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
This is precisely the point that Noaani is trying to make for I don't know how many years now
If you are just trying to straight up ban all trackers without a good information ingame gathering tool (like advanced combat log filtering) then people will just risk using the meter anyway.
If I'll use your RL sports allegory then meter can be as simple as using a stopwatch to measure how long it takes to run X distance and this can also be used as encouragement for tracking progress.
― Plato
People can risk using the meter anyway. Just as some professional athletes risk using illegal steroids.
completely misguided allegory
meters are just like sports metrics of the athletes achievements and his performance
illegal steroids is input software that plays either partially or even fully instead of you
― Plato
In both scenarios you will only get kicked if the leader is toxic.
I believe that without a combat tracker, people are more likely to be meta slaves as there is no way to justify your off meta build to toxic people (who also exist without trackers).
Personally, I only want a tracker to optimise what abilities I use when and as long as damage number are put somewhere like a chat window, there are ways to show the DPS realtime.
Steroids are banned from professional sports and DPS meters are banned from Ashes of Creation.
If you want to risk thwarting the bans, you get to take the risk. If you get caught, you deal with the consequences.
On a side note though. Sports would be way more entertaining to watch if they let them go all out with steroids.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Combat trackers are not banned from all MMO's, only Ashes.
This sums up a good number of the points I have been making for several years.
Toxicity exists independent of trackers.
Trackers will allow more freedom from the games meta.
There will always be ways to track what players want to track.
To add some additional points to this;
Trackers allow more creativity in encounter design.
Trackers allow players to identify and confirm bugs.
Trackers allow players to better train/coach each other.
And the reasons people have against them are either some misguided notion of toxicity (a fact that can be observably proven false to anyone that wants to actually know the truth), or some notion of "trackers are bad because Steven said so" - when Steven subscribed to that misguided notion that trackers cause toxicity.
I see that you like compare general rules and exception rules
Ashes banning people for using meters is an exception rule that isnt common in other mmo titles
using steroids is a general rule that is enforced in all sports
Not to even say that when something is made a rule that doesnt imply that the rule in question is automatically good and doesnt make more harm than good
― Plato
Go read the book moneyball.
Or watch any college/professional sports game and listen for the stats. Metrics are all over the place in sports and it enhances the experience.
why though? The whole meters discussion revolves around the rule if they should be allowed and you start to discuss the punishment? I don't see a link in here anywhere
― Plato
I did not start the discussion on the punishment.
The rule is the rule. The punishment is the punishment.
If you want to change either of them, you will have to convince Steven.
It's unlikely you will be able to do so, but doesn't hurt to try.
If you think the major risks involved with steroids are that you may get caught...
Just a bad allegory that barely touches the topic - this happens
― Plato
Even without that word, it is a poor allegory.
As has been said, steroids are against the rules in all sports, and the main issue associated with them is very real, and has nothing to do with the sport.
Combat trackers are perfectly fine in all MMO' on the market today, and are used in all that I am aware of. The main risks associated with them are ignorance of specific players (and MMO studio owners) that have their head filled with misguided notions, and refuse to look at actual evidence that combat trackers are not an inherent cause of toxicity.
So basically, the two things are nothing at all alike, yet this is not the first time you have used the comparison.
― Plato
Indeed.
A much better comparison would be the fact that there is one state in the US that has a law against sending your friends surprise pizza. It's fine in all other states, and because it is stupid thing to have a rule against and is basically impossible to police, it isn't policed.
This is better because it is a harmless thing that people could do for fun. It is fine literally everywhere but one place. It is impossible to police effectively. The only people this could hurt are people that are gluten or lactose intolerant, and these people really should know better than to eat pizza anyway.
Edit to add; for clarification, combat trackers are harmless things that people use for fun. They are literally fine in every game but this one. It is impossible to police them effectively. The only people they could hurt are the people that are so against objective data that they are offended by it, and these people really should know to stay away from objective data anyway.
Also, that state is Louisiana.
It's much less complex than that. The game designers and a lot of players reject combat trackers.
