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
And for the argument of don't use meters if you don't want to. Even if I decide to not use them, I'll be actively putting myself at a disadvantage and knowing that will suck. I would probably cave in eventually and use it while being bored out of my mind.
You will be 100% disappointed.These builds are going to be created from the first alpha phase and then refined with every patch through the whole alpha-beta period.
Of course nobody will force you to find these builds, but they are going to be available on the internet.
― Plato
You won't.
Assuming Ashes has an even remotely deep combat, it could well just be that you need to spend some time with the build to fine tune it.
Additionally, many builds in many games are content dependent. Since the content in Ashes will change frequently, the build you may want will also change. A build that is top tier on one server may be trash on another, simply due to the content that is available on each. That is the issue with this game having a static meta - a static meta in a game with non static content doesn't make sense - yet Ashes without a combat tracker will have a static (or near static) meta.
Obviously, this will happen with or without a combat tracker. Thing is, without a combat tracker, you are not going to notice it nearly as much, which means you are not going to appreciate it nearly as much.
You seem to have an issue with seeing things outside your perspective, I suppose it's not quite as hard for me having seen it from several as my playstyle evolved over the past 18 years that I've been playing MMO's. Playerbases always see some form of division, meters or not. By pure technical and development limitations you can't play with everyone, all the time. That's just plain common sense.
I know exactly when and why I started using DPS meters, and it wasn't until Wrath of the Lich King which was already a couple expansions into WoW. And it was exactly around that time that I began getting more serious and competitive with my play. It is completely natural to start looking for tools to help you gauge performance and start identifying weak spots if you choose to push yourself further. And WoW was not my first MMO, nor my last, or my only.
In the end the best games are going to cater to as many people as reasonable. And it's completely reasonable to allow third party mods like dps meters, which are a 100% optional choice, despite your best attempts to argue otherwise. And for the people that keep trying the toxicity angle, you are just downright naive if you think not having meters is any kind of cure for that. As I said in an earlier post, people who are toxic generally express it any way they choose, regardless of what tools are allowed in a game.
Clearly we have a very different opinion
100% optional, again you are saying this from the perspective from someone that wants them. if you cannot even admit that if introduced as a tool like you want it , will become over time a requirement within the community. You are clearly not open to even consider anyone else's input. I've been playing MMOs for 18-20 years myself and have seen this happen in a lot of MMOs. Even WoW in a sense is an example of this.
Interesting to hear that you used them when you got serious, I personally use tools when I cannot be bothered with figuring out the game when I am not invested but just want to experience the end game. So for me, it's when I am not serious about an MMO.
In my personal opinion, if a person is invested and serious about playing the game, they will set themselves some goals and will be willing to invest the time to improve without a tool. While I understand that not everyone has the time, etc I do agree with @Noaani on the meter as a guild perk.
The perk is a good middle ground, it still makes you the player figure everything out on your own or with your friends, guild. When doing guild activities with an officer or leader they can see the performance of your build. This makes it so that 1) guilds have to be very organized and find the right people for those roles, 2) does encourage teamwork and communication. 3) based on the feedback you the player still has to go back and improve and figure it all out. Some guilds have different goals and this is perfect for guilds that aim for that top spot or competitive raiding. I personally have not seen your opinion on this suggestion and frankly, I think it is an option that pleases both sides of this discussion.
I do wonder, does having a meter really impact you? would you not play the game because of this or maybe be less willing to go for that top spot? Because I think your answer to this really says more about your interest in the game then you think. + if you want a meter just use an "illegal" one as people said those will be around. Just do not stream on twitch with it
I don't see the point to this.
The only use for it is to see if a person is able to meet your arbitrary threshold for being "good enough" to play with. While some people use a combat tracker for this end, this is exactly the kind of thing that combat trackers are sometimes used for that cause issues - and are the kinds of things that any combat tracker added to a games client should specifically designed to prevent.
If they require a performacnce baseline, they should be putting their hand up to get people to that baseline - not requiring people to be at that line before they join the guild.
This notion is a big part of the reason the WoW raiding community is so isolated and insular. Guilds don't accept players unless they can prove they are raiders.
Like everything in WoW, they have this system completely wrong.
It's just truly mystifying that you think having something of this sort available just makes it mandatory. I've watched countless streamers in WoW and other games that have them that never look at them. I've played with them for years and only pay attention to them when I need to. Information is not a bad thing, period.
While I completely agree that the presence if a combat tracker in a game doesn't actually make it mandatory outside of top end play, I can easily see how people could feel as if it does.
