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
It's quite amusing to me. If you look through this thread, you will see an abundance of people against trackers being toxic to those who want them and thus will have them, and very little going the other direction.
Haha a bit dramatic, but yes, i do understand Steven's opinion but sadly disagree with it, restricting things like DPS/AGGRO meters is meaningless and will only hurt people who doesn't use it, as long as it proves to be useful people will still develop and use them anyway, knowledge is power, the data acquirable through such hard to prevent/detect 3rd party tools is very valuable and will provide advantage for those with access to it.
Aren't we all sinners?
Hot take, but what would be a real middle ground (though impossible because, addon writers have ways around everything), is if there was no way to view things in real time, preventing any automated callout type addons such as deadlybossmods or cactbot.
Instead after encounters give a full combat log, option to save into a txt file if we want it. Anti addon crowd can just manually read the log, and addon crowd can use something like ACT to read and format into nice charts and such.
I just want the numbers in any way I can get them.
Are you suggesting we play the game completely blind?
Or can ACT only make callouts if it reads smth in the game's log? Iirc either Noaani or Azherae said there're ways to have visual trackers that would just parse animations and stuff like that, so even if you have completely no written text related to the encounter - people will still have boss ability callouts.
Without going in to any details at all with this statement, I'm just going to say that it isn't out of the realm of possibility for a combat tracker to exist on the games server, bypassing this restriction.
That said, the value of a combat tracker isn't to be had during the encounter. It is at its most valuable after the fight.
The in game floating combat feedback can be parsed.
It would be possible to set a combat tracker up to recognize animations, but this isn't going to assist in in depth data analysis. The only real use for it would be in regards to warnings for incoming abilities.
ACT works by reading the datapackets in the network data sent to the client, getting numbers that way. Although you can get the same numbers just reading the combat log.
ACT can make custom triggers from the real time combat log too, making a callout that "MECHANIC A is happening"
ACT plugins like cactbot in ff14 for example, can also read the datapackets, to go one step further than that. If mechanic A had several variations for instance, it can know exactly which variation is going to happen even if that is never sent in text to the real time combat log.
I am sure other apps can do the same thing maybe by just watching the screen, but ACT is very efficient at it.
I think having automated callouts is a bad thing, it removes the requirement to have awareness from the raid team. As in, why need someone to take a leadership shot caller role in the raid, if a machine can do it for me better.
In the end though, for theorycrafters to do their craft, they just need numbers, from the encounter itself so all variables are accounted for. If Ashes gives us a text file combat log we wouldnt even need addons to collect the data for us. Though I would write my own python script to parse and format the data for me.
I think this is context dependent. If there are many things happening and the challenge of the encounter is in dealing with those things, automated callouts of what ever form are good.
If the encounter is all about awareness, then automating awareness would probably make it too easy. I say "probably" because the only encounter I've ever played that required awareness not something that ACT could track, so it couldn't assist at all.
To me, that is the key thing though. If awareness of players is the goal, you use mechanics that can't be called out by a tracker.
Making an encounter where you want players to be aware, but then making the things they need to be aware of easily able to be called out just seems naive.
Developing fights for us is what the devs work on, to deliver carefully crafted challenge and fun, and the ways they tell us how things are happening is a part of that.
If we are to rely on automated callouts to remove that part, then the devs can (and will, as history has shown us) just be lazy in how they communicate things to us in a fight. Fights should be developed so that any player on any machine without any addons can complete them, As experience in the last few decades have shown us, we are given lower quality tells about how things happen.
Its just my opinion, but in my experience I think devs water down their content 'delivery' (couldnt think of a better way to say it, I hope you get the point) when we use addons to tell us incoming mechanics. Sure the end result of an overall fight is a more engaging and more complex fight, but at the cost of anyone NOT using an addon being out of luck and at a severe disadvantage. Its totally unfair and because its unfair, Intrepid have taken a stance against addons.
Its the devs responsibility to still develop challenging, engaging and complex fights, AND have a good clear way to communicate everything going on to us while doing so.
