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
Stop, Also Steven is 100% right.
That's just to get ppl of his back.
He wont change his mind.
People will play AoC when it comes out, even all those that say they wont for XYZ reasons.
Most of what Steven said in the clip has already been debunked on this thread as being inaccurate and is subjective opinion based on limited expereince.
I find it funny that Steven said "before DPS meters (by which he means combat trackers)" several times, and also asked people what they did before them. It is as if he doesn't realize combat trackers existed before MMORPG's, and that even Meridian59 and a good number of MUD's had combat trackers.
Essentially, he keeps asking about a made up fairlytail time that he thought it was real - when really it was just the time before he found combat trackers, and honestly just thinking about it makes me laugh.
Then he talked about toxicity, admitting that not having combat trackers isn't goint to do anything at all to prevent it (without actually saying as much). Basically, he admitted that gamers are going to game, and if people want to see the performance of others they will find a way. Thus, if people want to exclude others from content for what ever reason (his previous definition of toxicity in relation to combat trackers) they will do so, and it won't even be hard to do so.
After that (or intertwined with that) was talk about information on encounters, and players not having any. Honestly, this left me scratching my head and wondering how much Steven actually knows of combat trackers. It seems to me that all he knows of them is a second hand account of what DBM for WoW is, and he just assumes that is what all combat trackers are.
This goes to a point I made years ago (in this thread, if someone wants to find it) about how Steven dimply doesn't understand what a combat tracker can or can not do, and is making decisions on them for Ashes with that actual lack of understanding as to their function.
For those in a similar position to Steven (and for Steven himself, as I have a feeling he will read this post), we'll run a scenario. Lets imagine myself and my guild are walking up to some big bad dragon in Ashes for the first time, and I have my combat tracker running. At this point, my combat tracker isn't telling me what to expect from that dragon - because a combat tracker can't ever tell me what to expect from anything. What my combat tracker is doing is waiting. It is looking at my combat log, waiting for combat that it can track.
So, it is only when I engage that dragon and see it's abilities that my combat tracker even knows what abilities that dragon has. It learns about them at the same time I learn about them. How can it be telling me what that dragon is able to do if it doesn't know? And if my combat tracker learns about that dragons abilities at the same time I learn about them, it is never going to be able to tell me anything I didnt' already see.
Even after that first fight with that dragon, when I go to pull it a second time, my combat tracker isn't going to tell me anything at all - because that is not what a combat tracker does. If I want my tracker to tell me that a specific ability is incoming, I need to pull the encounter enough times to see and understand what abilities I want a heads up on (you know, learning the encounter - the thing Steven and some others that blindly believe him say combat trackers remove the need to do), then I need to work out what tell the encounter has for those abilities (animation, text, timer etc), and tell my combat tracker to look out for them, then I need to tell my combat tracker how to alert me to this ability (a ding, ping, or some other noise is what I opt for).
So, in order for my combat tracker to do literally anything at all in regards to telling me any useful information on the encounter, I first of all need to fully understand that encounter. This makes the argument that Steven had in relation to people going in to encounters with as little information as possible simply ignorant on his part. The amount of people I have seen over the last few years that have seen this thread, his views on combat trackers and simply exclaimed "this idiot is making an MMORPG? really?".
Now, to be perfectly fair to Steven, you could set up the ability to import that information that players have set up in to your combat tracker, and then you have, say, warning that a specific AoE is about to go off. The problem with this as a defense for Steven is actually threefold (and each of these is a complete debunk).
The first point to make here is that knowing an AoE is about to go off doesn't tell you how to deal with it. You still need to fully understand the encounter before you know how to deal with any one ability - assuming good class and encounter design. The exact same ability with the exact same damage and effects on two different encounters SHOULD need to be dealt with differently. If players can just see a list of what abilities the encounter has, walk in and kill it, then your encounter design is the issue.
Second, the easiest way to understand what an encounter does during a fight is not to download a file and import it in to a combat tracker. The easist way is to talk to others about it, read about it on the forums, or read about it on a wiki. If someone wants to know what an encounter does in almost any game out there, they can find far more information on it than what can be imported in to a combat tracker.
