I don't know of any MMO's that come with a dps meter or combat logging parsed to external sites built into it. That being the case, it's 100% optional for EVERYONE, regardless of your goals in the game. While that may be paying lip service to an ideal, since if it's something supported, competitive guilds will use it, and if you want to be in one of those, so will you - this is still entirely a choice made by you.
I've been all over the spectrum on this, from pure casual gaming to trying to compete towards the top of NA guilds spending hours on sites like warcraftlogs comparing myself to others of my class. All that time I spent in games with these features supported, and not one time during that did I feel like my experience was hurt by them simply existing. With them you're absolutely going to run into scenarios where someone sees someone doing low damage, something mean may get said and feelings may get hurt. But you don't HAVE to run with people like that.
I just have a really hard time with the argument that excluding so much as a choice on having something like that is a good thing, given the breadth of my experience. It may be interesting being in a game without them, not going to lie. But it's also a bit disconcerting thinking about how performance is going to be judged (if that is something you care about) without hard numbers to back it up.
Someone still has yet to give a specific situational example in which a tracker would be more beneficial than harmful. I've given multiple of examples of how they are likely to be used in a negative way but I can't really think of any positives.
If the positives outweigh the negatives then that's when it would be worth it to have a tracker but so far not a single person has made an argument as to how exactly a combat tracker would be beneficial.
In which specific situation would a combat tracker be more beneficial than harmful?
Read the thread then, because there have been many.
I've read it over the past two days and can't really recall any give me an example
Ok, lets say you are trialing for a competitive raiding guild. Your DPS is low and is under the threshold requirement to join, so to raise it up you go through the combat tracker to figure out why people of your same class are out damaging you and how you could emulate their strategies or come up with your own strategy to increase your DPS to be above that threshold.
Also many people have pointed out (me, noaani, pantease, and some others) that combat trackers can be a boon because it immediately lets a class leader or raid leader know what the problem is and how to remedy that problem. They can work together with their guildmates for the betterment of the group. People in WoW are disposable, because server transfers, teleporting, looking for group/raid, etc. In this game, there won't be any of that, so no one is going to just kick a low dps raider 3-4 hours into a raid night. They won't be able to replace that person in a timely manner, so the best thing to do would be to go over the combat tracker with them and figure out what went wrong and how everyone can be better.
Without combat trackers, it's just hectic. "Why are we wiping?" "Idk! Maybe dps is low?" *proceeds to bash their heads in at the boss for another hour* "WHY ARE WE STILL WIPING?" "I DONT KNOW, FUCKING SHITTER DPS MAYBE!" *raid ends and everyone is mad*
Then it turns out the reason people were wiping was because the healers weren't properly dispelling. No one knew because there were no trackers. Everyone is mad. And their lockout is ruined. Sure they could have spent the next week theorycrafting about what went wrong and coming up with "subjective" reasons why it happened until they managed to get it right, but combat trackers negates all that hassle, all the stress, and makes raiding more fun. You wouldn't have nights where people just give up because no one knows what is happening for hours.
Trying out different builds and trying to do the best you can is part of the fun and challenge in an mmo for some people, myself included. A DPS meter is a tool people like me use to measure whether I'm doing better by using a different kind of gear or a different set of skills or talents or augments or what-have-you.
I take pride in bringing my A game to encounters I do with friends and guildmates, and having the tools to ensure that I am adds to my enjoyment of the game. I have fun trying out silly things and seeing if they're any good. I've spent years in an mmo with DPS meters playing a build that was unorthodox on a spec that was considered underpowered, still knowing that I'm doing well and not holding anyone back BECAUSE I had meters to test with. I got to spend years playing the way I wanted to (which was very much against what was meta and considered good at the time) because I had the tools available to me to test out the build to make sure it was capable.
DPS meters have made mmos more fun for me not only because I get to see my improvement, but also because they help me try things out and experiment and play the way I want to without hindering anyone else's enjoyment of the game.
I've said this multiple times now though.
I've got no problem with an optional PERSONAL and private source of determining what your damage is that you CHOOSE to share with others if you want
Not somethings thats forced on people because one mans a napolean micro manager forcing his measures like epstein himself.
Ok, then you are on our side of wanting Guild Perk combat trackers. You can opt in or out of those and no one is forcing them upon you.
Wrong I'm only on the side of people having a PERSONAL and PRIVATE tracker that
a player CAN share if he or she CHOOSES
Nothing more, and ultimately I would prefer none.
That is a compromise I would be okay with as well, but to be fair if you are planning on joining a competitive guild they will expect you to share those with everyone. Especially in this game, where the content gets harder and you get better/more loot the better your group does, no one will want to play with someone who is hiding their dps from their guild (even if they are doing really well) because they don't want the possibility on missing loot.
Ok, lets say you are trialing for a competitive raiding guild. Your DPS is low and is under the threshold requirement to join, so to raise it up you go through the combat tracker to figure out why people of your same class are out damaging you and how you could emulate their strategies or come up with your own strategy to increase your DPS to be above that threshold.
Also many people have pointed out (me, noaani, pantease, and some others) that combat trackers can be a boon because it immediately lets a class leader or raid leader know what the problem is and how to remedy that problem. They can work together with their guildmates for the betterment of the group. People in WoW are disposable, because server transfers, teleporting, looking for group/raid, etc. In this game, there won't be any of that, so no one is going to just kick a low dps raider 3-4 hours into a raid night. They won't be able to replace that person in a timely manner, so the best thing to do would be to go over the combat tracker with them and figure out what went wrong and how everyone can be better.
Without combat trackers, it's just hectic. "Why are we wiping?" "Idk! Maybe dps is low?" *proceeds to bash their heads in at the boss for another hour* "WHY ARE WE STILL WIPING?" "I DONT KNOW, FUCKING SHITTER DPS MAYBE!" *raid ends and everyone is mad*
Then it turns out the reason people were wiping was because the healers weren't properly dispelling. No one knew because there were no trackers. Everyone is mad. And their lockout is ruined. Sure they could have spent the next week theorycrafting about what went wrong and coming up with "subjective" reasons why it happened until they managed to get it right, but combat trackers negates all that hassle, all the stress, and makes raiding more fun. You wouldn't have nights where people just give up because no one knows what is happening for hours.
This exactly proves my point and is the reason why I personally don't want trackers in the game. They make the game easier and just hands you information instead of people actually putting in the work to analyze the situation. In that specific situation that you mention you merely need to approach systematically to find where your problem lies rather than just automatically scream "I DON'T KNOW, FUCKING SHITTER DPS MAYBE!"
That's just not the way to approach the situation which I would say the guild wiping over and over is well deserved.
Another thing is that I'd personally prefer being rewarded for handling those situation the right way and if your raid leader or guild leader is not experienced or skilled enough to know what went wrong then you can simply talk to other raid leaders or guilds to help you. If you have the trackers it would get rid of that opportunity for social interaction.
Ok, lets say you are trialing for a competitive raiding guild. Your DPS is low and is under the threshold requirement to join, so to raise it up you go through the combat tracker to figure out why people of your same class are out damaging you and how you could emulate their strategies or come up with your own strategy to increase your DPS to be above that threshold.
Also many people have pointed out (me, noaani, pantease, and some others) that combat trackers can be a boon because it immediately lets a class leader or raid leader know what the problem is and how to remedy that problem. They can work together with their guildmates for the betterment of the group. People in WoW are disposable, because server transfers, teleporting, looking for group/raid, etc. In this game, there won't be any of that, so no one is going to just kick a low dps raider 3-4 hours into a raid night. They won't be able to replace that person in a timely manner, so the best thing to do would be to go over the combat tracker with them and figure out what went wrong and how everyone can be better.
Without combat trackers, it's just hectic. "Why are we wiping?" "Idk! Maybe dps is low?" *proceeds to bash their heads in at the boss for another hour* "WHY ARE WE STILL WIPING?" "I DONT KNOW, FUCKING SHITTER DPS MAYBE!" *raid ends and everyone is mad*
Then it turns out the reason people were wiping was because the healers weren't properly dispelling. No one knew because there were no trackers. Everyone is mad. And their lockout is ruined. Sure they could have spent the next week theorycrafting about what went wrong and coming up with "subjective" reasons why it happened until they managed to get it right, but combat trackers negates all that hassle, all the stress, and makes raiding more fun. You wouldn't have nights where people just give up because no one knows what is happening for hours.
This exactly proves my point and is the reason why I personally don't want trackers in the game. They make the game easier and just hands you information instead of people actually putting in the work to analyze the situation. In that specific situation that you mention you merely need to approach systematically to find where your problem lies rather than just automatically scream "I DON"T KNOW, FUCKING SHITTER DPS MAYBE!"
That's just not the way to approach the situation which I would say the guild wiping over and over is well deserved.
And that will happen, but it will be less apparent. Without a tracker, the game will have to be trivialized to simple tasks instead of an environment where you can keep track of many things at once while also allowing yourself to be mechanically proficient in your class and pumping out as much damage/healing/threat/mitigation as you can while also managing small things.
Let's say in a raid there are 2 debuffs. If you mix the 2 debuffs, the player instantly dies, and everyone around them blows up as well, resulting in a wipe.
Now, is it more reasonable for the 1 raid leader to spend the next 5 hours trying to watch 39 other player's debuffs the entire night while also trying to pull his own weight? Will he even be able to keep track of all that information? Will they even be able to tell it was the debuffs at all? What if the first debuff comes out in the first 10 seconds of the fight, but the next one comes out 2 minutes later? People will look at the combat log and go "huh, I got debuff#2 and then I just died, that debuff must be dispelled I guess!" and then it will keep happening again and again because they don't know the actual crux of the problem. Then all it will lead to is an argument between DPS players and Healers about who is in the wrong. It could take a lot of guilds an entire raid week or maybe multiple weeks, just to figure out this one mechanic that really doesn't have a lot of depth or even challenge to it. Leading to guilds disbanding, fighting, people leaving, etc.
Sure that's more "challenging" (imo tedious, I find fights challenging because they actually push your mechanical skill and gear checks), but is it really more reasonable for people to be hard stuck on content because they have no idea how these 2 debuffs interact with each other and the onus of figuring it out is placed on 1 guild/raid leader who needs to babysit 39 other people? Or is it more reasonable to have a tracker and people to look at it after a wipe and go "Ok, so these 2 debuffs interact in such a way that wipes the raid, so healers be mindful of dispelling and dps be mindful of where you stand!"
Trackers allow devs the ability to make extremely nuanced and in depth mechanics because they are designing around the idea that players will be able to sufficiently track things. This allows for amazingly tuned and engaging boss fights. It's why WoW is still an MMO titan to this day even though it really sucks, because it's raids are absolutely fantastic and each fight is crafted extremely well while being insanely challenging at the mythic level.
In your example the player who got the debuff will be able to tell you. Since it will be pretty obvious to them what happened. Which proves yet again that DPS meters will remove social interaction that is overall pretty meaningful.
Ok, lets say you are trialing for a competitive raiding guild. Your DPS is low and is under the threshold requirement to join, so to raise it up you go through the combat tracker to figure out why people of your same class are out damaging you and how you could emulate their strategies or come up with your own strategy to increase your DPS to be above that threshold.
Also many people have pointed out (me, noaani, pantease, and some others) that combat trackers can be a boon because it immediately lets a class leader or raid leader know what the problem is and how to remedy that problem. They can work together with their guildmates for the betterment of the group. People in WoW are disposable, because server transfers, teleporting, looking for group/raid, etc. In this game, there won't be any of that, so no one is going to just kick a low dps raider 3-4 hours into a raid night. They won't be able to replace that person in a timely manner, so the best thing to do would be to go over the combat tracker with them and figure out what went wrong and how everyone can be better.
Without combat trackers, it's just hectic. "Why are we wiping?" "Idk! Maybe dps is low?" *proceeds to bash their heads in at the boss for another hour* "WHY ARE WE STILL WIPING?" "I DONT KNOW, FUCKING SHITTER DPS MAYBE!" *raid ends and everyone is mad*
Then it turns out the reason people were wiping was because the healers weren't properly dispelling. No one knew because there were no trackers. Everyone is mad. And their lockout is ruined. Sure they could have spent the next week theorycrafting about what went wrong and coming up with "subjective" reasons why it happened until they managed to get it right, but combat trackers negates all that hassle, all the stress, and makes raiding more fun. You wouldn't have nights where people just give up because no one knows what is happening for hours.
