Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
They will be 1% raiders in a game that supports them - which won't be Ashes.
Do you play GW2?
EDIT: Just saw your reply to the other.. Stopped reading after you told me to shut the fuck up.. so waste of forum space.
I simply told you to stop telling me what I would do and listen so that I can tell you what I would do - as it is clearly not something you have any clue about - just as I have no clue about what you would do in any given situation.
Not my problem if you can't take that.
Being told to shut the fuck up and listen is not cause for grievance.
Anyone that takes it as such is the root cause of the problem, not the person telling them.
Being told to just shut the fuck up is valid cause for grievance, however.
I will add, being told to shut the fuck up and listen, and taking it as being told to shut the fuck up - that is providing justification for the person telling that person to shut the fuck up and listen was absolutely correct in telling them to do so.
You have told us what you would do on many occasions, so I think I am qualified to state what has already been stated. Sometimes you are blunt, sometimes you dance around the subject, sometimes you deny you would even do it. But the main thing we get, is what you would most likely do.
Cocaine is a helluva drug!
-Rick James
See where I get off saying what I say? You are willing to risk your account because you basically do not care about your account if the game does not have content to fit for YOU.
If you are willing to risk your account for a tracker, how I am supposed to believe that when it comes to picking that guild perk offered to you, you will say to your guild "You know what guys, we already have an advantage due to us breaking the EULA, let us skip the guild perk so we keep it sorta fair".. doubt it.
I cannot take anything you say seriously because you do not take us or the Developers seriously when we say we do not want trackers. You just keep coming up with the same few reasons and hopeful compromises wishing someone will bend. And even though it has been made clear AoC will not have trackers at launch, here you are fighting the good fight. I can respect that, putting up a good fight is a respectable thing, but that respect is lost when you say things like you did above. And while that may have been the clearest you ever made it, we already knew what you were going to do.
Is this a new concept to you?
I literally explained this in the post you quoted.
A game without a tracker is not able to supply me with top end raid content - it is straight up not possible.
As such, if I play such a game, I will run my own tracker. This is a point you are aware of.
In this situation, I am more interested in "playing" the tracker than the game, it is more interesting and more enjoyable to me, as the game will not be able to offer up any content that I find interesting.
Losing my account in a game that I am only logging in to in order to get data for a combat tracker, so that I can then compare classes, builds, gear and such (and just generally laugh at the games meta, as was the case in Archeage), is not a big deal.
However, if that game has a combat tracker built in to it, they are able to make content that I would enjoy. As such, losing my account in this game would be a big deal.
It is the difference between someone only interested in Battle Royal games losing their account in WoW vs losing their account in Fortnite. They clearly wont care about one, but are likely to care about the other.
Your argument here boils down to the theory you seem to have that if I am willing to lose something I dont care about for a large gain, I would be willing to lose something I do care about for a small gain. It makes no sense, and just further highlights your total lack of understanding here.
Players with no insight or accomplishments trying to dictate better players how they should play.
First of all - it has NEVER been said that using a tracker is against terms of service, but only that "they think they've close most avenues for tracker to work" - just go and listen to Steven when he talked about them.
Atop of that for the hardest encounters to be truly hard means that all of the mechanics need to be clearly telegraphed to the player so players can identify every mechanic during combat, however if there is an ability that is being glitched/hidden by other mechanics (because the hardest encounters ALWAYS have a lot of going on at the same time) then without the ability to go through the combat log for what happened is extremely frustrating for the players, because every pull becomes a frustrating search for invisible mechanic (or the interaction of few mechanics) that is wiping the raid pull after pull.
Argue what you want, but trackers have found a gigantic amount of bugs in released encounters that just slipped through the dev testing.
― Plato
I've used them myself to this end.
Be wary of any MMO developer that doesn't want players looking under the hood.
"The toxicity I am referring to for the meters does not contradict the participation trophy philosophy for the following reasons:
IMO when you choose to exclude someone due to their performance or build (which happens often, not always) you are choosing the easiest path to success. This path is more easily available to groups that parse combat data through dps meters.
The desire to obfuscate (or make less prevalent by not offering this feature) so that groups are encouraged to grow together and help one another become better by more old school/organic methods of trial and error, efforts in watching other people during the raid, by failing repeatedly until success is possible. Now, could people use meters to aid in this task? Yes, but in my experience it isn’t used in this way..more often it is an exclusionary tool designed to separate players.
