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Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest news on Alpha Two.
Check out general Announcements here to see the latest news on Ashes of Creation & Intrepid Studios.
To get the quickest updates regarding Alpha Two, connect your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
But perhaps for a planned content that's only meant for the top 1-2% then sure, i'd consider that a special circumstance to have aid from a combat tracker, as long as it's not the games everyday standard.
Further, if a game has content that can be defeated without a combat tracker, then that is a game with simple encounter design in comparison to what raiders are used to taking on.
Having a combat tracker allows the developers to create more complex encounters than they could otherwise. Perhaps a good analogy for this is the difference in a math exam when it is designed for students to do mentally, vs an exam that allows for students to bring in a calculator.
While "technically" a student should still be able to do the second exam even without a calculator, by the time the student gets to that point there is no longer any need to test them on basic arithmetic - the students are beyond that and so the exam can move on to more complex topics, with a calculator being allowed so those students need not be burdened with that basic arithmetic, instead focusing on the bigger picture.
There's so many ways to design encounters and make them challenging & fun at the same time without locking it behind a need for a combat tracking feature.
The devs can still design complex encounters by utilizing other elements of a fight to make it more challenging. There's so much more to a fight that could be done to make an interesting encounter that would be challenging enough.
For most people killing the most is what matters. But for some, being the best and killing the boss faster than anyone else matters.
Wow classic is a good example. Most people, casual / semi-casual players that for the most part didn't use combat tracker cleared Naxx in around 2 to 3 hours. However, the absolutely most hardcore players that optimized everything, with timers, classes, buffs, using the combat tracker to see what that could to better, cleared Naxx in under an hour.
So no, killing the boss isn't just what matters, some people want to be the best and the fastest killing that boss.
I also want to say that, it's a huge difference between a in-game UI dps meter and a built in combat tracker for after fight analysis. I can live without the DPS meter, but we need the combat tracker.
To address the rest of your reply - if you know there is more to a combat tracker than just DPS, don't write out a post that suggests otherwise. It makes you look like you don't know what you are talking about, and propagates the notion that DPS is all they are used for even more.
It should take no more than 20 key strokes to achieve this - less than it takes to alter the color of your text. Spend the time with the content of what you are writing before you waste time with the aesthetics of it.
Lastly, the developers of any game (assuming competent developers) can create content up to and past the limit of what players are able to take on. It is perfectly possible to create an encounter that is so complex that even with a combat tracker, it is simply not possible.
Since a combat tracker allows players to take on more than they would be able to otherwise (in the same way using a calculator allows students to take on problems in an exam they wouldn't otherwise be able to, given the same time limits), it is then a foregone conclusion that developers are able to create more complex and detailed encounters when they assume players will use a combat tracker.
This is why every MMO that has had complex encounters has had developers that assume players are using a combat tracker, and every game that doesn't assume this has had easy, boring content (Archeage, BDO, early GW2 etc).
WoW classic is not a good example. Look i understand what you're going for but you also have to think about the incredibly large portion of players who had a very tough time finding a spot for dungeon groups & raids simply due to them not being the optimal spec. Many guilds required their raid members to acquire world buffs. And all of this on content that was very very simple.
Anyway, summary of this. If a person want to min/max content to be the very fastest then he can find a group of people who shares the same philosophy as him/her and just min/max the crap out of the content to their hearts extent, even without a combat tracker.
A combat tracker is what allows min/maxing.
It is the measure, the standard to compare yourself with others. It is the tool for troubleshooting, the tool for peer review (as well as developer review).
This quoted statement simply does not make sense.
Also, wow classic was a game where theorycraft was already totally done.
At first from vanilla time, and then more detailed with Private server.
So people all went with "meta" builds, (where there is around 10% of talent point free to use to whatever you like).
And "metabuilds" came from math on paper but also tests... with parser.
The problem i see from people that goes a deep "no for parser" don't understand that there will always people trying to min/max. Just see FFXIV, many people are totally against it. Do a topic with "should devs add in game parser" and you will have people approving... and also some totally against. The reality is "parser exist, FFlog exist and Yoshida/SE can't do nothing against it" Like modding is totally forbidden in FFXIV and... they can't do anything against it.