To me, the fact that some people think this is in itself an issue worth considering - even if I do not agree that a combat tracker being present does actually make it's use mandatory. Sometimes, the perception of a non-existent issue is in itself an issue worth addressing.
This is a part of the reason why a guild based combat tracker works. You are either in a guild with one by choice - in which case you are opting in to that type of gameplay - or you are not in a guild with one - in which case you don't have access to a combat tracker and so can't possibly feel obliged to use one, none of the people you are likely to group with often will have one, and of those that do, they won't be able to use it on you.
This assumes that every class is only concerned about a single number during any encounter in the game.
Some classes will do more damage than others, but they will also have less utility. Some encounters will not even rely on damage at all. Some encounters favour burst dps, some favour sustained dps. How does a DPS meter help here? You either beat the encounter or you don't. If you don't it's more likely that 'you stood in the fire' rather than 'you didn't do enough DPS'.
Adding (support for) a DPS meter will just cause people to hyperfocus on a completely irrelevant number to the detriment of everything else. You can see what this does to other games, where people only ever play spreadsheet hero. BORING.
Play the game, not the spreadsheets.
Would be nice to have a summary at the end of dungeons/raids/wars/sieges so to know how each participant did in various aspects.
Also, if you are afraid of DPS meters trivializing the difficulty of bosses, then I hate to break it to you, but you need to design better bosses, because that would only matter if the boss was a tank and spank or a timed dps test.
Now, let's talk compromise; the problem is that people feel that if some want to know how much damage they are dealing to bosses or other monsters (So they can improve their performance), then that will become the baseline, or it will promote a toxic attitude towards those that perform worse then others. Here's a compromise, (Although I still think band-aid fixes to problems are bad overall) Turn off DPS meters in easier and more casual encounters, and only allow an option to turn them on in encounters that require heavy teamwork and skill, so that way the competitive players have their DPS meters, and the casual players can avoid that content altogether if they want to.
This allows those tighter knit groups to turn it on or off if they need to see in what areas they need to improve the most and work as a group to address their shortcomings, or allows the elitist snobs to berate their teammates and bleed players to better guilds.
It barely qualifies as an MMO - it is more of a lobby based dungeon dive/arena game.
Other than polish, all Blizzard got right with WoW was marketing. Using the existing Warcraft franchise - including basically making Warcraft 3 a game to transition players from notions off RTS to RPG - is essentially the only reason WoW was ever popular.
The only reason WoW raiding is popular is because people that raid in WoW have either never tried or tried and failed at raiding in an actual good game. I wish I had kept track of the number of WoW players (and indeed guilds) that came to EQ2 while I played it in order to "show us how to raid properly" and failed miserably to kill even entry level content.
WoW raiding isn't even a shitstain on raiding in a number of other games. The WoW community is far too up itself considering the level of actual ability needed to raid top end WoW content, and this is in large part due to the fact that the game lets them do this.
If server transfers and the open nature of that games API were not a thing, WoW raiding would probably be fairly good. The people would be less full of themselves - they would have to be in order to get recruits since recruits could only come from their server. The fact that they would be less full of themselves also means there could be (perhaps not would be, but could be) more worthwhile discussion on WoW raids, which would mean people could more openly talk about where they are lacking in comparison to other games - a discussion that is simply not possible in WoW due to the nature of that games raiding scene.
If you talk to someone that raids top end in a game other than WoW, they will have a fairly solid understanding content from a number of games, including things that other games do well and other things that the game they play could do better. If you talk to someone that raids top end in WoW, they will think that WoW is the only game worth raiding in - because they are all full of themselves, think they know what they are talking about, but really have absolutely no clue about anything other than what some high profile player says, which they take as being the truth without consideration.
The fact that a product is popular does not mean it is good. McDonalds is popular, but few people would argue that it is good - I can't think of a single person I know that couldn't point to somewhere they could buy a better burger.
EQ2 doesn't even come close to qualifying for the "Massively" in Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.
The game systems also would pretty much completely break in a week under the sheer amount of research and man hours wow gets in a week. When you stand the test of both ~15 years and 5-10 million active players for the whole time you are the GoAT MMORPG.
Also Steve himself said that addons aside, WoW really nailed raiding. Maybe you should pay attention.
Toxic players will be toxic, with or without a combat tracker. If the developers wanted to try and develop the game in a way that reduces player toxicity, then they should be looking at never allowing server transfers, and never implementing automated grouping of any form. The more content people can participate in without their toxic nature being a prohibitive factor, the more toxic they will be.
As to a combat tracker making encounters easier - I agree again. If this is something Steven thinks, then he should either hire better content developers or - more appropriately - have more trust in the content develoeprs he has in his employ already.
