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
Boring is subjective. I'd say it's boring and unimmersive to be examining a dev-created tool after battles to figure out new tactics.
As far as arguments against DPS meters.
1. Some people will use DPS meters to bully people.
This is 100% true. I would argue however that even without DPS meters people will get bullied for performing badly. It may be harder to tell who is performing poorly in a PUG, but organized groups will figure it out.
2. Some people will use DPS meters to optimize the characters damage. This will result in things like the Devs using optimized numbers as benchmarks for designing PvE content.
Also 100% true, but a lack of DPS meters wont change this. The top performing groups and people will use meters. As a tool the information that it provides is to useful for self improvement. Since the best are doing it, (or somehow reaching a similar level without it,) upper PvE content will be based around it regardless.
3. People will chase the numbers and become bad players by ignoring mechanics and causing extra work for healers.
100% true. But DPS are going to locked in and ignore the mechanics anyway. Healers will have to heal that guy who stood in fire or let him die. It wont be any different if you remove the meter. If you have the meter, DPS will just brag about their numbers after the fight while the healers take a couple of deep breaths.
Though I'll disagree with #3 100%.
It's blatantly obvious when a meter is available for all to see during a fight. Without them this isn't nearly the issue. Bad players are bad, but meters change play directly and immediatley for the e-peen obsessed.
*** could that be a compromise? The timeliness of the report?
A few points.
Every MMO ever has had combat trackers be used, most of them from day one of the game being live.
I agree people shouldn't be looking at a combat tracker during combat, that is a misuse of them.
Combat trackers are used for more than just combat, despite the name.
He primary use of a combat tracker - in terms of hours spent - is on character builds, not on content.
Combat trackers are the only tool we have for checking developer work. I have personally used them in many games in the past to show developers where they got things wrong, and in most cases these things have been fixed.
Despite all of this, combat trackers dk not give players access to any information we don't already have access to.
Fron my perspective, it isn't about designing a content thst is hard without trackers, it is about attracting people to top end content that aren't also people interested in self-improvement.
The kinds of people that want to be on top in a game strive to be the best they can. A combat tracker is a part of that. Thus, people running top end content will have a tracker.
Designing an encounter that is capable of being killed by people that haven't used a tracker to inform their character and raid builds, but that is also challenging to those that have - yeah, that isn't possible in a game that allows for player directed builds.
I dunno who you've been playing with or what MMOs you've played, but "every mmo ever" is definitely not true.
I've played MMOs for over 35 years now, and the ones I've played I can promise you, basically not a single person was using DPS meters because there would be no point, because they're not structured in a way where DPS meters would have any purpose.
I've also managed to play WoW, a game that definitely DOES benefit from third party (imo cheating) software like trackers, at the highest pvp and pve levels since vanilla without using a single add-on. So saying they're "required" is also, obviously not true, unless I'm just magic or a god (I'm not. I'm mediocre as hell).
Hopefully we won't have DPS meters, because we won't need them. If you want to measure the damage per second you're doing on a target dummy, for some reason, I don't see a problem with that. But with dynamic gameplay, emergant abilities based on node/event, etc etc, that we've seen from previews so far, I just don't see how knowing your DPS is going to be even remotely useful in this game.
Sounds like a skill issue, tbh. If you can't handle the game without relying on a third-party program to hold your hand, then that's a 'you problem'.
I care more about what the average players are doing. And I would rather not have the devs creating tools that denegrate the below-average players.
Boy will it be fun stealing your RBs...
Or are you still going on about asking for DPS meters in an mmo in which instanced content will be so limited and wont have that much of an impact in your overall character/gear progression, and which will certainly wont be designed the same way that gear/achievement treadmill mmos are designing their raids?
Every MMO ever has had combat trackers be used, most of them from day one of the game being live.
This is FALSE.
And not only that, I'd call it a blatant lie concocted to push a motive.
It is true.
They were being used for Meridian59 during its first week of being live, and we're used on MUD's before that.
You perhaps need to understand - a combat tracker is not just a tool to measure DPS - even though some people mistakenly call them DPS meters. You seem to be assuming this is all they do.
What they are doing is basically recording everything. You can use them to record how many pieces of ore you harvest in an hour, if you like.
This is why they exist in every MMO. it isn't just about DPS, it is about getting any objective data at all that any given player may want to know for any possible reason.
It's pseudo science to make certain ppl (that havent gotten their inrl priorities straight) feel like they are a fountain of knowledge and uncontestent powah. Hardly necessary, even for competitive players, whose self image and value isnt dependend on a 0.00001% advantage, therefore (still only in their own internal dialogues) making them better than others.
Necessary isn't the point.
The point is, competitive players will have it, because it does give you (at the very least) an edge.
I would argue that it doesn't make one a fountain of knowledge, but it does provide benefits.
It is the fact that it provides these benefits, in combination with the fact that many people will run them regardless, that is the reason why I believe the best thing Intrepid could do is build one in to the game.
The only people that will use it to that extent have received my description already.
Know why?
Because it's an owpvp mmo. But go for 300 pages.
Class balancing for what?
1v1 duel
Small scale random pvp
Large scale siege pvp
Raiding
Grinding xp/loot
Gathering
Class balancing for what? This isnt ESO.
As long as each class can offer players a unique playstyle that they identify with and can fill succussfuly one or a few of the above, players will be happy with their characters even if they arent good at the majority of the above.
Can my party kill another party with me in it? If yes - there's your balance. If no - we gotta do better.
Don't need any meters to do better, because absolute majority of parties will misplay more than will simply be missing some dps values or something. So as long as we misplay less - we'll win. And there's your balance.
This just promotes laziness and people to get away with minimal effort.
A DPS meter will filter these weasels out.
Can tell people haven’t done high level raids before and it shows
^ this
The DPS meter will show the blokes doing less damage than the tank/healers but still getting the same rewards 😂
Maybe it's your build. Maybe it's that an aspect of combat mechanics doesn't work how you thought it worked. Maybe it's that an aspect of combat mechanics doesn't work how Intrepid thought.
An experienced player can probably tell a class isn't balanced without needing to use a combat tracker. If all you are interested in if you find yourself playing an underpowered class is knowing this to be true and then changing to a different class, then a tracker may well be of no use to you.
On the other hand, if you are interested in finding out why that class is underpowered, in trying to find a way to make it not underpowered, or in trying to get the developer to fix the class, a combat tracker is essential.
I fall in to this second catagory. If something is broken, I won't just move on, I will try and get it fixed.
I have yet to see an MMORPG where the top end players didn't know more about the games combat system than the people that made said combat system.
Out of touch.
Not every player gets to loot. The drops are numbered. The leader decides who gets what.
"This"
Out of touch as well.
If you refuse to do that, your alternate options are to stick to a fixed group, or insist on some variation of a meta build. Both come at the disadvantage of restricting your pool of potentially skilled allies.
That's what a socially interactive game loop looks like. Something that is foreign to WoW players, as your anxiety about being left without add-ons is betraying painfully obviously.
Or you just do the math yourself and test in the field in practice. If you don't care enough to do that, you don't care enough to play better. Which is fine, too.
Out of touch.
Top end guilds (basically all top end guilds, though not some that think they are top end) award guild members for participation - that is what DKP is. That DKP is then used to bid on items that drop.
I have never seen any top end guild run with "leader decides" loot. I've seen some people try to run a guild like this, but any player that is worth having in an actual top end guild would have no interest at all in a guild with this kind of loot system.
It would take weeks just to collate the inputs after a reasonable length raid, let alone any actual math happening.
We are literally talking tens or hundreds of thousands of events, each event having at least 6 different inputs.