Don't project your WoW experience on me. The hardcore mmo players play other games because WoW is so casual. It's been proven in those games that dps meters aren't really needed. Good players don't need to use meters as a crutch.
Honestly... Folks who've only played WoW, need to stop pushing this issue so hard. this is not WoW. there are SO many other games out there that didn't ever have dps meters and did just fine.
If a raid leader can't tell the efficiency of the group without a dps meter to tell them exact number,s then they need to work on their skills as a raid leader... end of the day, you either do the raid as a group, or you don't. you inspect your team's gear, and skills used, you work with folks to understand what they can/can't do, you work with folks and teach them the rotations they need to learn. interact with people and mentor folks, and you won't need to see exactly how much dps each person is doing, cause you'll beat the boss and it won't matter at that point.
[...]interact with people and mentor folks, and you won't need to see exactly how much dps each person is doing, cause you'll beat the boss and it won't matter at that point.
Actually that's not quite true, it all depends on how the boss mechanics work. Also there's other MMOs than WoW out there that have dps meters. I'm all for dps meters, at least a personal one, that only displays your own dps for yourself, imo one really fun component of an MMO is the theorycrafting and testing of abilities.
Apart from this whole discussion though, I think IS very well knows that they can't implement boss mechanics such as dps checks if they don't allow any kind of dps meters, so I think not having a dps meter won't be an issue in this game. I really do hope that the difficult boss fights will be very challenging.
Don't project your WoW experience on me. The hardcore mmo players play other games because WoW is so casual. It's been proven in those games that dps meters aren't really needed. Good players don't need to use meters as a crutch.
Yea of course, just like those oldschool smiths don't use hammers they just forge weapons with their bare fists like real hardcore man.
On a more serious note, WOW actually has an extremely hardcore raiding scene.
Just because 95-98% are casuals and can hardly tip over a glas of water it doesn't mean that the 2-5% of the playerbase which actually manage cutting edge archievments are bad as well.
At least the Raid design in wow has always been decent.
interact with people and mentor folks, and you won't need to see exactly how much dps each person is doing, cause you'll beat the boss and it won't matter at that point.
You may be killing the boss but it also matters how you perform doing so.
Steven Sharif said that individual boss loot and difficulty in raids will be performanced based.
So it sounds a lot like you will have loot gated behind dps checks.
Hi @StevenSharif I know you read these. First of all thank you for the beautiful game and your drive and sacrifice for this, this is a dream for most.
Regarding DPS meter, I am all with you, I think with a game thats brand new you need simplicity and a clean game. Plus it will help people to really learn the game from its core and its mechanics. The people who want dps meters are just veteran players who had it for years on other games. They will do well without it.
The thing is that many games already have a damage log, it should be easy for them to implement an easy display for it. They can make it person specific (no one can see the dmg from other people except when you are the group leader).
DPS meters have a place in games in my opinion, as long as you dont get isolated because you do mediocre dmg. Group/Raid leaders need dps meters to weed out the weak (people who dont carry their own weight if you know what i mean aka those that dont even do mediocre dmg and bring nothing else to the table)
I think that a DPS meter could be implemented without the side effects of exclusion if its a personal damage meter because it could help with a personal understanding of your build and its a necessity for theory crafting and understand the numbers better if you a trying different subclasses trying to figure out what abilities you prefer and for what situations. I believe this could be an in-between in having no DPS meter and having a DPS meter.
I'm personally against addons. Addons tend to make the content too easy, or add drama where there otherwise wouldn't be any. It's the job of the developer to make sure there's enough customization within the base UI (something like ffxiv works great).
The only argument I could see for something like a dps meter is for the most difficult content. If your team is failing content because some people are not pulling their weight, it's hard to find a solution without some of the tools a dps meter would give. I can't tell you how many times I use warcraftlogs to help my teammates improve. Steven likes talking about two sides of the sword, and the other side is that people also use warcraftlogs to just bash other players, sometimes on stuff they have no control over like their class, or race.
So for me the elitism, making the content easier, and the general boost in toxic behavior that comes with addons is not worth the good may come from their addition. I believe this scale changes depending on the difficultly of the content though. More difficult content = easier to argue for addons.
Well the game is going to scale to your skill level to some extent. So if your team is overall not good enough you won't get the hardest version. This game doesn't sound like it's going to have set rotations. So the ups and downs to what you use is up to you.