It's not about being "fair" or "toxicity", we straight don't like it, we don't want that help, we don't want to look at the combat tracker and we prefer to learn what we can with the encounter itself, even if it takes more time and we don't get it right 100%. The game becomes funnier and improves for a lot of people including myself.
Believe it or not.
Then don't use it.
Here we go. The famous "Don't like it ? Don't use it"
We all know this doesn't work/apply in a multiplayer game.
@Marcet I don't think this is fair to say. Plenty of people would use it if a dps meter was available. The rest would be forced to use it because not using it means you just aren't as good as someone who is using it.
@Noaani I completely understand your viewpoint in this discussion but I disagree with it in a different way than everyone else is disagreeing with you/it. After painstakingly reading through the last 6 or so pages of comments, it feels like people are just arguing to argue or they have had bad experiences with toxic leaders. When I ran my guild in wow, I honestly cannot recall a single time that someone had an issue with the dps meter. I wasn't a piece of shit to people and helped them each individually ( which killed my play time but we were successful so....it was the price I paid I guess).
This is the most efficient way I can think of to successfully be a top end raiding guild with the tools we are being given and allowed to use. If guilds don't do this, they will simply not be as good as the next.
As a guild leader, I would clearly use the dps meter if it was available (I'd be forced to and so would every player). Being that we will each have our own private dps meters, we will all be using them. I (and my 8 class officers) will be screen sharing on discord with players to help develop their skills, rotations, and builds whenever they request it (or when something is clearly off). We will be MASTERS of our classes and the help will not stop in guild. I'm making it possible that helping citizens of our node will be a thing as well.
Why I am excited for an environment without a dps meter is simple. Meter free forces quality guilds to rise up and shitty guilds to dissolve. I cannot stand guilds with bad/toxic leaders. In a game where we are building community, "some" leaders will use the dps meter in a way that negatively impacts a players experience. I'm literally bursting with joy that the community aspect of AoC is being crammed down our throats. This will help fill an mmorpg void that has been empty for too damn long.
On top of all this, do you really think that PVE bosses are going to be difficult? The balancing is going to be insane if they try to make pve bosses hard. They have to be easy to accommodate for pvp counters. I want the pve to be hard AF but I am holding this bar very low as to not expect fun pve and be let down. Only time will tell on this one though. Fingers crossed.
According to current information about open world pve raids and boss encounters is that all of it just wow open world bosses with maybe more mechanics to them.
Basically all of current ashes PvE is this - gather enough people to make the difficulty irrelevant
― Plato
Don't take it wrong - it looks amazing for youtube montage, but actually playing it? Pretty thrash experience
― Plato
If I thought that this was a likely possibility, I would be all for it.
Problem is, I dont think it will be.
There were two reasons shit guilds are able to survive in WoW. The first is the information sharing that goes on there - it's so bad at this point that it is literally automated.
The second is how easy it is to replace people in WoW.
In Ashes, I dont expect to see that same level of information sharing (explained a page or two back). Also, guilds will be a lot more restricted in terms of their pool of available potential recruits - due to no server transfers.
These factors alone will largely deal with shit guilds and guild leaders.
Combat trackers existing or not will not have any impact.
I mean, I agree with you that I dislike shit guilds getting kills, and I dislike guilds with shit guild leaders.
My thing is, in my time playing EQ2, I saw a lot of guilds with shit leaders get started. None of them lasted more than a month or two. I saw a lot of guilds not know what they were doing and only getting two mobs through a 25 mob raid progression.
I have to assume this is what you want to see in Ashes. It is what I want to see.
This was all with combat tracker use in EQ2 as high as it is in WoW, so combat trackers cant be the answer to these issues, as far as I am concerned.
That game had top end raid encounters in an open PvP setting, the Red Dragon being the top of the actual raiding (as opposed to naval) encounters.
I was involved in maybe a dozen kills of this encounter.
Some of them had 100vs100 PvP or more going on, and no one got the kill. Some of them had more lopsided PvP and it took hours and hours to get a kill.
One of them was me and 10 other guild members. No opposition. It was dead in less than 15 minutes.
Encounters in an open world setting are great fun. They are not PvE though. They are as PvE as the flag is in a capture the flag setting.
― Plato