Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
― Plato
I played WoW from Burning Crusade and into Battle for Azeroth. I saw DPS meters go from a curiosity where people used them to tweak their characters for better damage, healing and managing cool downs to a device that got people kicked from raids, guilds and parties. They have become a double edged sword. They can be used to greatly enhance your game play or they can be used to destroy a players enjoyment by becoming a barrier that keeps a player out of some types of game play.
When I started playing Black Desert Online and there were no DPS meters, I noticed people stopped worrying about DPS and switched to kill vs death. Some classes don't do as much dps as others, but can still kill someone/something just as fast because of speed, maneuverability and skill.
I don't miss DPS meters at all to be honest.
The only solution I can think of would be to have an in game DPS meter on something like training dummies and then when the player leaves the training dummy the dps meter goes away. Thus it is a good training aid, but not used in actual game play.
Didnt make any assumptions. you said you will use them either way, so I made a statement based on your statement.
People were being kicked because of dungeon/raid finder and server transfers. Blizzard just made it too easy to replace instantly any player that you will never see again with a new one.
― Plato
I think this is the best solution.
I think dps meters make solving the game easier.
Not only do they make solving easier but the process to solve becomes less involved in actual game play, and there for less fun. Instead you are managing a number rather than feeling immersed in the fight.
I dont want to know exactly to the number the dps I need for a certain encounter to bother engaging with it.
I want to try and fail and try again and eventually taste success.
Games will always be solved eventually, but making that proccess too easy for players, means content gets stale quickly.
Numbers off a training dummy are little better than a baseline of a player’s ability, it has little to no relevance to the overall performance of a build in a raid setting.
You will still fail and retry until you get it right. Having the blueprint for a house doesn’t make it any less challenging to build, it just cuts out the guesswork that will waste time and resources. That’s all a lack of information does; causes frustration for no gain.
Fair enough.
And I stand by that - if Intrepid want to be the outlier in regards to rules that MMO players have been generally abiding by for decades now, they will need to expect people to simply not want to follow the rules that are outliers.
No, the best solution is the one made over a year ago.
Implement a combat tracker in to the game, make it a guild perk that only works on members of that same guild (so if you and I are grouped, I can not track your combat unless we are in the same guild and that guild has this perk).
Additionally, the combat tracker will provide no information at all while the player is in combat - and as such there is no numbers to manage in the fight - leaving the player to be fully immersed in what is going on around them.
There are one or two other factors to the whole thing, but that is the best solution.
The problem with a training dummy is that it won't stop people from developing third party tools - and third party tools will always provide data in real time (or damn near close to it), and on everyone in the general area, regardless of guild or group status.
Literally the only way to add any restrictions like this to a combat tracker is for the combat tracker to be controlled by Intrepid.
This 100%.
Also this suggestion makes sense to me from an immersive perspective. If I wanted to test a new weapon, trianing dummies in a test area would be the way to do it. Otherwise it breaks immersion to have a UI count every tick of damage I do in a raid - it's as if the imagination of a raid experience gets simplified into a numbers game for the rational mind to calculate.
However, I do conceded that if you have to repeat the same raid 50 times and the content of the raid is low-quality, then a DPS meter gives people something to work at.
Additionally I think it would be extremely bad if the raids are bad and nobody can open a breakthrough on what happened during the fight and find weak spots to either alter the strategy or switch around assignments.
Not to say that training dummy is literally one of the worst tools to figure out how good your build is, because you do not have the raid environment with all of the buffs or consumables. Hitting training dummy is good for finding out ppm values and hidden stats in your kit over long repetition sessions.
― Plato
Oops
Yeah but its easier to check some numbers and then you know if its worth trying to go after a certain raid or not. Whats the point in trying if you don't know if you can beat it?
xD quick google search with "final fantasy 14 dps meter download" shows me among the first links a page with over 2million downloads - are you sure ff14 doesnt have meters? xD
― Plato
True, I should have been more specific.
It's against the game's ToS and it isn't a requisite to play end game as a result. People won't ask you to adhere to it if it'll cost them their account. Especially in a game like that where leveling is a proper slog and snoozefest > : (
In FFXIV, players may not tell you that they are excluding you from top end content because you are not very good, but they will still exclude you from top end content if you are not very good. The difference is, they have to make something else up rather than telling you the real reason - and so the game is denying some people the chance to improve.
Also, that game does not have cross server grouping in quite the same way WoW does. It is far more limited as to who you can group with across servers, and also as to what content you can participate in with people from other servers.
Lastly, FFXIV has a toxic community, they are just more passive aggressive toxic, rather than WoW's overt toxicity. If someone in FFXIV doesn't like you, they may not boot you from a group, but they will report you in hopes of getting your account banned for no reason - all they need to do is encourage you to say something that could be construed as criticizm of their performance, report that, and wait for Square Enix to take action on the assumption that you are running a combat tracker (how else would you be able to comment on their performance?).
This is not a better situation - and it is amusing that you would bring it up thinking that it is.