This exactly proves my point and is the reason why I personally don't want trackers in the game. They make the game easier and just hands you information instead of people actually putting in the work to analyze the situation. In that specific situation that you mention you merely need to approach systematically to find where your problem lies rather than just automatically scream "I DON"T KNOW, FUCKING SHITTER DPS MAYBE!"
That's just not the way to approach the situation which I would say the guild wiping over and over is well deserved.
And that will happen, but it will be less apparent. Without a tracker, the game will have to be trivialized to simple tasks instead of an environment where you can keep track of many things at once while also allowing yourself to be mechanically proficient in your class and pumping out as much damage/healing/threat/mitigation as you can while also managing small things.
Let's say in a raid there are 2 debuffs. If you mix the 2 debuffs, the player instantly dies, and everyone around them blows up as well, resulting in a wipe.
Now, is it more reasonable for the 1 raid leader to spend the next 5 hours trying to watch 39 other player's debuffs the entire night while also trying to pull his own weight? Will he even be able to keep track of all that information? Will they even be able to tell it was the debuffs at all? What if the first debuff comes out in the first 10 seconds of the fight, but the next one comes out 2 minutes later? People will look at the combat log and go "huh, I got debuff#2 and then I just died, that debuff must be dispelled I guess!" and then it will keep happening again and again because they don't know the actual crux of the problem. Then all it will lead to is an argument between DPS players and Healers about who is in the wrong. It could take a lot of guilds an entire raid week or maybe multiple weeks, just to figure out this one mechanic that really doesn't have a lot of depth or even challenge to it. Leading to guilds disbanding, fighting, people leaving, etc.
Sure that's more "challenging" (imo tedious, I find fights challenging because they actually push your mechanical skill and gear checks), but is it really more reasonable for people to be hard stuck on content because they have no idea how these 2 debuffs interact with each other and the onus of figuring it out is placed on 1 guild/raid leader who needs to babysit 39 other people? Or is it more reasonable to have a tracker and people to look at it after a wipe and go "Ok, so these 2 debuffs interact in such a way that wipes the raid, so healers be mindful of dispelling and dps be mindful of where you stand!"
Trackers allow devs the ability to make extremely nuanced and in depth mechanics because they are designing around the idea that players will be able to sufficiently track things. This allows for amazingly tuned and engaging boss fights. It's why WoW is still an MMO titan to this day even though it really sucks, because it's raids are absolutely fantastic and each fight is crafted extremely well while being insanely challenging at the mythic level.
I see your point and maybe I would agree with it if it were like 15 years ago but now people have so much experience with many different types of mechanics that it would not take very long for someone out of the thousands of people that play the game to figure out how it works and it will be posted someone on the internet and everyone will follow.
Years ago that wasn't the case as much as it is now.
Also like I said before, in order to really complete the raids people would have to be more organized so rather than having one leader and 39 group members you have 5 groups of 8 each with it's own leader to guide them and each has specific roles in the raid. That's how AoC is currently designed because groups are made from 8 people but you can have up to 5 groups of 8 in a raid. AoC is just being designed different than something like WoW or virtually any other MMO currently in the market. If you prefer those types of raids and those mechanics and that sort of challenge where the challenge lies in how much DPS you can do because of your gear and how min/maxed your build is then sure but I prefer something that's more difficult because of boss and raid mechanics.
Ok, lets say you are trialing for a competitive raiding guild. Your DPS is low and is under the threshold requirement to join, so to raise it up you go through the combat tracker to figure out why people of your same class are out damaging you and how you could emulate their strategies or come up with your own strategy to increase your DPS to be above that threshold.
Also many people have pointed out (me, noaani, pantease, and some others) that combat trackers can be a boon because it immediately lets a class leader or raid leader know what the problem is and how to remedy that problem. They can work together with their guildmates for the betterment of the group. People in WoW are disposable, because server transfers, teleporting, looking for group/raid, etc. In this game, there won't be any of that, so no one is going to just kick a low dps raider 3-4 hours into a raid night. They won't be able to replace that person in a timely manner, so the best thing to do would be to go over the combat tracker with them and figure out what went wrong and how everyone can be better.
Without combat trackers, it's just hectic. "Why are we wiping?" "Idk! Maybe dps is low?" *proceeds to bash their heads in at the boss for another hour* "WHY ARE WE STILL WIPING?" "I DONT KNOW, FUCKING SHITTER DPS MAYBE!" *raid ends and everyone is mad*
Then it turns out the reason people were wiping was because the healers weren't properly dispelling. No one knew because there were no trackers. Everyone is mad. And their lockout is ruined. Sure they could have spent the next week theorycrafting about what went wrong and coming up with "subjective" reasons why it happened until they managed to get it right, but combat trackers negates all that hassle, all the stress, and makes raiding more fun. You wouldn't have nights where people just give up because no one knows what is happening for hours.
This exactly proves my point and is the reason why I personally don't want trackers in the game. They make the game easier and just hands you information instead of people actually putting in the work to analyze the situation. In that specific situation that you mention you merely need to approach systematically to find where your problem lies rather than just automatically scream "I DON"T KNOW, FUCKING SHITTER DPS MAYBE!"
That's just not the way to approach the situation which I would say the guild wiping over and over is well deserved.
And that will happen, but it will be less apparent. Without a tracker, the game will have to be trivialized to simple tasks instead of an environment where you can keep track of many things at once while also allowing yourself to be mechanically proficient in your class and pumping out as much damage/healing/threat/mitigation as you can while also managing small things.
Let's say in a raid there are 2 debuffs. If you mix the 2 debuffs, the player instantly dies, and everyone around them blows up as well, resulting in a wipe.
Now, is it more reasonable for the 1 raid leader to spend the next 5 hours trying to watch 39 other player's debuffs the entire night while also trying to pull his own weight? Will he even be able to keep track of all that information? Will they even be able to tell it was the debuffs at all? What if the first debuff comes out in the first 10 seconds of the fight, but the next one comes out 2 minutes later? People will look at the combat log and go "huh, I got debuff#2 and then I just died, that debuff must be dispelled I guess!" and then it will keep happening again and again because they don't know the actual crux of the problem. Then all it will lead to is an argument between DPS players and Healers about who is in the wrong. It could take a lot of guilds an entire raid week or maybe multiple weeks, just to figure out this one mechanic that really doesn't have a lot of depth or even challenge to it. Leading to guilds disbanding, fighting, people leaving, etc.
Sure that's more "challenging" (imo tedious, I find fights challenging because they actually push your mechanical skill and gear checks), but is it really more reasonable for people to be hard stuck on content because they have no idea how these 2 debuffs interact with each other and the onus of figuring it out is placed on 1 guild/raid leader who needs to babysit 39 other people? Or is it more reasonable to have a tracker and people to look at it after a wipe and go "Ok, so these 2 debuffs interact in such a way that wipes the raid, so healers be mindful of dispelling and dps be mindful of where you stand!"
Trackers allow devs the ability to make extremely nuanced and in depth mechanics because they are designing around the idea that players will be able to sufficiently track things. This allows for amazingly tuned and engaging boss fights. It's why WoW is still an MMO titan to this day even though it really sucks, because it's raids are absolutely fantastic and each fight is crafted extremely well while being insanely challenging at the mythic level.
I see your point and maybe I would agree with it if it were like 15 years ago but now people have so much experience with many different types of mechanics that it would not take very long for someone out of the thousands of people that play the game to figure out how it works and it will be posted someone on the internet and everyone will follow.
Years ago that wasn't the case as much as it is now.
And I agree to an extent.
It just seems pretty silly to claim that "trackers makes the game too easy" when WoW not only has trackers but a plethora of other addons that play the game for people and they have the hardest content in all of MMOs.
Sure Method clears content in a week, but they also play 20 hours a day, spend 10k real life dollars to buy gold to buy gear, have every class at max level to swap to FOTM classes/specs, and split raids a week before to get the best possible advantage they can get. And they still have bosses that take over hundreds of attempts (most recent example I can think of is Mythic Kil'jaeden which took over 19 days of attempts, was killed on the 654th attempt 3 weeks after release).
You can't call that easy and most guilds never even finished the raid on mythic difficulty. My guild got cutting edge 2 weeks before the new raid tier was about to come out (june 27th mythic released, got the kill november 14th, almost 5 months, and my guild was considered one of the better guilds at the time).
So really, if ashes decides to make content as hard as WoW's (which I'm not advocating they do and I highly doubt they will) then not having meters will mean basically no one will clear content at all. Mythic KJ cutting edge was only accomplished by 1.4% of the entire playerbase, with combat trackers, with addons that tell you mechanics, with outside sources of information, and he was nerfed TWICE during that time.
Ok, lets say you are trialing for a competitive raiding guild. Your DPS is low and is under the threshold requirement to join, so to raise it up you go through the combat tracker to figure out why people of your same class are out damaging you and how you could emulate their strategies or come up with your own strategy to increase your DPS to be above that threshold.
Also many people have pointed out (me, noaani, pantease, and some others) that combat trackers can be a boon because it immediately lets a class leader or raid leader know what the problem is and how to remedy that problem. They can work together with their guildmates for the betterment of the group. People in WoW are disposable, because server transfers, teleporting, looking for group/raid, etc. In this game, there won't be any of that, so no one is going to just kick a low dps raider 3-4 hours into a raid night. They won't be able to replace that person in a timely manner, so the best thing to do would be to go over the combat tracker with them and figure out what went wrong and how everyone can be better.
Without combat trackers, it's just hectic. "Why are we wiping?" "Idk! Maybe dps is low?" *proceeds to bash their heads in at the boss for another hour* "WHY ARE WE STILL WIPING?" "I DONT KNOW, FUCKING SHITTER DPS MAYBE!" *raid ends and everyone is mad*
Then it turns out the reason people were wiping was because the healers weren't properly dispelling. No one knew because there were no trackers. Everyone is mad. And their lockout is ruined. Sure they could have spent the next week theorycrafting about what went wrong and coming up with "subjective" reasons why it happened until they managed to get it right, but combat trackers negates all that hassle, all the stress, and makes raiding more fun. You wouldn't have nights where people just give up because no one knows what is happening for hours.
This exactly proves my point and is the reason why I personally don't want trackers in the game. They make the game easier and just hands you information instead of people actually putting in the work to analyze the situation. In that specific situation that you mention you merely need to approach systematically to find where your problem lies rather than just automatically scream "I DON"T KNOW, FUCKING SHITTER DPS MAYBE!"
That's just not the way to approach the situation which I would say the guild wiping over and over is well deserved.
And that will happen, but it will be less apparent. Without a tracker, the game will have to be trivialized to simple tasks instead of an environment where you can keep track of many things at once while also allowing yourself to be mechanically proficient in your class and pumping out as much damage/healing/threat/mitigation as you can while also managing small things.
Let's say in a raid there are 2 debuffs. If you mix the 2 debuffs, the player instantly dies, and everyone around them blows up as well, resulting in a wipe.
Now, is it more reasonable for the 1 raid leader to spend the next 5 hours trying to watch 39 other player's debuffs the entire night while also trying to pull his own weight? Will he even be able to keep track of all that information? Will they even be able to tell it was the debuffs at all? What if the first debuff comes out in the first 10 seconds of the fight, but the next one comes out 2 minutes later? People will look at the combat log and go "huh, I got debuff#2 and then I just died, that debuff must be dispelled I guess!" and then it will keep happening again and again because they don't know the actual crux of the problem. Then all it will lead to is an argument between DPS players and Healers about who is in the wrong. It could take a lot of guilds an entire raid week or maybe multiple weeks, just to figure out this one mechanic that really doesn't have a lot of depth or even challenge to it. Leading to guilds disbanding, fighting, people leaving, etc.
Sure that's more "challenging" (imo tedious, I find fights challenging because they actually push your mechanical skill and gear checks), but is it really more reasonable for people to be hard stuck on content because they have no idea how these 2 debuffs interact with each other and the onus of figuring it out is placed on 1 guild/raid leader who needs to babysit 39 other people? Or is it more reasonable to have a tracker and people to look at it after a wipe and go "Ok, so these 2 debuffs interact in such a way that wipes the raid, so healers be mindful of dispelling and dps be mindful of where you stand!"
Trackers allow devs the ability to make extremely nuanced and in depth mechanics because they are designing around the idea that players will be able to sufficiently track things. This allows for amazingly tuned and engaging boss fights. It's why WoW is still an MMO titan to this day even though it really sucks, because it's raids are absolutely fantastic and each fight is crafted extremely well while being insanely challenging at the mythic level.
