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
Tell that to the literal hundreds of people I helped using data from DPS logs in ESO so I could show them in great detail where they're going wrong, how to improve. Many of which have been raiding happily for over a year now, and a couple recently sent me screenshots of them getting the hardest raid achievement in game. All because I had a tool I could use to help them.
I was one of those proverbial hundreds in another MMO. Which means, it actually increased my interaction with other players. And enabled me to help others as well. So reducing it to No meter is a win/win is oversimplifying it.
I don't argue that there are good points to both having and not having it. But I rather want one for myself.
I just dont want forced meters 🤷🏻♂️ Thats where my line is
I'm ambivalent about "forced." But we seem to agree.
That took a lot of words to figure out though. LOL
Still, I'm appreciative of mature, thoughtful discussion. Whether we agree or not, thank you.
Classic WoW is like that because the game is over 16 years old, and tuned for crappy players with PCs built in the 90s on windows 95 with dial up internet dude. People have been exploring it's meta on private servers for years. Combat trackers don't just immediately give you the best spec and skill in the game. There is still TONS of testing. Hell the current meta for classic (fury prot tanking) was discovered just 2-3 years ago on a private server, feral druid dps optimization was figured out on private servers, etc.
Also Vanilla had combat trackers and DBM and still had shitters, still had an evolving meta, still had those "epic" moments like Indalamar, and still was never figured out in it's life span. So you are proving your own point wrong.
Master Assassin
(Yes same Tyrantor from Shadowbane)
Book suggestions:
Galaxy Outlaws books 1-16.5, Metagamer Chronicles, The Land litrpg series, Ready Player One, Zen in the Martial Arts
I still can't think of a situation in which a DPS meter would actually help me help someone else that I couldn't have done without the DPS meter to begin with. Can you elaborate on a specific example in which a DPS meter is absolutely necessary to do something that otherwise it is just not possible?
This is the same thing as having a tracker for everyone anyways because guilds that focus on pve will require themselves to get that perk for the guild so that doesn't really accomplish much and the people tracking others aren't really best served by helping those that they are tracking rather than disposing of them.
This is still not an example of a tracker being necessary for anything as you can do all of that without the tracker so my question still stands, why do we need a tracker and how exactly does it help because as far as I know a tracker still only helps to decide that there's a problem but you can find that out without a tracker so I don't see a reason to have trackers. If you're looking for competition than honestly you're looking in the wrong place. Even if you had the most DPS in a raid that doesn't mean you're better than anyone. If you want to compete against other players, go do some pvp. It's my nice way of saying stop sucking your thumb while trying to constantly pat yourself in the back for being marginally and subjectively better than someone else that doesn't really care to compete with you. It's the exact mindset you shouldn't have with trackers, that elitism that everyone seems to be talking about.
I disagree with this point because if I'm in a guild and I want to still misuse the trackers, I can. I can still kick people for doing marginally worse and because I'm that type of person I will not care if I have to wait 30 mins for another person to come join our raid if they will perform better. I'd rather kick that other person that wasn't performing instead of spending 15 minutes to teach them just to have them mess it up again and wasting an hour of everyone's time.
I personally don't think that way but people that already do, will think that way and tracker or no tracker they will find a way to get away with things like that but the only diference is that having a tracker just gives those people another tool to abuse. That's a negative right there. I still see no positives that cannot be accomplished without the tracker.
While I would agree with this point but the reality is that not everyone thinks that way. It's bascally impossbile to control how everyone will handle their guild and new recruits, you can't really dictate that or make it against the rules without causing an uproar from certain people. You seem to have the right mindset on how to handle a guild and new recruits but that doen't mean that others do as well. They do not think like you. So like I've said before, tracker still seem to bring no positives that cannot be accomplished without them, in fact I personally believe that they could not only give certain people another tool to abuse but also it takes away from some player interaction within guild as well as the need to be more organized in a raid. So essentially you cut a part of the game out while adding a possible negative to the game while not necessarily adding any positives.
