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Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
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Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
No one should or will use combat tracker during a fight since it will take away to much focus from the fight itself.
People that care only about dps meters and shit on other players are just shit players themselves.
Yes, combat tracker will be useful during hard boss encounters, but experience is much better than theoretical analysis. The only reason people analys a fight afterwards is to get a somewhat better understanding of that fight and find some odd behaviors. One will also be able to spot slackers, these slackers won't get instantly kick but they will probably get a warning.
Now let's get to how it all works.
The game sends your computer a lot of information, information about your party members and everything around you. You then send information to the server and indirectly to everyone else. All the information that the server sends to you (and you to the server) is saved to a text file. Some games may only have a temporary combat text file while others may save everything. In world of warcraft classic you can enable a setting so every combat encounter in a dungeon or raid is saved forever.
What a combat tracker does is take that combat text file, which have everything listed down to the millisecond, and make it much much easier to read. In world of warcraft one can even track the position of the boss and the players to see how everyone moved and positioned themselves.
Will combat tracker give people that use it an advantage, yes but also no. It will give people at the very very top an advantage if they understand the fight and how to probably use the information given by the combat tracker. But for 90+% of player the combat tracker will just be numbers and timestamps which won't give them much useful information.
So people that don't care about the combat tracker will not be affected by others that use it. Meaning, if we have a combat tracker the top end will be happy AND everyone else will also be happy since they won't care or won't be affected by it .
But what about the toxic players?!?!?!
Just don't care about them, if people start to complain about your dps/hps then just leave and try and find other players to play with. I promise you that there will be players and guilds that will fit your play style if you take the time and try and find them. Please try and find a guild, solo playing can be fun but mmos are so much better and fun if you find a nice group of people to play with.
The primary purpose of combat trackers is to spot "slackers".
Which is what people who hate combat trackers hate.
"Slacking" is not even a possible concept for anyone when I play RPGs. It's not a thing.
I dunno how people can "slack" while PLAYING.
Just as you can't steal where there is no ownership.
We caught slackers in L2 by just paying attention to the people in our party... See a ranger on auto attack mode in the back of the room.. see a gladiator swinging his arms with no skill animations for more than 10 seconds... Tank needing constant heals because he wont use buffs or self heals... seeing a tank in the lower quarter of his health bar for more than 20 seconds.
We also had Soul Shot, which was 100% needed to buff your DPS, and after every hit on the mob, it woudl reactivate on your weapon (bright glow for those who do not know)... some people would toggle off their soul shot to try and save money.. All catchable if you just paid attention. And we would call them out right then and there. Once you play a game long enough, you kind of get the TTK ingrained in your head when in popular leveling places, and you know when something seems off. If it seems off.. start watching.
Now, different story when it comes to a 40 man, unless you just assign certain people in the raid to watch over certain classes to make sure they dont go to sleep. 40 man raid.. get 8 people to watch over a group of 5 each... done. Announce it before you start... and people not wanting to get called out will play the right way.
If that RPG sets a minimum performance level for specific content, anyone opting in to that specific content and not performing at that level is slacking.
Rather than saying "your PLAYING, you cant be slacking", you should be saying "if you cant perform to this level, dont opt in to content that asks that of you".
And dont even try and say you should be able to do all content, not all content in a game is for all players, if you are not willing to meet the needs of the content, the content t is not for you.
Sorta... I guess.
I doubt the Devs made a raid boss and said to themselves "If they do not have the exact 40 man raid team we designed this for, with the exact classes and weapons needed... not to mention skill rotations... there is no way they will ever beat it", or any boss for that matter. With the exception of using the Holy Trinity.. it should be down to teamwork and communication..
As long as you have capable gear, and the skill to play your class, you should be able to participate in all content. Skill being the determining factor, not #'s.
But in the end, I do know that all players will not have the ability to play all content. The biggest downfall should be the gear and skill though. IMO that is.
People totally try to slack off, and get pulled through content with the minimum amount of effort.
The problem is that some content requires everyone to bring a standard of skill to complete. When people are unwilling to put effort into achieving that standard of skill, and show up to the content hopeful that everyone around them will preform well enough to allow them not put work into improving as a player. Then the people that do this in my opinion are slackers and do not deserve a spot on in a group with people who are putting in real effort and bringing that standard of skill to the content.
It is not about being toxic, it is about having reasonable expectations and being able to find people who can live up to those expectations. The challenge is letting someone know they are not living up to the expectation their role brings to the group without sounding toxic. I don't think vary many people have mastered that skill.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
You should make your own MMO... call it Accountants of the Mist! you could crunch numbers all day in that game.... drool......... Your first expansion could be called the The Audits of Winter!.. OMG you would have a hit on your hands. Everyone at H&R Block would definitely jump in on this... and you know how many H&R blocks there are... so awesome.
Just because not everyone wants things reduced down to numbers, that doesn't mean they can't be.
If you are a DPS character, your DPS output over time is the total sum of your gear and ability.
Those are my problems with combat trackers. They harm the community as a whole.