If you prefer those types of raids and those mechanics and that sort of challenge where the challenge lies in how much DPS you can do because of your gear and how min/maxed your build is then sure but I prefer something that's more difficult because of boss and raid mechanics.
Both of those are WoW though. WoW has the hardest and most nuanced boss and raid mechanics in any game. It also has individual mechanics, mechanical skill, dps pumping, and gear play a huge part.
Considering people left Everquest for WoW because Everquest was too hard. I highly doubt WoW has the most challenging content ever. We want fair difficulty as well and not due to things like pay 2 win or untuning. For the last 6 expansions WoW has never had a key raid boss that was reasonably balanced on launch. Further proving the game to be even worse to base on for difficulty.
And I agree to an extent.
It just seems pretty silly to claim that "trackers makes the game too easy" when WoW not only has trackers but a plethora of other addons that play the game for people and they have the hardest content in all of MMOs.
Sure Method clears content in a week, but they also play 20 hours a day, spend 10k real life dollars to buy gold to buy gear, have every class at max level to swap to FOTM classes/specs, and split raids a week before to get the best possible advantage they can get. And they still have bosses that take over hundreds of attempts (most recent example I can think of is Mythic Kil'jaeden which took over 19 days of attempts, was killed on the 654th attempt 3 weeks after release).
You can't call that easy and most guilds never even finished the raid on mythic difficulty. My guild got cutting edge 2 weeks before the new raid tier was about to come out (june 27th mythic released, got the kill november 14th, almost 5 months, and my guild was considered one of the better guilds at the time).
So really, if ashes decides to make content as hard as WoW's (which I'm not advocating they do and I highly doubt they will) then not having meters will mean basically no one will clear content at all. Mythic KJ cutting edge was only accomplished by 1.4% of the entire playerbase, with combat trackers, with addons that tell you mechanics, with outside sources of information, and he was nerfed TWICE during that time.
My personal main concern is it will make content easier and also it gets rid of the possibility for other social interactions which is part of an MMO imo. Some people don't really care about those other aspects of an MMO and they just want the raids and pve and could care less about it so why not just go to something like WoW? If WoW does have all those things then those people will keep playing that but AoC is not trying to become WoW it's clearly being designed different with more player interaction in mind.
AoC would just be balanced to be just as hard as those mythic+ raids but without the need for those addons. Also there's no point in having the meters from the beginning of the game since there's no content to test if they would even be needed for those that really claim that they do.
And I agree to an extent.
It just seems pretty silly to claim that "trackers makes the game too easy" when WoW not only has trackers but a plethora of other addons that play the game for people and they have the hardest content in all of MMOs.
Sure Method clears content in a week, but they also play 20 hours a day, spend 10k real life dollars to buy gold to buy gear, have every class at max level to swap to FOTM classes/specs, and split raids a week before to get the best possible advantage they can get. And they still have bosses that take over hundreds of attempts (most recent example I can think of is Mythic Kil'jaeden which took over 19 days of attempts, was killed on the 654th attempt 3 weeks after release).
You can't call that easy and most guilds never even finished the raid on mythic difficulty. My guild got cutting edge 2 weeks before the new raid tier was about to come out (june 27th mythic released, got the kill november 14th, almost 5 months, and my guild was considered one of the better guilds at the time).
So really, if ashes decides to make content as hard as WoW's (which I'm not advocating they do and I highly doubt they will) then not having meters will mean basically no one will clear content at all. Mythic KJ cutting edge was only accomplished by 1.4% of the entire playerbase, with combat trackers, with addons that tell you mechanics, with outside sources of information, and he was nerfed TWICE during that time.
My personal main concern is it will make content easier and also it gets rid of the possibility for other social interactions which is part of an MMO imo. Some people don't really care about those other aspects of an MMO and they just want the raids and pve and could care less about it so why not just go to something like WoW? If WoW does have all those things then those people will keep playing that but AoC is not trying to become WoW it's clearly being designed different with more player interaction in mind.
AoC would just be balanced to be just as hard as those mythic+ raids but without the need for those addons. Also there's no point in having the meters from the beginning of the game since there's no content to test if they would even be needed for those that really claim that they do.
That's fair. All I'm advocating for is player choice. It's also fair for Steven and the developers to say no to me, and I will be perfectly happy with it. I agree it will be interesting to see how this game plays out and even if they don't plan to cater to a competitive side of players in the same way WoW does, I'm sure they will find something that will be good as well. I was honestly just hoping that this game would give me that same itch and would be able to pull a lot of competitive players from WoW (especially with how they plan to cater to a more "hardcore" style with the experience debt and resource loss from death, and other similar mechanics).
We'll just have to see where it pans out!
I just can't stand some of the arguments in this thread where people are being willfully ignorant/belligerent on the topic. Where people like me have tried to address every issue against meters, and even come up with compromises, people like @Yuyukoyay have just tried to attack people over what game they play or for being "toxic!" and have not offered a single suggestion instead being stuck in their own bubble. It's upsetting that they can't give people who advocate meters the same respect and courtesy that people like @noaani and @Pantease have given them.
If you think I'm attacking people then you probably didn't understand what I was saying at all. Maybe you should copy and paste them together and read them all at once. Will give you a pretty good idea of every possible downside imaginable about meters and how harmful they are to the game.
That said I don't think the argument for meters is entirely honest. Sounds more like a bunch of excuses so that the vast amount of downsides can be abused.
If there are multiple ways to maximise damage (which I suspect), then a DPS Meter isn't required. You once said 'How do you know what's the best?' 'The best can be best until a DPS Meter shows the best'.
So, my reasons still stands, because someone has to build the builds in the first place, every build is viable, just because it took you and others to locate 'The Best' from a DPS Meter doesn't mean other theory crafters haven't already learnt of 'The Best'.
There is no risk/reward when a DPS Meter eradicates the risks, there would only be rewards.
Almost everything about this statement is inaccurate.
The only reason I am not sayign everything is inaccurate is because you spelled the individual words correct - other than that, it's all incorrect.
Just because omeone creates a build, doesn't mean that build is viable. If a game has the capcacity to create builds that are not viable, in the absence of a way to objectively assess them, there will be non-viable builds posted.
The thing to note is that not every build that is posted was actually tested by the person posting the build. In many cases, they are simply theorycrafted based on the description of the abilities. The issue with this is the description itself may be incorrect - a sitation best observed via combat trackers.
As to your risk vs reward argument at the end, this would then suggest that the only risk at all in the game is in the build you opt to take. You are suggesting (actually outright saying) that is a player dumb-lucked their way on to the best build for their class, they won't face any risk in the game. By extension, you are suggesting that Intrepid develoeprs would be incapable of creating challenging PvE content, and that PvP will be so un-balanced that a person running the best build of their class will face no competition.
Clearly, these things are not true, which means your statement that a combat tracker eradicates the risk is also not true.
Ashes will be a competitive game. I do not appreciate subversion and tricks to ensure dominance. I'd rather carve dominance through actions. It is all well and good to use DPS Meters when people only compete for gear, for fast kills, for world firsts. When the focus is PvE it is all well and good. When the PvE is the foundations of PvX then there should be no advantages from third party processes.
Sucversion is essentially being built in to this game.
If you look at combat trackers as subversion (how access to objective data could be subversion is beyond me), then it would fit in even more with the design direction of the game than if you did not consider it as such.
What happens is Steven says something, then all the opposition twist the information and tarnish the information. Then we who support Steven explain why we also do not want DPS Meters, then the people who want DPS Meters twist the information again, saying we don't give good enough reasons and refer back to Steven's reason.
Have no fear, the cycle is a long one which you can clearly see by the size of this thread.
Actually, there have been no new arguments presented in this debate since before Steven entered it. There is no need to twist what he has said, as at least from my perspective I am able to state that I have already provided a logical reason as to why I disagree with what he has said.
I could have answered every post in this combined thread that has been posted since March simply by quoting earlier posts. I don't, because that would be rude, but there have been no new points made.
This is completely true - until you start to factor in other people.
If you join a raiding guild, you are agreeing to play the way they play, at the times they play. This is a part of the deal. This is why having a combat tracker in game as something only these guilds would use would work - because everyone joining these guilds are already agreeing to play the game the way the guild plays the game.
If done this way, it leaves everyone else to play the game their own way - which seems to be exactly what you want.
I should be shocked you require tools for the hardest content, but, I'm not.
In games with combat trackers, the developers develop content based on the assumption that players will have access to one, because players will have access to one. The content is designed where it is not reasonable to take on that content without at least one person in the raid running a combat tracker to keep track of various things.
This is why my argument is that they should be built in to games. Not just Ashes, but all MMO's. Developers inevitably end up developing content based on the assumption that players are using these third party tools, so they should instead be first party.
e stated before, IS should implement a system so we can all use the system. So far, from the DPS Meter crowd all I've seen is requests which would see a select group of people having the tools while the rest do not.
I am all for having EQ2 style combat trackers (essentially a log file of all events that happen around you, that players are free to parse if they wish), the problem is that this opens it up to people using it incorrectly in pick up groups and such.
It is worth noting that the original suggestion of adding a combat tracker to Ashes via guilds that is contained in this thread (that you have claimed to have read and thus your answers are comprehensive) includes a training dummy either as a freehold item, or as a service that nodes are able to build (or both, why not?). This would allow any player that wants to the ability to try out a new build for themselves. I have to assume this is the only reason you have for wanting a combat tracker to be available to all - and I agree and accounted for it a year ago.
But you've read this thread, you know all of this, because your replies are comprehensive.
What this system does is provide any player at all that wants it with the ability to access any build, ideally on a target with almost any stat dialled in to it that the player would want (or that they have faced), and it allows guilds to monitor their performance as they are want to do. It allows players taht are not in top end guilds to peer review builds that are posted by others (reviewing these builds should be done by peopel from multiple different playstyles). It also allows people to potentially find bugs that raiders wouldn't have seen as not all abilities and augments will be suited to raiding.
While doing all of this, it still leaves all other players in the game to play as they please.
But any mandatory group forced meters in any actual content will only create toxicity.
I agree, any manditory use of combat trackers (or percieved manditory) would be bad. Every single time a combat tracker is used on a player, that player should have opted in to it. Though to me, it can be a single opt in to always let a group of players use it on them, and of course the opting in is reciprocal.
I would consider this to be a basic necessity of combat trackers if they were implemented directly in to a games client - though to be sure, would never feature in a third party tracker.
Meters serve one purpose. To exclude others based on marginal percentage differences. That is it.
Combat trackers actually serve many purposes, and it is only in one game on the market (as opposed to the two dozen or some games in which they exist) where they are used to exclude players.
You can't say that is the only use for them when they exist in games where this is not something that happens.
Im not excluding anything from you other than you trying to peep on what I'm doing. Mind your gear and your own damage *shrugs*
If you've not opted in to allowing the two of us to track each other, I totally agree. If I've not opted in and you have, then we still don't get to track each other.
Its quite literally win/win. Meters have no real function to healthily building an mmo communities pve groups. It serves only epeen folks and elitists trying to use the easiest method of toxicity
Your entire argument here is built around the notion that a combat tracker only actually measures DPS. This is a fallacy, and why I will always refer to them as combat trackers (even though that in itself isn't telling the full picture).
I have seen two games where a combat tracker (the same combat tracker) was used to demonstrate to the games developers that their random number generator was not functioning as it should (to be fair, it wasn't the generator itself, it was rounding that was done with the number the generator spat out). There was a rounding error, and the way it manifested itself in game was that the first number and last number of any given range would only come up half as often as all other numbers.
This would mean that if the game had to roll a random number out of three, the number two would come up 50% of the time, the number one would come up 25% of the time and the number three would come up 25% of the time.
Since the random number generator is used for almost literally everything in game, from crafting success, to loot distribution, to damage dealt, to dodge chance, to, well, everything, this one thing actually impacted every player, every day, in many many small ways.
A combat tracker was the only way thing was even noticed, let alone being the only way that enough data was able to be collected to pass it on to the developers so they could fix it.
Every game has bugs in it that developers miss. Every game has had many of these bugs found by the playerbase. Most of these bugs are only found because combat trackers are a thing.
I want to again point out that the only toxicity that exists around combat trackers comes from WoW. No other game has this issue. Other games have combat trackers without that toxicity, and other games that that toxicity without trackers, but there is no other game that has the combination of high combat tracker use and high toxicity.