The better the player the less you going to need it, but you will have the ability to tell if people are playing sub optimally. That guy doesn't look like he's doing much, maybe i should see what he's doing. Just google what most are doing and compare to him. You could just be wrong in a game like this is going to be.
I think that having DPS and other meters is a really good way to optimize the fun out of the game. I don't consider myself a hardcore player but one of the reasons I couldn't get into WoW was because of all these meters and statistics to min/max a character. It made the game so easy for you to figure out that it left nothing for you to look forward to. You're basically a robot spamming buttons in specific rotations. It's just not interactive. This might just be my opinion but I think a good raid group would have common sense as to how to gear up and if the raid group isn't doing too well I think it's more fun to have the whole group analyze the situation and try to figure out what's going on. From personal experience I can say that not enough DPS is never really the reason a raid or dungeon fails unless it's absolutely obvious when there's a mechanic where you would have to kill something fast before it wipes the raid but something like that you can clearly figure out without a DPS meter.
If you know that your group isn't doing enough DPS to counter a specific boss mechanic that is wiping the raid, then now the question is, why are you not doing enough DPS? This is where a group would be able to use a meter to easily find why or rather quickly point a finger at someone and kick them out of the raid and that's what we're trying to avoid. There can be many reasons as to why someone wasn't doing as much DPS as someone else. Quickly pointing a finger at someone is not the right way to use the meter. If you use the meter properly, now the question should become, why is that person not doing enough DPS?
It could have been due to gear or maybe a boss mechanic that prevented the person from attacking or a debuff wasn't cleansed from the person fast enough and they died mid fight. The thing is, I think you could literally just skip the part where you actually use the meter to determine why you're not doing enough DPS and just analyze the whole situation and take all possibilities into account. By doing so, you take away from the possibility of a meter being used improperly to point a finger at someone without context. While you can make an argument that it will be more tedious or more difficult for you to min/max, and you would be right, it also makes the game more interactive. Without the DPS meter you're forced to take all possibilities into account, at least if you're a good raid group or leader. So in this scenario what you would have to do without the meter would be first look for obvious reasons that might be it. Is everyone wearing their right gear? Is anyone confused as to how the boss mechanics work? Did one of our DPS die or wasn't attacking right away? Anything that's big enough of a problem to cause a raid to wipe will be obvious even if it's the first time encountering a boss that no one has ever fought before. If you think that there's no obvious reason then it's likely due to someone being inexperience with a boss mechanic or someone that's not fulfilling their role properly and in that scenario the burden would fall under the raid leader and the commanders because it should be their duty to analyze the raid as a whole while they are fighting the raid boss. They should be able to take notice of someone that was slacking or not paying attention.
One of the main points that I've gathered from Ashes of Creation is that they are trying to bring back a little of that social aspect back into the game. Raid groups instead of just having a raid leader with 39 other people, will have to be a little more structured if they really want to be "hardcore". To make things go by quicker and easier for your guild to analyze a situation, you will have to have sub-groups withing the raid group and a commander that's in charge of that group that reports to the raid leader or something of the sorts. Then when something does wipe the raid, each commander will be in charge of keeping their own group on their toes which I think adds a fun dynamic into the mix. What if you could create your own group of 8 people within the guild and compete within your guild to be part of say, raid group A instead of raid group B. It does allow for some role-play for those that are interested in that sort of thing but it works well as an actual system for raiding as well while making the game a little bit more social or interactive.
I personally like to work for what I get because it gives a much better sense of accomplishment. I feel like meters take away from that sense of accomplishment.
Well the game is going to scale to your skill level to some extent. So if your team is overall not good enough you won't get the hardest version. This game doesn't sound like it's going to have set rotations. So the ups and downs to what you use is up to you.
The better the player the less you going to need it, but you will have the ability to tell if people are playing sub optimally. That guy doesn't look like he's doing much, maybe i should see what he's doing. Just google what most are doing and compare to him. You could just be wrong in a game like this is going to be.
There will be combat logs, and from those, combat trackers. These will be necessary for those who want to and have fun maximizing the capabilities of their class.
Visuals cannot tell the whole story in a game with gear cosmetics.
And you will need ways to track combat to effectively deal with mechanics. It’s not unusual that bosses will punish too much dps, or for them to have health thresholds for mechanics. Groups have to know when to push dps and when to shift focus.
No combat tracker means all PvE content will be less complex, and thus easier to figure out. Players like myself will use combat trackers not because it gives us an dvantage, but because it will - in time - force Intrepid to accept their use just as happened in GW2.
