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
How wrong you are - i could very well see a scenario when a fighter-tank is the best tank, because he can survive anything the bosses throw at him, but is actually the best at making threat and subsequently damage
We have almost no information about the actual game balance so there is no reason to take as granted that their implementation is exactly the same as their proposed design goal
― Plato
There is one thing to play with prelaunch perception and quite another to study how the game actually works
― Plato
Again you prove know nothing about endgame in MMORPG
and also nothing about player behaviour around it.
Players will define a meta. dislike this if you want, Steven can dislike this if he wants. it is what will happen, like it was when i discovered MMORPG with Everquest. Like it was in DaOC, like FFXI had.
Meta exist. In souls ? some weapon are better for some kind of fight => meta born.
Hollow knight ? for most fight, the charm that boost spells damage is strong, it was meta to use it (and i never used it ^^' prefered another build)
Counter Strike? there is meta about round where you buy nothing to get more money then buy directly strong weapons and snowball.
Strategy game are full of meta...
City builders ? they also have their meta...
Any RPG with at least a little choice to do to build your character (so... any RPG) have meta. the time you get choice, there will be meta...
Fucking tetris and pacman got a meta !
There will be meta, you are not convinced i know, and because you don't want
You are sure that the fact that IS can do what NO dev ever managed to do.
You said "you can think earth is flat" but you are far closer to flat earther with ignoring what the reality of gaming is.
ALL game are about "you just need to defeat challenges". this is the reality on ALL GAMES EVER (not only video games) ... and there are way far more efficient than others and player will always try to find it. and here i don't speak about 25 years of MMORPG, 50years of videogaming... Poker, and older games proved it
The problem about "false meta" and how hatefull "meta" can be...
A good example is League of Legend : proplayers do things, and all silver-gold consider this new meta... Without any try to understand why they did this. People consider meta like a "how to win" while it is far deeper than this. I never follow meta, i always play "what i like" (sometime it can fit meta but i don't care) but ALL TIME i did my part of work well, because at first i know meta, i understand it, and i can play "like i want" because i know exactly where is my place in group...
And more you have objectiv way to see efficiency of your choices, better you have to prove that you can do work (even if you don't have a "meta build" ) This is where combat tracker can be usefull : helping me to have better efficiency in game by learning how to play my build, adapt it, see where i do mistakes in rotation, etc. AND proving to all that my build, even if maybe off-meta, can do its work... better that lot of people brainlessly following the holy meta without understanding it... and without training their gameplay (they play the top DPS why train, they will be on top... or not)
We have some info about the actual game balance.
"Any Primary Tank is viable...and absolutely not laughable... for an upper end raid."
---Steven
If the implementation doesn't meet the design, the game is a failure, and therefore, the balance will be moot.
In what world?
For you. for some players. Yes, you are totally right
For others, and they are also a lot, this is totally revelant.
I mock people following brainlessly meta, but... it is how they like to play.
You speak only with your own point of vue, how YOU consider we all should play a game...
So sure, you can't understand how positiv a combat tracker could be, because, for your experience, all good point are meaningless because you don't care using it...
Try, one time, to learn how other players than you will play AoC... There will be many different kind, with totally different expectations.
That is a very good point, well said. As a counterpoint: doing more dps doesn't always mean being a better player. The best example would be players who stand in fire, but then end up doing more dps since they didn't dodge. But maybe in those cases the fire should do enough damage to kill anyone that ignores it.
that is true. Bigger weapons could also have a higher chance to miss targets that have high dodge.
so if you choose an easy class to play that has the same dps ceiling as any other then you will have much better results than if you played a hard class. And the "quality" of a player is usually determined by how well he can do everything he needs to at the same time as he is piloting his class (this is however a teritorium foreign to mmo's because they have really bad balance and usually there are straight up better classes)
― Plato
A combat tracker instead of a DPS meter would show if you were standing in the fire.
There is always the danger of people only looking at the DPS and just standing in the fire draining the resources from the healers.
combat tracker tells you retroactively that you stood in fire - almost nobody configures it so it shows when you are in a fire, because that is borderline a combat assist - which we all agree that we do not want
― Plato
It's because the bad outweighs the good.
Just as, for you, the good outweighs the bad.
For this game, the devs don't agree with you.
Some people can believe that "best Tank" matters.
Just as some people can believe that the Earth is flat.
What they believe doesn't change reality.
And the reality is going to be dependent on the game design.
And the game is being designed such that "best Tank" is objectively irrelevant because any Primary Archetype Tank will be viable in upper end raids.
