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'll put it through the parser and see if we can do better on the next hundred pages.
And thanks to George for shot-calling in that last 10% and getting us there after that 3 month break. Was beginning to think that Alpha-2 might hit before we made it.
Perhaps a combat tracker built in to the game as a guild perk would be suitable.
So in the context of such levels of difficulty, how much you or @Noaani would be upset (as analytical players) if the game literally told you what you did wrong at the end? In other words, we'd jump my entire damn argument by, like, a hundred lvls, make me a complete hypocrite in the process, and completely circumvent the tracker usage by the game simply giving you the result of said tracker's analysis.
This would only apply to instanced encounters and those instanced encounters would only reward cosmetics/titles.
And an additional question for Noaani. Would you still use your own tracker on top of that for ow stuff, even if it was way easier to parse on the fly?
Maybe I'm mistaken in this take (and I'd ask @Azherae as a third party to check me), but it feels to me that I want a much more difficult and complex design than you, Noaani
To me, "reacting to the ability post-factum" and "every mob has the same basic set of features" seems like the laziest possible game design ever. Maybe I'm just still misunderstanding Noaani's point? Or missing (forgot?) some context?
With that said...
I feel like the game cannot.
Because what you did wrong is based on what you were trying to do, sort of.
I'll try using Predecessor (or Karkinos, but Pred might be better, so I'll start there).
When you start a match, you look at the enemy team. You don't necessarily think about their skills, just the combination of characters. If you see a lot of CC, you build CC protection. Simple enough to think about.
But 'you building CC protection' only matters if your team benefits from your specific character building CC protection because you expect a specific situation to happen during the match based on the enemy team comp.
As soon as the enemy team tosses this concept, your build is wrong. But what if they only toss it temporarily? Like, they realize "we have a situation that can only occur at this one moment in the match, we can go against what we appear to be normally be relying on and make this 'surprise' play".
In the grand scheme of a Pred match (40m let's say), that moment might not even look important. Sometimes it's bizarre because it looks like team A won whatever was happening, when really, the way it changed things made Team B then win without changing anything much else.
There's no way for anything less than a highly trained AI with a huge dataset to be able to pick out 'why you lost', from the coding side. Because sometimes it's the order of your choices that matters, and small things like that.
In short, the game can't tell you what you did wrong at the end. The tracker isn't 'telling you' either. It's giving you a context to figure out where your expectations didn't match reality, so you can adjust it.
I feel like that's the strongest point I can generally make here. The tracker 'tells me' very little other than 'here is everything that happened, objectively' and I can look and go 'wait that didn't match what I expected to happen, why not?'
And as noted, I can do that just by watching a replay. Trackers exist for people who 'can't do it from just watching the replay, because they need data tabulated' and 'people who don't have that kind of time'. I believe your general wish is that people who don't have ~40 minutes a day to just rewatch a match, in Predecessor (obv you could just skip through certain parts, but you also need to rewatch certain parts more than once from different perspectives), don't get to improve by using a shortcut of 'being able to get a quick-summary'.
Interestingly, one of the main features of old Armored Core games is that when you fight an Arena opponent, you can watch replays of the fight, and you can switch it to be either your perspective, theirs, or 'external to both'. I miss this feature...
Anyways lmk if this all was missing your point and I'll try the Karkinos route.
I was just thinking about the core of my general argument against trackers in the context of pve difficulty (at least how I'd prefer it to be at the top). If Intrepid could, in theory, make the hardest possible encounter then my argument of "trackers let you clear hard encounters faster and ask for harder encounters" doesn't quite apply, because the difficulty would already be at its theoretical peak. And devs could then just tweak personal difficulty per player per encounter per variable.
And I then thought, from that standpoint, what I'd probably want from the game. If the encounter is already at peak design (of hybrid combat with a multitude of thing to concentrate on) then the performance itself is valued higher than the ability to know what was wrong post-factum (to me that is).
And if the game is designed in such a way that all the info you need to beat it, on a personal lvl, is perceivable by the player during the fight itself w/o any external tools, then there's also no need for a wow-like tracker, because its features would already be imbedded into the encounter's design.
And for it to be the peak difficulty for me, the encounter would have to have some rng to its composition, which means that importance of the performance goes up even higher and that failure rate goes higher as well.
One of the biggest arguments for trackers I've seen is the "how would I (as a player or as a RL) know that there was a failure". So I tried to think of a way to minimize this issue. "Game showing you where you failed" was the kneejerk solution, but I do get your point of "not what was expected happened".