Imagine approaching Dark Souls or Monster Hunter with that attitude. "Unless the game forces me to parse invisible data, it's not complex enough mechanics". Ridiculous.
Dark Souls is a single player series, as far as I am aware.
I'm more concerned with having the data from my entire raid, as the key factor in all raid level content is how the raid is performing, not how the individual is.
With a limit of only 5 players, one could argue the same applies in Monster Hunter. Everyone in that game has specific individual roles, and if one of those roles isn't being performed as well as it should, it is easy to rectify. In a raid with 25 people all performing the same function, it is much harder to find the fault (note, it will never be just one player) and fix it.
It's about having perfect information, when the world is trying to convey itself as natural, breathing. Having imperfect information is part of life and informs so many decisions we make as humans, taking that uncertainty away just turns it all into a math problem.
What is wrong with perfect information?
While having imperfect information is a part of life, having perfect infromation is a part of competition.
While I'm fine without a DPS meter, how would Devs be able to balance the game without them? Would they be actively monitoring combat behind the scenes, using tools only available to GMs and such?
If you genuinely think class balance is solely based on dps, you are missing a huge part of the picture.
Class balance is, more or less based on multiple factors such as Power, Versatility, and Utility.
That means that there will be :
-class with high damage output but low versatility, low utility, (dps glass cannons)
-class with average damage output, high versatility, low utility, (solo class)
-class with average damage output, low versatility, high utility, (tank class)
-class with average damage output, but average versatility, average utility, (hybrid class)
-class with low damage output, low versatility, high utility, (support heal / control class)
etc...
And that will be balanced because they will do what they are meant to do.
DPS is only a tiny part of the balance equation !
WoW is the main reason I'm against it because this worked on older MMO's. However the foundation of what these MMO's are built upon are completely different. MMO's in the old days were built upon making friends and sticking with them no matter how much they might suck. Whereas WoW fostered a community where you abandon people who are bad to min/max your potential at winning because it is annoying to lose a week of resources.
I'm against almost anything that would make the game more akin to WoW.
WoW absolutely fostered a community where you abandoned people that were underperforming, and they had many things in place to promote this.
With only 5 players per group, you had only 3 DPS. This means if one of your DPS was performing at 75% efficiency, your whole group was only functioning at 91.6% efficiency. In Ashes, a group is 8 players, which will linely mean 6 DPS. This means if one of those players is performing at 75% efficiency, the group is still operating at 95.8% efficiency. This in itself makes it less viable to kick someone out of a group for performing lower than would be expected.
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Then there is the fact that WoW has systems in place to see you have new group members ported directly to you should you boot someone from the group. This obviously facilitates the ability to boot players that are under performing. If the penalty for booting another player and getting another one in was having to wait the time it took the player to actually get to the dungeon, then there would be far fewer people kicked out of groups in WoW, as it would be faster to continue with the lower DPS player than waiting for that new player.
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The next thing you have in WoW is the fact that the player pool for group content is essentially millions, as the systems in that game work across server. This means that if you boot someone from a group, you don't need to worry about meeting that player again, nor that players guild and friends. They are a faceless, nameless entity to you, but more importantly, you know that you are a faceless, nameless entity to them.
In Ashes, if you boot a player, that player is on your server, quite likely living in your node cluster. You will meet that player again. You will meet that players friends. You may well both have to defend your home together. This kind of connectivity means you are far more likely to spend some time helping that player than you are treating them like a disposable entity. You are also far more likely to reap some of the benefits of that assistance you are offering down the line.
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Essentially, Ashes is being designed as the perfect game to completely mitigate the issues a game like WoW has with it's community - issues some poeople erroneously contribute to combat trackers, when really they should be contributed to the entire game design of WoW and how it facilitates players treating others as disposable.
If Ashes had a dungeon finder, I would actually agree that a combat tracker wouldn't be a good idea. I would also not even consider playing, but that is besides the point.
My main reason for not wanting them is to slow down the meta so people outside the top tier players have a chance to experiment on their own before the "Best, must use or get kicked" build gets made and enforced.
Other than that i don't really care much.
The issue with this is that those builds will be posted before the game launches anyway.
The even bigger issue with that is since there is no combat tracker to test out other builds, the games meta will essentially go unchanged from launch.
This is what happened to Archeage, a game with very low combat tracker usage.