Min/maxing its own character only need a personnal parser, (and nooani said it was what we would have)
The simple existence of this personnal parser will reduce a lot the "group parser" as tier program.
Also, instead of fighting parser like Don Quichotte fights treadmill,
Learn to use it (don't change your build if you like it, but understand all its strength/weakness and adapt your gameplay with this knowledge will make you a better player than people following meta and doing "best build" without fully understanding it)
It will also avoid to see a "meta" dictating what players have to play. because personnal parser will allow to do test and show that, even if it is surprising the build A can do as much heal than build B... so stop saying only B can do the job. Lot of time during the long wow life, we was in "this is the best build for [class]" untill we discovered that changing one thing allowed a second build to do a real good job.
It isn't the syntax or grammar that prevents it making sense, it is the idea behind it.
Saying people can just min/max without a combat tracker simply doesn't make sense. No, it was on topic. It was a suggestion that you put more thought in to your posts content before you concern yourself with the aesthetics. If someone can read your post on a thread about combat trackers and make the immediate assumption that you think they are about DPS, then you have not done a particularly good job at writing your posts.
It may well not be something you notice, but if no one points it out to you, then you likely never will.
Now that we have made that perfectly clear (as in, do a better job of saying what you mean to say), you can perhaps now go back to that post and answer my direct point when you said and I asked you to explain why no game developer has ever managed to do this in an MMO.
C'thun was unbeatable, untill the lead of elitist jerks (a guild and also a forum where most theorycrafters went in) did show he was impossible to kill even with bis and perfect gameplay.
This was just "overtune", when blizzard did nerf a little C'thun, it was really fast killed.
so not a so good example
Let's take a look to what FFXI offered
Absolute Virtue and Pandemonium ward.
A guild killed them both finally but the mechanics around those bosses are really really hard. and min maxed character was not enough.
@Galux about "if they want min max, they can, but only with people that also does want it"
If you don't want to min/max don't do it. but don't go in a team where some of the people prefer doing min/maxing !
Such sentences are most of time a really bad choice. It consider that "the way i play the game is the good one".
the truth is "the min/maxer that goes PU have to accept people not min/maxing" but also "the people who underplays can understand he is not wellcomed everywhere" . . .
While helping people to do some content, learning them to play their class... from my beginings in MMORPG to now, i saw people that just wanted to do a content, without any care they didn't have the capacity to do the least they had to do... and saw this often... (more often on some games also... ). While i already rejected a "top player" to join my raid (because it smelled the shitty elitist) i already had to kick out players who were deadweight. Because, when most people does their best, but clearly 1 or 2 guy are not doing their work and so we fail all time, i can't say to the other "heh, we are a team right, we will do it" . . .
Absolutely, difference being (from my understanding atleast) that nobody assumed i was using it, nobody talked about it as it is banable to use the third party client which is used to track all information for you, and this is over the span of 600 hours give or take in FFXIV.
But people can utilize such information if they want to, that ain't my problem. My problem is when it's the standard of the game. When the standard of the game becomes to take ability A over B because A according to these statistics is improving this and that by 2%.
I personally never had a problem finding groups, but I was a healer so maybe my experience is different. But I also want to say that I was a druid healer = no ress = not wanted, but I still got groups.
Yes some guilds did required players to get world buffs, but I also now guilds that didn't. As you said, it all comes down to who you are and what your goals with the games are, and you need to find people that have similar goals to play with. That is why I think wow classic is a good example, it was all kinds of players, hardcore and casual and both could clear the content the way they wanted to clear it.