If we deconstruct the encounter, there'd be: dps, personal mechanics, group mechanics, raid-wide mechanics. I'd imagine the game could track all of those things, because it registers them already, right? So if playerA from party1 failed to do personal mechanic C while succeeding in doing party mechanic 2 - that would be seen by the game and could be put into the post-encounter summary.
And I envisioned the summary UI as a "movie timeline", with colored sections. Colors would indicate how the player did the mechanics throughout the encounter and would also take into account the player's dps as related to an "optimal" value that was intended by the devs.
If I'm understanding tracker use correctly, this is pretty much what people are doing with the battle log, right? You look at what happened, when it did and then try to figure out why it did. The why would still remain a mystery to solve in my suggestion, but I think that's only solvable through video recording and analysis (unless trackers can parse player movement? I forget if they would be able to in Ashes). Otherwise you just gotta attempt again, while paying attention to your previous fail point.
Party and raid leaders would get the whole timeline for their respective groups, so it'll be easier to discuss the fail points afterwards (with potentially other people remembering that point better and/or from another perspective).
If the encounters do have rng, would your "what we expected didn't happen" still apply as much? You might be able to anticipate a variety of things, but unexpected would still often happen, right? In other words, I think this relates to Jormun (or whichever was the name of the FF11 rng dragon). Would what I envision help you figure out the problem you might've had at that encounter, or would you still need a more detailed tracker-base dataset?
At this point it's kinda the opposite. My current idea is "the encounter is so damn difficult that I'm fine with people forgoing the analysis part almost completely". Obviously there might be raid-sized savant groups who manage to just completely outplay the devs' design, but at that point they just deserve that imo, and I also think that per server there might only be 1-3 such groups, if at all.
p.s. I don't think I know what/who Karkinos is
Anyways, I'll stay in that realm by going back to AC6.
When Baltheus does X, you do Y. There isn't a specific 'correct' Y, there's a Y that is correct 'relative to your idea of the next Y'.
When you expect Y to work and it doesn't work, you have to figure out why Y isn't working. Sometimes Y only comes up every 4 runs. You have to decide if to try to make Y happen more often or not, in case the reason you were failing it was unlucky RNG.
Most people give up pretty fast on a Y that isn't working, but sometimes, by 'design' or 'interaction of your team with the mechanics', the 'Y' is supposed to work. On razor's edge content, it may be that the Y is among your only options that will work.
In an AC6 situation, for example, you might encounter a boss where you feel like you want to use missiles, but the missiles keep failing and you don't know why. You keep changing missiles, you change ranges, you change movement... the missiles keep failing.
Most people respond by giving up on the missiles. But sometimes that means they just can't win anymore at all without changing MUCH more about their build, because their playstyle IS supposed to use the missiles. The devs 'tuned it so that the style they are using, wins that fight with missiles'. What's going wrong, then?
They have the wrong FCS equipped.
But it didn't have to be that. It could be that they were using the wrong arms, so they're slightly too slow on 5% of their dodges and get worn down. I've had this experience just the other day helping someone. They throw themselves against a boss for hours, I come and look at it for a bit, I go 'your FCS is wrong', they change it, they improve or win.
Taking all that into account remember one thing above all else. Ashes probably has RNG accuracy and evasion. As long as that exists, you don't have any reasonable way to achieve the data clarity you are talking about in a form that many people understand. The game just tells you 'you lost because you didn't do enough damage before you died' or 'you lost because the damage you got from this risk was not sufficient to justify the risk'.
Devs tune games to this level all the time. Then what happens? People get stuck on the boss because they don't know how to check the details, and the game can't give you the details because it honestly has no way to understand exactly what you're trying to do relative to the overall goal.
What you've been referring to is what we refer to, the combat log. A combat Tracker is usually 'a tool to read a combat log faster and extract statistics from it'. The problem is that since 'damage done in a specific window' can be a fail point, then the information given would include that. And then it will be 'a DPS meter'.
As for accuracy, I'd imagine that would matter way more for the dps characters than anyone else, purely because the value of each of their hits is higher. A "solution" to this could be a boss mechanic that requires a certain amount of consequent hits to complete it. And then this mechanic could be a fail point on the timeline, so the player would see that they can't reach that amount, and if the player knows for sure that he was hitting the boss that whole period - accuracy would probably be one of the first things that comes to mind as a solution (or at least an option of one).