You are completely wrong in here - reality is dependant on the implementation of a game design
game design is like a building construction plan - there are many cases when the construction plan is flawed and the building created with those plans falls or needs to be taken down, because of a flaw that can make it fall
If you can't accept the FACT that plans are not equal to reality then there is no help for you
― Plato
If the devs end up just re-creating WoW, sure, they can include DPS meters. No one will care because no one will be playing that game.
Arguing for DPS meters in Ashes is like arguing for separate PvE-Only servers.
All viable : the least i hope for any MMORPG... All viable means only that you can use all to fight boss, they will all be strong enough to kill the boss. This is the really least we can expect from any MMORPG.
but while all viable doesnt mean all equal... So even if your game get all class viable in their focused role, it doesnt avoid to get best tank, best DPS, etc
All tank are viable on WoW, or FFXIV. all DPS are viable, and all heal are viable.
it means, for FFXIV, time you do a team with 2 different tank, 2 different heal, 2 different melee DPS, 1 magic DPS and 1 physical range DPS, you can beat any content. It is real, totally real.
BUT while the 4 tanks are viable, there is one best than the other, and one worst than the other.
Let imagine 2 tank build : One will have bigger mitigation/selfhealing. the other will be better to generate enimity. Both are same DPS
both was used as main tank to kill the hardest boss of the game. and both were in team which managed this.
So, both tank are totally viable.
BUT, they are not equal, the simple fact the tank with lowest enimity was totally viable to kill this boss makes him factually better... Why ? you don't need more eninimty than enough to remain first on the boss. more than this is useless. So you don't need the enimity bonus from the tank better on it. On the other side, the more mitigation/selfheal you get, the less healer got work to do... making their work easier and/or able to help a little more the DPS
Both those two tanks are viable, one is better than the other
What would make "best tank" is objectively revelant would be to have all tank build perfectly equal : sale hate generation, same mitigation/selfheal, same DPS, same utilities (so, the 8 classes, and ALL combinaison of augments on the skills). It will NEVER happen in any MMORPG.
because you use comparison without knowing what you speak :
Some people can believe that all viable means all equal.
Just as some people can believe that the Earth is flat.
But i invite me to prove me wrong. show me one good MMORPG, be it young or old, with more than one tank, where all the tanks were equal. Where there wasn't one tank stronger than the other.
And "AoC will be" is not a good answer, because it doesn't exist, neither you or i or any dev can prove it will be the case.
And i say "all equal" not "all viable"
From the begining of this discussion you NEVER tried to prove anything, you just send some affirmation without any example, anything to prove this affirmation is real. But you forget that we know that "flat earther" are false because there are factual proof they are wrong.
I gave factual situation all people on MMORPG was able to see.
Give me a mmorpg where people didn't use anykind of meta (while you prove it already a wrong statement for AoC...)
Give me a mmorpg where all tank are equal, one were all DPS are equal.
Give... to support what you say, any kind of factual proof. please... do it at least once.
And for "devs disagree with you" Jeffrey bard was from EQ2, some other in the team now are from EQ2... *looks at ACT which was born for... EQ2 1 years after release* You sure?
AAAAAAND... It is as true as the earth is flat :
Implementation can fails, and the game live really well. Example ?
FFXI : implementation of ninja, a DPS job... the implementation failed, because people used it more to do the best tank on many boss instead of a DPS. Did the game failed ? hell no...
Another example outside MMORPG, :
Nunu was build to be a Top-laner originally. it was when nearly all character was meant to have one specific role (toplane, jungle, midlane/APcarry, ADcarry, support).
One day, a proteam used nunu not as top, but as support... and then, without riot doing any patch for it, people considered nunu top out-of-meta.
Failed implementation, not failed game.
STOP EXPECTING UTOPIA AND PROCLAIMING THE GAME FAILED WHEN IT DID NOT ACHIEVE IT You are completely wrong in this - if anything the last few weeks showed is that players want to have in an mmo a lot of content, that respects their time and investment without bullshit whale exploiting monetization - dps meters are not at all comparable in importancy with these topics, but are inevitable with big population
― Plato
I couldn't disagree more. Easy-access dps meters will inevitably bring about a toxic game culture hellbent on optimizing the fun out of the game. For proof you need only look to the difference in the WoW and FFIV communities.
There is nothing "inevitable" about large MMOs and some imaginary need to have hard numbers to crunch.