Most WoW players probably don't understand this concept, but WoW is the least social MMO that ever existed and has been since vanilla. To the point where they blame the wrong systems for the problems with that community. FF14 is one of the most social and successful MMOs ever to exist, but it's got things like dungeon finder and raid finder that WoW players blame for a majority of their problems. The difference is FF14 assumes the player isn't stupid, but WoW does.
No matter how you look at it DPS meters did not help WoW with it's community issues. It actually eventually became a detriment to that game because back in the early days of WoW the developers looked at the data to balance content. So instead of using what they wanted to use they used what was best. This made the Developers falsely assume that players just liked the roles being used. Which caused them to ignore the balance of the builds people didn't use in favor of the ones they did.
You can see very quickly how allowing them snowballs into a bunch of other issues with the community of the game and even potentially ruin the balance. I don't even have to cover how toxic the current WoW playerbase is. No other MMO ever had a community where shut the fuck up was an acceptable and widely used term in the playerbase when trying to communicate in dungeons or raids. Whereas in FF14 people socialize and say stupid shit all of the time and don't even talk about the dungeons at all. Yet do the dungeons perfectly efficiently despite some of the players never having played an MMO before.
That is due to the superior community aspect. People actually help each other in FF14 and most of it is without combat trackers. Since every ability has a unique animation it is very easy to tell what every player is and isn't doing. The game has combat trackers, but it's a bannable offense to use them in toxic ways. Which doesn't solve it's issues either cuz it will just make people lie about it.
I trust the developers to make a good game for AoC, but until the community heads into a clear direction I will not trust the community to be tolerable. That will be exceedingly hard when the WoW playerbase will likely at least try the game. These forums aren't likely to help me learn about the community. 90% of the people I'm going to be playing with probably don't even know about this game yet. I don't know how the community is going to be.
I don't want it to be swayed into the wrong direction from the start though.
Also it's naive to think that there will be workarounds to have combat trackers. The games that do only have them because the company allowed for them to exist. It is very easy for a developer to make a system server side to hide data until the game determines when it can be used. They can do this for any system in the game. Over time client sided tasks have been dwindling and server sided tasks have been growing. There was a time when the client did virtually everything, but due to the rise of addons that has been changing for gaming in general.
U.S. East
At the end of the day, the issue is neither of these perspectives, but rather the clash of them. If people not willing to do what is needed to progress only group with likeminded people, and people willing to do what is needed only group with likeminded people, then this issue all of a sudden disappears.
The thing is, this is an issue for each individual player to take responsibility for themselves. If I am running a group and one of my members is not willing to do what is needed for the group to progress, it is my fault for not making it clear that this is what would be expected, and it is their fault for not informing me that they are not willing to do what is needed.
What it is not, is the developer of that games fault, and as such they should not be doing anything at all about it.
There you go stating facts that everyone knows again...
When I look at my screen and play, I like to see a Dragon in front of me...
When you look at your screen and play, you like to see 110110001110101111011011000
YES!! for the top 1% of players that want to be the best of the best, not for random groups, rp-players or the "normal" type player.
If you are not a hardcore top end player, then you will not even notice the combat tracker
Nope... it's for anyone who is not beating the boss. This applies much more broadly than the top 1%
I am not an accountant. I don't even consider myself to be an expert with math. I'm still pro combat trackers because it is actionable data that empowers people to make better decisions.
I am a firm believer in data informed decision making in all aspects of my life.
There you go not paying attention.
When you look at the screen, you see a dragon.
When I look at the screen,I see a dragon.
When we are finished with the dragon, you go off and.do what ever you want, I look over the numbers.
Once again, if you are looking at a combat tracker during a fight (at least for PvE), or if you think that is the way to use them ar all, you dont know how to use a combat tracker.
Not even going to respond with something serious here since sarcasm seems to go right over your head.
It CAN be used by anyone, but it's much more likely that people that do not aim for "being the best" will not use it, while people that do will use it +90% of the time.
I just meant that causal players and normal day to day players shouldn't worry about the combat tracker since it won't affect them most of the time. (That is, if they play with people with the same mind set)
So you are basically Ben Stiller's character in "Along Came Polly" .. got ya.
Either way.. another sarcasm/joke gone over the head. Which is now why I can see where you are coming from... you do not see the fun in funny, because you did not have the data to tell you it was time to hit your Laugh Skill button in your rotation...
EDIT: Before tempers flare.. this is another joke poking fun at numbers.
Since there is no accepted way to denote sarcasm in text form, using arguments in a discussion that people actually use can not be distinguished as sarcasm.
I agree with all of this except the last paragraph. It might not be a devs fault, but that doesn't mean they cant/shouldn't try to solve for it. Good products solve customer problems regardless of who is to blame (and great product teams know which problems to solve and which to not solve). I'm not sure to what degree they should solve this problem. I'll need to think on this more. One way a dev can help solve for this is making the game as balanced as possible between classes/specs to promote more player choice in what they choose to play. It's no fun to have your favorite spec not be viable in the top content you want to do.
Really though it comes down to this clash of two ideas: Player 1 wants an optimized group. Player 2 is prioritizing their playstyle experience over their teams success.
