Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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
I don't deny that.
I'm saying you're engineering the fun out of the game.
Sure, for some people.
Many people enjoy that kind of thing.
The good thing about a raid though, you only need two or three people to actually use them.
As long as the rest of the raid are willing to make improvements to their performance as needed, then all is good (you should not be playing cooperatively with others if you are not willing to improve when an improvement is presented to you).
What if that improvement was to change your secondary archetype and weapon used, but you really enjoy the one you are playing now? Why should the way you enjoy playing determine if you can actually play?
If you are opting to play at the top end, with 39 other players depending on you, then you should be both willing and happy to do what you can do to pull your weight.
What is more fair, one person playing not their favorite subclass, but participating in the content they most enjoy, or 40 people failing at content because one player refuses to pull their weight?
In my raids, if you need to change spec/class so that we can kill content, I expect you to. If you do not, you can find another guild/raid. If we do not need tou to change in order to kill the content, why would we ask you to change?
Yea, just grinding mobs and questing...it's not needed at all. Combat trackers are only needed when doing difficult content.
Sounds like you haven't played against a rank 1 team in highly competitive 10v10 PvP (instanced of course, just like the most intense PvE is instanced). The skill level those players bring to a game is insanely high. Both PvP and PvV (when instanced) can be very difficult to beat. When a new season (e.g. new raid tier) comes out it tends to be that PvP is easier and gets harder over time (as your competition gets geared up) while PvE gets easier over the season (as your team gets geared up). Both can be very challenging though.
Note: I'm not advocating that lots of PvP/PvE be instanced in this game, just pointing it out from other games. I think we have both agreed previously that the highest skill based combat can only be measured in a instanced environment.
There are very valid reasons to do so in PvP (as I've pointed out in other posts before). In PvP the boss is not scripted, you can't just stop between pulls to see what's going on and tune your strategy like you can in PvE. You've got to be doing it while the battle is happening and the combat trackers will tell you a lot about what your team and your enemies team is doing so you can adjust your strategy. I've done this hundreds, if not thousands of times and I'm sure its helped my team come back and win many games.
Yea people who don't know how to use trackers tend to be against them.
Indeed I haven't.
While I do enjoy open world PvP, arenas have never been my thing - or any ranked PvP for that matter. It may well be that there is a desire to look at a combat tracker in such a situation, I am not qualified to argue the point either way.
I am not a casual player, I am not worried about myself, so this is not me arguing that you are hurting my play experience. I am worried about casuals who just enjoy taking part in the full game, who will get booted from everything they join... This can kill a casual player population in a game like this. And a loss of casual players, would not work well with the node system and how it works.
Now the argument here against what I said is.. do not use them if you don't want to. Problem is, even the casual guilds who say they will not use them, will in fact, eventually use them if it is provided in game. Next thing you know, if you are not meta, you are not playing in end game activities. If a casual guild does not have easy access to one (provided in game), they will not use one. And they could play this game ignorant of what a calculator tells them to do and just have fun.
Either way, the simple fact is this... there will be DPS meters for this game official or not. If you choose to use one, in whatever form it comes in... I say go for it. I know I will be if I can find one. But to the casual players, it is not fair if one is forced on them.
This is the kind of content where the specific class you run actually could matter.
This content is not designed for casual players.
As far as I am concerned, this kind of renders your point moot - but feel free to let me know if you disagree.
The system I have been arguing for now for several years (I have no doubt you would not yet have come across my points on this matter) is that the best thing Intrepid could do is add in a combat tracker to the games client, but make it an optional guild perk (since these will be a thing).
Make it so guilds can pick a tangable advantage in harvesting or crafting, a boost to small scale PvE combat when in guild only groups, a boost to PvP combat when in guild only groups, or a combat tracker that only tracks combat of guild members.
Most casual guilds wouldn't even consider taking a combat tracker over a tangeble benefit to aspects of teh game they frequently use.
I don't disagree with any of this at all.
Thing is, if combat trackers are left to be available to all players, then all players will be expected to use them - or to have used them to develop their build (or use a build that someone else has used a combat tracker to develop).
The only way to prevent this is to implement combat trackers directly in to the game, where people that really want them - the people that drive their development - have access to them, but where others have other things they would perhaps rather chose to take instead.
"The system I have been arguing for now for several years (I have no doubt you would not yet have come across my points on this matter) is that the best thing Intrepid could do is add in a combat tracker to the games client, but make it an optional guild perk (since these will be a thing).
Make it so guilds can pick a tangable advantage in harvesting or crafting, a boost to small scale PvE combat when in guild only groups, a boost to PvP combat when in guild only groups, or a combat tracker that only tracks combat of guild members.
Most casual guilds wouldn't even consider taking a combat tracker over a tangeble benefit to aspects of teh game they frequently use."
I love this idea.. The only issue I see, would be guilds that are hardcore, taking advantage of the perks. All you would have to do is make multiple guilds for each perk you would like to take advantage of and fill it with alts and or mains that would like to take advantage of said perk. Each sub guild, benefitting the main guild in some way. You could only allow one guild per account, but then people with the means would just buy more accounts. If you could find a way to stop all the ways to bypass and take advantage of this system, Im all in.
