Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
Communication absolutely would increase btw. You are missing a lot of information that a combat-tracker usually would provide. If you still want access to that information, you will have to get it from different players in the raid. One could argue about that being a good or bad thing, but the overall increase in communication seems fairly obvious.
The suggestion that was made earlier (over a year ago) in what is now this thread was to have a combat tracker as a guild perk.
This perk would be available at a point where the options include something that PvP players would rather have, something that casual guilds would rather have, something that RP guilds would rather have and something that crafting guilds would rather have. This would leave only non-casual PvE focused guilds that would consider a combat tracker to be the best perk for that specific guild.
This combat tracker would then only work on members of the same guild, that are in a group/raid together.
There is also the potential of making it so this tracker does not provide real time information, but rather provides players with an information dump at the end of an encounter (regardless of whether the players or the encounter came out on top).
This, if implemented in to the games client before release, will see most third party combat tracker developers simply stop developing, as the bulk of players that would use a combat tracker properly would simply use the built in one. It would not be seen as worth the effort to carry on developing third party tools.
In terms of the effect it would have in game, we would see combat trackers mostly in the hands of people that understand how to use them (and understand that they are not just "DPS meters"). Of the people that do not know how to use them, they will be unable to use them on players outside of their guild - so there is at least a massive restriction on what ever potential damage they could do with them.
Going back to the people that know how to use them, they would have easy access to them to be able to assess the combat system, identify and report in depth bugs and issues, post objective build suggestions, and also to objectively assess the effects of various group and raid builds.
As an aside to this, keeping in the personal combat log that is the current defacto is a perfectly valid suggestion, so that players can self-assess their build in an objective manner, even if they are only able to do so in relation to solo content.
I have not yet come across anyone willing to discuss the merits and detractions of this suggestion that has not ended up agreeing that it is over all likely the best way todeal with the subject of a combat tracker in an MMO.
I see, thank you for clarifying and explaining.
No worries at all.
Honestly, it was about time I reiterated what the actual suggestion that I have referred to a number of times in this thread actually is again.
To be clear though, while I am pushing this suggestion still, it is not *my* suggestion. It is a result of many players putting in suggestions and spotting issues, and then many of us working through those to come out with something at the end that is actually workable.
I'm actually still hoping people attempt to find issues with it, as I have no doubt it could use further refining. I'd also like to see people suggest things that could be offered to other types of guilds at the same time this is offered - as I do not believe I am qualified to suggest what these other types of guilds would value.
When you mess up in big raids, you DO know it was you. In small group pvp (or pve, but I'll avoid that as much as possible), the rest of your party will also know it was you. So you'll do better. Getting better takes time. DPS-meters take that time away and lock you out of stuff that you then have no chance of learning anymore. Rather than numbers, you need to have team mates that forgive you and explain.
One thing I despise in MMOs, even the ones I love, like ESO, is a complicated rotation that results in much higher DPS than a simple one. In ESO for example you can get 20% more DPS with some classes by using a 2 bar 7 skill rotation in the right repeating order to keep dots up land vulnerabilities etc. I truly hope that AoC does not take this approach to combat and that a DPS meter personal or otherwise isn't used to create an elitist segment of the game that dictates a specific style of play to be successful in end-game. I feel that kills a games community and you end up with a HC only community. In my opinion, WoW has survived because it had such a huge player-base and strong following before the elitism began. Today its really not the same game and you can't really enjoy end-game rewards in either raids or dungeons because they've segregated the masses by creating tiers that only the HC can even compete in. It leaves everyone else, even those who can run heroic raids (which are no joke) or Mythic + which require specific class combination to get 10+ and with some affixes even as high as 5+ with subpar gear and rewards. It's become a complete poop-hole of a game as the end-game is there for Esports and world first chasing guilds like Method.
I hope AoC can build more community and be more like Asheron's Call and Everquest with the new generation of graphics than like WoW or ESO.
Since when has 7 skills been considered complicated?
That sounds like a childrens game to me.
Its 14 because of bar swapping.
The problem is that ESO is so fast paced you might as well being playing COD with magic.
Go play ESO in cyrodill and come back and tell me its easy lol
14 is still not even close to complicated.
@neem
This is why the suggestion is for a guild only combat tracker.