That games meta now is still almost exactly the same as it was when the game first launched in Korea in 2013.
A combat tracker allows the meta to change, no combat tracker means people will be afraid to change.
A personal dps dummy to test your builds and rotations out is as far as it should go, or make it somekind of "personal arena" that are instanced where people can test tanking / healing and dps'ing...
Even combat logging shouldn't be allowed to be "extracted" in any way using 3rd party software to a 3rd party website/program to run sims should be a bannable offense honestly.
The problem is the difference between making a rule, and being able to enforce it.
My take on the DPS meter is to remove it. As it can make encounters easier and then the development team will have to make encounters arbitrarily harder.
But I like the idea of having a target dummy that gives you a DPS meter.
I also like the idea of having a target dummy for a group DPS meter as a whole, not individual meters. This lets your 8 man party synergize as Steven said classes will play off each other to deal more damage if timed correctly.
I think that having DPS and other meters is a really good way to optimize the fun out of the game. I don't consider myself a hardcore player but one of the reasons I couldn't get into WoW was because of all these meters and statistics to min/max a character. It made the game so easy for you to figure out that it left nothing for you to look forward to. You're basically a robot spamming buttons in specific rotations. It's just not interactive.
This is an issue with the game design of WoW, not with combat trackers.
It is far more accurate to say that WoW is a game that is so easy for you to figure out it left nothing for you to look forward to, and that you are basically a robot smapping buttons in a specific rotation.
If you take the combat trackers out of that game, you are still left with that games basic design, which is where these things all come from.
If you know that your group isn't doing enough DPS to counter a specific boss mechanic that is wiping the raid, then now the question is, why are you not doing enough DPS? This is where a group would be able to use a meter to easily find why or rather quickly point a finger at someone and kick them out of the raid and that's what we're trying to avoid. There can be many reasons as to why someone wasn't doing as much DPS as someone else. Quickly pointing a finger at someone is not the right way to use the meter. If you use the meter properly, now the question should become, why is that person not doing enough DPS?
I completely agree with this last point.
You only want DPS meters to be available in situations where it is in everyones best interests to help someone that hasn't quite got it, not boot them from the group/raid.
This is why the suggestion that I have been making for over a year now (probably somewhere near the start of this thread) is that Intrepid should build a combat tracker directly in to the games client, but make it available as a guild perk, that can only track the members of that specific guild.
With this, you straight away have a combat tracker that only people that want combat tracker access will be able to use. You have a system where people that don't want input from a combat tracker simply don't have any avenue for that input to get to them. You have a system where anyone whose combat is being tracked is in a position where the peopel tracking them are best served by helping that person rather than disposing of them.
When combined with all the ways that Intrepid have already removed a lot of the genesis for negative social interactions (see my post above in reply to Yuyukoyay), and you have a system where literally no one in the game will ever be in a position to say that a combat tracker is causing negativity.
The other thing this does, that I personally think is even better, is that it forces the role of trainer on to raid guilds. When recruiting a new player, there is absolutely no way to know how well that player performs, so recruiting is done based on player not numbers. Then when the player joins the guild, there is a complete and total understanding between all involved that this new recruit has not had the opportunity to improve themselves with the aid of objective data. As such, the guild has to give this player time to work on improving their ability - and the player also has to be in a situation where they know they will need to work on improving. Since this is the first chance the player would have had, these expectations would essentially go without saying.
While I'm fine without a DPS meter, how would Devs be able to balance the game without them? Would they be actively monitoring combat behind the scenes, using tools only available to GMs and such?
If you genuinely think class balance is solely based on dps, you are missing a huge part of the picture.
Class balance is, more or less based on multiple factors such as Power, Versatility, and Utility.
That means that there will be :
-class with high damage output but low versatility, low utility, (dps glass cannons)
-class with average damage output, high versatility, low utility, (solo class)
-class with average damage output, low versatility, high utility, (tank class)
-class with average damage output, but average versatility, average utility, (hybrid class)
-class with low damage output, low versatility, high utility, (support heal / control class)
etc...
And that will be balanced because they will do what they are meant to do.
DPS is only a tiny part of the balance equation !
If you genuinely think that DPS is all a combat tracker (or DPS meter) can inform you of, then you are missing a huge part of the picture.
A combat tracker can tell you how much damage the tank took, mitigated, dodged, reflected and blocked.
A combat tracker can tell you how much healing a healer performed, how much they overhealed.
