling you things like 'If I build to counter the Dragon by adding more Ice Resistance, and I think that I will still do enough DPS because I don't think it is THAT evasive, am I correct?'
And similarly 'If I build for more DPS and accuracy to make sure that I keep hitting it, will I still fail because the rate of the Paralysis Proc is too high for me to use all that Accuracy and Damage?'
We're talking about a fight that takes 30 minutes, in which some characters perform 900+ melee attacks. A lot of the more 'casual' Tracker users that I'm aware of, this is what it is for.
You can't test a change in the accuracy of your build 'on Jormungand' by fighting a dummy/scarecrow. You can't work out 'how often out of my 900 attacks was I paralyzed' without spending more time number crunching than you do playing the game unless you have a certain specific weird 'skill'.
So I guess people could theoretically just 'guess and hope', particularly because they could be attacked mid combat anyway. But if builds are meaningful, and the game has Acc and Eva aspects that matter in this way, the amount of frustration from 'not parsing' will often change the behaviour of many players.
RNG build stats -> Tracker usage. There's a clear benefit, almost always.
A 6 month DLC cycle, sure, but a cycle like this would probably need 4 DLC's to equal a full expansion (EQ2 expansions were basically full game sized - proper expansions rather than the DLC that is common these days)
If a game had a 6 month DLC cycle, a new top end boss would be expected every 2 DLC's - as opposed to expecting two every DLC.
If the game has actual good content (as in, best in the genre), they could get away with one top end content every three DLC's.
The key then (realistically with both) is that the raid content other than that top end encounter needs to still be interesting.
First, I've yet to come across someone in a top end raiding guild that didn't also enjoy PvP. I'm sure they exist, I've just never met such a person.
Most top end players in general just enjoy a challenge. Top end PvE players know (as I have said many times) that you can't have PvE challenge in the presence of PvP. That doesn't mean we don't like PvP, it doesn't mean we don't like PvX - it just means that we love the challenge that can literally only ever be had by developers creating intestinally difficult content for players to consume in the absence of other factors.
Second, there is no inherent reason this game can't be for gamers that enjoy good PvE, the game has all the pieces in place other than the desire. That desire is more important than any one of the individual pieces.
Third, the idea of restricting data won't do anything to people that want a tracker. There are always ways of obtaining that data, though I won't go in to those methods here.
So say one top boss a year. How long would that have to be unsolvable to satisfy top pvers? 2 months? 6? Obviously in the context of them using trackers. And whatever the answer is, how long would other bosses have to take to get solved for pvers not to get bored? And how many of those would you need to have in weekly rotation to consider the game's content fulfilling? 7 a week or more?
If Intrepid utilizes UE5's dev tools to the max, I'd assume they could pump out enough new land masses to fit a ton of dungeons in it, so that they'd have enough instanced dungeons to provide truly hardcore pve content within them. Say they manage to create bosses that take ~3 weeks of daily attempts to solve. And say they add 8 such bosses each dlc, with a multi-month boss every 2 dlcs. Would that be enough content? That is if the quality itself is satisfactory.