That way, if you are grouping up with people that are not in your guild, they can't track you at all.
On the other hand, if you are grouping up with people in your guild and they kick you, then you know you are in the wrong guild.
I've been playing MMO's for almost 20 years, and I have never seen a single player get kicked out of a group for performance reasons. This tells me that this kind of thing is basically restricted to WoW (both the game and the players as they infest other games - I don't interact with either in regards to group content).
The issue with this whole thing is that before that player with his finger on the kick button in WoW is looking at a combat tracker to tell him if he should kick anyone, he is put in a situation where he *can* kick someone, and face basically no reprocussions from that action. WoW allows for this due to the LFG/LFR system - the group know that if they kick someone, a replacement is only seconds away.
If you leave that same player in that same group with that same LFG system, but you take away that combat tracker, the player will still have his finger hovering over that kick button, just looking for a reason (and with this kind of player, it doesn't even need to be a good reason, nor an objective one).
If you want to stop this kind of thing, then the idea isn't to get rid of the combat tracker, the idea is to get rid of the ability to easily replace that kicked player.
Put that same player in that same group but where it could take an hour to get a replacement player in, and that player won't even think of kicking someone from the group - regardless of whether they are using a combat tracker or not.
So, if the issue that is more important to you in this regard is making grouping easier if you are a little behind the curve, then combat trackers are not your enemy - the system in Ashes that is going to most likely cause you this kind of issue is the family summons ability, as that will occasionally allow players to easily replace group members.
Lastly, if you are indeed behind the curve, a combat tracker is probably the best tool you could hope for in order to catch up - other than guides, though guides are only worth using if they were made using data gained from combat trackers.
That is a great collaboration on feedback for dps meters being a guild perk. What I personally wouldn't mind is that a guild would need to be in certain % placement in order to activate the meters, because it takes a lot of effort to get your raid roster (which in AoC will be above 40players - gotta have bench players) to a level where the players actually are able to perform the basic mechanics of their class and of their role in the raid.
What I would more specifically suggest that any guild could enable a meter where you can see how long players stood in shit or how many abilities on boss was not interrupted etc - just a basic tracker for this kind of stuff.
If the guild gets into top 20% then they could enable dps full meters, but no exact numbers just % ratios. So they can clearly reward their members that are literally carrying everyone - because believe me in most guilds there are such people - however they often times leave if they don't have close friends in those guilds. And remind the Billy the dipshit that he should focus to start doing some damage when he succesfully tried to dodge shit on the floor
When the guild gets good enough with these trackers and are in let's say top 5% guilds then enable for them full dps meters with exact numbers to get into their own theorycrafting for raid compositions.
This would give a roadmap for guilds to focus on the important things ignoring numbers, but still giving the guild leadership a way to focus their weaknesses and believe me that overwhelming majority is always much quicker to blame anything except themselves even with full meters present. This is just human nature - don't ignore it, but don't make it rule the game either
― Plato
Ashes just like every other MMO is not for everyone, that is very simple
The fact that there will be combat logs should make everyone happy. No meters to worry about in-game and for the people that require logs to optimize you are getting those. The only thing is: it is Ego, J*rk and A hole, free. People cannot be harassed over a number and nobody can hide behind it because they are top of the board.
So let's be happy and have a beer
Ps: I hope dungeons/raids will be extremely complicated to the point that it's a not a DPS race but require real teamwork, coordination, effort, practice, trial and error, etc.
teamwork coordination and all that good stuff you dream about is just a benchmark to enter the DPS race - you can never get rid of it - especially when leaderboards are going to be in the game even for raids
You are of course free to bury your head in the sand and ignore this topic and just wait and see what will come. However literally everyone that is advocating here for DPS meters knows for sure that the meters will exist even if Intrepid does everything humanly possible from them. To say that the meters will not exist is the same doomsaying that the sun won't come out tomorrow.
― Plato
When you find out the person on the bottom of the damage meter is using rank 1 spells since he didn't know that he could learn higher ranks. He always complained that leveling was so hard, we laughed a lot when we found out why.