So to conclude,
My stance on participation trophies is that things should be hard, people should fail, the bitter taste of defeat is what makes success that much more rewarding. Helping other players learn encounter strategy, and fine tuning their play style for high end content is an important part of eliminating participation trophy. Growing together is a good thing, and that includes failing together as a means to drive for success together.
My stance on dps meters, these help automate the encounter, provide an easier way to complete content, creates less failures by eliminating the less experienced or less optimized players, defeat becomes less bitter tasting because it is experienced less often, and the reward is now glancing at a chart and eliminating the lesser players.
I’ve given my opinion and decision on the meters discussion and have read the opposing and supporting arguments."
Agreed.
If having a parser in the game is going to lead to this level of toxicity as you say, then yeah I 100% agree.
Also, no one is going to convince the guy with literally the logo of a combat tracker as his avatar that combat trackers aren't to be in the game.
I personally don't mind them, but it challenges the good nature of the interactions in game, as this thread seem to be doing, then I don't mind not having them either.
And don't @ me saying, that because I don't care that I shouldn't take it away from others who do want it. You're gonna try to get it there anyway by non accepted means. So do it on your own corner and live happily.
Meanwhile, the rest of people who don't want them, won't have it in game nor should be forced to download and install one.
Adding and listen doesn't change the shut the fuck up part enough. You could use different words.
Anyway - combat log data is in truth what is essentially needed - because if the filter system is advanced enough for showing you only what you want to know then it is essentially what the meter is meant to be used for.
However it would be funny if that combat log data is limited only to X small amount of entries without the possibility to show more of the history, meaning that you basically can look through the log for what happened only during the end of the fight
All I want from the combat log data is to look at what happened during the whole fight and not just the last few seconds of the fight
― Plato
https://education.com/games/data-and-graphing/
Perhaps not posting as passive agressive dickhead would be better?
― Plato
I find this explanation fascinating. I get your point, and it's completely fair that your ask for it. Allow me to apologize but I'm not as well versed as you're at writing.
I'm paraphrasing here, but I get that raiders as you enjoy solving a complex problem. After all a raid is just that, a complex problem to be solved. But in this case you want this problem to be so complex that you require asistance from a tracker, aking as to a developer needing a programming language of high level to make the solution easier.
You need this data, but you don't always need it. Just a sample, a couple of inputs, like a test data. After you have enough data, and you have found the solution, this data is not necessary anymore, because your problem is solved and you have found the solution to it. And you know it will work despite what test case you throw at it.
So, once you have solved this issue, all of these information will be available for others, so other people might be able to work on this complex problem but basically without all the thinking, because it was done by you.
And I think that's cool, but what happens to less complex problems?
Raiders will take the same approach, using tracker. So, this less complex problem will be shreaded to pieces and all the info is again available to others.
Doesn't this make the less complex problems that don't require tracker now "stupid" problems?
I kinda feel like it will water down other content because raiders already found out the most efficient solution. Maybe I'm just rambling, I don't know.
EDIT = what I mean on last point, is that if you have found the optimal approach, there's no point in others (except for the lolz) to try a different approach if there's one already. So, this content becomes just a cookie cutter scenario with no investigation, problem solving, because raiders did it already.
From 2 pages ago you starting to sound quite delirious. I suggest you to go out, breathe fresh air and forget about AOC for a moment.
A combat tracker does not automate anything, it doesn't give you a simple way out. Again, it only gives you the truth about what happened. And yes, it my show who is "less experienced" or "less optimized" but no decant person would ever "eliminating" them on the spot. They would instead help them improve, if that is what they want. "eliminating the lesser players" by helping them become better players.
If the raid leader isn't aware of why someone has died the fault lies with the raid leader. My raid leaders were always switched on to the raid and aware of why players have died. If you can't regulate a raid team why are you the raid leader? Raid leaders shouldn't require tools to explain simplicities, raid leaders should lead the raid with foresight, experience and dedication.
Otherwise, Steven would just go ahead and include the combat trackers because those players would be toxic anyways.
It's kinda like when you can use e-mail to send a document rather than relying on snail mail.
Suddenly, you want everything to be instantaneous, whereas before you were willing to wait days or even weeks.
non-toxic players will not be pushed into toxicity because then they wouldn't be non-toxic players
People that are toxic with dps meters will still be toxic, 100% of the time. People that is not toxic without dps meters are much more likely to not be toxic with them. And even if they would be toxic, then just don't play with them xD
And Steven is the one you have to convince.
How can someone convince a person about something when they think they are correct even thought they have never experience a situation that is relevant to the conversation?