I guess this could be a bit too revealing of an info, but I'd hope that not all top lvl bosses would depend on perfect accuracy from players. Or, if they do, that the game has tools to circumvent that. Smth like "the target can't evade for a period of time" debuff or "you always land your hits in the next X time" buff and stuff like that.
As for "I've tried things, but nothing worked until I was told to change a thing" - imo that's on the player. Those who need help from others will always need it, no matter if they're given a tracker or not. I think I'm an example of that. AC provides players with the tools to figure out builds and approaches, I simply don't use them. If I ever get tired of failing on a boss - I can always go and "seek help", in case I decide not to try out another build myself.
The same applies to other people who need help. It's just that their amount of attempts might be lower than mine. But asking for help on smth is a social thing and I support that, which is why I said that PLs and RLs would see the full timeline of their groups. If a player keeps failing a particular point, I'd expect leaders to discuss that with that player.
Obviously there'll always be toxicity based on that, but as we've discussed countless times before - it'll always exist.
My point is, I want to automate as much of the analysis as possible, so that those who need help have a higher floor of when they ask for it. The encounter's difficulty would still remain super high, so even if they do get help it's not like it's gonna be a magic pill that will resolve everything (which, I believe, has been one of the arguments for trackers all along).
Congratulations, you have joined the Dark Side.
From my perspective at least, this is actually all a Tracker is supposed to do.
I don't agree that those who need help will always need it though, because again, statistics. AC6 doesn't give you your hitrate anywhere. It doesn't tell you how much HP bosses have in an easy to read number. I definitely have friends who, if they could see what I see or 'have a tool that emulates the amount of information I can hold in my mental slots at once', would solve the problem themselves or better.
Sometimes my part is just 'seeing'. So let's take it directly in Ashes terms.
"Only X% of players can win this."
"Oh, why?"
"We're going to tune it that way, you'll need to be able to see 40 things at once with photographic/video level memory, because that's the best way to make it hard."
"So the X% you're talking about..."
"Are the X% of humans genetically capable of doing that. Better find one to join your group."
So yeah, you've actually never been unclear about the fact that you don't really care about the 'other 94% of players' relative to this part. I just happen to care about them. There's no specific reason I 'should'. I just do. Steven probably doesn't, and that's fine.
The only thing that matters here is if some members of that 94% (let's say tacticians who could figure out what to do, but can't see enough data to try) get frustrated because there are no 'Genetic Lottery WInners' in their group, and go 'screw it, let's use the Combat Tracker'.
If Ashes could absolutely guarantee a 'haha no fuck you guys you need to keep looking for a person like that', fine. But as you know, it generally can't, because trackers run from video feeds, not the game.
Interestingly, you have reached a point that I normally expect but didn't think we'd get to, so I offer you a thought...
You're really stubborn, and as you said, you can just go look for help. Do you see how someone who is similar to you in skill type but has seemingly exhausted every other option, gets to the same conclusion of 'I want something else to do the analysis part for me'?
Either way, I guess it's fitting that Page 200 is the one for this post.
Or maybe you wanted to say "someone else"? Cause I definitely understand how a second/fresh pair of eyes can come up with a new solution that the og player might've not thought about, but I think that's just an issue of "you haven't explored every avenue", be it due to lack of imagination or lack of trying.
But if you did mean "smth else", then maybe I misread and/or misunderstood the context of this question? Is it in the context of my suggestion and someone ignoring it until they can't figure out the encounter through their own observational skills? Or is it someone using my suggestion, but it not providing them enough info so they now want a more detailed tracker?
I'm not sure I completely understood that.
Also I think I'm yet again misunderstanding how trackers would be able to influence direct performance or help in any way to change your non-lottery-winnerness.
If the encounter requires you to track a ton of stuff all at the same time to clear it - how exactly does post-factum analysis helps you track all that stuff in the moment of the repeated fight?
Because what you're tracking is the 'data input' required to make the changes, i.e. achieve the output.
If you lose portions of the input due to failure tracking, you 'cannot' reach the correct output.
If the fight is very dynamic, then we're back to Baltheus.
"I keep dying to the grenade/howitzer, I'll focus on why I keep getting hit."
Then they successfully focus on that, but their focus causes them to drop something else or start to do something slightly different.
But they're focused on the grenade howitzer, so they don't notice what else changed. So they just spin in circles 'changing the reason they lose'.