I do not like the taste of sand, maybe you do
Never said that they won't be around, I said that we are getting logs
You know you can never get everything this goes for both the pro and con group. So logs are the best solution, in my opinion, they are accessible to everyone, give people like yourself the opportunity to analyze them and the chance to work towards that top spot on the leaderboard and guess what
That people will use 3rd party, just like someone said they did in gw2 is their choice
I personally do not support them for several reasons, but if you have a DPS meter supported or would allow them it is a lot more difficult to say no more and ban them then not supporting them from the start. Wouldn't you agree?
Is a meter that important for you that you wouldn't play the game?
If logs are going to exist in the minimal form of X actions done by you/to you without timestamps then no, these will not be enough.
I do not understand this notion that only your way of playing is the right and that others are forbidden to choose their way of playing.
In every popular game you either have analytical/practice tools created by the dev team or the playerbase that are used to get better. I understand that having the performace on such tools to be the leading factor in player to player interactions is bad - I wholeheartedly agree, but why to punish players that use these tools correctly in order to get better at the game?
As long as playing better is going to be rewarded in this game, then you inevitably will have an exclusion based meta gaming. Meters just point fingers to players that play bad or specialize in noncombat parts of the game.
Even if the only measurement system is going to be screen capture and watching the video then I will surely give this game a try. The systems that devs introduce are interesting and exciting.
However I do not agree the fact that when I want to improve my gameplay I am literally forbidden by the rules to use the best tools for getting better.
― Plato
The Lore is good, the fully voiced side and main quests are good and all have their own stories with some being very interesting. None are unique like Ashes will though affecting your game world.
The combat is (or at least was until recently) my favorite a with a couple glaring issues like animation cancelling and stamina being required for CC break, block, dodge.
You gave up playing eso many years ago, so you dont understand why the game is not the same as even 2 years ago. Not that I blame
you, ESO balances like a child trying make his own tree house. Good intentions but terrible execution.
As for complication, why do you need 40 buttons to be complicated? Complexity in game isnt determined by the number of buttons used, that isnt what I consider complex because you're having so many cd's on skills, where in comparison in eso I've already set up my second rotation, popped a potion and am trying to focus burst 1 of the 3 people I'm usually fighting to survive.
This is why Action combat (to a lot of players) is more engaging and complex from a fighting perspective rather than a keybind perspetive as well as the obvious need to be much more reactive and aggresively intelligent for burst windows and terrain usage in eso.
The complexity should be inherent to your actions, gear, and the way you use and place your skills.
In reality, I feel adding more buttons LOWERS complexity because its just less decision making for each fight since you have more than enough options to simplify the way you approach combat.
Although I agree ESO is shallow in content in some ways. But the combat is not one of them.
Any game in which you play your class the same regardless of what other classes are present is a shallow game.
EQ2 is the game that has had the biggest difference in the way you play your class based on who is in your group, with Archeage coming in at a distant second (though it was rare that people in Archeage would spec for full support).
So yeah, ESO combat is shallow. The limit to abilities is only a small part of that. Fair enough.
That seems to be the central issue of the complaints against trackers here.
If you put trackers in to a game in a manner where players only have access to them when they are in guilds expecting to take on top end PvE content, it them becomes behoven on such guilds to provide new members with training.
A guild will not be able to expect a player to be at the top end of their capabilities when joining a top end PvE guild for the first time, as they would not have had a chance to work on improving their ability as yet - they can't even start to try to improve until they are in the guild.
Obviously, this is all assuming there is enough going on with support classes to alter the way other classes would play - even if only slightly. I don't see the point in support classes if this is not the case.
Lastly, games like ESO and WoW have one major flaw that Ashes won't have in regards to top end guilds - they are able to recruit from the entire playerbase.
If you are a top end guild in Ashes, your potential recruitment pool are the players on your server. Players can not transfer servers just to join your guild. As such, the 'luxury' of only picking already elite players to join your guild is simply not present. You are in a situation where you will have to train new members.
This last aspect will happen regardless of the situation with combat trackers.
Guilds that say content is all about DPS are only able to say that because they have spent years working on their teamwork and communication.
This is why content is rarely about DPS for pick up raids - unless they are taking on old content.
And that is the issue with using teamwork as a means of adding difficulty to content - when the raid has their teamwork under control, the developers need to then switch over to a different metric - something that has no real cap - like the ability to output damage, the ability to absorb damage or the ability to avoid damage.