I've been following this game since A1, Intrepid show a lot of passion on this project and in every aspect they have shown us, such as the world creation, node stuff, class previews have been stellar. I would expect raid encounters to be equally awesome in delivery.
The flip side of those "lower quality tells" is that we get more content.
I'm specifically talking about EQ2 here. The developers there were able to take existing basic mob models, upside them and use then as they were for raid boss encounters. They were able to do this because they didn't need to rely on specific animations for abilities, as abilities didn't *need* to be communicated this way.
There were a number of times while I was playing EQ2 where players got through content faster than developers expected, and so said developers put together entire raid dungeons with absolutely no new art assets at all, but still managed to create interesting encounters that even today stand out. An encounter that literally removed the tanks pant slot item comes to mind as being one of the above encounters.
In turn, the ability for developers to be able to do this is what led to that game never having more than a few weeks at a time where top end players didn't have something to work on.
I'll take the ability for developers to be able to push out content like this over having more pronounced tells for abilities any day of the week.
The other thing I think you should be keeping in mind here - for the most part, keeping an eye on encounter abilities is only ever up to one or two people in a raid. It isn't as if every person needs to keep an eye out for a casting animation - one person keeps an eye out and then lets everyone know via voice chat. Even with a tracker in place, this is still the case - which means there is no difference for everyone present -1.
This is exactly what I dont want, and why I dont think we will agree on it. We should expect a better quality game.
If we get stuck in content drought its not like we also arent raiding everyweek in more than one game anyway.
I'll agree here, if I have to choose between the two.
For many reasons, but at least partly because +1 post count.
To me, the mark of a good quality game is having enough enjoyable content. EQ2 is the only MMORPG that has managed to meet this basic expectation - largely due to not relying on the things you are asking for.
When you consider that the things you are talking about only actually affect 1 out of 24 people in EQ2, I consider that to be actually insignificant.
Edit to add; that isn't to say that every encounter in EQ2 was designed like this. Apex encounters of each expansion, as well as every boss in the major raid dungeon were all uique models with animations for each ability. It was only with additional content as and when needed that these things weren't used - and they weren't used because the developers knew that the animations weren't what people were looking for in order to get queues as to what the encounter was doing anyway.
The reason then being, if the unique animations weren't being used as a means to identify incoming abilities, unique animations aren't needed as a tell, meaning unique animations are only a "nice to have" aspect of these encounters rather than a must have.
Basically, it was player driven, not developer driven. Give players the option, and animation tells are not the preference. Someone telling them on voice chat is the preference for most.
If AoC turned into pantheon: rise of the fallen I would quit mmorpgs.
Visuals on the boss
Post processing changes (shaders changing the screen graphics or depth of field or coloration etc)
Castbars
Audio Queues
Arena Changes
Damage happening
Adds changing behavior
Taking off the tanks pants (your example! which is cool)
I mean, the options to communicate mechanics are infinite, its on the devs to not be lazy and come up with cool things to keep us on our toes and learning to watch for them, its part of the fun during prog.
Also, all 24 players ought to be able to read mechanics and pay attention, the shot callers job should be redundant, its just as humans we are easily defocused during hours of prog, a shot caller helps to keep 'cadence' if that makes sense.
Does that happen in most teams? Nope, most folks rely on someone else to do it for them, and it shows in weeks the shot caller is on vacation when those guys are constantly dead because no one told them the arena was about to change shape or something.
I'd rather have fewer high quality encounters with more variety in mechanics than asking the devs to churn out tons of fights just for the sake of giving me something to do.
And, with ashes world constantly changing, I hope that means a lot of focus on the dungeon part of the raid itself too, changing paths or more than 1 entry point, all sorts of creativity to give us there too.
In either case, a thing I think we both agree well on, is the need for a combat log, which is the title of the thread. 'DPS meters'
Just that everyone is clear on this:
This guy here advocates for screen cluttering dps meters/trackers/addons and any other hair-splitting term you want to waste time on (yes, again) just so that developers can churn out never ending instanced raiding content of low quality that people can repeat over and over and over and over (and not make them obsolete with any new additions... remember that) instead of taking time to make proper expansions of proper quality content and depth.