This should lead people to look for another source for that toxicity, as if one games with combat trackers have toxicity, and many games with combat trackers do not have that toxicity, then it seems incorrect from any perspective to say that combat trackers cause that toxicity (though it is an understandable position from someone that has only played WoW).
Oh you mean like how it leads to player toxicity. Lessens the games social ability by a pretty large margin. Unfairly forces people to participate in it whether they want to or not. Will be used to force how loot is distributed. Is objectively useless to the design of the game. Assumes the majority of the playerbase is stupid and can't think for themselves. Assumes that the playerbase are more casual for some reason.
Will force a meta that may not even be the most effective way to play. Will force a meta that will not be enjoyable by the majority of the playerbase. Will lead to class denial despite player skill (even in cases where they out perform you in every possible way). Will cause elitist pricks to be even more intolerable than they already are despite their statistics being inherently flawed by the design of the game when determining player and build viability.
Is a crutch that may limit player growth. May ignore mechanical skill methods in the game. Absolutely guaranteed to lead to a second layer of toxicity ingrained in the game due to all of above coming true.
@Sangramoire
I'm not wanting to get too involved in teh conversation you and Linstead have been having, I just wantto throw in a few specific points that I had while reading.
if you have anything specific you would like me to try and answer, by all means @ me and I'll do my best.
In which specific situation would a combat tracker be more beneficial than harmful?
When peer reviewing other players builds that they have posted as a guide for new players. It is, in my opinion, the veteran players resposibility and obligation to make sure that information is as accurate as possible - which can only be done with a combat tracker.
When checking to make sure tool tip descriptions of abilities match the effect they have. If an ability has a range of 150 - 300, and you want to make sure it is working as it should, you need at least 15,000 data points of that spell against a single, un-debuffed target. Doing that without a combat tracker is - let's just say tiresome.
When in an encounter designed with combat trackers in mind, combat trackers are obviously needed to keep track of the multitude of mechanics that are in play at the same time.
My personal main concern is it will make content easier and also it gets rid of the possibility for other social interactions which is part of an MMO imo.
Two points here.
The first one is simple - it does, but then developers take combat trackers in to consideration when developing content. I would then agree that this means that there is content that people can't do without combat trackers - which I am sure would be the next point of debate.
What I would say to that though is that I think this is fine. To me, as long as players that want to raid without a combat tracker have content on which to do that, it is not an issue if players that do have a combat tracker also have content on which to raid.
Should the guild without a combat tracker then decide to make their content easier by using a combat tracker, they then have the content that was designed with their use in mind that will pose a challenge to them.
Thus, basically, everyone has content to meet their own level of challenge, base on the tools they want to make use of.
The second point - the social aspects of an MMO - I am unsure as to why a combat tracker would have an impact on this.
To me, things like a dungeon finder have an impact on social aspects like this, but not a combat tracker. I kind of need more of an idea of what you are thinking to form any real opinion of this.
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?
I believe I answered this above, again, @ me if not.
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.
I am of the opinion that when you join a guild - especially a guild that is aiming high in what ever content it excels at - you are signing up to play the game in the manner that the guild plays the game.
This is why guild choice matters - it shapes the way you play the game.
If you are joining a guild that requires you to use a combat tracker, then that is what you are signing up for when you join that guild. As such, I don't see how this could be considered an issue.
As to your example of a person in a guild misusing it, I have two points to make.
The first is - should we simply remove everything from the game that people could misuse in this manner? I don't think we would have much of a game left if we did.
Second, people have the option to leave guilds. If you leave the guild with that player in it, that player is never able to track your combat ever again.
And as you said, that player will find somethign to abuse - why take useful tools out of the game just for the sake of those few people?
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 true, not everyone will behave this way. However, if combat trackers were set up in this manner, guilds that don't take this mindset will eventually find it hard to get new members.
The design of the game will have a far greater impact on the behavior of people in game than any other factor. If the game is designed in a way where it is in a guilds best interest to put some time and effort in to new recruits, then that is what guilds will do.
While this is something I often do in games anyway (especially if I come across a player that is actually enthusiastic for top end content), I am not at all suggesting that systems should be put in place in the hope of this happening. I'm also not a fan of making it a rule or anything. However, there is a middle ground where you make it so that it is in the guilds best interests to assit new recruits, and all of a sudden that is what guilds will gladly do.
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.
See, I am all for having both.
Have content that is designed around not having combat trackers. Maybe even make it so that guilds killing it without the combat tracker perk get better loot.
Honestly, I'm all for that.
However, I am also all for guilds that want and enjoy the added dimension that comes from having a combat tracker and encounters designed around the use of a combat tracker.
The thing is, having both of these things in one game in a way where they both make sense to be in that game can only be possible if the game has a built in combat tracker.
Oh you mean like how it leads to player toxicity. Lessens the games social ability by a pretty large margin. Unfairly forces people to participate in it whether they want to or not. Will be used to force how loot is distributed. Is objectively useless to the design of the game. Assumes the majority of the playerbase is stupid and can't think for themselves. Assumes that the playerbase are more casual for some reason.
Will force a meta that may not even be the most effective way to play. Will force a meta that will not be enjoyable by the majority of the playerbase. Will lead to class denial despite player skill (even in cases where they out perform you in every possible way). Will cause elitist pricks to be even more intolerable than they already are despite their statistics being inherently flawed by the design of the game when determining player and build viability.
Is a crutch that may limit player growth. May ignore mechanical skill methods in the game. Absolutely guaranteed to lead to a second layer of toxicity ingrained in the game due to all of above coming true.
I'm confused.
This post starts off like you are talking about an automated grouping system, as the things you are complaining of there are literally all a result of that.
Then the second paragraph goes on to complain about things that will happen if a combat tracker isn't freely available.
I was under the impression that you were against combat trackers, not that you were against automated grouping systems and all for combat trackers.
Assuming you are indeed still against combat trackers, I would be interested to hear how you think their inclusion would cause all of the above, as much of it is completely unrelated.
Have content that is designed around not having combat trackers. Maybe even make it so that guilds killing it without the combat tracker perk get better loot.
The first one is simple - it does, but then developers take combat trackers in to consideration when developing content. I would then agree that this means that there is content that people can't do without combat trackers - which I am sure would be the next point of debate.
What I would say to that though is that I think this is fine. To me, as long as players that want to raid without a combat tracker have content on which to do that, it is not an issue if players that do have a combat tracker also have content on which to raid.
Should the guild without a combat tracker then decide to make their content easier by using a combat tracker, they then have the content that was designed with their use in mind that will pose a challenge to them.
Thus, basically, everyone has content to meet their own level of challenge, base on the tools they want to make use of.
first off, then why not just balance content with trackers not in mind since they are not available? That way the developers still end up with a challenging game that doesn't need trackers and doesn't have to deal with the negatives of having trackers.
Second, I think it would be a good idea to give better loot to guilds killing content without the tracker though there's some problems that can come with that but you also have to keep in mind that AoC is being designed fundamentally different than other MMOs.
The Developers cannot guarantee that there will be content in your server that's balanced for trackers and non trackers because that's not up to the developers in this game. AoC is ever changing and it would be easier to just balance content for no tracker use, that way people that advocate for a tracker really have no need for it because the game would already be balanced for no tracker and the people that don't want a tracker will not be forced to use one.
For testing other people's builds and such a tracker is absolutely not needed. Take Path of Exile as an example, people including myself play that game just to theory craft and create new builds all the time. The game changes every couple of months and there's a lot of changes with completely new items and new game mechanics. Yet we still don't have a tracker in that game to test builds.
And in this case a combat dummy could be added instead that would actually be better than a tracker for testing builds because fundamentally each server will be different. a good build on one server may not be as good on another because certain builds will be made for specific things that another server may not have.
The second point - the social aspects of an MMO - I am unsure as to why a combat tracker would have an impact on this.
To me, things like a dungeon finder have an impact on social aspects like this, but not a combat tracker. I kind of need more of an idea of what you are thinking to form any real opinion of this.
Having combat trackers would get rid of the need to be more well organized as a group when raiding and having to communicate as much. Groups in AoC are capped at 8 and you can have up to 5 groups in a raid which means 40 people total but there doesn't necessarily need to be just one raid leader. You can have a raid leader and you can also have group leaders that are in charge of that smaller group of people. The argument for trackers I keep seeing is that it's difficult to keep track of 25 or 40 people as a raid leader but AoC is not being designed like WoW or other MMOs. Having those trackers would get rid of even the possibility of that dynamic being added into the mix of raiding.
The second point - the social aspects of an MMO - I am unsure as to why a combat tracker would have an impact on this.
To me, things like a dungeon finder have an impact on social aspects like this, but not a combat tracker. I kind of need more of an idea of what you are thinking to form any real opinion of this.
Having combat trackers would get rid of the need to be more well organized as a group when raiding and having to communicate as much. Groups in AoC are capped at 8 and you can have up to 5 groups in a raid which means 40 people total but there doesn't necessarily need to be just one raid leader. You can have a raid leader and you can also have group leaders that are in charge of that smaller group of people. The argument for trackers I keep seeing is that it's difficult to keep track of 25 or 40 people as a raid leader but AoC is not being designed like WoW or other MMOs. Having those trackers would get rid of even the possibility of that dynamic being added into the mix of raiding.
Combat trackers in no way get rid of the need to be more organized as a group, nor is impacting the amount of communication that goes between the players. That's just plain silly.
It's really simple. Beyond simple.
Imagine yourself in an 8p group, learning the fight for a new savage boss. The mechanics, and when to put out buffs as a group etc etc. A day passes, you made some progress, a week passes, now you're able to bring down the boss to 50%, a month passes, now you're able to bring it down to 5%. Then you're hit with the enrage, and realize that you've seen all the mechanics. Now you just lack the DPS.
Are you in all honesty going to play forever until the player in your group that's doing the lowest damage figures out how to increase his damage?
Well here's news flash for you. He can't figure out how to increase his damage, because he doesn't EVEN KNOW that his damage can be increased by doing certain rotations.
Everybody in that group will think they're all doing fine, and that the boss is simply hard to beat. But no amount of re-tries are going to help you. 1 or 2 of your party members ARE HOLDING YOU BACK!
You need the means to find out who's pulling the least weight in your party.
A player who plays MMOs to clear the hardest content there is, doing it without a damage meter is the best way to waste time.
I don't care about "people's feelings"
Sometimes I'll be the one getting kicked from parties, and Im perfectly fine with that.
The second point - the social aspects of an MMO - I am unsure as to why a combat tracker would have an impact on this.
To me, things like a dungeon finder have an impact on social aspects like this, but not a combat tracker. I kind of need more of an idea of what you are thinking to form any real opinion of this.
Having combat trackers would get rid of the need to be more well organized as a group when raiding and having to communicate as much. Groups in AoC are capped at 8 and you can have up to 5 groups in a raid which means 40 people total but there doesn't necessarily need to be just one raid leader. You can have a raid leader and you can also have group leaders that are in charge of that smaller group of people. The argument for trackers I keep seeing is that it's difficult to keep track of 25 or 40 people as a raid leader but AoC is not being designed like WoW or other MMOs. Having those trackers would get rid of even the possibility of that dynamic being added into the mix of raiding.
Combat trackers in no way get rid of the need to be more organized as a group, nor is impacting the amount of communication that goes between the players. That's just plain silly.
It's really simple. Beyond simple.
Imagine yourself in an 8p group, learning the fight for a new savage boss. The mechanics, and when to put out buffs as a group etc etc. A day passes, you made some progress, a week passes, now you're able to bring down the boss to 50%, a month passes, now you're able to bring it down to 5%. Then you're hit with the enrage, and realize that you've seen all the mechanics. Now you just lack the DPS.
Are you in all honesty going to play forever until the player in your group that's doing the lowest damage figures out how to increase his damage?
Well here's news flash for you. He can't figure out how to increase his damage, because he doesn't EVEN KNOW that his damage can be increased by doing certain rotations.
Everybody in that group will think they're all doing fine, and that the boss is simply hard to beat. But no amount of re-tries are going to help you. 1 or 2 of your party members ARE HOLDING YOU BACK!
You need the means to find out who's pulling the least weight in your party.
A player who plays MMOs to clear the hardest content there is, doing it without a damage meter is the best way to waste time.
I don't care about "people's feelings"
Sometimes I'll be the one getting kicked from parties, and Im perfectly fine with that.
well your reply is really silly since i've already answered that sort of situation in past examples I won't bother to do so again as I tend to write a lot.