As long as the combat tracker only tracks the combat of people in that guild, if you try and get people in different guilds with different perks, the tracker won't work for them.
If they implemented this, they would be able to do away with the combat log that the game is going to have, and could even do away with floating combat feedback. These are the main two vectors by which combat trackers for Ashes are being developed (and yes, there are two that I am somewhat following in development).
Yeah yeah, combaty trackers are not inherently evil, and toxicity comes from people, not the trackers, I get it. But 9 out 10 people (hyperbole) WILL be d**ks. This is an MMO, come on.
YOU might not be toxic with your trackers, but you're in the vast minority.
Thank god they don't want trackers in this game and I hope they never do.
You parse low then?
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
I do.
Vhaeyne does.
Other players do.
Even if we didn't have combat trackers, people would still tell you what builds are acceptable, and that your build is shit - the difference is that with a combat tracker, they are likely to be right.
Not going to lie. If they are able to do a total prevention of parsers I will at a minimum be theory crafting a lot in the ranger family of classes. Ill use spreadsheets or write my own sim tool if I have to. If the game is worth my time, I am going to put my time into it. I am not going to be playing ranger shooting from the hip.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Same.
If a game won't allow me to maximise my time while playing, I will play another game - or no game at all (as is the case right now).
And there it is, lmao. The typical passive-agressive, condescending strawman BS from generic parsers!
Just as the thread title. Anyone who's not obssessed with this crap is automatically a "slacker". LOL.
It was actually intended as a friendly ribbing. Welcome to the forums.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
WoW has them and WoW has more casuals than any other MMO. Seems this argument is inaccurate based on the available data.
Ahh your missing out. Rated 10v10 battlegrounds has been the feature I've enjoyed the most in all of thr aspects of WoW. I guess you can't really call the game garbage if you actually haven't done the best content in it
Note, there is a massive difference between rated battlegrounds and arenas in WoW. Arenas are 2v2/3v3 and solely focused on a simple death match style win condition. It's less about strategy and more about skill in your class/knowing the enemy's class. It gets redundant fast. Rated battlegrounds has the additional layers of battlegrounds objectives that drive the win conditions and require a lot more strategy that makes them fun.
Having only invested maybe 40 minutes of my life to WoW, I cannot speak about the game at all... but I can ask questions.
Did WoW have DPS meters at launch? Or did they come years after the game was launched?
I'm not sure if they were right by at launch or shortly thereafter. My personal experience was that I didn't know about them when going into the first raid with my first guild (and we were doing very suboptimal things like bringing fire makes to molten core.... we had no data so we didn't know truly how bad this was). That guild fell apart when we could not get past the second boss in the next raid tier. A handful of the "better" players (at least those of us we subjectively thought were better) moved into another guild. In that guild I first learned about combat trackers. That guild was also consistently in the top 3 guilds on the server for completing raids over the next few expansions (including some server firsts).
DPS meters should not be needed for common sense, and sounds like your guild leader might have been ignorant in that fact. Cannot hate the person, maybe they just did not know or care. Either way... ignorance in common MMO mechanics is a common thing, and usually gets figured out quickly without a DPS meter.
In the end, I get it... they help fine tune builds or find builds that out perform other builds. But the last thing you want is a game with 64 classes that only utilizes 12 of them, at least I do.
Lyrics from a band I love say this.. "Don’t let their school make a fool of you. Because the teachers may be fools too".
There fixed it
We had a hunch it was suboptimal, but not right away. We had no idea how bad it was without combat trackers.
Also, this is not necessarily common sense. Blizzard moved away from this design due to the inherent imbalances it introduced to certain class specs. (They chose to reduce immersion in order to better balance gameplay).
For example, when they released Firelands (which ironically enough has the same end boss as the first raid coming back) there was no reduced damage for fire damage.
I'm not saying Blizzards decision to do this was right or wrong, but it was in alignment with the vision of their game and it shows you cannot always make assumptions like this. Developers will choose to sacrifice immersion/realism if it aligns better to the vision if their game.
I guess this is just more justification for needing combat trackers right?
Nope lol...
Combat trackers based on WoW's use of it does not justify it in any other game. Lineage 2, where this game draws a ton of its core game play from, did not use them, and we did just fine. Trial and error was enough to figure out what to do, and what not to do.
Fair point
The game referenced doesn't matter in this point. The point is you can't assume all thr mechanics in a game will follow real like mechanics... especially when talking about a class that throws fireballs!!!
You may disagree with having combat trackers in a game, but there are still pros/cons either way and one pro is that a combat tracker can eliminate the risk of false assumptions like this.
Playing the game with trial and error can do the same. Just takes a little bit longer, but sooner or later players will figure it out.
Maybe... but would it happen fast enough to prevent the guild from breaking up? People only have so much patience for this trial and error.
What if we subjectivity decided to sit the hunters first because someone heard a rumor they were not good?
Data is empowering and improves the experience! Ignorance is not bliss!