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
People aren't willing to share this information most of the time.
This is why meta's propogate. It's easier to just not take people along that have builds you don't have experience with, than dealing with people claiming you are being toxic when all you are doing is trying to post-mortem the run.
Edit to add; the group of players that I personally consider most toxic in MMORPG's are those that refuse to put any effort in to being involved in groups or raids. Games would be inherently better expirences if these people simply stuck to offline games - not that I am pointing to any specific posters or anything.
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."
couldn't have said this better myself, spot on.
"Out of touch.
Not every player gets to loot. The drops are numbered. The leader decides who gets what."
Honestly sounds like you are out of touch tbh, how you dont see having a damage meter (plus other meters Healing meter / CC meter / Dispell meter etc, baffles me how you cant see this being a good thing for this kind of large scale game. What i see is someone so blinded with hateful rage against WoW that anything even remotely close to WoW's successful methods will be instantly rejected. Just FYI WoW itself posts its own Damage meter every season patch to show which DPS class is at the top and which is at the bottom, and has been doing this for many expacs now, so the whole "wow addon" excuse is basically fake news lmao
You've just discovered that your time is valuable.
If other people are coming up with metas you disagree with (including the possibility that they might have used software to track the game data contrary to game policy), you're free to copy them, but if you think you might have an untested secret weapon that they didn't account for, but it's not worth your time to test and confirm manually, you have all the power to stick to your secret weapon anyway, and just hope it pays off for you. Same for everyone else around you.
That's a luxury you can only get in a game that doesn't make information access and analysis easy.
People who do write software to try and circumvent server-only information and read hidden client information value their own time too btw. Which is why third-party tools tend to be scuffed and a pain to calculate worthwhile data from in the early years of development. You can deny that reality and just pretend technology autosolves everything, but in my experience, there's a ton of stuff that flies under the radar even when people datamine the shit out of everything.
EDIT: It's just easy to be in denial about that reality when 90% of MMOs cave and make all data for analysis readily available anyway.
"Play the way I've determined to be optimal in order to earn the right to exist in my presence, or don't play at all; your lack of effort to impress me is toxic."
What a fucking princess.
How about I put effort into the groups that bother to communicate and theorycraft the way I like and you fuck right off if all you can do is compare epeens and circlejerk about how little fun and variety you have left in your hyperoptimised game, and exclude everyone who doesn't conform to your implicit standards?
Your posting here has taken a sharp turn towards toxic.
Not sure if you realize it, but that is exactly what you are saying to me here; You are telling me that I have to play the way you want me to play, not the way I want to play.
You are suggesting I am a "fucking princess" for what you think I am saying (not what I am saying, by the way), yet you are literally saying the same thing to me.
As a point to make, in regards to this comment; WoW is the most analyzed MMO that has ever been - and yet people still find out new things about the game years later.
Having access to the information quickly does not mean you have all the data instantly - you still need to check each individual build. As an individual build takes weeks to check properly, and as we are talking about how builds interact with each other in a raid setting, even in WoW, less than 10% of everything has ever been actually checked.
As an actual response to this point;
I've never met anyone that is even remotely close to what you are talking about here.
When it comes to pickup groups in EQ2, everyone I know only cared if they thought their group was capable of running the content they had in mind. If they thought they were fine, no one at all cared about the class or build of people - other than in regards to what alterations it meant people needed to make to how they play (some tank builds required different types of heals, some tanks built threat faster but ended up with an unshakeable hold on mobs, things like that).
In Archeage, people just stuck to the meta, because you wouldn't be invited to groups if you weren't one of the classes.
You can have your opinion on how you would like things to be, but I live in the real world, and talk about how things are in that real world. In the real world, people don't want to have that discussion you are talking about every time they run group content. If they had to have it, they would be able to run significantly less content.
That is what is holding your ideal back. You are saying people should spend time talking instead of running content - most people would rather run more content. That is both why in a game like Archeage people only invite people with a meta build, and also why in a game like Archeage people only run with a meta build.
It just means more content, which means more fun for most people.
I don't understand what you're correcting here. Talking about other people's playstyle and experience level is how you find out whether players are "capable of running the content they had in mind."
How else would you do it in a game without DPS meters?
You don't have to. But then you don't really get to be disappointed if the person you end up with isn't capable of doing what you expected them to do. That's on you for being too careless to have that conversation when you don't have an Add-On to do the talking for you.
That's the risk you take by making all your expectations implicit. It's up to you whether you invest the time at the start to confirm that you're on the same page (or ignore everyone who doesn't confirm to implicit meta standards), or if you spend those few extra sentences before allowing a new player into your group (e.g. because you're missing a member from your standard party) Investing that time into communication to make expectations explicit is like investing into damage compensation insurance.