I'll give you a short example instead. About a week ago I downloaded TERA and created a new character. I had not played the game in years so many things have changed since then. Due to the lack of new players sometimes queue times could take a very long time so I decided to go through a dungeon that's actually balanced for 3 players all by myself. I could have queued up for the same dungeon (solo) and it would have been balanced for solo but I didn't.
When I got tot he first major encounter I died. I took the boss down to maybe 90% before I died. I tried it again and again and after dying another 3 times I finally decided I would really try to kill it and stop screwing around. I needed to focus.
I've said so before and I'll say it again. DPS will NEVER be the reason you fail a raid UNLESS the encounter spawns a mechanic where you have to DPS something down like a structure before it blows up and automatically wipes the raid, and in that situation a tracker is not needed to know that you didn't do enough DPS to destroy whatever the mechanic was.
Anyways once I decided to focus I dodged certain attacks from the boss and saved certain abilities I have for escapes instead of damage to deal with some of the mechanics and though I killed the boss slowly, I still managed to kill it on my very first try after deciding I needed to be focused.
DPS was not my issue and most of the time will not be the issue. I don't know how far back in the thread you've read but I've said so before that most things that will wipe a raid or cause it to fail will be obvious things that have to do with the mechanics of the raid such as maybe healers used a certain ability that they should have saved for a specific boss mechanic or the tank didn't stand in the right place and died or stuff like that and as long as people are paying attention then it's easy to figure out where something went wrong. Trackers are not needed to figure out where something went wrong you just need common sense.
The trackers are also not needed to pin point who in your raid is pulling the least of their weight. Guilds just have to actually put in effort and make sure they are paying attention during the raid.
Trackers are also not needed to help that one person that you've figured out now that is not doing enough damage or is over healing too much. You merely need common sense once again. Read the tooltips of your abilities and figure out how to use them. If someone is not doing so well there's enough people that will play the game that they can find someone else that's playing the same class and they can copy what that person does if they don't want to put in effort to actually get better but the raid will still be limited by people like that simply because that person may not want to put in that effort.
Even with a tracker that person would not put in any effort so the situation would be the same. Eventually with or without tracker if that raid group wants to advance they will need to replace that person that's not willing to learn. If a person is willing to learn, with or without tracker they will get better. Essentially what I'm saying is there really is no use for a tracker even though some people may enjoy watching the numbers like myself I do like seeing the numbers but the drawbacks far outweigh positives. The only thing that I would say a tracker is useful in that cannot be done without it would be to make sure abilities work as intended. To make sure the tooltips of each ability is correct. I think having a dummy or area in your house where you can test that out would be sufficient as opposed to a tracker though.
I still really see no need for a tracker as any situation you throw at me in a raid can be dealt with without it.
first off, then why not just balance content with trackers not in mind since they are not available? That way the developers still end up with a challenging game that doesn't need trackers and doesn't have to deal with the negatives of having trackers.
The main reason here is that they offer up a completely different type of challenge.
In order for the following to make sense, you first need to understand and agree that developers are able - should they want to - of creating an encounter so complex that even though it is theoretically able to be killed, players simply would not be able to manage all of the mechanics involved in it, combat tracker or not.
From there, you need to understand that developers are able to set a target difficulty for an encounter, and this is often the first actual thing that is known about an encounter during development (they will often know how hard they want to make an encounter before they know where in the world the encounter will go, what rave it will be, what it's name is, etc). The way to provide this difficulty is in how much mental capacity you ask the guild to offer up, and how exact you want their execution to be (which includes, but is not limited to, DPS output).
So, if a developer is making an encounter for a game that doesn't have combat trackers, they have to take in to account that if there is an important AoE in an encounter, the simple act of timing that AoE takes up some of the raids mental capacity - a surprising amount, as you always need at least one backup timing each mechanic that needs to be timed, and many encounters will have 4 or 5 of such.
This puts a limit on how many mechanics a developer can apply to an encounter based on the difficulty of the encounter.
Take that same developer, same encounter and same difficulty target, but make the assumption that players will have a combat tracker.
Now, the raid can time the combat tracker, and then input that in to that combat tracker. This means that the players in the raid do not need to time the mechanic any longer, freeing up some mental capacity. This allows the developer to then fill that mental capacity back up with more mechanics.
This means that the players in the raid with the combat tracker have their time taken up more with actual mechanics, and less with stopwatches.
There is an argument to be made for having the encounters signify in some way that they are about to cast a specific ability, but without fail it is easier to time these encounters (they are almost always cast after a set number of seconds, +/-4). Since this is easier and more reliable, it generally becomes what most guilds default to over time.
The Developers cannot guarantee that there will be content in your server that's balanced for trackers and non trackers because that's not up to the developers in this game. AoC is ever changing and it would be easier to just balance content for no tracker use, that way people that advocate for a tracker really have no need for it because the game would already be balanced for no tracker and the people that don't want a tracker will not be forced to use one.
If the developers are able to make the statement that there will be 10 - 12 world bosses up at any given point in time, I would assume they are able to make more assumptions about content than that.
I don't expect as much granularity to content as many people seem to think - the actual developing of that amount of content would be prohibitive.
For testing other people's builds and such a tracker is absolutely not needed. Take Path of Exile as an example, people including myself play that game just to theory craft and create new builds all the time. The game changes every couple of months and there's a lot of changes with completely new items and new game mechanics. Yet we still don't have a tracker in that game to test builds.
There are combat trackers for PoE.
Not sure if GGG know about them (I would assume so, I'm fairly sure they are pulling data from the servers), but I am fairly sure Chris is too laid back to care, and Tencent too distant even think about it.
And in this case a combat dummy could be added instead that would actually be better than a tracker for testing builds because fundamentally each server will be different. a good build on one server may not be as good on another because certain builds will be made for specific things that another server may not have.
I totally agree that each server is likely to be different, at least to a degree. This is a part of the reason why I can't quite understand the people that say combat trackers will lead to cookie cutter builds or a static meta.
The only way a game like Ashes will have a static meta is if people are too afraid to try somethign new.
In my mind, the best way to make sure people are happy to try something new is to give them the tools to objectivly assess that new thing.
Having combat trackers would get rid of the need to be more well organized as a group when raiding and having to communicate as much. Groups in AoC are capped at 8 and you can have up to 5 groups in a raid which means 40 people total but there doesn't necessarily need to be just one raid leader. You can have a raid leader and you can also have group leaders that are in charge of that smaller group of people. The argument for trackers I keep seeing is that it's difficult to keep track of 25 or 40 people as a raid leader but AoC is not being designed like WoW or other MMOs. Having those trackers would get rid of even the possibility of that dynamic being added into the mix of raiding.
In my experience, combat trackers don't detract from the need to communicate.
While it "may" make it less common for raids to break up the leadership in to smaller units, I would think this would be rare enough outside of PvP that it isn't an issue.
Come PvP time though, assuming the suggestion I want to happen did happen, the combat tracker is of no real use, and so guilds need to rely on their ability, communication and teamwork - just as they need to on actual hard content in PvE raids when using a combat tracker.
This discussion has been had in almost all mmorpgs, and there's always a need for Dps meters, hence why third party software is always widely used if the developers don't directly support it.
Without dps meters, you are basically reducing the experience considerably for a lot of players. If there's neither in-game meter or third-party that is.
It's not just dps though, it's about a lot data that can be used to improve yourself and/or your party.
I can however see the disadvantages with it too, but I just think that's inevitable anyways. Also, you can at least limit it to seeing just your own performance or something, and maybe allow for a group to activate full coverage of dps meter when doing harder fights.
I think a lot of people just see it as a means to judge people though, but I've never called someone out for their dps. I use it improve myself, and to challenge myself to get better.
EDIT: To make myself clear though, I hate add-ons etc that help you with the fights or give you information that can make things easier or more convenient. I'm strictly talking about getting performance data that can be used for analysis after a fight.
The second point - the social aspects of an MMO - I am unsure as to why a combat tracker would have an impact on this.
To me, things like a dungeon finder have an impact on social aspects like this, but not a combat tracker. I kind of need more of an idea of what you are thinking to form any real opinion of this.
Having combat trackers would get rid of the need to be more well organized as a group when raiding and having to communicate as much. Groups in AoC are capped at 8 and you can have up to 5 groups in a raid which means 40 people total but there doesn't necessarily need to be just one raid leader. You can have a raid leader and you can also have group leaders that are in charge of that smaller group of people. The argument for trackers I keep seeing is that it's difficult to keep track of 25 or 40 people as a raid leader but AoC is not being designed like WoW or other MMOs. Having those trackers would get rid of even the possibility of that dynamic being added into the mix of raiding.
Combat trackers in no way get rid of the need to be more organized as a group, nor is impacting the amount of communication that goes between the players. That's just plain silly.
It's really simple. Beyond simple.
Imagine yourself in an 8p group, learning the fight for a new savage boss. The mechanics, and when to put out buffs as a group etc etc. A day passes, you made some progress, a week passes, now you're able to bring down the boss to 50%, a month passes, now you're able to bring it down to 5%. Then you're hit with the enrage, and realize that you've seen all the mechanics. Now you just lack the DPS.
Are you in all honesty going to play forever until the player in your group that's doing the lowest damage figures out how to increase his damage?
Well here's news flash for you. He can't figure out how to increase his damage, because he doesn't EVEN KNOW that his damage can be increased by doing certain rotations.
Everybody in that group will think they're all doing fine, and that the boss is simply hard to beat. But no amount of re-tries are going to help you. 1 or 2 of your party members ARE HOLDING YOU BACK!
You need the means to find out who's pulling the least weight in your party.
A player who plays MMOs to clear the hardest content there is, doing it without a damage meter is the best way to waste time.
I don't care about "people's feelings"
Sometimes I'll be the one getting kicked from parties, and Im perfectly fine with that.
well your reply is really silly since i've already answered that sort of situation in past examples I won't bother to do so again as I tend to write a lot.
I'll give you a short example instead. About a week ago I downloaded TERA and created a new character. I had not played the game in years so many things have changed since then. Due to the lack of new players sometimes queue times could take a very long time so I decided to go through a dungeon that's actually balanced for 3 players all by myself. I could have queued up for the same dungeon (solo) and it would have been balanced for solo but I didn't.
When I got tot he first major encounter I died. I took the boss down to maybe 90% before I died. I tried it again and again and after dying another 3 times I finally decided I would really try to kill it and stop screwing around. I needed to focus.
I've said so before and I'll say it again. DPS will NEVER be the reason you fail a raid UNLESS the encounter spawns a mechanic where you have to DPS something down like a structure before it blows up and automatically wipes the raid, and in that situation a tracker is not needed to know that you didn't do enough DPS to destroy whatever the mechanic was.
Anyways once I decided to focus I dodged certain attacks from the boss and saved certain abilities I have for escapes instead of damage to deal with some of the mechanics and though I killed the boss slowly, I still managed to kill it on my very first try after deciding I needed to be focused.
DPS was not my issue and most of the time will not be the issue. I don't know how far back in the thread you've read but I've said so before that most things that will wipe a raid or cause it to fail will be obvious things that have to do with the mechanics of the raid such as maybe healers used a certain ability that they should have saved for a specific boss mechanic or the tank didn't stand in the right place and died or stuff like that and as long as people are paying attention then it's easy to figure out where something went wrong. Trackers are not needed to figure out where something went wrong you just need common sense.
The trackers are also not needed to pin point who in your raid is pulling the least of their weight. Guilds just have to actually put in effort and make sure they are paying attention during the raid.
Trackers are also not needed to help that one person that you've figured out now that is not doing enough damage or is over healing too much. You merely need common sense once again. Read the tooltips of your abilities and figure out how to use them. If someone is not doing so well there's enough people that will play the game that they can find someone else that's playing the same class and they can copy what that person does if they don't want to put in effort to actually get better but the raid will still be limited by people like that simply because that person may not want to put in that effort.
Even with a tracker that person would not put in any effort so the situation would be the same. Eventually with or without tracker if that raid group wants to advance they will need to replace that person that's not willing to learn. If a person is willing to learn, with or without tracker they will get better. Essentially what I'm saying is there really is no use for a tracker even though some people may enjoy watching the numbers like myself I do like seeing the numbers but the drawbacks far outweigh positives. The only thing that I would say a tracker is useful in that cannot be done without it would be to make sure abilities work as intended. To make sure the tooltips of each ability is correct. I think having a dummy or area in your house where you can test that out would be sufficient as opposed to a tracker though.