Third, if you built the combat tracker in to the game, as the suggestion has been for years, you just build it without the ability to import.
So essentially, Steven has said that he doesn't want trackers because it blocks off the fourth easiest way for players to get information about an encounter, with the three easier paths all left untouched. That really is Homer Simpson levels of smrt.
Then Steven talked about the effect of combat trackers on player builds - with who ever it was on the stream pointing out that gamers are going to game, and people are just going to use one of the meta builds. When I played Archeage, more than 90% of all players participating in contnet (Halcy, Mistmerrow, CR, DR, Luscas, Abyssal attack etc) were running one of the meta builds. In fact, with GR and CR, if there were more than 40 people present, the leader of the raid would usually just boot anyone not of one of those classes if someone that was one of them wanted to get in.
This is what meta builds look like in games that don't use combat trackers. People will just look at the name of your class and boot you if they don't like it.
This is Ashes future without combat trackers.
Steven won't get much push for combat trackers.
As I've said in the past, that multi-tens-of-millions block of potential subscribers has already lumped this game in to the same catagory as BDO, Crowfall and Albion as being not even worth the time to look at as a game to consider playing. This is largely due to the tracker stance Steven has - not because it means no tracker, but because we know what no tracker means for PvE.
If the bulk of the people that want a tracker aren't even looking at this game, Steven isn't going to hear a whole lot about people wanting one.
As an aside, it dawned on me that one of the major differences between PvE in a PvE game vs a PvP game may actually come down to combat trackers. I don't know of any PvP games that build PvE with them in mind, and so when such games do attempt to go all out on an instanced PvE encounter, this may well be why that attempt inevitably falls flat in the eyes of people that have played content designed with them in mind.
It's fine. As I've said, I have one working already.
The issue those people I talked about above have isn't in relation to not having a tracker - we literally all know we would have one if we played - the issue is in regards to what Stevens stance means for the game and it's content.
LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL
As usual bad takes, you don't speak for the mmo community. Any new good/bad mmorpg will have tons of people playing if the game is good people stay if not they move on. Based on the hype around this game and when they market it, pretty much every mmorpg player will be playing it.
So plenty of people will be looking at it, it is pretty much ignorant to think else wise or you really don't understand the mmorpg community.
Such thirst for approval. Risking getting banned to show off.
If Intrepid will ban people for saying they have a combat tracker that Intrepid have no way at all of ever detecting - or even proving exists - then I think everyone using any service they ever offer should be wary.
Just edit it out.
isnt that part of being good? using your own ability to clear the encounter instead of watching a video on youtube on how to configure a program to tell you whats coming?
why not pay attention to the boss and use your memory? plenty of people killed bosses without trackers.
a top pvper finds it unacceptable to use any kind of software that helps him pvp, yet "top pvers" need software to tell them whats up on a boss fight lmao.
its okay. people who like ashes and l2 also think those other pve games arent worth the time. literally not considering playing them hahaha. you guys stay on your lane, and we will stay in ours. if you all have a game with instances, trackers and all the pve you want, then why you want to change ashes? u dont see us coming to those forums trying to change their pve game so why the pvers want to change this game?
there are literally more millions of people who arent playing wow, eso, ff, eq, gw, etc than the people who play those games. plus all i hear in those games community is people complaining about their so loved pve game.
Because their are bored of running the same instances 1000 times, they are bored of their 20 alts and they are too bored to do the same NPC chasing story main quest and the quest hubs for xp.
Now, they are looking for the next mmo in which to place players to the background, do all of the above again, tinker with the screen cluttering addons to perform a max dps rotation in a dummy, which any braindead gamer can achieve with 5 mins of practice and the strickly limited meta build fotm.
The analogy I often use is that of a math paper. If that paper is testing you on basic arithmetic, then a calculator wouldn't be expected, as the point of the paper is to test your ability to perform that basic arithmetic yourself.
