Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
No. I am the guy that knows that only good players and good attutide make the difference. The rest is a waste of time and a poor excuse of salaries.
Very few coaches inspire and lead. The rest of the 'data team' are nonsense.
And remember, reality, real bodies are nothing like a keyboard and graphics.
Turning games into sience may bring views on youtube but the truth of it is you are kidding yourselves.
Noaani, I figure will still be using the big abilities with the long cast times when the platforms bring up the randoms to trigger the windows for the mechanics.
So if we all use shorter posts we should get it down quick while still getting a good content rank.
I'm gonna need a timeline of when zRanger and Adrenaline were effective in L2 relative to its content cycles. Once I have that, I can deploy the web crawlers. Any other precursors to these two like walker, also good, don't wanna waste crawlers on the wrong targets.
Nah, you gotta get used to my full form first, only after that is my Joker aspect a relief. Comedy is about subverting expectations.
Thanks for the confirm though.
We should use the "Chess players vs TCG players" positioning this time to start, according to George and Noaani, so I'll get that set up. As usual, NiKr just has to stand opposite Mag, tho, which might complicate things.
You see, with those pub pundits, they can theorize all they like, they could be right, they could be wrong. With them, it doesn't matter because what they come up with isn't going to be put in to practice.
With us, when we think we have something worth considering, it gets put in to practice. Why would I be looking at tracker data if I can instead be contesting someone in game?
This just goes even more towards showing your lack of understanding on the matter. The bulk of ones interaction with a combat tracker and the data from it happens outside of the game, usually while you don't have access to the game itself.
If I'm able to play the game, I'm probably playing the game. If I am looking at data, it is because I can't play the game in that moment - perhaps I am on my commute to work or some such.
Essentially, combat tracker data is a way to interact with the game and learn more about the game during a time of the day/week/month where you wouldn't otherwise be able to interact with the game at all.
So really, rather than it being us sitting there parsing while others get freeholds, it is both of us contending for a freehold followed by you doing nothing until you are online next, and those of us with trackers looking over data to learn more about the game before we are able to come back next.
@JamesSunderland do you remember the 21st night of september (which is coming up btw) when you first heard of those two?
Considering that the only TCG I've ever played and/or were even interested in is Artifact, Mag's opinion on it would be the deciding factor.
I'd explain the whole strat but it's better if some people don't have to think about it anyway.
EQ2, by all data currently available to me, is a Chess style game for PvE. When you want to make the game more interesting, you change the board. You introduce special rules for different zones or squares. You change the starting configurations of the pieces. The challenge for a player who likes this (Noaani, a few others who normally leave discussion to Noaani):
1) Figure out all the new board zone rules, and when the board expands or shrinks
2) React to this by deciding what pieces to move where, either beforehand, or where to put them after the board change triggers an automove.
FFXI is a 'TCG' style game for PvE. The board usually matters much less, when you want to do something interesting, you 'add an OP card', 'change a rule that normally is there for balance', or alter the function of the limiting resource pool in the game. The challenge for a player who likes this (Mag, George, Depraved sorta, me):
1) Figure out what the new Card does
2) Adapt known strategy to the fact that a weakness that the enemy normally has that keeps them in check, has been removed, or to the fact that your resource pool acts differently
Trackers work on both game types, but 'TCG side' people don't seem to care about all the things that make stuff easier for them, and 'Chess' style people don't seem to care about the dynamism that PvP brings to the TCG style. Understandable.
NiKr, because you want a hard 'TCG style' game, but you're talking to a 'Chess style enthusiast' half the time, you end up trying to ask 'can't this be hard anyway?' But you always offer TCG-style suggestions for difficulty.
If Ashes is TCG-style as a game, it will have less interesting pure owPvE (any situation where no conflict happens counts as this). Mag can stand on the 'but it's not less skillful!' side. NiKr can stand on the 'ffs Mag you're not listening' side.
Ofc you can all just ignore this, I'll reposition everyone whenever George reminds me to.
The current challenge ofc is 'Figuring out what Steven was trying to sell when he said his stuff'. He talks about stuff that means the game can supposedly please both sides, but on the owPvE at least, it kinda can't consistently do both. Our 'Hybrid Combat' offers no clues either, and Tumok told us nothing because WoW is mostly Checkers.
90% of this thread has been 'what is Steven's actual product tho?' and then back and forth between these two 'camps'. Why stop now?
When i first heard of them they didn't even had a proper name and the initial "3rd party tool project" kinda branched out to different directions with different names as time went by(zranger/adrenaline and walker being the main names), but the big datamines and first source pack leaked(C4 version) that gave origin to them were around ~2006...
First time i remember seeing it with the L2Walker name was around 2006,
First time i remember seeing it with the Adrenaline name was around 2007,
First time i remember seeing it with the Zranger name was around 2008.