I still really see no need for a tracker as any situation you throw at me in a raid can be dealt with without it.
That's because you're talking about normal content where nobody is using damage meters.
Even if the game had built-in damage meter I wouldn't be using it to clear the normal content.
I'm talking about savage and ultimate raids, call them however the fuck you want, they have hard enrage meaning, if you don't kill the boss on time, they make 1 final move, and kill everyone instantly.
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NelsonRebelMember, Leader of Men, Kickstarter, Alpha One
Ultimately this whole argument boils down to what steven envisions in AoC
He wants to bring more social interaction in the game world, something that dungeon finders, easy fast travel, dps meters, all discourage. (In one way or another)
I specifically detest meters (no secret) but I also have no issue with a private meter on dps dummies as long as they are out of raid/dungeon environments.
I'll just have to agree to disagree here (I'm on Stevens side of the Fence on this issue) as I dont think the benifit of a DPS meter outweighs the negatives of what inevitably follows in a community. I mean thats partly why he isnt allowing addons. I know people will figure out their own ways, but at least the barrier to entry will be less and get real interactions going within the game world.
I think this is how it's going to play out in Ashes, somehow 3rd party DPS meters might creep it's way to the game. And it will end up in the hands of hardcore raid guilds which probably won't be the majority of guilds or players in Ashes.
Now hardcore players might enjoy this and they might of used it in other games like say WoW or whatever. And even within hardcore players they might of have a few players who rage quit simply because it created some kind of hierarchy within their members.
The only scenario I can think of is that even hardcore players specifically for Ashes would create disarray among their members is the lack of time and availability for players to work towards improving their build (tank,dps,healz) so that they can make the cut to join a raid guild (assuming dps meter is good enough) if that's the only measure the leaders will make their decision to invite you.
Now, depending on the leader, he might try you out and see if you know the boss mechanics as a minimum requirement until you get better gear and increase your performance by relying on the DPS meter. So if this happens, then at least the leader is helping you to get better gear. And I know that in ashes you can get gear by other means rather then just grinding dungeons. But I would assume that there will be valuable drops within dungeons that might help you gear out towards a specific build by selling or crafting.
Now if the master loot is on just for the sake of argument, and assuming that hardcore raid leader is using a DPS meter for evaluations then he will use the master loot to distribute loot drops among members. Again, I come back to time and availability. You are trying to get better by increasing your performance, how many trials are you going to get invited for raiding so you can achieve your goal for a specific loot drop? What if that specific dungeon disappears due to node destruction by siege or atrophy?
Now, if that specific player wants to increase performance and joins a casual guild that doesn't use a DPS meter, his/her chances might be better to acquire a specific loot drop vs a hardcore guild. Now you might argue that a casual player is just cheating himself by thinking he can do the most hardcore raids. Maybe so, but why not? That's a decision every player has to make, what's your objective and what's the best way in achieving it? If he's going to be cast out from a hardcore raid group, why not take his chances on a casual raid group, it doesn't mean they will fail a 100% of the time.
I'm not really against DPS meters as long as hardcore minded people have fun with it. But we are in an age of MMORPG's that casuals are a thing and you can achieve the same results given time to get good at some things. So I suspect lots of people aren't going to use DPS meters in this game simply cause Intrepid decided not to have it in-game but maybe a 3rd party meter will make it in the game. Personally, I like to be flexible and not too restrictive.
im very torn, i can see the bad and the good, main reason for them is, how can i know im playing good for myself and using a good build if i dont have any way of measuring my dps, bad is ofc people being left out. ideal would be a way to see only your personal dps somehow.
one of my concerns is, pve content and raid content, has to be fundamentally very easy, if theres no dps meter, and thus no way to know if theres a bunch of people in your group underperforming. either content will be tuned to a decent percentile of performance, therefore when you have some unavoidable underperformers you wont know who it is and feel like your banging your head against a wall, or content will be tuned so underperformers can complete it, meaning a higher performer will sleep through the fight as its so easy and thus boring.
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NelsonRebelMember, Leader of Men, Kickstarter, Alpha One
I think this is how it's going to play out in Ashes, somehow 3rd party DPS meters might creep it's way to the game. And it will end up in the hands of hardcore raid guilds which probably won't be the majority of guilds or players in Ashes.
Now hardcore players might enjoy this and they might of used it in other games like say WoW or whatever. And even within hardcore players they might of have a few players who rage quit simply because it created some kind of hierarchy within their members.
But how will 3rd party play into it with no addons for AoC?
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NelsonRebelMember, Leader of Men, Kickstarter, Alpha One
im very torn, i can see the bad and the good, main reason for them is, how can i know im playing good for myself and using a good build if i dont have any way of measuring my dps, bad is ofc people being left out. ideal would be a way to see only your personal dps somehow.
one of my concerns is, pve content and raid content, has to be fundamentally very easy, if theres no dps meter, and thus no way to know if theres a bunch of people in your group underperforming. either content will be tuned to a decent percentile of performance, therefore when you have some unavoidable underperformers you wont know who it is and feel like your banging your head against a wall, or content will be tuned so underperformers can complete it, meaning a higher performer will sleep through the fight as its so easy and thus boring.
Thats the fun part of discovery to me. The mechanics are #1, communication is #2, group composition is #3
Damage is (and should) be dependent on how well 1-3 is done.
People like to measure how fast they can burn things via that meter. I say people can use a ballpark estimate based off of a instanced or open world monster without the specifics in the dungeon.
Mastering damage (in my opinion) is more fun when its through group effort and interaction. Not just by how much the dps meter tells you on the raid. Opinions differ here I suppose. But I like no meters and I'm glad this is where AoC is standing on it
Comments
I don't know of any MMO's that come with a dps meter or combat logging parsed to external sites built into it. That being the case, it's 100% optional for EVERYONE, regardless of your goals in the game. While that may be paying lip service to an ideal, since if it's something supported, competitive guilds will use it, and if you want to be in one of those, so will you - this is still entirely a choice made by you.
I've been all over the spectrum on this, from pure casual gaming to trying to compete towards the top of NA guilds spending hours on sites like warcraftlogs comparing myself to others of my class. All that time I spent in games with these features supported, and not one time during that did I feel like my experience was hurt by them simply existing. With them you're absolutely going to run into scenarios where someone sees someone doing low damage, something mean may get said and feelings may get hurt. But you don't HAVE to run with people like that.
I just have a really hard time with the argument that excluding so much as a choice on having something like that is a good thing, given the breadth of my experience. It may be interesting being in a game without them, not going to lie. But it's also a bit disconcerting thinking about how performance is going to be judged (if that is something you care about) without hard numbers to back it up.
Ok, lets say you are trialing for a competitive raiding guild. Your DPS is low and is under the threshold requirement to join, so to raise it up you go through the combat tracker to figure out why people of your same class are out damaging you and how you could emulate their strategies or come up with your own strategy to increase your DPS to be above that threshold.
Also many people have pointed out (me, noaani, pantease, and some others) that combat trackers can be a boon because it immediately lets a class leader or raid leader know what the problem is and how to remedy that problem. They can work together with their guildmates for the betterment of the group. People in WoW are disposable, because server transfers, teleporting, looking for group/raid, etc. In this game, there won't be any of that, so no one is going to just kick a low dps raider 3-4 hours into a raid night. They won't be able to replace that person in a timely manner, so the best thing to do would be to go over the combat tracker with them and figure out what went wrong and how everyone can be better.
Without combat trackers, it's just hectic. "Why are we wiping?" "Idk! Maybe dps is low?" *proceeds to bash their heads in at the boss for another hour* "WHY ARE WE STILL WIPING?" "I DONT KNOW, FUCKING SHITTER DPS MAYBE!" *raid ends and everyone is mad*
Then it turns out the reason people were wiping was because the healers weren't properly dispelling. No one knew because there were no trackers. Everyone is mad. And their lockout is ruined. Sure they could have spent the next week theorycrafting about what went wrong and coming up with "subjective" reasons why it happened until they managed to get it right, but combat trackers negates all that hassle, all the stress, and makes raiding more fun. You wouldn't have nights where people just give up because no one knows what is happening for hours.
That is a compromise I would be okay with as well, but to be fair if you are planning on joining a competitive guild they will expect you to share those with everyone. Especially in this game, where the content gets harder and you get better/more loot the better your group does, no one will want to play with someone who is hiding their dps from their guild (even if they are doing really well) because they don't want the possibility on missing loot.
This exactly proves my point and is the reason why I personally don't want trackers in the game. They make the game easier and just hands you information instead of people actually putting in the work to analyze the situation. In that specific situation that you mention you merely need to approach systematically to find where your problem lies rather than just automatically scream "I DON'T KNOW, FUCKING SHITTER DPS MAYBE!"
That's just not the way to approach the situation which I would say the guild wiping over and over is well deserved.
Another thing is that I'd personally prefer being rewarded for handling those situation the right way and if your raid leader or guild leader is not experienced or skilled enough to know what went wrong then you can simply talk to other raid leaders or guilds to help you. If you have the trackers it would get rid of that opportunity for social interaction.
And that will happen, but it will be less apparent. Without a tracker, the game will have to be trivialized to simple tasks instead of an environment where you can keep track of many things at once while also allowing yourself to be mechanically proficient in your class and pumping out as much damage/healing/threat/mitigation as you can while also managing small things.
Let's say in a raid there are 2 debuffs. If you mix the 2 debuffs, the player instantly dies, and everyone around them blows up as well, resulting in a wipe.
Now, is it more reasonable for the 1 raid leader to spend the next 5 hours trying to watch 39 other player's debuffs the entire night while also trying to pull his own weight? Will he even be able to keep track of all that information? Will they even be able to tell it was the debuffs at all? What if the first debuff comes out in the first 10 seconds of the fight, but the next one comes out 2 minutes later? People will look at the combat log and go "huh, I got debuff#2 and then I just died, that debuff must be dispelled I guess!" and then it will keep happening again and again because they don't know the actual crux of the problem. Then all it will lead to is an argument between DPS players and Healers about who is in the wrong. It could take a lot of guilds an entire raid week or maybe multiple weeks, just to figure out this one mechanic that really doesn't have a lot of depth or even challenge to it. Leading to guilds disbanding, fighting, people leaving, etc.
Sure that's more "challenging" (imo tedious, I find fights challenging because they actually push your mechanical skill and gear checks), but is it really more reasonable for people to be hard stuck on content because they have no idea how these 2 debuffs interact with each other and the onus of figuring it out is placed on 1 guild/raid leader who needs to babysit 39 other people? Or is it more reasonable to have a tracker and people to look at it after a wipe and go "Ok, so these 2 debuffs interact in such a way that wipes the raid, so healers be mindful of dispelling and dps be mindful of where you stand!"
Trackers allow devs the ability to make extremely nuanced and in depth mechanics because they are designing around the idea that players will be able to sufficiently track things. This allows for amazingly tuned and engaging boss fights. It's why WoW is still an MMO titan to this day even though it really sucks, because it's raids are absolutely fantastic and each fight is crafted extremely well while being insanely challenging at the mythic level.
U.S. East
I see your point and maybe I would agree with it if it were like 15 years ago but now people have so much experience with many different types of mechanics that it would not take very long for someone out of the thousands of people that play the game to figure out how it works and it will be posted someone on the internet and everyone will follow.
Years ago that wasn't the case as much as it is now.
Also like I said before, in order to really complete the raids people would have to be more organized so rather than having one leader and 39 group members you have 5 groups of 8 each with it's own leader to guide them and each has specific roles in the raid. That's how AoC is currently designed because groups are made from 8 people but you can have up to 5 groups of 8 in a raid. AoC is just being designed different than something like WoW or virtually any other MMO currently in the market. If you prefer those types of raids and those mechanics and that sort of challenge where the challenge lies in how much DPS you can do because of your gear and how min/maxed your build is then sure but I prefer something that's more difficult because of boss and raid mechanics.
And I agree to an extent.
It just seems pretty silly to claim that "trackers makes the game too easy" when WoW not only has trackers but a plethora of other addons that play the game for people and they have the hardest content in all of MMOs.
Sure Method clears content in a week, but they also play 20 hours a day, spend 10k real life dollars to buy gold to buy gear, have every class at max level to swap to FOTM classes/specs, and split raids a week before to get the best possible advantage they can get. And they still have bosses that take over hundreds of attempts (most recent example I can think of is Mythic Kil'jaeden which took over 19 days of attempts, was killed on the 654th attempt 3 weeks after release).