On the other hand, if the paper is on advanced hydrothermal dynamics, the ability to perform mental arithmatic is not important. You are no longer being told to multiply two numbers together, you simply have two numbers (or several thousand) and you need to work out to do with them yourself.
Someone that has only ever done basic arithmetic would look at someone doing the above paper having a calculator and thinking they have it easy, that the calculator isn't needed. But really, all this thought is proving is that this person doesn't actually know the point of a more advanced paper.
Likewise with a combat tracker. Someone that has only ever played the PvP version of PvE content would look at a tracker and thing "why even?" All this thought proves though is that this person doesn't actually know the point of a more advanced encounter.
This isn't an issue in itself though. If people want to stick to basic math and then move on to a different topic instead, thats fine. Unless that is what they specifically want to do, most people will have no use for anything more than basic math in their life.
However, it does become an issue when these people start criticizing the tools and methods those that have opted to go mroe deeply in to math use for that deep diving.
Steven knows I have a combat tracker.
The rest of the ppl should get a a chance to play a nice mmo without visual clutter. Who knows they may like it. And hopefully more studios can bring back quality, following the example set by AoC.
Yes it is.
Do you understand the point of an analogy?
good analogy. ive done everyboss in wow when i played with 0 addons. never used trackers in any games. just learned everything doing it and reacting. barely watched any videos on how to do a boss or a dngeon. probably 5 total ever. . got to the top in about 10 different mmorpg during the time i played each game and near the top in a good 10 more. killed everything over and over. pve isnt that hard
i guess some people need these tools and some others dont or dont care.
for some reason ive met really really godo pve players who suck at pvp. below beginner stage lmao and they even admit it themselves. but never met a pvp player who wasnt at least decent in pve. and of course ive met players who suck at both. everybody has different experiences i guess.
i just wonder why people dont play the other so called "top games", yet they say "oh aoc isnt worth it" as if they were some elite gods who bless us with their precence, and not just another gamer dude lmao. i mean i could say the same about all those other games. they are worthless.
i wonder why people even play more single player rpg than those "great" mmorpg rpg. i guess george was right in his previous comment
Even though WoW isn't the game with the most top end encounters ever (it has had I think 6 encounters in it's almost 20 year history that I would consider top end), I can without hesitation tell you that you were not defeating top end encounters in WoW at any point in it's history without trackers being used in the raid.
Do you understand apples and oranges?
Advanced hydrothermal dynamics?
What visual clutter?
A combat tracker can and should be run completely in the background. When I run one, I start it up at the start of a play session, and the first time I see any evidence that it is even running is when the game client closes (or if I alt+tab out of the game for some reason).
If your argument against combat trackers is a visual thing, then that isn't an argument against them in general, it is an argument against the specific implementation of some of them - and to be honest, it is an argument I agree with.
https://www.history.com/news/human-computers-women-at-nasa
Steven wants those uber PvErs to just write down their encounters and figure out how to beat the bosses w/o any additional tools.
It's just the good ol' "back in my day we had to walk 20 miles in 10 feet snow to get to school. Woke up at 3am to do that as well".
You and I have talked many times about the differences in PvE content in PvE games vs PvP games. If content in PvP focused games is all you know, and if you think it's great, then you won't see a need for combat trackers.
You may note that when I talk about games with top end PvE, ESO is never in the conversation.
ESO content is that basic arithmetic. You don't need a calculator for it.
Play the game, learn it yourself, find what works for you.
Raid and dungeon groups are not are friendly thing in the MMORPG world, if you underperform for any reason you're out, it doesn't give people the chance to improve and makes them steer away from such content.
I'm sure some people are saying they wouldn't have this toxic mindset but its a straight lie.
WOW is a clear indicator on why they're bad.
They do have their upsides but the downsides greatly outweigh them.
Ya most people agree, its just a handful you can count on like one hand that try to push for it as most people don't want it or don't want people being able to read them and posting it online wanting their privacy.
maybe other people used them? for sure. but i didnt. according to you, you cant carry a bad player in a top pve encounter. so i either got carried or i just didnt need the tracker
give us example of top pve content in different games.