This is essentially what I was against on my first post which you responded by saying
Which as you can see is not the case. Combat trackers are a way to optimize the fun out of any game. The coombat trackers will tell you everything and it makes the game so much easier for people to learn. I like a challenge and like someone else said in a previous post, the trackers make the game easier and the devs will have to make encounters arbitrarily harder. I would rather have encounters be more difficult mechanically to the point where you have to really be paying attention and it will come down to actual skill and reaction in the game than to have encounters be harder because the boss in a higher difficulty just does more damage and has more health or an extra phase that doesn't change anything mechanically. So to me that's another negative. It makes the game objectively easier because there's no real trial and error and then analyzation. There would still be some trial and error but the analyzation would be done for you which just makes build optimization go by quicker making the game a lot more casual. Actual hardcore players that want to min/max their build have to actually put some work in without trackers rather than be lazy and just hope that everything is handed to them.
I don't think this will be the case. You seem to assume that just because someone is living in the same node as someone else or is in the same guild that they will be forced to treat them with respect because of possible consequences of not doing so might really impact their gameplay. That most definitely will not be the case because even if I'm living in the same node as someone else that I hate or from a rival guild or something of the sorts, it's still the node where I live and have my house and resources, so if it gets attacked I'm going to protect it either way and so will everyone else that lives there that has resources and wants to continue living there.
As far as being in the same guild, if it's a large guild then it won't really matter because there's probably a lot of other people on the guild that you could add to the raid instead of that one person that didn't know what they were doing and if it's a small guild it still doesn't matter because finding another player will not be as difficult as you make it out to be.
each server will hold tens of thousands of players and thousands will be logged in at the same time. Another thing to note is that AoC is very different than other MMOs because it's everchanging so even if you burn your bridges with someone from the near by nodes while trying to raid a dungeon, that dungeon may not exist the next day and you might have to move your guild and there's going to be people moving from one place to another fairly often.
Giving guilds the option to use DPS meters or combat meters is still not a good option as this would introduce a different issue. There will be two kinds of guilds, ones with meters and ones with no meters. Over time any guild that does pve content will inevitably have meters and they will basically be required and if it's a guild that doesn't require it then those guilds will basically be all the people that don't know what they are doing meaning you're only left with guilds that are fully on one side of the spectrum or the other, there's no in between. I can't speak for most players but I'd rather be in a guild that is not fully on either side of the spectrum. I want to be able to clear pve content with people that are generally competent but I would mind have a few new players learning with us as we clear a dungeon.
I kind of agree, but I don't think your conclusion is correct. If there was a choice and there were 2 different kinds of guilds. Then there would be no actual difference in ability between them. One would just be putting up with DPS meters and the others wouldn't. The guild with DPS meters would just have like 20 other problems with it.
U.S. East
Does not matter, if they are faulty. They will be more like suggestions with loose data behind them rather than tested and true methods until next update.
I don't know much about Archage, but that sounds like the dev's fucked up, as a stale meta is not a player community problem, but a dev problem.
So i don't think you can apply the same rule to Ashes and expect the same results.
As i don't think your above example is too valid i'd say this would be speculation imo.
People get more creative and invested when they are given freedom to experiment and try things for themselves in my experience, both in games and real life.
I couldn't imagine playing a racing game with no speedometer or not knowing what place I finished. The thing is that combat meters are not used for competition. If you want to compete then go do some pvp.
competition is not what trackers are meant for.
The meta being stale is related to how the game is balanced and does not actually relate to combat trackers at all. If anything combat trackers will make the meta even worse because people might be more afraid to use a build they want because it does less damage. Despite potentially providing more team support than the higher dps option.
People who make metas don't usually think about the big picture. They don't think about what is better in which situation. They just try to force others to play like they do so they can oppress those who don't.
U.S. East
South East Asia/Oceania server discord: https://discord.gg/J4Epj77
Not everyone wants to be a blissfully ignorant guy who is just content with clearing a menial amount of content. People WILL want to progress, people will want to challenge themselves, and having no combat tracker at all just devalues what they enjoy about MMOs.
But give us a post combat log, with dps, damage done, healing done, rotation used etc.. so people who want to improve can look and analysis their combat log
If the value of a grand mmo is tied to number on the meter that really isnt supposed to part of the game worlds immersion and experience. Then it sounds like their enjoyment isnt tied to the mmo, but to the value of an arbitrary number. I've never met a true mmo fan that enjoyed the dps number over the artistic value in the game world, or the zone designs, armors, lore, immersion and mechanical design of enemy npcs.
Combat number tracking wasnt even introduced until later in mmos.