Say they learn how to deal with the howitzer, but can't keep internal track of the targeted rockets' timer, so they get hit too many times by them. Tracker would show that they got hit 20 times, instead of 10 times back when the howitzer was killing the player.
How would that information help the player keep both in mind, if the inability to do that was the reason they failed in the first place?
Or do you mean that my suggestion wouldn't show that they got hit 20 times instead of 10? Cause this is the thing I mentioned in the previous comment. I envision the timeline showing info relating to mechanics. In other words, targeted rockets and howitzer would be such mechanics during stage one. If player gets hit by either of those - it's a fail point on the timeline saying "got hit by X targeted rockets" or "hit by howi". This is the same thing that a tracker would do, right?
But hard PvE is based moreso around your plan and adaptations than performance. You plan to do X under Y condition, and as you go, you learn more conditions. It's the same reason people ask for Aggro/Threat meters to be displayed (note that I have no strong opinions on this either way).
If there was no Aggro Meter, the only way a Tank would know when to use certain abilities would be to have the ability to understand and 'calculate' the values for everyone in their group at once and hold all that information in their mind while doing all the other mechanics at the same time.
If your healer died because the Tank chose to go for a defensive ability to reduce their own Threat depletion, because they lost track of the Healer's Threat value and therefore used their Taunt two seconds late, it's obvious 'why you lost'.
What isn't obvious is what you as a group want to do about it. You can't just go 'ok let's have the Healer heal less'. And you can't necessarily go 'alright just always use the Taunt first', in really hard content. If it's really hard, sometimes the Healer (that specific build) can't afford to heal less, and the Tank's choice could be fatal to someone else depending on the conditions (like, say, choosing to use the Taunt first means it isn't up when the Mage has the window for their big damage, resulting in the Mage having to hold back, meaning insufficient DPS, therefore you lose).
So you go back and back through the log/your encounter timeline, looking for 'a thing you can change to help with that situation when it comes up again'. Or sometimes you find a thing you can change about an entirely different situation, so that the Tank has to track one less thing, so that they can refocus on the Threat Values of the Healer with whatever focus you freed up by coordinating to take a focus point off them.
At the top level, almost all games of this type are 'pushing to overwhelm the group's focus, and seeing how they arrange the focus they have'. You win by 'reshuffling the focus points until everyone has their most comfortable and natural slots' relative to the enemy.
You can just reshuffle randomly, though and hope it eventually works. Your question was 'how does post-analysis result in improvement in battle' though. That's how.
"Ok, you track this instead since that seems like you might track it more naturally than OtherPerson in this specific fight, and we'll see if the changes in the fight that result from this are something we can handle naturally too."
See above.
You want the same thing, or rather...
You appear to have taken the information "People who can't track everything need a way to check and the game can't tell them exactly what went wrong" and considered "Wait maybe we can give them a full perfect combat log with timestamps so they can check it."
That's what we're talking about though.
It's a Combat Tracker. It's there to help you by tracking the combat. Then you check its data afterwards. What you've suggested is all most people who write the parsers need, and depending on the game, it is all we can get.
To keep in the flow of AC6 for a moment... Richochets work both ways. So if you fight an Arena enemy with a short range weapon from longer range, assuming you had your timeline... your timeline has to tell you 'X fired Y at you, at 145m away, and hit'.
But if it doesn't tell you how much they hit FOR, you might decide 'well, getting hit is bad, so I should avoid getting hit', when, really, they hit you for like 6 damage (this is how bad the Ricochet on your handgun is btw, it goes from 'Hit for 68' to 'Hit for 6' in some cases just by you changing range).
So now you have something that looks like this:
"HeroAC fired Coquillet at Target Baltheus, Distance 92m, Forward Vector, Assault Boost: Inactive. Baltheus: Angular Vector 47 degrees: Bullet hit 22f later, Ricochet, Damage 18."
"HeroAC fired Coquillet at Target Baltheus, Distance 101m, Forward Vector, Assault Boost: Inactive. Baltheus: Angular Vector 41 degrees: Bullet hit 23f later, Ricochet, Damage 8."
Am I understanding correctly that this is what you're suggesting?
Then I think my suggestion would still work, cause the battle log part is still present. It's just that the game would point out the obvious (from developer's design pov) fail points, while if the players are not satisfied with that, they can comb through it themselves.
In other words, in theory, my suggestion would let those 94%ers to clear a bigger part of hardcore instanced dungeons even if they don't have the lottery winners among them. Well, given that the players themselves still have the skill to utilize the info they'd get from the timeline.