But yeah, once a guild has been together for 12 months, they stop even thinking about teamwork because teamwork happens without thinking.
Yeah demand people just give you their account info to while they're at it.
What a ridiculous defense for what I suggested. The only reason you want to demand peoples information from what I had as reasonable response is that you're an elitist entitled individual with an inflated ego and god-like sense of self importance.
You are exactly why Meters should be either a guild perk with notification to members, or completely private upon or until request. Or as Steven wants, non-existent.
Personally, your cute little condenscending attitude just makes me all the more happy they currently aren't being added to the game at all for the time being. I'd enjoy seeing you get banned for 3rd party usage for a nice dose of karma.
@Noaani is about the only one here with a legitmate claim with guild perks+notification alert that I'm completely fine with.
It has nothing to do with what you percieve. You're just being an ass @cleansingtotem because you really dont like the thought of people denying you access to something you have no
inherent right to in the first place.
It's like... Imagine Aragorn in Battle of The Black Gate, running to the fray, everything looks so f***ing epic!!! And than a damage meter comes up ._. And you're like... "Wut?" ._. Than Aragorn proceeds with slashing his sword... the same way... 50 times... while standing in one place... smashing his skill buttons while doing so, only so that he can put out the best skill rotation, because they said it has the best DPS on the forums.... And suddenly, RPG element is non-existent anymore. It's just another cookie cutter BS that nobody, with a bit of curiosity and imagination, wants to see.
I saw a comment that said "We all checked the classes, more or less, to see what's best". No. No, I didn't. Why would I? I didn't think once about "Me King Ape! Me most strong!" kinda BS. I'm here, getting excited about the most minor details in all the gathering, crafting etc. possibilities, worried about how they'll mix 2 different combat systems (And how will the action-based combat stay "action", if there is a tap target combatant in front of you, staying in one place, mashing his best rotations, counted thanks to this dps dipcrap) and people are still arguing about something so amazingly out of the context for this game, as it is.
This whole thread just makes me sad. :c
But don't worry. I'd bet that this game will cure your "WoW-ism" in no time! ^_^
Or, if you all love math so much, how about getting rid of the WHOLE COMBAT SYSTEM from the game, and you can all just press a button and it will "inflict" a number, to a certain bigger number. We can get rid of the graphics too, just KEEP IN THE NUMBERS!!! NUMBERS GUYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYS! DDDDDDD:
The first 40 pages or so of this thread were the formation of a general idea - the remainder of the thread is the defence of that idea.
The idea was outlined once again exactly 22 posts above yours (a bit of reading, but not in the contect of this thread).
The basics of the suggestion are for Intrepid to implement a combat tracker in to the game itself, but in a way where casual players have no need to interact with it at all (and in fact, probably couldn't interact with it at all if they tried - at least while still being casual players).
A part of that suggestion is that the combat tracker doesn't provide any information to players until after the encounter has finished. This means no "damage meter" either in game, or on a stream you are watching.
This should be the perfect solution for you, as it means you don't need to interact with a combat tracker at all.
On the other hand, if the game doesn't have a combat tracker, we will end up in the same place as literally every other game that doesn't have a built in combat tracker.
You are wrong in one specific point you make, you say that you think top end guilds will know if what we are doing is right or wrong, no need for meters. Thing is, the top end guilds will have meters, one way or the other. This is a point that isn't really up for debate - they are already in development.
WoW, EQ, EQ2, LotRO, DDO, EVE, SWG, AoC (the first one), WAR, Rift, GW, GW2, Archeage, Vanguard. None of these games had built in combat trackers - yet players used combat trackers in all of them. Some of these games took the exact same stance that Intrepid is taking right now, and all of them eventually realized that it is a fight they can not win.
If you want a different result than the status quo, you have to make a different decision. The decision to not have a built in combat tracker is what every other game has done, so players in all of those games have had to go to third party ones - which means overlays, real time information, all the things you say you don't want.
A first party combat tracker is literally the only way to get what you want - and I for one hope you get that.
This means that should Intrepid want to take this specific outlook on things, if they want to retain control of any combat tracker that players use, they will have to implement it before players start using a third party one.
There will be at least one third party combat tracker ready before the end of beta - so that is the time frame Intrepid have to make this decision