Are you sure? Like sure wow has better addon automatization download process, but ACT for ffxiv is just download and extract. I'd definitely say that the thing to blame is the fact that blizzard was actively shrinking the game master team and ffxiv has very strong antiharassment policy so you get banned pretty quickly if you harass other players for whatever reason.
and "optimizing" the fun out of the game is never really on the dps meters, because it is actually from theorycrafters that are creating gigantic spreadsheets and are looking for strong interactions to create the strongest builds possible
You are simply blaming toxicity on the thing you dislike disregarding any other variables and their importance
― Plato
FFXIV both has easy access to DPS meters and is toxic AF.
They may not say, "Your DPS sucks, GIT GUD!" to you face in game. The group will however magically vanish and reform without you in it after 2-3 of your bad pulls. That or you will just outright get removed from the party with no explanation.
Installing ACT in FFXIV is as easy as installing any meter in WOW.
It is naive to think that not having the game's official blessing on DPS meters will remove toxicity. People get toxic AF in "Extreme" FFXIV content (content that is designed to be beginner raid content). Realistically, the only cure for toxicity is to have the players know each other well before doing content together.
Anytime players do challenging content with strangers, there will be toxicity after a few failures.
The good news is that Ashes is a very guild-centric game. You will likely never be able to do any high-end content outside a guild group. This means that Ashes will be less toxic of a game inherently. Removing DPS meters is just taking tools away from guilds. That is, if you think Intrepid can prevent DPS meters from existing. Which I am extremely skeptical of myself.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
All games do not have the same design goals.
And by your logic, it's perfectly fine if Ashes is pay to win or ends up with a PvE-Only server.
Yep. Everyone wants Ashes to have lots of content that respects their time investment without whale exploiting monetization.
And we don't need DPS meters to accomplish that.
If DPS meters are inevitable then this thread has no purpose.
As far as I know, no one has stated that the devs not including DPS meters will remove toxicity.
Ashes devs are not including DPS meters because that will reduce toxicity.
The devs won't be removing DPS meters, rather they won't be implementing DPS meters.
And the devs will be bannin add-ons.
I'm not aware of anyone arguing that DPS meters won't exist.
I mean, at that point, you can't even look to any other game and say "we don't want that here", because no MMO has implemented a combat tracker in to the client. So basically, Intrepid are just doing what everyone else has done.
If they wanted Ashes to be different in this regard, the only thing they really could do is implement a tracker them self, so that they have full control over it.
Assuming they are looking for a different result than other games - the fact that they are performing the same actions is just baffling.
Dygz: "no official statement" Dygz: "i believe" Dygz: "i argue on semantics, not on the stance" Dygz: "i'm for intrusive platform scanning for the purpose of banning people for using addons" Dygz: "to end my post here is my subjective observation"
― Plato
If I am able to parse combat from a YouTube video (as I have done), then I am not even interacting with the game. As far as I am aware, it is not against YouTubes terms of service for me to parse combat that is posted on their platform, and as such Intrepid have absolutely no say in the matter.
So, as we are able to parse from YouTube videos, that means in this situation the closest thing to interacting with the game is OBS or what ever software is used to record it. This means that if Intrepid want to ban someone for using a combat tracker, the only course of action they have is to ban people for recording in game combat.
They can not ban anyone for how they interact with a YouTube video - that is simply not something that can legally be in their terms of service unless Google approve it.
The only way around that is to limit the ability to screencapture the game - like you need to get a license to stream the game
― Plato
But, YouTube is not an add-on.
I'm pretty sure the devs will not include a tool that lets you view YouTube from inside the game.
And...I'm pretty sure the devs would ban an add-on that allows people to view YouTube from within the game.
That's what happens when you twist statements into a strawman argument.
Twisting statements into an absolute creates not just a strawman fallacy, but also a reductio ad absurdum fallacy, which inherently invalidate your arguments.
I didn't write "you end up with p2w and pve only". You wrote that.
We are talking about design goals; not designs.
The devs have the design goal of not including DPS meters. Just as they have the design goal of not being P2W and not having separate PvE-Only servers. And, sure, at the end of the day, it depends on what they actually implement rather than what they say they will or will not implement.
Just as Steven says he is against P2W and against PvE-Only servers - he is also against supporting DPS meters.
I think you were trying to make a statement about the difference between reducing toxicity and removing toxicity??
But, if they aren't going to ban people for using YouTube, and we can use YouTube to parse combat, that means they can't ban people for parsing combat.
Ergo, any talk about banning people for using combat trackers has absolutely no place, as that is not something Intrepid are able to do.
It is quite hilarious that you bait with strawman post to attack the reply being absurd example and that "somehow" invalidates my arguments Lemme repeat again: Design goal isn't the same as implementation of the said design goal.