Most players don't want good games, they want programs, non-ingame cues to help them defeat encounters, he says.
And we want AoC to continue this trend? Keep going with the dps meters and their ugliness?
I dont get people these days. I don't get this obsession with low quality entertainment. Video games, TV shows, books, music, people want more more more more quantity of bad quality, writing/visuals/sounds, as long as it is more more more and more.
I wonder, do people need dps meters and the likes when playing soulslike games, to help them beat the bosses? Low quality encounters, so that the devs can start working on the next bad game?
Or I shouldn't have drawn that linkage because "it'S nOT aN mmo mAN. reasons: X Y Z?"
The raiding scene, the ones you need all the addons and stuff to help you perform better, are so unnecessary.... so unnecessary....
I played tera online, eso and ff14 which had raiding and loot. I went to all these games with random groups and with the exception of ff14 (there are no build options in ff14), my build wasn't meta because I did like the playstyle.
From all the the above games, from all these dungeons, I performed as dps or tank and got what I wanted. I would repeat them 20-30 times until I got the perfect item I was looking for, with those random players that the game allowed me so easily to group because they were lobby mmos.
So easy to do good enough dps and get away without using a dps meter.
But I got bored of these games. Why? Because these games where just instanced content. BGs and raids, no reason for guild gameplay. Sure tera had a tiny bit of owpvp but who cares for a tiny bit.
I got bored in these games. Yet the crowd that HAD TO USE dps meters and such kept playing, and playing, and playing the competitive raiding scene to get the best time, to get the best "cleared", so that they can get the most patheric rewards: a title, a skin, a mount.
Shallow games, shallow content, bad quality mmos.
I got bored of them because there was nothing worthy to compete for, no good rewards. Why would I do the same scripted content over and over and over? That's crazy to waste your time for a title or a mount skin.
Play mmos like L2....
Play good games.
DPS meters are for people that have nothing better to do than run a dungeon 1000 times to get the perfect performance and a title reward.
Sad...
AoC won't have dps meters, because it won't have ridiculous, empty raid scenes. The rewards are the gear, and you dont need a dps meters to achieve the perfect score. Anything can be cleared easily.
The rewards are the victory over other players. Not ladderboard competitions.
Visuals on the boss only work if everyone can see the boss. On some complex encounters, this isn't the case.
Post processing isn't an overly good idea. It's too easy for things like this to be lost in graphics settings - players can then inadvertently turn off such warnings.
Cast bars are bad imo. The worst thing about them is it is a game mechanic rather than an encounter mechanic. It would be odd to just have it on one encounter and not all. If it is on all encounters, it becomes the only tell you have.
Audio queues as a general concept kind of clash with the notion of having voice communication. Most players I know turn all game sounds off for raids.
Arena changes are viable.
My assumption with "damage happening" is that you may be talking about an ability that deals a small amount of damage, and if it deals enough or the effect persists long enough without being cleansed it causes a bigger effect. Similar to audio queues, many people turn off floating combat feedback in order to get a better view of the game, making this trigger a prime candidate for setting up a call in ACT for.
Adds changing behavior is viable, but needs care.
To be clear, I'm not saying EQ2 doesn't use the above (it uses most of them). What I'm saying is that it doesn't rely on them. If they have a need to create an encounter without the ability to use one, many or all of the above, they still can.
Again, I'll take that any day over a game where top end content could be bottle necked because the sound designer is too busy, and your encounter needs an audio tell created for it.
I've told you this before. If your combat tracker is visable during combat, you are using it wrong.
I am not advocating for anything that takes up any screen real estate at all during gameplay - but that is because I know how to use a combat tracker.
YOur constant comments about combat trackers taking up screen space just tell everyone here that you don't know how to use them. It tells us all that you used one once and didn't even get past the standard settings it shipped with.
You are purposefully misrepresenting what I have said, and are in fact saying that I am asking for something I have specifically said no to. You are doing this because you know you have no argument to make against any of the logical points I am making here, so you opt to invent something and argue against it instead.