They had similar functions as they mostly shared the same base, but still had their peculiarities and things they were better for and things that they had exclusively.
Aren't we all sinners?
Uninvolved from the fact that i heard only about just negative Discussions from others when it was involved. Jepp, the World of Warcraft Community is in fact "THAT" toxic, hahahahahahah. x'D
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
✓ Guild is " Balderag's Garde " for now. (German)
In video games, we lack most of the senses and cues we would rely on to determine health of prey in the real world. Which is why video games have visual health meters.
We have visual health meters because of static combat and the inability to actually wound a target. In hack and slash games you tend not to have health bars. Merely have limbs removed, heads removed, wounds shown etc. 😀
In Hack and Slash games, the TTK is exceedingly small. Also, doesn't really matter what abilities you use.
Button mash enough and your target will die.
RPGs are intended to be more strategic than that.
We don't lack the senses. Visual cues and hearing anguished cries are enough stimulus in a video game. Health bars are quite redundant in a modern game.
List some Online RPGs that have no health bars.
And then describe what they use instead of health bars.
Monster hunter has no health bars and monster hunter works out well. Not sure you'd class monster hunter as a rpg though.
I see a health meter. And that health meter is a visual indication of Health that is there because in video games we lack senses - like pain.
(Same reason there is a Stamina meter)
I would think that is what we are talking about as well. Especially true considering we should be able to see exact health percentages of those in your group or raid.
So a talent tree isn't going to say +20/40/60 shadow damage, its just going to say + min/mid/max shadow damage? Then what, you get a +shadow damage item and it says (+something in between min and mid?) lol
You pick up a new sword and it has no stats, no swing damage, no attack speed? I mean, those are the things that make it "better" than another sword. If you don't have the numbers you can't accurately compare.
You get in a fight and there is no health bar? You have no idea that the monster can kill you in 4 more hits because you don't know that you have 400 health and the monster is doing 101 damage. You also don't know the ability giving you -2 received damage will turn it into 5 more hits. And this is supposed to be better?
I mean I can understand some of the arguments against DPS meters, kind of. Really the main argument is that they don't like when people prioritize DPS over other mechanics in the game. So I guess they will take a level 1 person then, because DPS doesn't matter? Oh wait, we can't have numbers, so we can't have levels. Any numerical metric that indicates if something is better than another thing is "bad"? So you take any player that you see and immediately they join the group and no one has any way to tell if they are helping or not?
Math is about ACCURACY.
People arguing about removing all numbers from the game are advocating that players have no accurate metric to determine relative strengths and weaknesses of any particular decision they make. This will just make players blind and frustrated because they don't know what decisions they can make to make them better.
MAYBE there are a couple areas of the game where this blindness is a good thing, and makes the play more fun. But lets not get carried away here.
Its just, if the point is to prevent any possibility of a dps meter, then its necessary to look at the network traffic.
Since data is sent from the server, to your computer, about how much damage or healing you did to update your client on the world status, as a end user you actually have access to that, because it is data on your computer.
Even if the screen doesnt show anything to us as a player. Its a very challenging problem to keep information private.
And the reason is because, in video games, we lack most of the senses we would use in the real world to help us determine health and when something is close to death. And visual cues are the quickest and easiest way to help us determine that.
You don't need to do maths to determine that. It's easy enough to just look at a meter and see dwindling health. And you don't really need to "do maths" to know that a hit of 75 dmg is greater than a hit of 10 dmg.
If there were no sources of heals there would be no health bars - even health regen is heals. If stamina was unlimited there would be no stamina bar. Same with mana. Its why few games had health bars on the mega drive. They just had multiple lives.
You also don't need to "do maths" to place more points in a desired stat.
I don't need to "do maths" to recognize that a sword has a Shadow stat on it rather than a Fire stat.
I also don't really need to "do maths" to know that +75 Shadow is higher than +10 Shadow.
Health bars don't have to display numbers.
Steven says that Ashes Health bars will not display numbers. Especially not on subjects outside of your group.
You won't necessarily have to see numbers to see how much of an impact an attack had on your Health bar.
We can expect visual Health meters in Ashes. They won't necessarily be numerical. And we probably won't be using "maths" to determine how much damage we did to our opponents - especially not in PvP.
That is part of Steven's vision of Risk.
Ideally, we should be Roleplaying rather than rollplaying.
I'm not aware of people using absolutes like "any" - that is something you are adding in order to concoct a strawman argument.
Irrelevant.
Who advocated removing all numbers?
How else would you know, for example, if adding 10 constitution will give you more HP than adding 100 raw HP?
Math is literally required to min/max, as without it you don't actually know of you are min/maxing at all.