So the only thing left would be to see if Noaani would still use his own tracker for any ow stuff, cause while I can definitely see how trackers provide a big benefit in instanced (or at least pure pve) fights, I'm not sure how beneficial would the analysis result of "well, a whole guild came in the middle of our farm and fucked us up" be when you're trying to figure out what went wrong
I guess there's still the possibility of "we're usually fighting the same group of people in this location so let's go through the tracker to see if we can optimize anything", but I feel like trying to optimize against potentially everchanging builds (especially at group scale) is somewhat counterproductive? So unless the game's build progression becomes so static that people's builds don't change for weeks on end - I don't quite see as much point in a tracker for ow.
But as I was telling you before, this works for Predecessor too.
It's much more meaningful when the margins are razor thin, as noted.
There are fights in Predecessor where if you had 2% more Physical Penetration you could be reasonably sure to kill the entire enemy team by focusing down the regenerating bruiser jungler, and without it, he kills someone and goes on a rampage.
My job is to be able to look at the fight and go 'we needed 2% more Physical Pen or so, there, should have bought the 6% Pen item instead of the 10 damage one with the bonus bleed'.
This analysis is just as beneficial. Pred is 5v5 but I can do it for up to 16 opponents (I know my limit from FFXI PvP mode and BDO). And even when the information is varied, sometimes if the game only gives you 4 or 5 choices in the moment, you only need enough information to know 'which of these choices even had a chance of working'.
The real time stuff that helps you clear it, isnt about data, its about automated callouts or mechanic solving tools, which is what Noaani is advocating for to help the devs churn out more content faster.
It has nothing to do with a DPS meter, it just so happens to be a possible function of ACT which is his favorite tool. (And mine also, because it generates the combat log text files for me in games I play, which have no option to export the in game combat log to text file)
Beyond just callout programs, there are some truly cheaty things these kind of addons do that I do not want to see any part of in ashes. A good example is here. This is an example of a program that reads the datapackets sent to the client, and then puts an overlay on your screen telling you where to go or where not to go. (These guys did get banned by the way)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=eExsRph2Fqg
I really, dont want that, I dont care how easy it makes the developers life to let them churn out more content.
Back to DPS.
Post factum data analysis is the reason I want a DPS meter. I measure everything during a fight, and then afterwards break down the data and discuss with others the results. Some people like to look at the real time value and feel good or bad about themselves, but really it doesnt help or hurt anything but ego, and I dont really care how much lower or higher someones dps is compared to someone else in the moment.
If the combat log provided in game gives me everything I need already, I can just take that data, and draw whatever conclusions I need from it.
The thing that people are upset about, to my understanding, is that to actually figure out what is going on, you need everyones data. Yours, your friends, the monsters, and any arena effects that happened. Turns out skills interact with each other, buffing or nerfing, and only seeing what you did gives you a partial picture of yourself.
As far as what to do with these logs, most games have a website you upload these textfiles to, which then parses the log, and does every bit of math imaginable you might ask it to. (ie: helps you see just how useful it is to put your raid buff on the party at 80 seconds into the fight when everyone's natural rotation is highest dps vs 90 seconds into the fight sort of thing, if you need tanking cooldown use or healing cooldown use examples I can give those too, its the same idea )
Before someone gets around to making a website to parse the data in a way that gives everyone what they need to have their discussions, I just write a python script to parse the textfile for me and bin all the data how it needs to be so it can be looked at objectively and understood by anyone.
I'd ideally try to keep the info at as base of that lvl as possible. In other words, what you see is what you get. If the tracker can parse player location/movement perfectly, because it can read data packets that tell your game that info, then I think it would be fine to have that kind of detail (if the game accounts for that kind of minute scale), mainly because the same stuff could be ultimately seen on a video as well.
If trackers can only perceive stuff that directly happens to the player or as a result of player actions (so, you got hit for X from Y or you hit Y for X) - then I think movement details would be left out and only the top hardcores who're willing to go through video recordings could know that stuff for sure.
I'd assume we'll have at least directional dmg (to the back, to the side, to the front type stuff), so that should definitely be included in the summary.
I would also hope that Intrepid provides us with detailed descriptions of stats, so that the threat issue that FF11 had wouldn't happen. This kinda goes along the "do better" spiel. I'd prefer if Intrepid were open with their tools, but could still make content that pushed people to the brink.
What I'm trying to say is that we, in theory, won't know our enemy's builds (and potentially even buffs), so how would you determine the smaller differences in attack/defense matchups?