This is genuinely disappointing. You should expect better than this from yourself. You should be better than this.
I'm not a game dev, its on the devs to come up with cool things to show us stuff. Those were just the first few things I came up with on the spot without much thought in it. Thats why I dont get paid to make video games, I just pay to play them.
I am a gamer, its on me to prog and clear the things. I dont want to be forced to rely on a program to tell me about mechanics.
I do want readily available combat data I can pour over outside of raid time.
Be the person that pours over raid data outside of raid time, but don't be the person that calls abilities over voice chat.
If you are the one to tell me how to game that is.
But, since you are not the one to dictate my gameplay, I'll do what I want though, thank you very much, and will probably be making raid calls as in most games.
Not playing L2 ever again. I don't like what they have done with the class skills, the cooldowns, the random critical skills and the content they locked out.
Plus the terrain feels so flat now.
I'm not telling you how to play, I'm telling you one way you could have the two things you said want.
Not sure what the hostility here is, tbh.
I've literally never been in, seen or run a raiding guild killing top end content that didn't have someone calling out every ability that more than 50% of those present needed to take some form of action on, or any ability that needs immediate action from one or more people in order to prevent an outright raid wipe.
This isn't someone telling others how to play the game - you joining the guild is you signing up to play the game in this way (during specified times). If you have a guild that does it a different way, you have signed up to play the game the way that guild does it.
Your suggestion earlier that you don't want to rely on a program to tell you what to do is something I find odd from someone that knows how to use a combat tracker. The combat tracker shouldn't be telling you what to do, you should be telling the combat tracker what to do.
Intrepid try to pride themselves on the depth of their settings. They should have mob-related sfx and vfx as a completely separate tab with its own controls, so that people can still have them for raids/farming, even if they turn off every other sound in the game.
And they should be required to do that, because both of those should not be just encounter-wide and instead be targeted at specific players/archetypes, so that the shot caller wouldn't be the only person who's paying attention to what's happening.
How exactly are "call in ACT" or "ACT says what abilities the boss is using cause we literally can't see them" NOT "game mechanics instead of encounter mechanics"? Hell, they're literally out-of-game mechanics.
This is a very weird argument in the context of what you're suggesting.
Also, cast bars could be done as an encounter mechanic. Have the boss' weapon glow in a bar-like fashion, or a casting circle fill out, or some visual on the walls of the room light up gradually. All of those are "cast bars" in effect.
I'd assume they do that because most of the time all the sounds are overwhelming. Or did EQ2 have the exact thing I suggested at the start of this comment?
Game's UI should let you move those floating numbers to where they wouldn't obstruct your vision, but would still be visible. And you should be able to modify them per effect type or even frequency/strength. Again, "call in ACT" is not a game mechanic.
In other words, as I've said before, Intrepid just need to do better. The BG3 example of "doing better" is a great one. Intrepid have the chance to do the same for the mmo genre. Obviously Larian had the benefit of experience with the same type of game and a group of devs that were honed in on that kind of dev genre, but Steven also prides himself on only picking "the right" people for the job, so I see no reason for them to slack off on the quality.
With all that being said, I do agree with your point of "make mobs bigger and call them a boss" or copying some mob/boss general models onto others. Elden Ring had copies of stuff and yet it is still praised as one of the best games to come out in the past decade.
I just disagree that the quality of those encounters should lack because of their "copyness". And absent animations are an example of such a lack.
Kind of interesting for a game that stresses Risk v Reward to provide the convenience of figuring that out with no Risk.
I'd prefer to figure out my build with trial and error with my go-to group - so that I can adjust my build based on how my group prefers to play their builds - and that is best done with actual mobs rather than with practice dummies.
But... doesn't hurt anything to include practice dummies. Practice dummies are not toxic to MMORPG player interactions the way DPS meter and combat trackers are.
In Ashes... players should not be relying on "rotations". "Rotations" are indicative of simplistic combat design.
(I think the only "animosity" towards those saying that they will use "add-ons" even when they know it's a bannable offence is calling such people cheaters.)
interlude server T_T