Pros:
- I can see how well my build is doing and whether or not my dps is worth taking into a group
Cons:
- Elitists will use this as a gate to prevent good dps based on gear alone, because with a dps meter you also have some form of item level that is a precursor to dps. A player that gets boosted into high gear will then get into raids where a person with not the highest gear but is miles ahead of the first player in skill and CAN outdps them will not get picked, get frustrated, and probably quit after a while
- Bad players looking to be carried will flood to LFG channels seeking outrageously high dps/item level numbers all while having low numbers themselves
- Toxic attitudes will ruin any sense of community in the game
- Highly mechanical fights that are more about surviving then dps are not even close to being represented in a dps meter (and most fights should be this way)
- Furthermore, there SHOULD BE MORE THAN JUST DAMAGE IN A RAID ENCOUNTER. With 8 archetypes and 64 classes, there should not be just a simple tank and spank on the meaningful content in this game
- DPS meters absolutely do not foster community, they inject artificial verticality and break immersion
- The only MMO i know of that uses DPS meters heavily is WoW, and look how well that's doing. ESO had DPS meters until 2017 i believe. The devs changed it to personal meters only (no longer able to see other players) because players were abusing it. And even THEN, you are still required to post your "DPS Numbers" in raid discords to verify you can hit certain dps checks before even getting invited to the group, so making DPS just for personal use makes the WHOLE PROCESS even more convoluted.
- DPS meters feel like training wheels, and raiding with dps meters is like riding a bike with training wheels. The reward of defeating a boss on skill alone without keeping an eye on "numbers" is forgotten to MMO players. Look how many people love playing Souls-like games, or any single player game that has no dps meter. These fights are mechanic, and can require a gear check, but mostly it's a skill check. The rewarding feeling of finally taking down a souls-like boss for the first time is unheard of in the MMO community, and even though it's a single player game versus an MMO, it's really not all that different.
If a person want to min/max content to be the very fastest then he can find a group of people who shares the same philosophy as him/her
If you want to quote me then take the sentence i wrote and don't change it. In that sentence i was specifically talking about people who wants to be the very fastest. People have all the rights in the world to go for world records and min/max. And they can and they will.
I can see both ends of the spectrum. I can see why someone would want to min/max and why it's thrilling to do so and i can see why someone just want to have fun and is okay not playing the most optimal way. I just lean more towards the casual side of this topic & i genuinely think that standardizing and designing new content for the few % who needs that new tough challenge is a bad thing for the overall game.
BUT absolutely that they can design some content for those who want a mathematically insanely hard fight and tie a combat tracker for those specific encounters
There is already answer for most of the cons you list... BUT
This is the proof you don't even know how to read a parser. . .
Parser is not only DPS it is also self healing, how much damages you take (the more you sustain yourself and the least you take damage, the better to survive the fight you are, so with those two datas parser shows people most able to survive)
Deathcounter, cc counter. interrupt counter. (again, those things help a lot to know who does his job or no).
etc...
I will just do an answer about toxicity :
and either on WoW and FFXIV (the games i did most PvE HL) i found far more toxic people on the "kikimeter is bad" team than the other... I don't count how much time i found too much time people joining in farm party or other content they clearly didn't have the level (in playstyle) to come in, and just hoped to be carry thru it...
I also saw some "elitist dumbshit" being kick... not for being bad or too good but their behaviour... Votekick on them mostly from other really good guy in the team who had a good gamelevel.
Toxicity is not from parser, neither from people using parser. Toxicity comes from personnal behaviour.
Archeage got a really toxic community without parser.
And know what, i know well 2 games have huge use of parser without a real one built in : FFXIV and GW2. i wanted to go on raid on GW2 without joining a guild. there is different discord servers where they learn people to do raid fight, you only need to prove your DPS after killing the easiest boss to go to the hardest where DPS really matters. toxic community to help casual without guild to kill raid bosses ?
You spoke about ESO players asking to show your personnal parse before joining a raid ? but even with removing it from ESO they could do it. or they also can give you a try, watch your DPS and if to low kick you... It is what happen in FFXIV... where kick are not explained because if you say why you kick, you risk a ban, so better shut your mouth
More than 15 years on wow + FFXIV (did break on first to go second during 5 years)
the last two games are developped around the fact people uses parser. and either got content for casual players.
On warcraft side "normal" raids is totally for casual, even when i turned casual, i was able to get all ahead the curve from when i came back in the end of WoD (so on the last raid with archimond) to the end of BFA (N'zoth). The M+ system i really disliked from the begining fit either for top end players (doing their weekly +15 before trying the +20) to most casual who will challenge themselves on +2, or +3 keys
On FFXIV, there is the story mode and raid 24 as entry door, then Xtrem primals that remains quite open to casual players. (i could saw it with my FC).