A combat tracker can tell you how long a CC player maintained CC on how many targets, and can tell you who broke that CC.
A combat tracker can tell you how long a given buff was up on a player, or debuff on a mob, and who exactly had it up for how long.
DPS is indeed only a tiny part of the balance equation, and only a tiny part of what a combat tracker can tell you.
This is why I don't use the term DPS meter, but rather combat tracker. It is far more accurate a term, and means people that don't know what they are talking about won't simply assume we are only talking about measuring DPS.
Personally I like that you don't want dps meters in groups, but I would like to have a personal dps meter outside of dungeons, like against a target dummy so I can test my own builds and see how much damage a skill does with a fire augment vs a holy augment, or something like that. Will there be anything like that in the game?
I'm personally against addons. Addons tend to make the content too easy, or add drama where there otherwise wouldn't be any. It's the job of the developer to make sure there's enough customization within the base UI (something like ffxiv works great).
The only argument I could see for something like a dps meter is for the most difficult content. If your team is failing content because some people are not pulling their weight, it's hard to find a solution without some of the tools a dps meter would give. I can't tell you how many times I use warcraftlogs to help my teammates improve. Steven likes talking about two sides of the sword, and the other side is that people also use warcraftlogs to just bash other players, sometimes on stuff they have no control over like their class, or race.
So for me the elitism, making the content easier, and the general boost in toxic behavior that comes with addons is not worth the good may come from their addition. I believe this scale changes depending on the difficultly of the content though. More difficult content = easier to argue for addons.
The issue with this is that WoW is a game where your personal relationships with others on your server don't really mean anything.
If everyone on your server in WoW hates you, because you keep bashing players over their class or race choice, it makes no difference to how you play the game. You can still find groups and raids to run the content that almost all players in WoW are running.
Due to how little impact it has on your gaming, more and more people do it. Due to how many people do it, fewer and fewer people bother trying to remember who it was that did it.
The end result is an infested swamp full of toxicity in a manner that has not been seen in any other MMO.
In a game like Ashes, if you start bashing people for their race or class, those players that you are bashing are the ones that you will want to be grouping with later on today, and tomorrow, and next week. They are the players that will help you defend your node from attack, and if you lose, defend you freehold from being ransacked.
It will become very clear to people very early on in Ashes that the people that are around you are your biggest asset, they will impact how your time in game goes even more than you will, and so you best treat them with the respect that they deserve.
As such, even if full combat tracker were implemented in Ashes, they will almost never be used in a toxic manner against other players - they will be used as a tool to assist those that want the assistance.
The issue with WoW isn't the combat trackers, it is the entire design of the game.
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ogreMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
Just dropping a comment in the megathread to say that I personally am against DPS meters, even if they're personal or guild-based. Including a meter of any sort will inevitably result in situtations where players are asked to prove what their DPS is in order to join a group or access specific content with others, i'm sure it would go as far as asking for screenshots in the event of personal meters.
I would infinitely rather fail a raid boss or dungeon a few times and struggle through it as a group rather than see players kicked or ignored for not reaching some arbitrary DPS number, even if it means "carrying" a player who might not be very good at the game. Despite the fact that a meter or tracker can provide unbiased data they would almost certainly be used as a measure to separate and exclude players.
For those arguing that raiding or other content is too difficult without a meter or tracker to tell you what's going on....perhaps use critical thinking to analyze the issues that you're encountering and talk to your group/guild mates about what is going wrong during the encounter. You can then refine your strategy or brainstorm a new one for your next attempt, and help people who don't understand the encounter to understand it.
Why would you want a damage meter/combat tracker at all then. That's the main system that makes people in WoW act that way.
People in WoW act that way because the entire game allows for it.
If the entire game allows for it, but the game doesn't have combat trackers, people will still act that way. They will still bash others for their class or race choice, or for their gear, even without objective data to prove the point. Archeage is a perfect example of this.
If the entire game doesn't allow for it, people don't act that way. It is this simple, and does not require the removal of combat trackers.
Comments
U.S. East
If a raid leader can't tell the efficiency of the group without a dps meter to tell them exact number,s then they need to work on their skills as a raid leader... end of the day, you either do the raid as a group, or you don't. you inspect your team's gear, and skills used, you work with folks to understand what they can/can't do, you work with folks and teach them the rotations they need to learn. interact with people and mentor folks, and you won't need to see exactly how much dps each person is doing, cause you'll beat the boss and it won't matter at that point.