I'd be ok with this as a compromise to a combat tracker.
It does once again require a combat tracker to be built in to the games client rather than as a third party - but I personally think every MMO should be building a combat tracker in to the game. If you are going to attempt to develop a UI that has the flexibility to suit everyone so they don't need mods for it, you may as well also develop a combat tracker so people don't need to run one on the side.
Last time I looked at the numbers, they had significantly less than 0.1% of their playerbase log in from Steam, but that was many years ago so may well be higher now. However, it would still be below 1% - which puts the numbers at no less than 15,790 average players over the last 30 days, numbers that are actually quite respecable for a 16 year old game.
There are games that are less than 5 years old that would kill for those numbers.
EQ2's game systems are somewhat more robust than WoW's.
Also, while I am not disputing that the game was popular, WoW never had 10 million active players. The numbers they gave that were 8 figures were active accounts - which included every account ever made that hasn't been banned, including trial accounts. They actually got in a bit of trouble for misleading their investors in this regard - which is why they stopped releaseing these numbers.
Technically, I count for about 8 WoW accounts due to trials, even though I have never paid them a cent for the game.
You lost me on how api and server transfers make people arrogant.
It's almost like people who play other mmo's have had to hop around and people who have played wow have mostly stuck with wow. I'm also glad you are here to speak for all of these wow players that way nobody has to ask them or talk to them /s.
I've played FFXIV and WoW but I don't play either anymore. Raiding was my favorite thing to do in both games and honestly raiding in WoW is way better in general nowadays than it was when I played. However I left the game because the world lost my interest after about 5 years of playing 30-40 hours a week. Completely natural.
If the fights are designed purely around kill times to increase difficulty/reward. DPS is always going to be the forefront of raiding. Content has two directions to take after this, either make the fight easy and make DPS not matter, or make it challenging and let competition and elitism take over.
Ashes will be fundamentally different than WoW in the fact that replacing someone isn't a painless and quick process. There will be factors of opportunity cost, sunk cost and attendance consistency that will play a much higher role in raiding than they did in WoW. The PVP aspect will also drive pure theorycrafting and boss killing strats into skepticism when it puts your PVP strength at risk. DPS meters will not ruin the game based on this alone, but why would they be good?
I say they will be good for the simple fact that they keep developers honest. There's no way to really prove that one class is stronger than the other until you put actual numbers into play. Things like CC duration, damage mitigated, hate generation, healing done, overhealing done can all be valuable tools in communicating to your team on what is missing and to the devs on what needs work.
When leveling takes so damn long and people want to play what is fun for them, there is nothing worse than to spend 200 or so hours leveling only to find out that your class isn't actually good at all at pretty much anything. Players will figure this out without dps meters. But with them they can prove it to the devs and eachother and get it fixed much sooner.
Steve is already relying heavily on player feedback, so why gimp them out of an excellent tool to do so?
In WoW, guilds are able to look up a whole lot of information on players to determine if that player would make a suitable addition to their guild. This allows guilds to judge players based on content they have taken on, rather than on that players abilities.
This means that even if a player is the actual best at their class in the game, unless they have also been in a top end guild, then no top end guild will recruit them.
This creates an insular community - which is exactly what top end raiding in WoW is.
As to server transfers - if they are simply not a thing, then that means every single potential recruit for a top end guild is someone on the server they play on. In games that do this, it means those top end guilds actually have to care about their server community. If the server doesn't have a number two raid guild, and a number three raid guild, then that top end guild has no potential new recruits that have any raid experience at all.
Basically, the way WoW is set up, top end guilds only recruit players from other top end guilds on other servers - and the game has systems to support this.
Get rid of those systems, and top end guilds have to foster the community on their server. It is in that top end guilds best interest to make sure there are other guilds on the server that are capable raiders, and it is in their best interest to be a guild that people actually want to join and would enjoy being in.
This kind of thing has a similar effect to automated grouping systems. If they exist in a game, then players in that game need not be concerned about their reputation on their server - as those players are never in a position to do anything about it. Remove that automated grouping, and others on the server are in a position to not group with that toxic player, meaning that toxic player may have trouble finding groups. The logical eventuality here is that at least some of those players that would be toxic towards others will think twice, knowing that any such act may well come back to haunt them.
Similarly, if a guild need not be concerned about the server they are on, then they obviously have no reason to be concerned about the server they are on. The players on that server are not the pool of potential recruits for that guild, they honestly may as well be NPC's. The second you limit that guilds potential recruitment pool to only players on that same server, every single person playing on that server becomes a potential recruit, and the guild has to treat the server differently.