Is it? Is it fun for you to be quietly disappointed every time a no-name player you're accepting into your party is not performing the way you were expecting? Is it worth not having to talk to people? Cause that's what constantly ends up happening in games where implicit expectations are encouraged.
Players have deeper expectations than just performance. They care about playing at different speeds, using different playstyles. If none of that ever gets expressed, the vast majority of gameplay time is spent frustrated about not being on the same page with the people you're playing with. I can tell, because what always happens 1-2 hours after those awkward mismatched parties is that either one person blows up with insults, or they just quiety split up disappointed with the events of the last 1-2 hours, and repeat the process until they run into a guild or party they connect with by coincidence. Then repeat that whole loop several times over until they have enough people when their primary parties are offline. It's so much unnecessary disappointment when you could just be talking about what you want from the start.
More =/= better. Players just take the path of least resistance and don't stop to reconsider whether there might be ways to achieve better results, because the meta game loop is "backed by the numbers" and it's the default solution with the fastest way to "do more." That doesn't make it the better choice.
Less effortless access to metagame data would be a great start to disrupt those bad default habits.
Proof: Have you noticed that literally only the people here defending automation and effortless accurate metagame data access are the ones also defending antisocial cog-in-the-machine gameplay? Does that not give you pause?
I prefer to ascertain peoples capability by their actual output, rather than their build and gearscore. I'd also rather ascertain peoples capability by their actual output than by what they have to say about themselves.
You keep talking about this conversation - in over two decades of playing MMORPG's, I've never seen that conversation actually happen. It isn't needed - people want an easier method, one that gives them more assurance. That is why actual data is what most players use in most MMORPG's, and when that isn't available, build/gearscore is what is used.
You think talking to them is going to tell you that would have been the case?
This is why objective data is good. If we are planning on running some content and have questions about our group, we run some "pre-content". On the very rare occasion when that player isn't looking up to it, we don't continue to the planned content.
In Archeage, we look at the players build and gearscore - that tells us if they are capable of running the content or not. There are no more questions to be had.
Yes, this is my point.
You wanting things to change will not mean things will change. Things are the way they are - we need to work within that. Trying to go in opposition to how things are simply will not be successful.
Using a meta is always going to be least resistance. Using a combat tracker is going to be more effective. If we are talking about reality, I do not see scope for a third.
Saying: "In over two decades of massively multiplayer games I have never come across conversations about aligning players' goals in forming a party, let alone had the idea occur to myself," and not even beginning to self-reflect about that is perplexingly absurd to me. I know you'll clarify and backtrack about different situations than dungeon-grouping now, but you're effectively telling me that you're treating the game's community as numbers, and think that's the way to play an MMO that should be encouraged and enabled by the game's design.
Build/gearscores also don't exist in all MMOs. You've got what the intergalactic call "a very planetary mindset", Noaani.
Yes, but you can shape what the options for the path of least resistance are, and make them more conducive to engaging, satisfactory player interaction.
Stop looking at the negatives and look at how it can be a huge positive, you can practice and see what builds work, what skill rotations work, testing out augs and different talents
People worried about people being “toxic” is a piss poor argument, toxic people will be toxic even without trackers or addons
You can do all of that by looking at the actual game while playing it. And take notes and write out spreadsheets, if you need more detailed analysis. None of that requires the game to summarise all of its data for you into a neat result. You're essentially circumventing everything about theorycrafting and experimenting with your class & build that's fun, and letting the devs hand you the solution.
that way if a raid is failing due to dps its upto the raid leader to actually find out why not just boot said lowest person or berate them
It isn't that I have never seen it happen, it is that I have never heard of it happening.
None of this is to say I am treating the games population as numbers. If I am looking for someone and don't have someone that can fill that gap in my guild or friends list, I simply state what role I am looking for, and what content.
There is no more discussion that needs to happen - there is barely any more conversation that *could* happen.
If I am looking for someone for a guild, there is obviously a lot more conversation that happens. That is when we talk about what that player expects, what the guild expects etc. But for a pickup group - we just want to get in to the content. Yes, but an equivlent does.
I've yet to see a game that doesn't have some form of character builds, but if a game doesn't have gearscore, you can probably see what gear a player has in general via some other method. I'd be interested to see an MMORPG in which you have no ability at all to see what kind of gear another player has.
I mean, look at Ashes - it won't have gearscore (as far as I can see). But you will have buffs on your character that are based on the gear you have, so players can very easily use that.
This isn't a "planetary mindset", this is understanding the core concepts behind MMORPG design. Not understanding the design itself - understanding why the design is the way it is.
Without going in to any detail - any MMORPG that wants even a modest amount of success will give players some manner of showing how good their gear is - to many players this is their version of cosmetics. They don't care about what their character looks like, they aren't showing off their fashion sense - they are showing off their in game accomplishments.
Many players wish to do this, and so MMORPG's will always allow them a means to do so - even if it is only a general means of showing it off.