You can't call that easy and most guilds never even finished the raid on mythic difficulty. My guild got cutting edge 2 weeks before the new raid tier was about to come out (june 27th mythic released, got the kill november 14th, almost 5 months, and my guild was considered one of the better guilds at the time).
So really, if ashes decides to make content as hard as WoW's (which I'm not advocating they do and I highly doubt they will) then not having meters will mean basically no one will clear content at all. Mythic KJ cutting edge was only accomplished by 1.4% of the entire playerbase, with combat trackers, with addons that tell you mechanics, with outside sources of information, and he was nerfed TWICE during that time.
Both of those are WoW though. WoW has the hardest and most nuanced boss and raid mechanics in any game. It also has individual mechanics, mechanical skill, dps pumping, and gear play a huge part.
U.S. East
My personal main concern is it will make content easier and also it gets rid of the possibility for other social interactions which is part of an MMO imo. Some people don't really care about those other aspects of an MMO and they just want the raids and pve and could care less about it so why not just go to something like WoW? If WoW does have all those things then those people will keep playing that but AoC is not trying to become WoW it's clearly being designed different with more player interaction in mind.
AoC would just be balanced to be just as hard as those mythic+ raids but without the need for those addons. Also there's no point in having the meters from the beginning of the game since there's no content to test if they would even be needed for those that really claim that they do.
That's fair. All I'm advocating for is player choice. It's also fair for Steven and the developers to say no to me, and I will be perfectly happy with it. I agree it will be interesting to see how this game plays out and even if they don't plan to cater to a competitive side of players in the same way WoW does, I'm sure they will find something that will be good as well. I was honestly just hoping that this game would give me that same itch and would be able to pull a lot of competitive players from WoW (especially with how they plan to cater to a more "hardcore" style with the experience debt and resource loss from death, and other similar mechanics).
We'll just have to see where it pans out!
I just can't stand some of the arguments in this thread where people are being willfully ignorant/belligerent on the topic. Where people like me have tried to address every issue against meters, and even come up with compromises, people like @Yuyukoyay have just tried to attack people over what game they play or for being "toxic!" and have not offered a single suggestion instead being stuck in their own bubble. It's upsetting that they can't give people who advocate meters the same respect and courtesy that people like @noaani and @Pantease have given them.
That said I don't think the argument for meters is entirely honest. Sounds more like a bunch of excuses so that the vast amount of downsides can be abused.
U.S. East
The only reason I am not sayign everything is inaccurate is because you spelled the individual words correct - other than that, it's all incorrect.
Just because omeone creates a build, doesn't mean that build is viable. If a game has the capcacity to create builds that are not viable, in the absence of a way to objectively assess them, there will be non-viable builds posted.
The thing to note is that not every build that is posted was actually tested by the person posting the build. In many cases, they are simply theorycrafted based on the description of the abilities. The issue with this is the description itself may be incorrect - a sitation best observed via combat trackers.
As to your risk vs reward argument at the end, this would then suggest that the only risk at all in the game is in the build you opt to take. You are suggesting (actually outright saying) that is a player dumb-lucked their way on to the best build for their class, they won't face any risk in the game. By extension, you are suggesting that Intrepid develoeprs would be incapable of creating challenging PvE content, and that PvP will be so un-balanced that a person running the best build of their class will face no competition.
Clearly, these things are not true, which means your statement that a combat tracker eradicates the risk is also not true. Sucversion is essentially being built in to this game.
If you look at combat trackers as subversion (how access to objective data could be subversion is beyond me), then it would fit in even more with the design direction of the game than if you did not consider it as such. Actually, there have been no new arguments presented in this debate since before Steven entered it. There is no need to twist what he has said, as at least from my perspective I am able to state that I have already provided a logical reason as to why I disagree with what he has said.
I could have answered every post in this combined thread that has been posted since March simply by quoting earlier posts. I don't, because that would be rude, but there have been no new points made. This is completely true - until you start to factor in other people.
If you join a raiding guild, you are agreeing to play the way they play, at the times they play. This is a part of the deal. This is why having a combat tracker in game as something only these guilds would use would work - because everyone joining these guilds are already agreeing to play the game the way the guild plays the game.
If done this way, it leaves everyone else to play the game their own way - which seems to be exactly what you want. In games with combat trackers, the developers develop content based on the assumption that players will have access to one, because players will have access to one. The content is designed where it is not reasonable to take on that content without at least one person in the raid running a combat tracker to keep track of various things.
This is why my argument is that they should be built in to games. Not just Ashes, but all MMO's. Developers inevitably end up developing content based on the assumption that players are using these third party tools, so they should instead be first party. I am all for having EQ2 style combat trackers (essentially a log file of all events that happen around you, that players are free to parse if they wish), the problem is that this opens it up to people using it incorrectly in pick up groups and such.
It is worth noting that the original suggestion of adding a combat tracker to Ashes via guilds that is contained in this thread (that you have claimed to have read and thus your answers are comprehensive) includes a training dummy either as a freehold item, or as a service that nodes are able to build (or both, why not?). This would allow any player that wants to the ability to try out a new build for themselves. I have to assume this is the only reason you have for wanting a combat tracker to be available to all - and I agree and accounted for it a year ago.
But you've read this thread, you know all of this, because your replies are comprehensive.
What this system does is provide any player at all that wants it with the ability to access any build, ideally on a target with almost any stat dialled in to it that the player would want (or that they have faced), and it allows guilds to monitor their performance as they are want to do. It allows players taht are not in top end guilds to peer review builds that are posted by others (reviewing these builds should be done by peopel from multiple different playstyles). It also allows people to potentially find bugs that raiders wouldn't have seen as not all abilities and augments will be suited to raiding.
While doing all of this, it still leaves all other players in the game to play as they please.
I'm still looking for the actual downside.
I would consider this to be a basic necessity of combat trackers if they were implemented directly in to a games client - though to be sure, would never feature in a third party tracker. Combat trackers actually serve many purposes, and it is only in one game on the market (as opposed to the two dozen or some games in which they exist) where they are used to exclude players.
You can't say that is the only use for them when they exist in games where this is not something that happens.
Other uses for them have been listed. If you've not opted in to allowing the two of us to track each other, I totally agree. If I've not opted in and you have, then we still don't get to track each other.
Your entire argument here is built around the notion that a combat tracker only actually measures DPS. This is a fallacy, and why I will always refer to them as combat trackers (even though that in itself isn't telling the full picture).
I have seen two games where a combat tracker (the same combat tracker) was used to demonstrate to the games developers that their random number generator was not functioning as it should (to be fair, it wasn't the generator itself, it was rounding that was done with the number the generator spat out). There was a rounding error, and the way it manifested itself in game was that the first number and last number of any given range would only come up half as often as all other numbers.
This would mean that if the game had to roll a random number out of three, the number two would come up 50% of the time, the number one would come up 25% of the time and the number three would come up 25% of the time.
Since the random number generator is used for almost literally everything in game, from crafting success, to loot distribution, to damage dealt, to dodge chance, to, well, everything, this one thing actually impacted every player, every day, in many many small ways.
A combat tracker was the only way thing was even noticed, let alone being the only way that enough data was able to be collected to pass it on to the developers so they could fix it.
Every game has bugs in it that developers miss. Every game has had many of these bugs found by the playerbase. Most of these bugs are only found because combat trackers are a thing.
I want to again point out that the only toxicity that exists around combat trackers comes from WoW. No other game has this issue. Other games have combat trackers without that toxicity, and other games that that toxicity without trackers, but there is no other game that has the combination of high combat tracker use and high toxicity.
This should lead people to look for another source for that toxicity, as if one games with combat trackers have toxicity, and many games with combat trackers do not have that toxicity, then it seems incorrect from any perspective to say that combat trackers cause that toxicity (though it is an understandable position from someone that has only played WoW).
Will force a meta that may not even be the most effective way to play. Will force a meta that will not be enjoyable by the majority of the playerbase. Will lead to class denial despite player skill (even in cases where they out perform you in every possible way). Will cause elitist pricks to be even more intolerable than they already are despite their statistics being inherently flawed by the design of the game when determining player and build viability.
Is a crutch that may limit player growth. May ignore mechanical skill methods in the game. Absolutely guaranteed to lead to a second layer of toxicity ingrained in the game due to all of above coming true.
U.S. East
I'm not wanting to get too involved in teh conversation you and Linstead have been having, I just wantto throw in a few specific points that I had while reading.
if you have anything specific you would like me to try and answer, by all means @ me and I'll do my best. When peer reviewing other players builds that they have posted as a guide for new players. It is, in my opinion, the veteran players resposibility and obligation to make sure that information is as accurate as possible - which can only be done with a combat tracker.
When checking to make sure tool tip descriptions of abilities match the effect they have. If an ability has a range of 150 - 300, and you want to make sure it is working as it should, you need at least 15,000 data points of that spell against a single, un-debuffed target. Doing that without a combat tracker is - let's just say tiresome.
When in an encounter designed with combat trackers in mind, combat trackers are obviously needed to keep track of the multitude of mechanics that are in play at the same time. Two points here.
The first one is simple - it does, but then developers take combat trackers in to consideration when developing content. I would then agree that this means that there is content that people can't do without combat trackers - which I am sure would be the next point of debate.
What I would say to that though is that I think this is fine. To me, as long as players that want to raid without a combat tracker have content on which to do that, it is not an issue if players that do have a combat tracker also have content on which to raid.
Should the guild without a combat tracker then decide to make their content easier by using a combat tracker, they then have the content that was designed with their use in mind that will pose a challenge to them.
Thus, basically, everyone has content to meet their own level of challenge, base on the tools they want to make use of.
The second point - the social aspects of an MMO - I am unsure as to why a combat tracker would have an impact on this.
To me, things like a dungeon finder have an impact on social aspects like this, but not a combat tracker. I kind of need more of an idea of what you are thinking to form any real opinion of this.
Reply to your earlier post to me is following.
This is why guild choice matters - it shapes the way you play the game.
If you are joining a guild that requires you to use a combat tracker, then that is what you are signing up for when you join that guild. As such, I don't see how this could be considered an issue.
As to your example of a person in a guild misusing it, I have two points to make.
The first is - should we simply remove everything from the game that people could misuse in this manner? I don't think we would have much of a game left if we did.
Second, people have the option to leave guilds. If you leave the guild with that player in it, that player is never able to track your combat ever again.
And as you said, that player will find somethign to abuse - why take useful tools out of the game just for the sake of those few people? This is true, not everyone will behave this way. However, if combat trackers were set up in this manner, guilds that don't take this mindset will eventually find it hard to get new members.
The design of the game will have a far greater impact on the behavior of people in game than any other factor. If the game is designed in a way where it is in a guilds best interest to put some time and effort in to new recruits, then that is what guilds will do.
While this is something I often do in games anyway (especially if I come across a player that is actually enthusiastic for top end content), I am not at all suggesting that systems should be put in place in the hope of this happening. I'm also not a fan of making it a rule or anything. However, there is a middle ground where you make it so that it is in the guilds best interests to assit new recruits, and all of a sudden that is what guilds will gladly do. See, I am all for having both.
Have content that is designed around not having combat trackers. Maybe even make it so that guilds killing it without the combat tracker perk get better loot.
Honestly, I'm all for that.
However, I am also all for guilds that want and enjoy the added dimension that comes from having a combat tracker and encounters designed around the use of a combat tracker.
The thing is, having both of these things in one game in a way where they both make sense to be in that game can only be possible if the game has a built in combat tracker.
I'm confused.
This post starts off like you are talking about an automated grouping system, as the things you are complaining of there are literally all a result of that.
Then the second paragraph goes on to complain about things that will happen if a combat tracker isn't freely available.
I was under the impression that you were against combat trackers, not that you were against automated grouping systems and all for combat trackers.
Assuming you are indeed still against combat trackers, I would be interested to hear how you think their inclusion would cause all of the above, as much of it is completely unrelated.
first off, then why not just balance content with trackers not in mind since they are not available? That way the developers still end up with a challenging game that doesn't need trackers and doesn't have to deal with the negatives of having trackers.
Second, I think it would be a good idea to give better loot to guilds killing content without the tracker though there's some problems that can come with that but you also have to keep in mind that AoC is being designed fundamentally different than other MMOs.