You just out here making statements with no effort to any context or logical pathing as a rebuttal. "Yeah, but that's different" ain't gonna cut it. Relax on talking down to people, too. That ain't gonna cut it either.
It pains me to see you in particular say that lol. Besides that; my experience is that they expect people to be familiar with the mechanics of a lot of fights and that is the exclusion factor, not dps meter or meta reliance. Not even gear score or whatever they call that variation of that dumpy metric.
I've seen a lot of those players have a short fuse on failure towards anybody that doesn't have a sprout on their name. It's counter-intuitive to me to some level but I also kinda get it.
I think you gotta define toxicity clearly for me. There's a line between talking down a player because they aren't performing well and moving on from playing with them in order to advance your own progression. The underperforming player in that situation is going to feel like a victim in both scenarios, but one of them is kinda reasonable. But if we're casting a net over all of that and calling it toxic, it muddies the waters on that discussion a bit.
FFXIV also has fewer servers available to pool players from, as both a percentage of total servers as well as in an absolute manner, so the chances of grouping up with the same people in FFXIV are significantly higher than in WoW.
I didn't expect to need to explain this to someone that plays FFXIV. Your experience is marred by the fact you thought the game didn't have a combat tracker.
If you are in a group and are then kicked, it *is* because people saw you underperforming. Everything else is just an excuse fed to you because the developers won't let them say you suck.
No one cares if you don't know the mechanics, because they are easy to teach. If you are not actually a good player though, no one will be interested. Same with gear - if you put up good numbers with lesser gear, who is going to care about that? If you put up poor numbers though, poor gear is an easy excuse to boot you.
I also wanted to ask where your information and "experiences" are coming from, as it seemingly isn't first hand and is hard to really value compared to people putting in months of /played in these games. WoW and FFXIV are as mainstream as MMOs get and vary quite a bit from a lot of games on this list. I'd be open to the idea that those more PvP intensive games in your list don't use damage meters as such an integral crutch for the PvE play. It may even have more value as AoC's gameplay loop would be more in line with those. But your credibility is marred for me; based on these quotes and how you try to refute my own experiences got me expecting to see you on a political campaign rather than a... gamer campaign?
Also, what is STO? Star Wars?
STO is star trek online, weirdly enough a mmo that a lot of people enjoy even that it has a million and one flaws
Swtor = Star wars the old republic
SWG = Star wars galaxies (only has private servers these days)
This is why - in the suggestion I have been making in this thread since last year - the built in combat tracker that Ashes should have as a guild perk straight up shouldn't work in PvP combat - It shouldn't track combat of any player other than players in the game guild, and so this excludes PvP combat anyway.
That said, a PvP focused combat tracker could be an interesting PvP focused alternative option to picking a PvE tracker. Again, I know it is marginally useful - but it may give some guilds an edge in PvP combat.
It is worth pointing out that I ran a combat tracker in every one of the games I listed above.
Also, the two quotes you posted seem to suggest you are hinting that there may be something inconsistent in regards to the games I say I have played. I'll address that for you.
I don't play WoW. I have had a total of 5 or 6 trial accounts that I have used to see how the game is progressing - and have never managed to get past about level 5 before being disappointed. However, as I have said many, many times on these forums, I have a brother that plays WoW, and raids fairly top end content (mythic raids).
I have joined his guild on raids on many occasions.
This doesn't make me a WoW player, even though I have run a dozen or so different top end raid zones in WoW over the years on four or five classes (specifically not as a tank though). What it does though, is give me an amount of knowledge of the game. Not a lot of knowledge, and what I do know is very muct restricted to the top end raiding content.
This is why you will not see me talk about the leveling content in WoW, the crafting content in WoW, indeed - most aspects of WoW. I know full well that I have no real knowledge of these aspects of that game, so I keep out of such conversations.
However, I do know that I have enough knowledge of WoW to be able to outright say the raids in that game are sub-par compared to top end content in other games. Since this is a thing I know enough on to be able to speak, I can and do speak on it.
If I am able to be handed the log in info for an account, log in a character of a race and class I have never played before, get taken to a top end zone I have never seen before, and am able to function to an acceptable level after being allowed to cause one single raid wipe, then I am able to say that the game over all is fairly easy.
So u run those epic raids on ur trail account with lvl 5 character, or u use ur brothers account?
In any case, games like aoc are not wow, its not like u reach certain lvl, only then you go take out certain raids
― Plato
You're either not smart on accident, or on purpose.
This would indicate that I am not raiding on any of my trial accounts - which I have no idea as to the details for at all. Really though, this should have been obvious.
Easy to miss when your post is as long as novel, and it has one thought in it...
Yes, only smart people resort to name calling...
Now that you know this key piece of information, and further comments on that post, or are you happy leaving your only opinion being based on not having read it properly?
My point being, your texts are too long, if you can't make your point in couple of sentences, its ur problem. Not interested in reading a short esse on same subject over and over again, i. Not ur highschool teacher