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
Imagine the DLC has a raid zone with 15 bosses, the last one being the top end boss we are talking about. We'll also assume this raid zone has a lockout timer of a week (basically, you can attempt this zone one time per week - you can wipe many times in that attempt, but once the attempt is over, that is it until the following week).
A top end guild in this scenario would expect to kill 3 or 4 of those bosses on the first night, and collect data on the next boss. From there, the remaining 10 or so bosses should be going down one every two weeks or so, with a loop of collecting data, analyzing that data during the week to form a plan, and then executing that plan the following week. Sometimes you will get that spot on and the kill will come the following week, but more often than not that first week will see you come across some kind of change to the encounter (adds at 50% or some such), and require a new plan to be formulated during that following week, and perhaps the week after.
This means it could well be expected to be 20 weeks or so before even arriving at that actual difficult boss. Keep in mind that all of that content can be assumed to be content for the 50% - it isn't made for top end raiders specifically.
From there though, it may well be a further 10 - 12 weeks before you get a kill on that final boss - meaning it isn't unreasonable to assume it could take 32 weeks from content release until first kill of the boss. The thing is, an encounter isn't suddenly rendered boring content by guilds that have killed it, and in fact I have had encounters that have taken well over a month of effort before getting a second kill (no changes to the mob, it was just truly hard).
Now, to be sure, I would expect there to be other raid content in the game that is being run on other nights of the week, and in that 32 or so week period I would expect to see other raid content released - just not necessarily with a top end encounter, which is what we are talking about here.
So basically, developers should (imo) be releasing interesting and varied raid content for the masses every 3 - 6 months, but once a year that content release should be capped off with a truly top end encounter - and this will keep most top end raiders content.
Wait, no, that's not what I meant.
You CAN do that. People will complain. I would assume a lot of them. It's not that FFXI doesn't have these, it's that they are impossible to properly prepare for.
They make really nice mid-tier content for exactly this reason. The sort of person who doesn't want to prepare much, who just wants to have an average experience, who isn't looking for the type of challenge where they gather together a bunch of top players (or alternately, try to do it with fewer because it's a good way to get a benefit out of shorter play sessions).
That leads to an easy situation where the top end hardest thing is 'scripted' and the mid-tier single-group fights are perhaps Gudanna-type.
I don't think anyone cares if a mid-tier single group content can 'randomly be easy'. People will probably care if 'the first kill of X happens because it literally doesn't spawn with certain abilities that were the only things stopping the third-strongest guild on the server'.
But aside from all that...
Once again, the 'tell you that your rotation is good' is often the ONLY thing the Tracker is FOR in FF (except that there are no rotations). The randomness is then the reason you need it. I don't need a Tracker in FF but my friends do, and I don't need a Tracker in almost any other game because anything other than 'bugged ability not working as intended' I can figure out what to do mid-battle, and my friends don't need it because in that situation I'm 'command'.
If we fought a 'Gudanna' and 'just couldn't seem to beat it when we normally do' for no clear reason, the Tracker would be there to tell us 'It spawned with a large Evasion Buff to go with its random White Magic', or I'd just notice, but it's quite possible my friends would be upset because they wouldn't notice.
If everyone can see them - that makes the player's experience of the Majority really really bad, since they don't really care that much and the Hardcore gamers will always try to blame people over numbers instead of actually focusing what it's in their control.
That being said DPS meters will have negative impact overall shifting the focus from immersion and decision making and just in general having fun with the boys - to one dimensional Numbers game and incentivize the blame game.
Before the "Party/Raid leaders" say a word that they need "DPS meter to know who does more damage and who doesn't" I really want to tell you if You are good Leader you don't need numbers, because being a Leader in 98% of the cases is based on Psychology, Mental Strength and Concentration.
It has nothing to do with Mathematics.
Also DPS meter isn't at all always accurate since players aren't straight forward sitting in one spot spamming buttons for absolute maximum damage done.
You have to account avoiding getting killed etc. There is so many things aside from DPS check that makes you a good party member or a bad one.
So that means don't give opportunity for people to circumvent everything and using DPS meter to play a Blame game.
If DPS meter is made that You are the only person who can see it and serves as Feature for the people who care about those numbers - they can turn it On for themselves only.
DPS meters only serve delivering some flat data in a final form without giving any details of why said person did more or less of said numbers.
There is no positivity out of DPS meter system.
Only gain is that neckbeards and ego players can brag about something and feel better for themselves Personally.
In an MMO game the major impact from DPS meters is negative. This meter isn't going to gauge your Fun factor and that's what most people play games to begin with - FUN.