1. Bad execution. I didn't use the right skill at the right moment. Didn't position myself where I should have been. Unlucky streak of RNG on either my side or my opponent, misjudged a jump distance, etc. Sometimes I was simply not good enough.
2. Wrong approach. I'm not tackling the problem from the right angle. I'm using the wrong tactics. I should have used stealth instead of a frontal attack. Range instead of melee. Take the right path, not the 5th door. Kill the small guys first, then the big one. So on and so on. I need to change my plan.
3. Wrong setup. I've used the wrong gear for the job. Range instead of melee. Fire instead of poison. It's related to point 2, but at a deeper level as it often influence what's even possible. Or maybe I don't have the level/strength/gear to overcome this part yet.
I often stay way too long on 1, thinking I'm failing only because of my execution. Then, once I I'm fed up, I'll consider if a fresh look on the problem could solve my problem. Sometime I'll have to switch gear to accomplish that, sometime not. Sometime I just don't have the tools for the jobs. I need another level or two, a better shovel, a different companion.
With better abstracted data I could maybe get to the bottom of my failure faster, but I'm usually more focus doing the thing than trying to analyze it.
Hope said in different words it helps.
So, keeping with that for a moment...
If you use a machinegun in AC6, you'd want it to give you this information for every shot, and then you would read through it and personally put all the data into a spreadsheet to figure out if you had the right arms for the fight based on reading and counting through all 300+ machinegun rounds?
Remember that with less information than that, you can't tell what your ricochet rate is (you have to know how far away you are to judge some things, and you have to know your vector because your movement and Assault Boost affect this too).
The information shown above is insufficient to work out the Arms issue, btw, because the above isn't factoring the bullet trajectory being 'off' due to recoil.
Item builds are visible (it's required for counterstrategy), but I can in fact often do it without that, because I can, in many situations, run the calculations in my head to know what their build has to be. This is actually necessary because in the case of that bruiser jungler, for example, knowing exactly how many 'stacks' of a specific thing he has active based on when certain things happen, matters.
I'd honestly say that it's hard to be really good at games like Predecessor if you can't do it, and similar for fighting games, you have to be able to see 'in frames'. Human brains are quite amazing when they have enough 'slots' combined with practice, and 'genius' level ones have a lot of 'slots'.
Basically, even without looking at the enemy builds, yes, I can do this for PvP, it's easier than for PvE because in PvE, the designers could hide stuff from me, whereas in PvP, I just have to memorize every item and buff in the game.
For AC I'd probably have separate fail points for each weapon, so if you're using machinegun the fail points would come up if you used it outside its optimal range, or missed, or the control of the spread didn't line up with the supposed amount of dmg (which would tie back to the angle of the attack). Movement vectors would probably be included in the auto calculation of what's "optimal" for that state of the character.
My point is, I'd want the info given, but also auto-analyzed to as big of a degree as possible. Lower the knowledge skill floor, w/o lowering the execution skill floor.
Also, the "optimal" in this case would be per weapon, so if the build still fails even when you're "fully optimal" then the person would know that the build doesn't match.
And I think this is the core difference here. I want the reverse
Obviously lottery winners can keep winning in pvp if their info extrapolations are correct, but, as you know - I'm completely fine with that and consider it as "it should be this way".
Human enemy should be at roughly the same difficulty as high difficulty pve, but I think that in an equally-matched pvp fight (mechanical-skill-wise) that can only be reached if some of the details about your enemy are hidden. And it's on both of the opponents to try and bridge that knowledge gap with their own knowledge skill.
Well, I'm probably done for the day, but a reminder of one thing.
In general, I don't come from the same experience space as Noaani, and from the posts that I've seen, we don't agree on much in design.
I've got no issue with your perspective, I am fine with it, I just hoped that you understand that what you're asking for has the exact same result as the thing Steven says 'no' to, and some people in this thread have opposed over its long life.
It has always been that the combat log is where players get the information from, the game doesn't have to send anything that can't be seen visually, so as soon as you say 'well I want all of the information that is relevant, put in a combat log', you have what people are opposing (assuming they even understood what Combat Trackers actually do).
If someone is ok with a text file that has 400+ instances of 'all the information you need relative to your machinegun shot', but not okay with 'Your Hitrate was 72%, your overall DPS was 11280', then they don't have an issue with 'DPS Meters', they have an issue with programmers.
Those people will probably never Excel.
snrrrkkk, haha