For the "non raid content", on both game, most things added is casu-friendly. deep dungeon, relic weapon, WQ farm to get stuff, etc.
Even brawlers in wow, that should be really challenging for highest tier became simple enough for most people before we get last tier stuff
Good devs never forget that part of their community want really hardcore content, and part want more opened one. The problem here is not the parser but the kind of dev we have.
Also if you speak that "all should be open to all" (so in this mind, mythic last boss on wow's raid, or ultimate on FFXIV are not good things) i will totally disagree. With a good curve of difficulty with different content, raids. you let people who want to improve themselves more and more to do it. Even a casual (so low timeplay) could want to find tougher content to push its limit. he will begin doing story content, then try to do xtrem primals, then for some push on sadic. A game with content harder and harder, allows all to try to push. and if they don't want to go deeper ? yes they can't do all, but is this a matter ? no. It is also this a MMORPG. A world where only some get to summit, becoming symbol but also they become an objectiv, a dream to try to get. being as strong of them.
That's for MMORPGs that lack content and have to design for years stuck in endgame.
I know how to read a parser. DPS Meters = Combat Meters, but since the topic was on DPS meter, i used that term.
You can easily swap out DPS Meter for Combat Meter, which has all of the metrics you listed, and nothing really changes.
Knowing how much damage a player is receiving, or their healing throughput, or damage mitigation, or interrupts, or crowd control, it's all relatively funneled through the exact list of cons in my original post.
Why do you need combat meters to feel like you're the best? The best at what? What's the gain?
Have you heard of a thing called gear? "Legendary" gear in the right context is proof that you've done the hardest content and is a more natural way of showcasing that you're the best.
Anyone can pad a meter.
The biggest con of all that i forgot to add is the "perceived Meta builds". With 64 classes, that's a massive meta list of good/bad/ugly, and a lot of builds that are potentially good (but new and untested) will get thrown aside for only the Meta Builds, the builds that the pros use, and this will shutdown anyone's sense of innovation.
It would be unironically devastating to see a game with 64 classes get pigeon holed into less than 10 viable cookie cutter builds because they are the only "perceived Meta builds" allowed in raids.
SO
If i read one quote :
DPS is not you have to watch the most to win fight if well designed
If i read the other quote :
CC, interrupt, avoiding to take damages, selfhealing (components of "surviving") is also not what is needed to win a fight if well designed
So ... what is important to do your part in a fight against a boss ? mechanics ? But you spoke about souls boss, which is mainly "learn and avoid their move set" (so take as low damages as possible) "drink your potion when needed and time for it" (self healing) "do as much damages as you can during the window you see" (DPS)
MMORPG bosses got some side mechanic that can hardly be read in parser right. but never saw a fight in any game yet, where all were around this. (and souls are clearly not a good place to find it ^^') If you have some examples
I don't care be the best
like i don't care getting a big e-pen stuff. Stuff is for me only a tool to get to tougher content
i just want to improve myself. so i need things to show me when i do worse or better.
Also you know, i am never really fan of the "killproof" because getting one kill proof is not so hard most of time. In fact... you can get some without playing well, after all, in a 40-man party, if one or 2 guys are totally underperforming, it won't be seen (unless parser) right ? i did sell sadic/xtrem kills, most of time on FFXIV, while selling kills, we ask the guy to kill himself asap to avoid doing mistakes that could kill others. So he gets killproof without even fighting the boss. (oh and we were payed with gils, so perfectly legal before you scream
getting 10, 20, 100 kill proof is better sign but needs lot of time (just because... respawn time ? ) so a really biased proof.
and this is more than enough to improve myself.
Aaaand in begining you don't need parser to see what is ok or no, but at one point, the differences are not so easy to see without collecting data. here comes parser. (and a personnal one is fine for this)
Players can use combat trackers to discover, review, troubleshoot and report issues with the game (this one issue trumps every con you list below, even without the debunking coming up).
Players are able to share objective information on builds with those that are not interested in getting deep in to builds. An item level system is not an inherent result of a combat tracker. There are MANY games out there with combat trackers and no such system.