Its just a way to exclude others, and stagnate the pve community. That may not be whats intended but that IS what happens with meters
no that's not what I said at all lol. And no you wouldn't get the same situation without having the trackers as you would with them. If you make trackers only for guilds then it will segregate the pve guilds between the ones that use them and the ones that don't. Not using a tracker doesn't necessarily mean that people are going to be bad at the game or unable to clear content but over time what would happen is that those players that are new and need to learn will not be taught by the guilds that use trackers so they will end up creating their own guilds with outcasts that still don't know what they are doing.
People that don't need trackers but do know what they are doing will end up joining guilds with trackers not because the tracker is a necessity but because if you have a raid where 4 people have to teach the other 36, it's too much for those 4 people and they would rather just go to a guild where people in general kind of know what they are doing. Not having a tracker will avoid the situation in which the guilds would be segregated and therefore you will end up with guilds where say 34 people know what they are doing and you only have to teach the 6 people that are new.
In your system where meters are given to guilds, the guild where there are 34 people that know what they are doing and 6 that don't will simply kick the 6 and get another 6 that do. Those 6 will join with many others in the same situation and that's how you end up with guilds that have no middle ground.
It's like getting rid of the middle-class in an economy and then you're left with either really poor people that work to be able to afford to live to work tomorrow or you're absurdly rich.
What you said is that with meters, good players and new/bad players will be separated heavily. Except this will happen without meters as well and the only way it won't happen without meters is if people cannot tell player skill. You essentially want bad players to mix with good players, with the good players not being able to tell the bad players apart from everyone else so no one gets kicked from the good player guilds.
We should promote competitive raiding groups to mentor players by using measuring through numbers. I feel like a lot of these arguments just boil down to one side saying "people will use dps meters to exclude and ridicule people so they're bad" and the other side saying "people will use dps meters to improve themselves and give advice to others so they're good"... and neither point is really wrong so we just argue in circles.
People will always find some metric to exclude others and put others down, but people will also always find ways to come together and lift each other up. DPS meters are a tool that can be used for either action, and I feel like the fear of how people might use them to be mean to each other isn't a good enough reason to keep them from people who would like to use them to help themselves and the people around them.
Why does everyone against DPS meters always talk in absolutes? I will still enjoy this game (if it's a good game) with/without DPS meters. But I will also enjoy the competitive aspect of it less because unless there are a bunch of number crunching rain mans constantly coming together to create metas, the PvE will never be as advanced and players will never be as good as they can be. Look at Vanilla WoW for instance. The people who we thought were good back in the day would be considered absolutely garbage at the game today. Raids in Classic WoW end in 20-30minutes and the meta has evolved into speedrunning because the content is too easy and was made decades ago. Ashes will probably be the same situation, where we will think the content is super hard when in reality it's just being tuned for people who don't have the information to properly play their classes to the fullest of their abilities. I want to push my class to it's limits and I would like some sort of challenge in the game for that.
Will I quit the game if it doesn't have that cutting edge raid feeling? Probably not if the other aspects of the game are fun/good. I don't need a meter to value an MMO, I don't worship combat trackers, nor do I care that much. But to purposefully remove an entire objective metric from a game and severely hamper the competitive side of MMOs because a bunch of people fearmongering about being kicked by "those meanie elitists!" is really ignorant imo.
It's a matter of a system that can ruin the game vs just letting people figure it out themselves without having a meta forced upon them.
U.S. East
quote the rest of my answer and respond to it fully without pieces of it
This sounds like an excellent compromise.
Gatekeeping who's a "true mmo fan" isn't productive and doesn't support your argument. People enjoy mmos for a large variety of reasons, and those varied reasons lead to discussion like these about what makes up an enjoyable mmo experience. Your way of enjoying mmos is no truer or better than anyone else's.
I don't have to, because @Pantease put it best. You trying to act like a gatekeeper of MMOs is literally the opposite side of the coin of the people you are fearing will gatekeep you from their pugs because of your low dps.
But... A dps number meter 😂 come on
How astute. You're right, I rescind my previous statements. Truly a master debater. I kneel!
U.S. East
I mean if the numbers on a meter is what gets you going, more power to you 🤷🏻♂️
As long as its a personal private matter that you choose to share and not forced on everyone have fun.