It is to the detriment of any given MMORPG to not have a means to do this, and so they will always have it in some form.
If it isn't an outright ability to inspect, it could be a gearscore. If it isn't a gearscore, it could be an icon with the general quality of gear the character is using. If it isn't that, it will be something else - but it will always be something. Cool.
Explain to me what that path of least resistance is. In Ashes, what will be easier than targeting the potential groupmate, looking at their build (I would expect there to be other means to get more information on a build than this - such as class buffs), and looking at their armor buff?
Because that is what the path of least resistance in Ashes will be if combat trackers don't exist.
Again, I am talking about the actual real world. You agree that players will take the path of least resistance - explain to me what an easier path looks like in the real world.
It's pretty clear a lot of the people posting on this thread don't have any clue what they are talking about.
And I'm used to simply asking people from my guild to fight me and get a direct response from both sides on what is strong or not. My guildmates would've fought dozens/hundreds of the same class as me, so they'd know whether I was fighting better than others or not. So we'd fight each other, while I attempt different approaches or builds.
And once I did become stronger than what they had experienced in the past, I'd try that gameplay against other players (both from my guild and from enemy groups). And I'd get direct feedback from them as well, because I love to respect and talk to my enemies. And with time I'd get to a point where I was in fact better at my class than all the others.
And in cases where I wasn't, I'd simply go to the person who was better than me and would ask them for pointers. And due to my respect of them, I'd get a very good response back.
I've made countless friends and acquaintances this way, quite often from the enemy side as well. None of this would be the case if I simply needed to look at numbers, after hitting some mobs. And I've seen a shitton of people become waaaay better players through the same path - all w/o meters, trackers or dps dummies.
And I know you'll say that L2 was a shitty game, so my experience doesn't matter at all, but I'd simply say that I don't see Ashes being anywhere closer to EQ/WoW than it will be to L2, so I'd imagine my experience will be closer to the experience of Ashes players than it is to the experience of WoW/EQ ones.
I just love that you consider yourself entitled to tell other players that if they don't make enough of an effort to adjust their playstyle to the objective meta standards, they're not qualified for multiplayer games and should stick to singleplayer games; meanwhile you're too antisocial to have a conversation with a non-guild player about what you plan to do together, and consider the very idea of ensuring you're on the same page outlandish. But apparently that's not a probematic trait for mutliplayer gaming at all.
- Expected clear pace/path/speed.
- Preliminary check-in about strategy for the encounter; if it matches, that should be good enough; if there are disagreements, which might just be due to different setups, you can work out further if there is a middle ground that works.
- If you want to keep expectations extra clear, you can then either qualify any proof for performance ability you would like to see, or if it's not important enough to test/confirm it, you can point out how you would define an incompatibility and how you would identify it during the encounter, and discuss if you'd be willing to regroup and retry, or if you'll be splitting up if a certain benchmark doesn't get matched. That way they'll know the hard thresholds they'll need to exceed.
Off the top of my head, I can name Regnum and DaoC. I also know I have played several other games where there either wasn't a gear score at all, or at the very least you'd have to ask players to share it with you, so there would be a hook for some amount of communication, though I'd personallly obviously consider that still way too much automation of theorycrafting.
They can show off their gear by wearing it, or talking about it. More importantly, they can show it off by being more successful in combat.
If no one else has a gear score or DPS parse score to throw around, you'll use the options that exist.
Again you're treating things as essential just because you're used to them.
Mistrusts happened from master looters, or loot that was ninja’d after end tier raids
🤦🏻♂️
So instead of a DPS meter, you want people to say how fast they kill things and potentially have to prove it?
Which will affect the default player interaction dynamics in all kinds of ways.
Again, proof: Other games I've played, plus the fact that pretty much everyone in this thread defending DPS meters is loudly proclaiming their disdain for players who don't meet their expectations. There is a deep-rooted need for more explicitly discussed expectations in group-making, and it comes out when automation of group-finding communication gets limited.
That's an interesting point of view and thank you for sharing it.
I think the default expectations for most people is the successful completion of the content you are grouping for. I think the vast majority of people wont complain to much about damage or healing numbers after a successful raid, if anything people may offer to help those that perform lower.
The disdain, infighting and calling people out happen when that expectation is failed. People feel like they are wasting their time and they don't want to continue doing so. That may involve removing people who are not performing well or disbanding the group to try again later. Meters allow the first to chosen more often. Rather than just DPS, if there aren't enough interrupts, a meter can show who needs to step it up. A healer spent the whole fight DPSing because other healers were overhealing until they were oom. Meters can show that to. A good meter can even show when the tank pressed cooldowns and how much damage they took.
In short Meters are an excellent tool that allows raid leaders to make objective decisions. Without available metrics the difficulty to make a similar decision is much higher and more time consuming. I think this will isolate groups even more than the design strategy of the game currently does.