Apart from this whole discussion though, I think IS very well knows that they can't implement boss mechanics such as dps checks if they don't allow any kind of dps meters, so I think not having a dps meter won't be an issue in this game. I really do hope that the difficult boss fights will be very challenging.
U.S. East
Yea of course, just like those oldschool smiths don't use hammers they just forge weapons with their bare fists like real hardcore man.
On a more serious note, WOW actually has an extremely hardcore raiding scene.
Just because 95-98% are casuals and can hardly tip over a glas of water it doesn't mean that the 2-5% of the playerbase which actually manage cutting edge archievments are bad as well.
At least the Raid design in wow has always been decent.
You may be killing the boss but it also matters how you perform doing so.
Steven Sharif said that individual boss loot and difficulty in raids will be performanced based.
So it sounds a lot like you will have loot gated behind dps checks.
So how exactly would you know?
Regarding DPS meter, I am all with you, I think with a game thats brand new you need simplicity and a clean game. Plus it will help people to really learn the game from its core and its mechanics. The people who want dps meters are just veteran players who had it for years on other games. They will do well without it.
A very big hug and energy for you and the team.
I think that a DPS meter could be implemented without the side effects of exclusion if its a personal damage meter because it could help with a personal understanding of your build and its a necessity for theory crafting and understand the numbers better if you a trying different subclasses trying to figure out what abilities you prefer and for what situations. I believe this could be an in-between in having no DPS meter and having a DPS meter.
I used my fairy powers. Also there is currently nothing in any mmo that requires a dps meter.
U.S. East
The only argument I could see for something like a dps meter is for the most difficult content. If your team is failing content because some people are not pulling their weight, it's hard to find a solution without some of the tools a dps meter would give. I can't tell you how many times I use warcraftlogs to help my teammates improve. Steven likes talking about two sides of the sword, and the other side is that people also use warcraftlogs to just bash other players, sometimes on stuff they have no control over like their class, or race.
So for me the elitism, making the content easier, and the general boost in toxic behavior that comes with addons is not worth the good may come from their addition. I believe this scale changes depending on the difficultly of the content though. More difficult content = easier to argue for addons.
The better the player the less you going to need it, but you will have the ability to tell if people are playing sub optimally. That guy doesn't look like he's doing much, maybe i should see what he's doing. Just google what most are doing and compare to him. You could just be wrong in a game like this is going to be.
U.S. East
If you know that your group isn't doing enough DPS to counter a specific boss mechanic that is wiping the raid, then now the question is, why are you not doing enough DPS? This is where a group would be able to use a meter to easily find why or rather quickly point a finger at someone and kick them out of the raid and that's what we're trying to avoid. There can be many reasons as to why someone wasn't doing as much DPS as someone else. Quickly pointing a finger at someone is not the right way to use the meter. If you use the meter properly, now the question should become, why is that person not doing enough DPS?
It could have been due to gear or maybe a boss mechanic that prevented the person from attacking or a debuff wasn't cleansed from the person fast enough and they died mid fight. The thing is, I think you could literally just skip the part where you actually use the meter to determine why you're not doing enough DPS and just analyze the whole situation and take all possibilities into account. By doing so, you take away from the possibility of a meter being used improperly to point a finger at someone without context. While you can make an argument that it will be more tedious or more difficult for you to min/max, and you would be right, it also makes the game more interactive. Without the DPS meter you're forced to take all possibilities into account, at least if you're a good raid group or leader. So in this scenario what you would have to do without the meter would be first look for obvious reasons that might be it. Is everyone wearing their right gear? Is anyone confused as to how the boss mechanics work? Did one of our DPS die or wasn't attacking right away? Anything that's big enough of a problem to cause a raid to wipe will be obvious even if it's the first time encountering a boss that no one has ever fought before. If you think that there's no obvious reason then it's likely due to someone being inexperience with a boss mechanic or someone that's not fulfilling their role properly and in that scenario the burden would fall under the raid leader and the commanders because it should be their duty to analyze the raid as a whole while they are fighting the raid boss. They should be able to take notice of someone that was slacking or not paying attention.