Holy shit, what is so hard to understand that certain point? You're just showing your incompetency to understand simple points, because you are always looking for any consecutive words taken out of context to be able to be understood in a way that supports your "deconstruction"
Do you realize that "reducing toxicity" and "removing toxicity" is literally the same thing? It might be just a quirk of the english language, but if you are in the process to remove all toxicity then you are basically reducing toxicity until it reaches nonexistance.
Once again you are only typing random conclusions that are only leaps of thinking completely devoid of logic and using that as "proof" of my arguments being invalid
And here you miss the most important point - the goal of a discussion is to get to a common ground on which we can both agree and then we can take the discussion to the next level in actually constructive way - so stop deconstructing all points as "moot" or "invalid", because your "deconstructions" are nothing but leaps of fantasy thinking completely devoid of logical steps how you got to that
― Plato
In terms of reducing/removing toxicity, it seems to me that if you have 100 toxicity and perform some action that lowers that to 80 toxicity, you have removed 20 toxicity and reduced the toxicity to 80.
I wouldn't even call it a quirk of language.
@Wingtzu
i was activ in two different topic around adding ingame combat tracker in FFXIV.
the first one lead to have the dummycheck for Xtrem-sadic content... Allowing people to know their DPS on dummy already... (we know the life they have, you can know easily the time you need to break it. => life divided by time => damage per second)
And while being already a good thing, was not enough, another topic born. I will pass over all pro/con argument (already did in this topic) but while using parser as personnal tool and for my FC i discovered with this second topic a site like warcraftlogs existed for FF... fflogs.
How ? some "anti parser" were angry and used this topic to ask SE to make thise site close... because there was fight data uploaded from some fight they were in... (and they were show being around the 25-40% lowest part of DPS ^^')
I invite you to go there, and look if your character got some datas... https://fr.fflogs.com/
If no, or you do not so much extrem farm / sadic bosses (which is fine) or you are really lucky...
If yes, do you really think that on FFXIV, combat tracker is not a thing ?
About the FFXIV toxicity around content, i spoke about it, and from the "pro combat tracker" side, an answer is already given to you i won't add. But it exist totally. Toxicity is not just "stfu noob" ... There is many way to be toxic, far more malicious (and not only about endgame content/DPSmeter). The main difference between wow and FFXIV toxicity ? on wow side, it is most of time totally assumed, and shown, on FFXIV side, it is more in the shadow.
As was said, FFXIV get a huge use of combat tracker. Because lot of people have competitiv mind... (not because they want to be toxic). Yoshida clearly said he didn't want to ban ACT users... while using third party program is illegal. (so using act is illegal)... for 2 reasons
1) non official but he knows he would harm his community and the game if he did.
2) he can't...
He can't like he can't ban people for modding the game aesthetic (nude big tittied girl with big... yes... this )
He can't because hunting such people wouldn't be free... far from it. It would be spending a lot of money, to ban people, and finally... having less customers. Because the large majority of modders and users of ACT are good people, who enjoy playing the game, who are not toxic, can even fight all kind of toxicity...
This is why i laugh when i read Steven "we will ban them all" ok... Maybe he dreams about it, he thinks will be easy to do what 25 years of MMORPG never did... I am no programmer, but i see those 25 years of games with the "third party program is forbidden" in the rules of all of them... And i see those 25 years where reality is far from this rules... I can't imagine steven doing what no other before did.
And even if he ban all third party program... (will be problem for streaming, for razer synapse users also... i will be ban even while i never used macro with my mouse :') ) don't worry, there will be way you won't see there is parsing... or simply, i will record runs... and while recording runs, it will be even better to see who underperformed during the dungeon... (So easier to see to who i should give advice, and what advice... or ... against who i can be even more toxic next time because i know he is bad). While combat tracker only show who did bad damages, who was unable to avoid AOEs. With the video record i will be able to see even more flaw in people's gameplay (me included)
Toxicity in MMORPG is a great problem. and the one helped by combat tracker is no exception. But you don't fight toxicity by hiding it. combat tracker can also be used against most "combat tracker toxicity" ... Most (if not all) people i saw being really toxic with it (pointing people with low DPS as problem in the wipe when not the main problem) were not so good DPS themselves, they had good one, but could be better. or even worse, they had good DPS, but... no interrupt, no cc, took lot of damages, etc. all those things shown by combat tracker... was so easy to just say them "before spitting about other people gameplay, try to improve yours first".
AND as i already said... combat tracker is a really good tool to... help other people to improve. to give them advice. Not generic advice "to play well this class, do this" no... but more "you should think more often to use this skill" and you can even make them understand why (understand how to play is the best way to improve...)