Either you have only ever played WoW, or you are making things up here.
Further, in every game other than WoW, people know that they are recruiting the player, not the players gear. When I recruit a player, I look at their gear and then judge their performance based on what I expect them to be able to do with that gear.
I don't care what their gear is, as if they join my guild they will get gear upgrades in short order. If they are able to perform to a standard that I find acceptable, I will then judge whether or not I think they would fit in with the guild, and if so, offer an invite.
Further, if any guilds did take the WoW mentality along to Ashes, they would still make demands of minimum gear requirements for any new recruits. In fact, with an absence of an objective way to assess a players performance, I may do that as well as it is the next best method for quickly working out how good a player is. How would not having combat trackers prevent this? Where is this toxicity coming from?
Either the game allows players to be toxic towards each other, or the game does not allow it. It's a good thing a combat tracker also tracks mitigation, resistances, heals, everything. A good combat tracker (or a combat tracker with a good plugin) will also track things like crowd control and buffing. See above. If you are looking at a combat tracker during an encounter - or even at all during a days raiding - you are doin g it wrong.
I am fully in support of keeping access to combat trackers out of the hands of people that do not know how to use a combat tracker.
They absolutely do foster community, but again, only if the game is designed in a way where individual player reputation matters. Every MMO has a combat tracker.
At the top end, combat tracker use is fairly even across all MMOs - 100% of players at the top end of each game use them.
In games that attempt to limit combat readouts to personal only, guilds tend to set up servers where each member of the raid can upload their data in real time, so that the raid as a while still has the full picture. Using combat trackers on low end content can feel like this, for sure.
Trying to take on top end content without one though is more like a bike with no wheels.
Again, if you are looking at a tracker during an encounter, you have no idea what you are doing.
A ) If you're going to quote me, actually quote what I said and not what you want me to have said
B ) Mechanics are important. Lording metrics over people is not.
Great, have at it. I hope the game has that content for you, and I hope you enjoy that content.
Thing is, that is not what we are talking about here. We are talking about content for the single digit percent of players - a content type Steven has specifically said he wants Ashes to have.
Just a helpful suggestion for the future.
STEVEN: "Back in the day, when MMOs were great, you had to win your encounters through trial and error. You didn't have a DPS meter telling you, "Oh! We need to get up to 67.7% damage in order to achieve the whatever!" It wasn't some mechanical bullshit experience where you got to look at a graph or chart and say, "Oh! We need to do exactly this." Instead, you actually had to be present, you had to watch what was happening, you had to help your fellow guild members learn how to play the game and you had to excel as a group.
Now, that is the type of experience we want to replicate: that everybody is in this together type of scenario where we build the teams we are friends with up and we accomplish content together. It kind of also provides this mystery effect, where you're required to actually participate and watch what's going on and not just rely on that DPS meter."
The two quotes are your own words... i didnt edit your messages...
and for B... yes mechanics are important, but i don't know lot of fight in old, new mmorpg or in solo games where it is the part asking for the most skills (while avoiding damages + doing damages is most of time the top1 duo... if not the only thing like in most souls/metroidvania fights)
These are the words of someone that doesn't understand what combat trackers do.
A combat tracker can not tell you that you need to do "exactly this". It can't tell you what you need to do at all. A combat tracker only tells you what has already happened.
Steven is getting confused between combat trackers and addons that WoW has that are better described as combat assistants here, as combat assistants can tell you that you need to do "exactly this", whereas a combat tracker can only tell you what has happened, and you still need to work out what to do with that information.
Just because the top end guilds could benefit from combat metrics, does not mean that they will not be abused at every tier below the top tier. ESO learned this and prevented public parses making it impossible for players to abuse one another based on metrics alone. You still need to prove you can hit DPS checks on discord or whatever forum a raid uses, which is almost as bad.
If you need combat metrics to troubleshoot why you're failing, I wouldn't want to go to a party with you at all.
Don't get me wrong, I get the desire for it, but having combat metrics is not indicative of skill. It's an easy button and takes away from actually earning end game gear.
Why do you NEED combat metrics to do content?