Numbers does not contribute in a positive manner to the Fun factor, more often than not contributes in a negative manner to the Fun factor.
So the real question is - will this be a Fun game to play, or a Numbers game to play.
And with, say, 15 of these getting added every year, majority of players would never catch up. And if the game provides gear that lets even the 50% clear this, that would mean that the power creep got high enough to trivialize that hardcore content. Which imo is just too damn fast.
That other content would probably be completely trivial for those top players, right? Otherwise those 50%s wouldn't be able to clear enough content. And I'd assume that trivial content would get real fucking boring if it was the same daily bosses, right? So the game would probably need a few hundred higher quality bosses to provide at least some variety for several group types of people.
And considering gear progress, each dlc would probably need to add several hundred new ones. And I personally don't see any current dev company keeping up with that kind of pace. Maybe UE5 can help out with that, which would be great, but will have to wait till there's way more UE5 mmos out there.
This is why I'd be fine with a dummy that helps you perfect your rotation, so then you know your limit and will have to figure out how your limit matches up with your current encounter.
But I also support a good combat log and I understand that people will just write their own parsers for it (or use act I guess), so no matter how much I might be against the increased pace of content clearing that meters bring, I understand that they're completely inevitable in the context of "players have the info to know what's happening during a fight". And I want players to have that, because otherwise it's a feelbad situation.
Guess this is the biggest contradiction with my current views
I'm going to keep this short, if devs are saying content can only be complete by 10% of people and they balance difficulty overtime this point doesn't mean anything. You are talking about a faction of a faction that is going to be far below 10% the more hoops needed to be jumped through int order to cheat and advert the rules of the system. Both of less people will do it, and it will be easier to take action against certain people if people within notify what is going on.
A tiny faction isn't going to be the main amount of people at the end of the day so that won't change balance of what the devs are doing.
Relative to the content release part:
Weaker content can still be a puzzle, especially when the game doesn't have large power creep in terms of Damage stats leading directly to output, which is exactly what Ashes plans to be. The groups I've been in and know of 'solve this problem' differently, by splitting up the raid or running the lower tier content on those weeks and times where everyone can't get organized.
So you actually get the situation where the Mid Tier bosses are 'Top End Content' for the Mid Tier players, but they are the 'fun off-week content' for the Top Tier players. The thing you do with half the team or less when your main tank's got a wedding to go to or something.
The issue is just of content flow itself. There's no 'raiding scene' if there's no time where the whole Raid Group has to come together and give it their all, but the mid content isn't the thing you run 'at your full power'. You use it to do things like test entirely new builds, build up synergy and camraderie with new recruits, etc. Note that most people will do this only because the content is known to be simple. When they have already established themselves as one of the top groups by taking down or being the closest to taking down the big one.
Relative to the dummy:
I don't play games where the dummy would matter, because again, your moment-to-moment reactive stuff changes as soon as 'Jormungand' does. There is no 'rotation'. The Tracker is just there to give the statistical part. The argument used by some, that 'numbers shouldn't matter as much if the game is good', I'm gonna be that person.
Those people are nowhere near top end. Yeah, I said it. If you play this type of MMO, and you somehow think that your physical skill is going to be the thing that matters enough so that you don't need the statistical output of your hitrate or 'figuring out which moments your target has some sort of hidden-ish front guard', you're not good enough to be concerned.
The physical skill of top-end gamers in games like BDO and Tera, especially on things they actually practice, is so high relative to the game requirements that they hit the ceiling for that really early in. I'm fine with games that have a low 'physical twitch skill' ceiling, but anyone who argues that the game should have more of that in order to 'make the Trackers less important' has either never risen to the top 5% of skill in a game or isn't referring to games where the Accuracy stat has any real meaning.
There is no 'rotation' for Katzvariak or Nouver in BDO, you adapt and react what you are doing every 2-3 seconds, if even that.
But BDO contains an Accuracy stat and it is possible for my attacks to miss either of these despite me moving perfectly correctly, so if BDO was a serious game, I'd absolutely throw my general accuracy into the parser to find out if I should build more Accuracy or drop some for more damage. My physical play wouldn't change at all because it already has to be near cap to do the things I want to do (because BDO is so poor/dead, I get lots of chances to solo the more obscure bosses, but I think I've mentioned it takes about an hour and a bit to do so, and that's actually all the time you have before they despawn).