One of the main points that I've gathered from Ashes of Creation is that they are trying to bring back a little of that social aspect back into the game. Raid groups instead of just having a raid leader with 39 other people, will have to be a little more structured if they really want to be "hardcore". To make things go by quicker and easier for your guild to analyze a situation, you will have to have sub-groups withing the raid group and a commander that's in charge of that group that reports to the raid leader or something of the sorts. Then when something does wipe the raid, each commander will be in charge of keeping their own group on their toes which I think adds a fun dynamic into the mix. What if you could create your own group of 8 people within the guild and compete within your guild to be part of say, raid group A instead of raid group B. It does allow for some role-play for those that are interested in that sort of thing but it works well as an actual system for raiding as well while making the game a little bit more social or interactive.
I personally like to work for what I get because it gives a much better sense of accomplishment. I feel like meters take away from that sense of accomplishment.
There will be combat logs, and from those, combat trackers. These will be necessary for those who want to and have fun maximizing the capabilities of their class.
Visuals cannot tell the whole story in a game with gear cosmetics.
And you will need ways to track combat to effectively deal with mechanics. It’s not unusual that bosses will punish too much dps, or for them to have health thresholds for mechanics. Groups have to know when to push dps and when to shift focus.
I'm more concerned with having the data from my entire raid, as the key factor in all raid level content is how the raid is performing, not how the individual is.
With a limit of only 5 players, one could argue the same applies in Monster Hunter. Everyone in that game has specific individual roles, and if one of those roles isn't being performed as well as it should, it is easy to rectify. In a raid with 25 people all performing the same function, it is much harder to find the fault (note, it will never be just one player) and fix it. What is wrong with perfect information?
While having imperfect information is a part of life, having perfect infromation is a part of competition.
If you genuinely think class balance is solely based on dps, you are missing a huge part of the picture.
Class balance is, more or less based on multiple factors such as Power, Versatility, and Utility.
That means that there will be :
-class with high damage output but low versatility, low utility, (dps glass cannons)
-class with average damage output, high versatility, low utility, (solo class)
-class with average damage output, low versatility, high utility, (tank class)
-class with average damage output, but average versatility, average utility, (hybrid class)
-class with low damage output, low versatility, high utility, (support heal / control class)
etc...
And that will be balanced because they will do what they are meant to do.
DPS is only a tiny part of the balance equation !
WoW absolutely fostered a community where you abandoned people that were underperforming, and they had many things in place to promote this.
With only 5 players per group, you had only 3 DPS. This means if one of your DPS was performing at 75% efficiency, your whole group was only functioning at 91.6% efficiency. In Ashes, a group is 8 players, which will linely mean 6 DPS. This means if one of those players is performing at 75% efficiency, the group is still operating at 95.8% efficiency. This in itself makes it less viable to kick someone out of a group for performing lower than would be expected.
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Then there is the fact that WoW has systems in place to see you have new group members ported directly to you should you boot someone from the group. This obviously facilitates the ability to boot players that are under performing. If the penalty for booting another player and getting another one in was having to wait the time it took the player to actually get to the dungeon, then there would be far fewer people kicked out of groups in WoW, as it would be faster to continue with the lower DPS player than waiting for that new player.
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The next thing you have in WoW is the fact that the player pool for group content is essentially millions, as the systems in that game work across server. This means that if you boot someone from a group, you don't need to worry about meeting that player again, nor that players guild and friends. They are a faceless, nameless entity to you, but more importantly, you know that you are a faceless, nameless entity to them.
In Ashes, if you boot a player, that player is on your server, quite likely living in your node cluster. You will meet that player again. You will meet that players friends. You may well both have to defend your home together. This kind of connectivity means you are far more likely to spend some time helping that player than you are treating them like a disposable entity. You are also far more likely to reap some of the benefits of that assistance you are offering down the line.
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Essentially, Ashes is being designed as the perfect game to completely mitigate the issues a game like WoW has with it's community - issues some poeople erroneously contribute to combat trackers, when really they should be contributed to the entire game design of WoW and how it facilitates players treating others as disposable.
If Ashes had a dungeon finder, I would actually agree that a combat tracker wouldn't be a good idea. I would also not even consider playing, but that is besides the point.
The issue with this is that those builds will be posted before the game launches anyway.
The even bigger issue with that is since there is no combat tracker to test out other builds, the games meta will essentially go unchanged from launch.
This is what happened to Archeage, a game with very low combat tracker usage.
That games meta now is still almost exactly the same as it was when the game first launched in Korea in 2013.
A combat tracker allows the meta to change, no combat tracker means people will be afraid to change.
But I like the idea of having a target dummy that gives you a DPS meter.
