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 can they achieve this? It's impossible to satisfy every single raider, and you know this.
No it's not.
ACT does it just fine, and has done so for 15 or so years.
Some players want to use meters
Some players dont give a flying f
― Plato
Players do not get to dictate how others play - saying they should not be available to anyone is not only an unreasonable stance, it is one that is already simply not going to happen.
Players can, however, have the stance that they don't want others to track their combat, and they can have that with guild based trackers - simply don't join a guild that has them.
Thus, all players are happy, other than those trying to dictate how others should play the game.
There is at least as much support for trackers as against them. This thread shows that.
Most of the people not wanting trackers would have no issue with a guild based tracker.
If not having them is ruining the raids, then we can all come back here and ask for them.
For information, I've always been quite good on dps meters in WoW, yet I am an advocate of "'no dps meters" in AoC. People should focus on the strat and not dying instead of feeling in a hot seat because maybe they're not doing enough dps and will get kicked. <-- that leads to taking more risks and paying less attention to the boss strat, then dying or wiping the raid more.
Let's see how raids will work, how demanding they will be, and if they require a dps meter.
Stuff like that shouldn't exist in AOC.
Though it could get out of hand at times especially when pugging, I think there are perfectly valid reasons to replace underperforming players in raids during progression. If your team is unable to beat a dps check than replacing your lowest dps with another player that has better performance will lead to more success for the raid team. This doesn't have to be simply because the player is underperforming, it could also come down the how classes play, such as high burst classes vs sustained dps classes.
The reason this was done in WoW was because the game allowed you to boot players from groups or raids, and replace them immediately. If the game didn't allow you to just port a replacement straight to you, then you wouldn't replace people.
This is why I am opposed to the family summons. It will allow this kind of thing - with or without a combat tracker.
If you are talking about raids in terms of progression, you should be talking about guilds.
If you are in a guild and you have a player that is underperformed, it is on the guild to help them improve. If you invite a player to your guild, you have as much of a responsibility to them as they have to you.
If they are underperformed, and you give them the assistance they need, then sure, if they aren't improving, get rid of them. However, this shouldn't be happening mid raid, improvement can take weeks.
On the other hand, if you are talking pick up raids, no, you shouldn't have the means to remove and replace a raid member mid content.
That is despicable behavior.
Look at WoW for what to avoid.
I agree with this.
However, the things you are talking about are not combat trackers - they are combat assistants. No one is asking for them in Ashes - not that I am aware of, at least.
The real question is whether or not you want this game to only be casual and dead in few months, or do you want it to thrive, be streamed, bring competitive players and audience etc. I don’t give a damn about competition, but I know that if we remove the DPS meters, we are removing competitive gameplay.
WoW was so popular thanks to various addons and ways to customize the user interface to suit everyone’s style. I don’t want addons to help me play my game instead of me, but I want all the addons to customize the interface and show the numbers that I want, where I want (cooldowns, healthbars, skillbars, bags, every single UI thing, I want it customizable)
I don't think a game needs dps meters to be competitive. Looking on twitch, how many of the top competitive games have dps meters? On the other side, how many games on twitch are popular and not competitive. I think you can also make these observations on steam charts if you want. Please tell me if there is something i'm not seeing.
They are planning on providing a lot of options for interface customization.
No, but they do have competitive aspects to them, even if not everyone is interested in that aspect of the game.
PUBG as an example has a tool for analyzing any match, where you can view the match from a birds eye view, in real time (or sped up - which I recommend), you can see the loadout each player has, where they are on the map, how many kills they have, and how much damage they have done.
While one could argue that this is not a combat tracker, it is the appropriate analysis tool for a BR game. The appropriate analysis tool for an MMORPG just happens to be a combat tracker.
If you want to suggest that games don't need analyzing tools in order to be competitive, I challenge you to point to any one such game where such tools do not exist.
And if it were played by adults, you had better bet there would be analysis of it.
You ain't getting on my freeze tag team with a low VO2 Max and high body fat percentage...
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Ok, correct me if i'm wrong but PUBG didn't have the analysis tool in the beginning and it was competitive.
No game needs analysis tools to be competitive. They can be a convenient and make since to add in most cases but in intrepid's case, they have a reason to not add this specific type of tool.
Name a game that you can't play competitively without an analysis tool?
Doesn't mean the creators have to be the ones providing an analysis tool integrated into the system.
Sure, you can compete in something without a tool like this. However, you can't compete with those that are using tools, so the question as to if you are being competitive is subjective.
These tools already exist, and will continue to exist. This means anyone wishing to be competitive has no choice but to use them.
Now sure, there is an argument that could be made that Intrepid don't need to make this tool themselves - I talked about this very early on in this thread (I assume everyone has read every post here). They could well leave things up to third parties to create tools, but then those tools could much more easily be integrated with things like timers and visual elements from the game, meaning the developers have significantly less control over what said tools are and are not capable of doing. If Intrepid make the tool (and if said tool performs the basic functions desired by most players), then Intrepid has full control over that tool.
This is why Intrepid have a specific reason to add this type of tool. While the above may not come true, Intrepid creating a tool and building in in to the client is literally the only way there is a chance that third party tools won't become a requirement for any form of competitive play - as has become the case in literally every MMO ever made.
Again, them adding a tool may not stop 3rd parties doing so, but it also may. Not adding them will guarantee 3rd party tools.
Which is the best option? A guarantee of third party tools and no first party tool, or a guarantee of a first party tool and a possibility of no third party? Essentially, these are the options available.
Oh, so now you are a proponent of third party tools?
You are changing the subject.
The comment I was responding to said that a game could not be competitive without a combat meter. There is no subjectivity about it, that is objectively false. A game can be competitive without a dps meter. Yes, watching a vod or going through logs might help me figure out what i did wrong in a situation but you also learn naturally by playing.
It depends on what you consider competition.
It your definition is that people compete with each other, then sure.
If your definition is that the game attracts people to it that want a competitive top end scene (my definition of a competitive game), then yes, you need those tools.
It isn't because you can't be competitive in a game without them - you clearly can. It is because the game won't attract people to it that want to play the game competitively.
So the question is - if a game isn't attracting competitive players, is it a competitive game?
Or is the real question if the competitiveness of a game really matters.
Also, I disagree.
In my experience, players become competitive in games because they play and enjoy them. Sometimes there is a money component but i've never heard of a player leaving a game or not playing it because the game doesn't have combat trackers. As long as you can play the game, you can practice. Things like combat trackers are just nice to haves.