I've been both of these players in my time with games. Neither one is wrong, but they conflict. The issue can be reduced through class/spec balance, but it will never go away.
Combat trackers help player 1s avoid player 2s. The lack of them helps player 2s blend in with player 1s.
Is it fair to force player 1 and 2 to group with each other? (Or rather to make it difficult for people to know what type other players are?) How difficult should it be for player 1 to find like minded individuals to group with? How does player 1 even know if what they are doing is right or wrong?
Is a player 2 okay with grouping with other player 2s? Or are they really looking to blend in and effectively get carried by the player 1s? Shouldn't the player 1s have the right to choose if they want to carry player 2s or not?
What about the possible difficulty of content? Inherently content will need to be easier without combat trackers as the player 1s will be handicapped in forming optimized groups. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
What about player 3? This is the person is an unskilled player... they may have the optimal spec, but they don't have the skill. What if player 3 sincerely wants to improve? How can they know they are getting better?
What about player 4? This player is lazy and just wants to get carried by others efforts. They seek to do content they know is more difficult than the effort they are willing to put in. Should this player be rewarded for this behavior? (In real world business, when someone is slacking on the team it can impact the moral/performance of the whole team).
How about player 5? This is the poor healer who's getting blamed for every wipe... when really she is an excellent healer, but her DPS can't stay out of the fire and are taking unnecessary dps. Without combat trackers it can be difficult for player 5 to not be blamed by the toxic players.
I'm sure there are more personas we could add to this list.
Data will help like minded people find their peers. I think this can be a good thing overall.
Ahhhhhhhhh. How dare you say such things!!!!!
I tried specing into the laugh skill, but it was suboptimal for my dps rotation....
Your joke didn't go over my head... I just saw an opportunity to make a point about it to combat the stereotype that data = nerd and only boring accountants/math geeks like it.
I'm a nerd cause I play video games, not because I've learned the value of data.
If you knew me you would know I can be quite sarcastic and I frequently use humor in my interactions.
The problem is, if they are only found out at the end of the content when the group is fighting a boss that needs everyone paying attention and being reasonably good, it will generate far more animosity than it would have if the group found out right at the start.
This will be amplified in Ashes when another group comes along after our group failed at an encounter and kill it.
The goal should be reducing player animosity towards others, and that doesn't happen by not knowing for sure whether a player is good or not until it is too late to do anything about it
The only thing a developer can do is give us a way to easily identify whether a player cares about performance or not - but even then it is up to players to understand where they fit in that scheme.
Perhaps for the content you are doing right now, but what about content in the future? I'm okay with giving new people a tryout, but I need to be efficient in accessing their ability and judging their ability to take constructive (non-toxic) feedback.
If I am running content that I consider difficult, I am running it with people I know.
If you are looking to expand your friends list with new people that you can take along on that difficult content,run content that you do not care about in order to find them.
If you are running that content with the goal of finding good players, there is no animosity towards those that prove to not be good. It's not like they are holding you back from something you care about.
When you find the people that are worth adding to your friends list, you can then look to take them along on content that you want to run.
With a combat tracker, determining who is good and who isn't (any why this is the case) at most takes one content run and maybe 2 minutes looking over a parse of that content.
Without a tracker, it takes several content runs with several different group builds to work this out.
Sadly, there is no way around that - without a combat tracker.
I honestly do not think tracker = nerd.. I just think it takes away from the overall experience of a game. Obviously it helps, but MMOs used to be about the journey and not how fast you can get to and do end content.
End game content has always been a thing, but these days it is even more important because of how fast people chew up and or ignore the content in the race to get to the end game. It just seems that most games today almost have to start promoting end game content before they talk about the meat of the content.
MMOs would probably be more cost efficient to make, if they just started everyone at Max level, and just made end game content to collect gear, instead of spending years making quests and story line that only a small handful of people pay attention to anyway.
But ya.. I do not think anyone is a nerd for using a tracker, as I have said before, I might use one too, although my use would be for my character's growth, and not to judge another character's growth. I am not paying their $15 a month... so I should have no say in how they play the game.
There have been people tracking combat in various ways since UO beta.
MMO's are about what the individual player wants it to be about. If you want to play the game as if it is all about the journey, combat trackers are not standing in your way.
See, just a tad further down on that thread, it basically says a combat tracker will not get in my way.
If IS said tomorrow that combat trackers would be put into the game after popular demand.. I would not throw a fit. I would not complain on these forums about it, and I sure as hell would not keep arguing with people on on here, namely you, that they need to be removed. Because whatever is put into the game, I will work and or deal with.
You on the other hand, cannot accept the fact that they will not be put in. And even though you have admitted proudly you will play with one anyway... you still argue that one should be included. As for right now.. it will not. Pretty simple answer.
Maybe IS does not want to include one now because the trackers will tell on them if they make balancing changes without telling anyone. Maybe they just want people to play the game vanilla style for a while before giving players the tools tweak their characters. Maybe they just truly hate them and will never put them in.. The point is.. if the game does or does not have them, you have to make a choice, which you already have, to either play the game as is, or download addons to help you get better.