So yeah, nothing is going to change the general player desire to 'know their hitrate' or 'know whether or not the Accuracy Down debuff applied by this mob is actually a flat 15%, a decaying debuff that starts at 40% and wears off 1% per second, or actually a thing that ticks up and down based on if you are hitting the mob with a melee attack while you have it'.
That same boss is not going to be there for months - and probably won't be there for weeks.
Even if you could repeat the same boss - it's not going to be exactly the same.
This isn’t the use of a combat tracker.
A combat tracker parses the log file to tell you what’s happening in the encounter. You could tell if a boss is a swinger (lots of small hits) or does a large special for high damage of a certain element type (like poison so you needed specific resists).
So beating bosses was like a puzzle to figure out what you need to do to kill the boss, and the logs/tracker helped you prepare.
It’s been my experience that games with robust logs and trackers had better raid experiences. You have the tools to figure out what to do and create a plan.
In games without them what I see is the analysis part is gone. Instead you have are raid leaders without the tools to create a plan and have no other options then be a turd to everyone to put pressure on the team to perform better.
This is purely anecdotal, but it makes sense. Lack of information leads to frustration which leads to lashing out. Even in games you have lots of raid leaders who’re too dumb to figure out an encounter, but without trackers everyone has to devolve to that level.
This is something that’s lost to most WoW raiders because guilds put up videos on how to beat encounters, but for those who raided in other games they’ll know what I mean.
In such a game, non top end raid guilds will still be making use of combat trackers.
As to your comments about power creep - the above scenario would see a new tier of gear added to the game every year. With the above amount of content (15 bosses) added to the game every 6 months, an individual raider would expect to replace each slot on their character about once a year.
Trivial in terms of difficulty, but that doesn't mean they can't still be interesting in terms of design - or at least some of them.
No, in terms of raid content, each new DLC would need to add about 15 - assuming 6 month DLC.
Even WoW doesn't add as many bosses as you are suggesting here. Keep in mind with that though, WoW is a game that needs to add far more bosses due simply to the fact that they mostly release bosses to live servers after players have killed them on test servers, rendering that 12 or so week period to perhaps 1 or 2. A game that doesn't do this and instead leaves players to work out how to kill mobs on the live servers doesn't need to add nearly as many new encounters.
More than 10% of players will have access to combat trackers.
If the content in the game is made any more involved than the content in Archeage (basically big dragon shaped punching bags), any guild wanting to take on top end content will be using one.
Adding one off hoops for players to jump through isn't a barrier, especially when the end result technically isn't against the rules at all.
Edit to add; for actual real world proof of this, look no further than the news. Last week, Italy banned ChatGPT nationwide. A complete ban. An actual law, with an actual punishment for breaking it.
The obvious result of this - that literally everyone predicted - was that there was the biggest surge in VPN sign ups in the history of Italy.
You need to look at things from other perspectives you mainly only see it from your own. The more difficult something is to use the less people will be using it more caring about it.
What I'm taking about is you are saying factions of people that will attempt to cheat and get around the rules since it wont be as simple as just using a tracker since you cant normally view allies stats. The less emphasis on it the less people will care to use trackers since they will feel it isn't needed.
Comment has already said they are not allowing it so it would be against the rules. Those 10% of players that would still try to use it would be spread out randomly among the player base, you can't count that percent as all end game when players will not feel it is a requirement to need it and/or want to follow the rules set.
Again, combat trackers won't be cheating.
You want to say I am only seeing things from my own perspective, yet I have told you exactly that at least a dozen times in this thread.
The only thing Intrepid can make a rule about is how their game software is interacted with. If I record gameplay and analyze that recording, Intrepid have the option of either allowing players to record gameplay or not allowing players to record gameplay. They have no say at all as to what I do with that gameplay I recorded as long as I don't attempt to break their copyright with it.
This leaves the only point you have left as being one of convenience - players won't use it if it is too difficult.
For a large percentage of players this is true, however, even while maintaining the above, existing combat trackers can be set up and running with as few as 6 mouse clicks. It is significantly easier than setting up a VPN, and as I pointed out to you above, people are more than willing to do that in order to use ChatGPT.
Now, an argument could be made (by you) that most guilds won't be full of people that are willing to download a combat tracker, so a combat tracker won't be tracking everyone in the raid. The thing is, top end guilds are literally all made up of people like me - so yeah, they will all be willing to do that.
Second tier guilds may not be willing initially, but it doesn't take long in a second tier guild for people to realize that their reluctance to join in on using the tracker is holding the guild (aka, their friends) back. These people will likely come around before long.
Third tier guilds are the guilds where not everyone is likely to sign up for using a combat tracker - but I guarantee the tank and the raid leader both are.