Basically, the nature of WoW's automated grouping and ease of server transfers have led to the toxic nature of the WoW community.
This is relevant in this discussion because many people incorrectly blame combat trackers for that toxicity - but this is clearly not true due to other games having equally high levels of combat tracker use but substantially less toxicity (EQ2), or substantially lower combat tracker use, but roughly equal toxicity levels (Archeage).
What is really funny is that the last stages of beta will heavily influence the base archetype player numbers, because if one base archetype is quite dominant then you can be sure that will be the most played archetype.
― Plato
@khrome
I missed this post.
Perhaps the first thing to point out is that a "DPS meter" is actually essentially just a colloquial term for a combat tracker. Calling it a "DPS meter" is misleading, as a combat tracker is able to measure every single facet of combat.
Sure, it can tell you sustained DPS, but if you know how to look, you can also see who is able to do well in burst DPS. You are able to see who is healing, you are able to see if a given build of your tank is able to mitigate, dodge or evade more potential damage, you are able to see who is CC'ing, who is breaking CC, who is standing in environmental traps (floor lava and such), and you are able to see who is making use of their class' utility properly.
Basically, there is nothing that can be done in combat that a combat tracker isn't able to track. Hense calling it a "DPS meter" is misleading - and imo Steven did this thread a dis-service by labeling it as that.
Now, it may well be true that if there is a combat tracker, some people will focus on that to a greater degree. I don't think that is something that anyone would dispute.
Where the dispute comes in is that some people - myself included - enjoy that. Every top end guild in existance will have at least a few players like me - people that enjoy breaking things down in order to better understand them.
This is why there is a suggested compromise. Instead of simply adding a combat tracker so that people that perhaps don't enjoy that kind of gameplay may feel like they need to, add one in to the games client in a way where only top end guilds would pick to take it - with all other guild types having someone they would rather take instead.
What this does is gives these guilds a tool that players like myself are then able to use to their fullest potential, but players that simply don't enjoy that kind of thing feel in absolutely no way obliged to take part in.
Perhaps the key thing to point out here is that no one is forcing you to play the game in a way you don't want to with combat trackers. However, without them, people are forcing the many people like myself to play the game in a way we perhaps don't want to - or indeed not at all.
As a random aside to this discussion, I came across a quote from a game that I played a lot many, many years ago that seems completely fitting to this discussion.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
I don't think it is fair to mention this here, because Steven basically said only his conclusion on what is best to do in AoC. Having said that I definitely want to know on what factors this decision was made, because the more I think about this decision the more I think that the "prevention of toxicity" is just the selling reason.
I think the real reason behind not allowing meters is to knock down the goal of playing "good" and to have players focus mainly on the open world opportunities and interactions.
I 100% agree that playing good (having minmaxed build and playing mechanically well) should not be among the main goals of the average MMO player. However I definitely think meters should be present in a moderated and controlled way for guilds that want to focus on this aspect of the game.
btw yes I think that if you don't minmax and try your best to play around encounter mechanics then you just want to be decent - nothing wrong with that ofc.
― Plato
I don't debate your point in the least but there are fight designs that afford you flexibility in whether you truly need the entire groups information. WoW is an example where the fight design tightly mandates everyone perform at a certain level, at least for Mythic raiding. Heroic, Normal, and LFR all have room for carrying to various degrees. On the contrary, GW2 fights are less tuned to require X performance from all DPS to be successful. Part of that is less reliance on set fight durations and more freedom in execution. I'd also say that the games I know which rely most heavily on meters also have HYPER boiled down roles to remove any hybrid nature from gameplay. I hope AoC does not take a similar stance. Once you start to factor in CC, interrupts, off-tanking, off-healing, buffs, etc. the value of meters goes down significantly. This is a large part of what makes GW2 a better example of why meters don't matter as much; such a large portion of gameplay is less measurable or at least adds a ton of complexity to get the full picture. I hope combat is dynamic enough to devalue metrics as narrow as DPS meters.
I know the value of meters as I've been both raid leader and DPS vying for 1st place. I also know meters can lead to toxic mentalities and I'm trying to weigh the pros and cons. Right now I lean away from meters because of the bad taste they've left in my mouth from WoW's community and more toward downplaying their importance from the positive experiences I've had in GW2 in their absence. Admittedly, I have a meter in GW2 but use it exclusively to optimize my performance Again, still fully respect your opinion as well.
This will happen regardless of the meter's presence. People will exclude you for what you choose to play if you don't play the popular build. Trick is to get into a guild and try to find constructive criticism there.
― Plato