This is one of the better and more interesting posts in this thread for quite a while, I appreciate that. I wish others in this thread would take notice, and rather than quoting a post answering a question and then asking that same question again, others actually took the time to consider what has been said, the implications of it, and then ask if there are any further questions.
It is a lot less frustrating to me to answer new questions than it is to answer the same questions three times in a row to the same person asking them.
I'm going to start answering your question by restating it as I understand it - so correct me if I have this wrong. You are saying that once one guild works out how to kill an encounter, there is no more problem solving for any guilds as that information will be shared. This would be a valid issue. You also touched on the point that having a combat tracker would make content that doesn't require a tracker far easier than intended. I'll answer this point first.
In short, yes it would. The thing to note here though, is that we are likely talking about a top end guild spending 15 minutes on the encounter as opposed to 16. If an encounter is designed to be killed without a combat tracker, a guild full of experienced raiders would not have any trouble at all with it. Another point to make here is that if Intrepid are in control of combat trackers in Ashes as opposed to them being second or third party, they could very easily create a few encounters that are designed to be killed without combat trackers, and also disable combat trackers for those encounters. If the game is supporting top end raiding well, top end raiders would not risk resorting to second or third party trackers for an encounter like this - or at least, most wouldn't.
In answer to your main question here, I think the key point to make is that Ashes is a competitive game. There will be many encounters that spawn that my guild is directly going up against your guild (assuming we are on the same server), and the first guild to get the kill gets the loot.
I can only think of one other franchise that is like this - where there are encounters that need strategy and there are also encounters that are competitive. That is the EQ franchise, though I will use EQ2 as my example here.
EQ2 has some of the most complex encounters of any MMO - and Intrepid has hired a number of the people responsible for those encounters (this is why - despite what Steven has said - I have hope for top end raiding in Ashes).
EQ2 also has contested encounters that spawn about once a week per server, and the first guild to kill the encounter gets the loot.
Due to this, while there is a lot of information shared in EQ2 in regards to class performance and raid setup, there is almost no information shared about encounter strategy. If I tell you and your guild how to kill an encounter, you are able to kill it faster, get more loot and thus are able to better contest the next contested raid encounter.
You can see this by trying to google information on raid encounters in EQ2 - there really isn't all that much available. Even encounters that are 15+ years old don't have much information on them.
This is in stark contrast to games like WoW, where once a guild has a kill on an encounter, there really is no reason left to withold the information. At this point, most guilds next priority after getting the kill is getting the accolades from other players.
To me, Ashes will be more like EQ2 than WoW in this respect. Why would I want to assist your guild in beating my guild to an open world raid mob?
As to how much data you need to collect (which seemed to be a secondary point you touched on), that totally depends on how complex the encounter is. I have seen encounters with seemingly simple mechanics that are overcome in minutes, leaving us to work on the more complex aspects. Once those more complex aspects have been worked out, the result of that makes that seemingly simple mechanic far more important, and we had to go back to working on that.
In many cases, work on an encounter can span weeks, or even months. Data is needed through this whole process.
The other point to make in this regard is that data is often needed throught a given pull of an encounter, it isn't just a case of
I hope that answers your questions, but if not, let me know what is missing and I'll try to fill it in. I know that was a fair amount of reading, but sadly, when you ask me a good question, you get a good answer - and good answers are rarely short.
Can you name for me, any one field at all in all of human endeavor where a good leader - someone that is responsible for other peoples time - would forgo objective data if it were available to them?
Thanks for such detailed reply! I get it. It didn't come to mind that you might NOT want to share the information on how to beat an encounter!
It's a great insight, because if I take into consideration the competitive aspect of Ashes it completely makes sense, and also adds extra layers on who to trust when sharing information in guild about how to beat encounter. You need to vouch these people as well, to make sure they don't run off with your work.
You might share info about classes and what specs are the best, but not how to beat an encounter, interesting.
Well, good luck with your personal quest on tracker is all I have left to say. I don't mind that much about tracker, my main issue is just when a tracker makes something easier for others that didn't really participated in figuring out the probem.
With RL sports teams the principle assessment of the players is by the coach watching them play. Metrics enter use wayyyy down the line when the player performance is worth lots of money to the team.
If your PvP/PvE team is genuinely that focused then you can derive methods of generating metrics by having trusted players monitor the PvP/PvE team performance in "practice" sessions, arranged against the 'B' Team or against expected easy raid content. Using video playback the coaches can critique individuals actions at key points and suggest alternative approaches to try next time. If the team wants to improve then an open discussion on the best use of abilities and tactics shouldn't be an issue.