I have never experienced trackers being used like that.
I commonly experience the leader looking over the log and saying (typically to friends of mine), "Why are your numbers so low?!? I'm kicking you."
Which is why people say they are toxic and they are banned in Ashes and FF XIV.
Maybe so, but all you've said here is that you're familiar with leaders that are shortsighted and poor at using them, and for whatever reason you don't end up playing with leaders who know how to use them in the way Iskiab mentions.
I'm not sure how banning the trackers is the solution to those people. The people will not be different. Usually they are worse.
The argument would therefore be that this isn't a reason to ban the Trackers, same as always.
That is *literally* what a combat tracker is for.
What are you trying to achieve?
Like most people, a dislike for third party add-ons, dps meters, etc.
This is a bit meta...but I'm feeling sassy, so here we go.
Is this thread (+ the devs decision to not allow 3rd party add-ons) not objective data? Regardless of WHY people like/dislike the idea of dps meters/trackers....the fact is...the majority of players (+ devs) have spoken; and don't want these to be officially supported and/or heavily influence game design. So I guess if you are a fan of objective data, you can admit this is the design philosophy that the game will take until further notice.
This take may be wrong, and MMOs do in fact require trackers to be "good" as you claim. But can't we go into alpha 2 with the current design philosophy and reassess during testing?
As much as I've enjoyed reading the heated debates in this thread...it has been going in circles for so long...can't we just let it die until alpha 2?
Two points.
First, this thread isnt objective.
Second, this thread is about an equal split between those that want or accept combat trackers and those that do not want them - a slight edge towards those that either want or accept.
As to going in to alpha 2 to assess, as I have said in the past, an MMO doesnt really hit its stride with top end content until 2 or 3 years after release. That is when developers learn what the game engine and creation tools can *really* do, and when players know more about classes and the combat system than the developers.
Das an aside, the way it tends to work is that developers release content as a "ha, bet you cant kill this" kind of thing, and players respond by, well, killing it and then asking if that's all they have got. Developers then get pissed (not really) and create basically a fuck you mob for players. When developers are allowed free interaction with players, there is as much smack talking between players and developers as there is between players in a PvP setting.
So really, we wont know how useful combat trackers will be to players until then - and at that point it is too late for Intrepid to change their mind (or, more to the point, Steven wont change his mind at that point).
Data parse indicates that the margin of those who support Noaani's suggestion relative to meters is 54%, I believe.
I'm not saying you need to believe my parse, only pointing out that from the perspective I hold, objective data says 'Yes, trackers ok'. So you'd have to do your own parse, show me methodology, and compare and question to mine, and only then after your parse was demonstrated to be more accurate, would I have any reason to accept it as 'objective data'.
Noaani has claimed at some point that some past or present Intrepid Dev is in fact partially responsible for the tracker the game already has.
Perhaps the majority of devs don't want one, but we really have no way to know that, as there's no indication there was an 'internal poll' of any kind that 'led to this outcome'. The Devs are the people whose input we know the least.
In the end, that's sort of the difference between the two camps. It'd make more sense to throw out all the supposed 'data' altogether and focus only on the discussion points, and that's why this thread gets resurrected.
Letting it drop off is great.
Making claims about majority and objective data isn't so great.
While I understand that there are others against them (from FFXIV if nothing else), I have yet to meet them.
So, I've had private discussions with about 25 MMO developers over the last 15 or so years, making it roughly 96% for trackers vs 4% against (not quite exact, but close enough).
Obviously this is a subjective and selective set of developers, ones that are willing to talk to top end players. It seems natural to me that a developer willing to openly discuss the game (even if in an unofficial capacity) would be more willing in general for players to have information.
Make of all of that as you will.
In WoW sure, that’s because all the boss’ abilities are given to you and there are videos on how to do the encounter.
In WoW right now what would you do without trackers. You’d fail and then the raid would disband and you’d never know why, so which is better?
If ashes doesn’t have combat trackers the encounters will need to be really easy or no one will do it.
Regarding human behaviour:
If someone dies to a gun shot, did the gun kill the person or did the shooter kill the person?
Same quesion but now it's a knife
Same quesion but now it's a butter knife from England
Same quesion but now it's throwing a rock to the head
...
Same quesion but now for dps meters in a game and someone is being toxic
Oh how I wish I could somehow flag this as 'politics'.
The answer is definitely that the shooter killed the rock with the knife and the dps meter told us how much damage was done to the person.
Leave the nukes alone, it is the humans fault.
35-40min in.