I also like the idea of having a target dummy for a group DPS meter as a whole, not individual meters. This lets your 8 man party synergize as Steven said classes will play off each other to deal more damage if timed correctly.
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It is far more accurate to say that WoW is a game that is so easy for you to figure out it left nothing for you to look forward to, and that you are basically a robot smapping buttons in a specific rotation.
If you take the combat trackers out of that game, you are still left with that games basic design, which is where these things all come from.
I completely agree with this last point.
You only want DPS meters to be available in situations where it is in everyones best interests to help someone that hasn't quite got it, not boot them from the group/raid.
This is why the suggestion that I have been making for over a year now (probably somewhere near the start of this thread) is that Intrepid should build a combat tracker directly in to the games client, but make it available as a guild perk, that can only track the members of that specific guild.
With this, you straight away have a combat tracker that only people that want combat tracker access will be able to use. You have a system where people that don't want input from a combat tracker simply don't have any avenue for that input to get to them. You have a system where anyone whose combat is being tracked is in a position where the peopel tracking them are best served by helping that person rather than disposing of them.
When combined with all the ways that Intrepid have already removed a lot of the genesis for negative social interactions (see my post above in reply to Yuyukoyay), and you have a system where literally no one in the game will ever be in a position to say that a combat tracker is causing negativity.
The other thing this does, that I personally think is even better, is that it forces the role of trainer on to raid guilds. When recruiting a new player, there is absolutely no way to know how well that player performs, so recruiting is done based on player not numbers. Then when the player joins the guild, there is a complete and total understanding between all involved that this new recruit has not had the opportunity to improve themselves with the aid of objective data. As such, the guild has to give this player time to work on improving their ability - and the player also has to be in a situation where they know they will need to work on improving. Since this is the first chance the player would have had, these expectations would essentially go without saying.
A combat tracker can tell you how much damage the tank took, mitigated, dodged, reflected and blocked.
A combat tracker can tell you how much healing a healer performed, how much they overhealed.
A combat tracker can tell you how long a CC player maintained CC on how many targets, and can tell you who broke that CC.
A combat tracker can tell you how long a given buff was up on a player, or debuff on a mob, and who exactly had it up for how long.
DPS is indeed only a tiny part of the balance equation, and only a tiny part of what a combat tracker can tell you.
This is why I don't use the term DPS meter, but rather combat tracker. It is far more accurate a term, and means people that don't know what they are talking about won't simply assume we are only talking about measuring DPS.
If everyone on your server in WoW hates you, because you keep bashing players over their class or race choice, it makes no difference to how you play the game. You can still find groups and raids to run the content that almost all players in WoW are running.
Due to how little impact it has on your gaming, more and more people do it. Due to how many people do it, fewer and fewer people bother trying to remember who it was that did it.
The end result is an infested swamp full of toxicity in a manner that has not been seen in any other MMO.
In a game like Ashes, if you start bashing people for their race or class, those players that you are bashing are the ones that you will want to be grouping with later on today, and tomorrow, and next week. They are the players that will help you defend your node from attack, and if you lose, defend you freehold from being ransacked.
It will become very clear to people very early on in Ashes that the people that are around you are your biggest asset, they will impact how your time in game goes even more than you will, and so you best treat them with the respect that they deserve.
As such, even if full combat tracker were implemented in Ashes, they will almost never be used in a toxic manner against other players - they will be used as a tool to assist those that want the assistance.
The issue with WoW isn't the combat trackers, it is the entire design of the game.
I would infinitely rather fail a raid boss or dungeon a few times and struggle through it as a group rather than see players kicked or ignored for not reaching some arbitrary DPS number, even if it means "carrying" a player who might not be very good at the game. Despite the fact that a meter or tracker can provide unbiased data they would almost certainly be used as a measure to separate and exclude players.
For those arguing that raiding or other content is too difficult without a meter or tracker to tell you what's going on....perhaps use critical thinking to analyze the issues that you're encountering and talk to your group/guild mates about what is going wrong during the encounter. You can then refine your strategy or brainstorm a new one for your next attempt, and help people who don't understand the encounter to understand it.
If the entire game allows for it, but the game doesn't have combat trackers, people will still act that way. They will still bash others for their class or race choice, or for their gear, even without objective data to prove the point. Archeage is a perfect example of this.
If the entire game doesn't allow for it, people don't act that way. It is this simple, and does not require the removal of combat trackers.