The Developers cannot guarantee that there will be content in your server that's balanced for trackers and non trackers because that's not up to the developers in this game. AoC is ever changing and it would be easier to just balance content for no tracker use, that way people that advocate for a tracker really have no need for it because the game would already be balanced for no tracker and the people that don't want a tracker will not be forced to use one.
For testing other people's builds and such a tracker is absolutely not needed. Take Path of Exile as an example, people including myself play that game just to theory craft and create new builds all the time. The game changes every couple of months and there's a lot of changes with completely new items and new game mechanics. Yet we still don't have a tracker in that game to test builds.
And in this case a combat dummy could be added instead that would actually be better than a tracker for testing builds because fundamentally each server will be different. a good build on one server may not be as good on another because certain builds will be made for specific things that another server may not have.
Having combat trackers would get rid of the need to be more well organized as a group when raiding and having to communicate as much. Groups in AoC are capped at 8 and you can have up to 5 groups in a raid which means 40 people total but there doesn't necessarily need to be just one raid leader. You can have a raid leader and you can also have group leaders that are in charge of that smaller group of people. The argument for trackers I keep seeing is that it's difficult to keep track of 25 or 40 people as a raid leader but AoC is not being designed like WoW or other MMOs. Having those trackers would get rid of even the possibility of that dynamic being added into the mix of raiding.
Combat trackers in no way get rid of the need to be more organized as a group, nor is impacting the amount of communication that goes between the players. That's just plain silly.
It's really simple. Beyond simple.
Imagine yourself in an 8p group, learning the fight for a new savage boss. The mechanics, and when to put out buffs as a group etc etc. A day passes, you made some progress, a week passes, now you're able to bring down the boss to 50%, a month passes, now you're able to bring it down to 5%. Then you're hit with the enrage, and realize that you've seen all the mechanics. Now you just lack the DPS.
Are you in all honesty going to play forever until the player in your group that's doing the lowest damage figures out how to increase his damage?
Well here's news flash for you.
He can't figure out how to increase his damage, because he doesn't EVEN KNOW that his damage can be increased by doing certain rotations.
Everybody in that group will think they're all doing fine, and that the boss is simply hard to beat. But no amount of re-tries are going to help you. 1 or 2 of your party members ARE HOLDING YOU BACK!
You need the means to find out who's pulling the least weight in your party.
A player who plays MMOs to clear the hardest content there is, doing it without a damage meter is the best way to waste time.
I don't care about "people's feelings"
Sometimes I'll be the one getting kicked from parties, and Im perfectly fine with that.
well your reply is really silly since i've already answered that sort of situation in past examples I won't bother to do so again as I tend to write a lot.
I'll give you a short example instead. About a week ago I downloaded TERA and created a new character. I had not played the game in years so many things have changed since then. Due to the lack of new players sometimes queue times could take a very long time so I decided to go through a dungeon that's actually balanced for 3 players all by myself. I could have queued up for the same dungeon (solo) and it would have been balanced for solo but I didn't.
When I got tot he first major encounter I died. I took the boss down to maybe 90% before I died. I tried it again and again and after dying another 3 times I finally decided I would really try to kill it and stop screwing around. I needed to focus.
I've said so before and I'll say it again. DPS will NEVER be the reason you fail a raid UNLESS the encounter spawns a mechanic where you have to DPS something down like a structure before it blows up and automatically wipes the raid, and in that situation a tracker is not needed to know that you didn't do enough DPS to destroy whatever the mechanic was.
Anyways once I decided to focus I dodged certain attacks from the boss and saved certain abilities I have for escapes instead of damage to deal with some of the mechanics and though I killed the boss slowly, I still managed to kill it on my very first try after deciding I needed to be focused.
DPS was not my issue and most of the time will not be the issue. I don't know how far back in the thread you've read but I've said so before that most things that will wipe a raid or cause it to fail will be obvious things that have to do with the mechanics of the raid such as maybe healers used a certain ability that they should have saved for a specific boss mechanic or the tank didn't stand in the right place and died or stuff like that and as long as people are paying attention then it's easy to figure out where something went wrong. Trackers are not needed to figure out where something went wrong you just need common sense.
The trackers are also not needed to pin point who in your raid is pulling the least of their weight. Guilds just have to actually put in effort and make sure they are paying attention during the raid.
Trackers are also not needed to help that one person that you've figured out now that is not doing enough damage or is over healing too much. You merely need common sense once again. Read the tooltips of your abilities and figure out how to use them. If someone is not doing so well there's enough people that will play the game that they can find someone else that's playing the same class and they can copy what that person does if they don't want to put in effort to actually get better but the raid will still be limited by people like that simply because that person may not want to put in that effort.
Even with a tracker that person would not put in any effort so the situation would be the same. Eventually with or without tracker if that raid group wants to advance they will need to replace that person that's not willing to learn. If a person is willing to learn, with or without tracker they will get better. Essentially what I'm saying is there really is no use for a tracker even though some people may enjoy watching the numbers like myself I do like seeing the numbers but the drawbacks far outweigh positives. The only thing that I would say a tracker is useful in that cannot be done without it would be to make sure abilities work as intended. To make sure the tooltips of each ability is correct. I think having a dummy or area in your house where you can test that out would be sufficient as opposed to a tracker though.
I still really see no need for a tracker as any situation you throw at me in a raid can be dealt with without it.
In order for the following to make sense, you first need to understand and agree that developers are able - should they want to - of creating an encounter so complex that even though it is theoretically able to be killed, players simply would not be able to manage all of the mechanics involved in it, combat tracker or not.
From there, you need to understand that developers are able to set a target difficulty for an encounter, and this is often the first actual thing that is known about an encounter during development (they will often know how hard they want to make an encounter before they know where in the world the encounter will go, what rave it will be, what it's name is, etc). The way to provide this difficulty is in how much mental capacity you ask the guild to offer up, and how exact you want their execution to be (which includes, but is not limited to, DPS output).
So, if a developer is making an encounter for a game that doesn't have combat trackers, they have to take in to account that if there is an important AoE in an encounter, the simple act of timing that AoE takes up some of the raids mental capacity - a surprising amount, as you always need at least one backup timing each mechanic that needs to be timed, and many encounters will have 4 or 5 of such.
This puts a limit on how many mechanics a developer can apply to an encounter based on the difficulty of the encounter.
Take that same developer, same encounter and same difficulty target, but make the assumption that players will have a combat tracker.
Now, the raid can time the combat tracker, and then input that in to that combat tracker. This means that the players in the raid do not need to time the mechanic any longer, freeing up some mental capacity. This allows the developer to then fill that mental capacity back up with more mechanics.
This means that the players in the raid with the combat tracker have their time taken up more with actual mechanics, and less with stopwatches.
There is an argument to be made for having the encounters signify in some way that they are about to cast a specific ability, but without fail it is easier to time these encounters (they are almost always cast after a set number of seconds, +/-4). Since this is easier and more reliable, it generally becomes what most guilds default to over time.
If the developers are able to make the statement that there will be 10 - 12 world bosses up at any given point in time, I would assume they are able to make more assumptions about content than that.
I don't expect as much granularity to content as many people seem to think - the actual developing of that amount of content would be prohibitive. There are combat trackers for PoE.
Not sure if GGG know about them (I would assume so, I'm fairly sure they are pulling data from the servers), but I am fairly sure Chris is too laid back to care, and Tencent too distant even think about it. I totally agree that each server is likely to be different, at least to a degree. This is a part of the reason why I can't quite understand the people that say combat trackers will lead to cookie cutter builds or a static meta.
The only way a game like Ashes will have a static meta is if people are too afraid to try somethign new.
In my mind, the best way to make sure people are happy to try something new is to give them the tools to objectivly assess that new thing. In my experience, combat trackers don't detract from the need to communicate.
While it "may" make it less common for raids to break up the leadership in to smaller units, I would think this would be rare enough outside of PvP that it isn't an issue.
Come PvP time though, assuming the suggestion I want to happen did happen, the combat tracker is of no real use, and so guilds need to rely on their ability, communication and teamwork - just as they need to on actual hard content in PvE raids when using a combat tracker.
Without dps meters, you are basically reducing the experience considerably for a lot of players. If there's neither in-game meter or third-party that is.
It's not just dps though, it's about a lot data that can be used to improve yourself and/or your party.
I can however see the disadvantages with it too, but I just think that's inevitable anyways. Also, you can at least limit it to seeing just your own performance or something, and maybe allow for a group to activate full coverage of dps meter when doing harder fights.
I think a lot of people just see it as a means to judge people though, but I've never called someone out for their dps. I use it improve myself, and to challenge myself to get better.
EDIT: To make myself clear though, I hate add-ons etc that help you with the fights or give you information that can make things easier or more convenient. I'm strictly talking about getting performance data that can be used for analysis after a fight.
That's because you're talking about normal content where nobody is using damage meters.
Even if the game had built-in damage meter I wouldn't be using it to clear the normal content.
I'm talking about savage and ultimate raids, call them however the fuck you want, they have hard enrage meaning, if you don't kill the boss on time, they make 1 final move, and kill everyone instantly.
He wants to bring more social interaction in the game world, something that dungeon finders, easy fast travel, dps meters, all discourage. (In one way or another)
I specifically detest meters (no secret) but I also have no issue with a private meter on dps dummies as long as they are out of raid/dungeon environments.
I'll just have to agree to disagree here (I'm on Stevens side of the Fence on this issue) as I dont think the benifit of a DPS meter outweighs the negatives of what inevitably follows in a community. I mean thats partly why he isnt allowing addons. I know people will figure out their own ways, but at least the barrier to entry will be less and get real interactions going within the game world.
Now hardcore players might enjoy this and they might of used it in other games like say WoW or whatever. And even within hardcore players they might of have a few players who rage quit simply because it created some kind of hierarchy within their members.
The only scenario I can think of is that even hardcore players specifically for Ashes would create disarray among their members is the lack of time and availability for players to work towards improving their build (tank,dps,healz) so that they can make the cut to join a raid guild (assuming dps meter is good enough) if that's the only measure the leaders will make their decision to invite you.
Now, depending on the leader, he might try you out and see if you know the boss mechanics as a minimum requirement until you get better gear and increase your performance by relying on the DPS meter. So if this happens, then at least the leader is helping you to get better gear. And I know that in ashes you can get gear by other means rather then just grinding dungeons. But I would assume that there will be valuable drops within dungeons that might help you gear out towards a specific build by selling or crafting.
Now if the master loot is on just for the sake of argument, and assuming that hardcore raid leader is using a DPS meter for evaluations then he will use the master loot to distribute loot drops among members. Again, I come back to time and availability. You are trying to get better by increasing your performance, how many trials are you going to get invited for raiding so you can achieve your goal for a specific loot drop? What if that specific dungeon disappears due to node destruction by siege or atrophy?
Now, if that specific player wants to increase performance and joins a casual guild that doesn't use a DPS meter, his/her chances might be better to acquire a specific loot drop vs a hardcore guild. Now you might argue that a casual player is just cheating himself by thinking he can do the most hardcore raids. Maybe so, but why not? That's a decision every player has to make, what's your objective and what's the best way in achieving it? If he's going to be cast out from a hardcore raid group, why not take his chances on a casual raid group, it doesn't mean they will fail a 100% of the time.
I'm not really against DPS meters as long as hardcore minded people have fun with it. But we are in an age of MMORPG's that casuals are a thing and you can achieve the same results given time to get good at some things. So I suspect lots of people aren't going to use DPS meters in this game simply cause Intrepid decided not to have it in-game but maybe a 3rd party meter will make it in the game. Personally, I like to be flexible and not too restrictive.
one of my concerns is, pve content and raid content, has to be fundamentally very easy, if theres no dps meter, and thus no way to know if theres a bunch of people in your group underperforming. either content will be tuned to a decent percentile of performance, therefore when you have some unavoidable underperformers you wont know who it is and feel like your banging your head against a wall, or content will be tuned so underperformers can complete it, meaning a higher performer will sleep through the fight as its so easy and thus boring.
But how will 3rd party play into it with no addons for AoC?
Thats the fun part of discovery to me. The mechanics are #1, communication is #2, group composition is #3
Damage is (and should) be dependent on how well 1-3 is done.
People like to measure how fast they can burn things via that meter. I say people can use a ballpark estimate based off of a instanced or open world monster without the specifics in the dungeon.
Mastering damage (in my opinion) is more fun when its through group effort and interaction. Not just by how much the dps meter tells you on the raid. Opinions differ here I suppose. But I like no meters and I'm glad this is where AoC is standing on it