Yes, the DPS meter gives you accurate information to determine who the problem was, but automating that process removes an essential part of paying attention to the actual game's feedback in order to track and improve your performance.
In a game without a combat tracker, you can achieve the same result by encouraging people to self-evaluate honestly.
Compared to their competition, better leaders lead more successfully, better players improve more, and better teams coordinate more impressively, if everyone doesn't get perfect analysis neatly packaged after every encounter.
And with that I think I'll leave this thread, the back-and-forth doesn't seem to find and end.
My final stand would be: Have an open mind.
The mainstream has been dominated by embracing automation and giving authority to an identifiable objective superiority to a meta by giving access to reliable perfect information for a long time. Just consider that it might primarily appeal to you because it's what you're used to, and perhaps a game with more ambiguity, variety, manual data anaylysis, and communication instead of implicit expectations might be better than you imagine it.
Someone cluelessly said that noobs will get loot without a DPS tool showing who performed.
As if this is yet another lobby mmo that randoms will raid in an instance.
As if every raid member gets awarded loot when the boss goes down.
Raids will know each members capabilities due to long time performance on pve pvp and economy participation within the guild.
All the "benefits" that you claim that dps meters will bring dont even fit AoCs stracture.
Totally out of touch on what this owpvp mmo is.
Keep talking.
Okay. For example, in Guild Wars 2, there is a raid boss called Dhuum. This is probably the most difficult raid in the entire game. 2 or 3 players must do something else than DPS at some point. When the time comes, they have to stop DPSing the boss and get in the air to collect orbs, or else we all die. And this is the most satisfying raid boss to kill because it is so hard to teamwork in this scenario.
Having varying raid encounters is challenging, and each individual has a role. But comes a point where players will find a way to succeed the raid and if the solution is to free a DPSer to do another mechanic, then be it.
You should check GW2 raids mechanics, they are really well made and thought.
From what I've understood of Noaani's and Azherae's explanations, a good tracker would give info about this mechanic. It'd say which players had to do the mechanic and would say how quickly they reacted, and how long it took them to do it.
Tracker sees all, records all, parses all of that info and then tells you exactly who did what and at what time. And then it'd be on the raid to decide how to solve the issue, if there was one.
I've said it before, but, as I see it, this leads directly to the speeding up of content devouring by players. This then requires more dev time to produce more content, while at least a fraction of that content is now so difficult/complex that only people with trackers can even start to see what mechanics/timings they missed during the encounter.
And Noaani also has a very precise attitude towards the content's design. He's ok with not seeing mechanics directly, because he's used to several of them being invisible cause they're stacked onto each other. So the only physical way for players to even know that a mechanic happened is to go through the tracker's log and be like "ohhh, at this moment the boss used 10 abilities all at once and one of them dmged out off-tank by slightly too much, which made our healer spend 0.5% more mana than was required, which inevitably lead to our deaths 5 minutes later".
It's the shit like that in raid mmos, that makes everyone who likes those mmos always think that you can't play a game w/o a tracker. Because, yes, you cannot play a game when you literally can't see a mechanic happening.
Tracker players want to fly a plane in the middle of a cloud and go only by their instruments, while those who dislike trackers want to fly a plane. Both activities are really difficult, but one relies way more on the tools at hands, rather than simply on player skill. And obviously flying w/o visuals is harder, which gives the tracker people big enough of an ego to tell normal fliers that they shouldn't even fly, if they're not ready to go blind while doing it.
And when there's a rival raid competing with you to kill the same boss. It's extremely useful to know who keeps blowing the mechanic and wiping the raid, intentionally or otherwise.
Dude. You were literally talking about not needing a combat tracker when learning to duel well. You are way out in left field. Just sit this one out and maybe learn from other people's experience.
And I didn't mean just you, people who have never raid lead or been in a competitive PvE environment really can't speak to the usefulness or lack thereof of combat meters.
My response was also in the context of learning one's own character's limits/strengths/powers. And all of that can be done in a pvp setting w/o trackers, because you have a direct and immediate feedback to all the things you're doing. And you also get to completely control your target's responses/buffs/movements/etc. None of that is fully true in a pve environment, because there's only so much that the devs let you control in that situation.
I've even seen people be toxic in the forums! And there is no DPS meter here...
This has been a recurring theme for about 200 thread pages.
I very much want the ability to measure and optimize my own performance.
I do not want in any way the game to rely on such optimizations, to need that kind of peak performance, or encounters to require addons to complete.
I just like to make more damage because its damage
Again, if all you are interested in is knowing which is harder/better/faster/stronger, your method is slower, but it works.
If you want to know why the above is the case, your method simply doesn't offer anything.
Basically, you and I have different goals. You want to create a strong build to play, I want to understand why the build is strong.