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Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest news on Alpha Two.
Check out general Announcements here to see the latest news on Ashes of Creation & Intrepid Studios.
To get the quickest updates regarding Alpha Two, connect your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
What I see you have problem with here is the possibility of people misusing meters and not the actual correct use of it.
First, there are only 8 classes because the 64 "ashes classes" are just a sum of all specs, where you spec into any of the base 8 classes (renamed to archetypes in here). Also theorycrafters have limited space to theorycraft and legitimate their ideas unless they create full blown simulations for their builds and even then they mostly have them for tank&spank situations and then they leave upon players to weight the mobility and minimum utility they need for any encounter.
Let me ask you, do you want every customization choice in Ashes to be a viable and correct one? Do you really want any choice you make not matter to how well you are doing, but to only influence the visuals you are performing on the screen?
In every building game you need the option to make bad builds, but a designer needs to ensure that every class (in here one of the 8 base archetypes) has at least 1viable meta build.
This is literally the antithesis for a build based game. What you are asking for is the homogenization of every build in the game to the point where you only choose the visuals and order of pressing buttons to your liking
This is not how people should solve problems. When people don't know how to drive a car you don't remove all cars from the world, you just forbid the people that do not know how to drive from driving and require a driving licence.
This is what a lot of meters actually can do, you click on it for detailed breakdown any many of these things are broken down in there. You say you want a dynamic play, but you want to restrict players dynamically reacting to builds?
I fail to see how this is any shape or form an argument against having meters. Saying top end players will know anyway is not an argument for or against meters. If anything what you seem to imply here is that Ashes will have shallow and small customization, that is the only logical reasoning why you would think that players would not need numbers and data.
If meta is not based in reality on what is actually good, but only what gets most popular at the start then developers will address that, but nothing will happen because players will not care and will stick to the same popular thing. If you cant know the actual performance difference between builds then you are better off doing the same thing as everybody else and only your skill is the factor then.
If by the problem you are meaning "players excluding others based on what build they play" then you can never avoid that. It is literally impossible, if you give players a leeway to pick and choose which player they take for dungeon/raid then you automatically create scenarios where players are excluded by the current meta
And that is great, talking through ideas educates all participants. That is why I want meters to be a part of the game, to have meta builds based on actual data and by proxy for developers to create a well balanced game that is not homogenized, but rich in playstyles and all of them have some real purposeful use in the game.
The want to not have meters seems to me more like the want to hide the developer mistakes and oversights rather than to have a rich and somewhat paper-scissor-rock balanced game
― Plato
I think I did a poor job making a firm statement of why I'm against DPS meters outside of those points. Dps meters are used to justify metas and even players' participation.
I am not against one build being better than another. I acknolwedged that it is inevitable. But just because one build is better than another shouldnt apply the mindset that the latter build is literally unplayable. Everything should be viable, even thoughb its not optimal.
Wether we define them as classes or not, the point is there are 64+ paths for a player to take for building their character, and thats before the Schools of Augments. I dont envision any argument that could justify to me that only a quarter or less of those builds would be allow into the VIP Exclusive Season Pass Meta.
And I know there will be a meta. My concern is that DPS Meters will justify players being alienated for deviating from it all levels of play.
Hope this clears up my base ideas/intentions, we see eye to eye on some of these, even if not how we actually apply DPS Meters to them.
This concern for players being alienated for deviating their builds should be aimed towards instant travel like family summons and stuff like that instead of meters.
If replacing someone practically means you need to wait for them another half an hour or hour then you push meta whoring to the back and people will be more acceptable to bring subpar builds, because ultimately having nonmeta builds is better than having an empty group slot
― Plato
let's say most of the viable builds can do 800dps - that's like 50% of all builds
around 45% of builds are just plain bad doing below 500dps
and the best few builds can do 1300dps.
If you have the ability to instantly summon any player and run dungeon with them then you will only take people that are playing builds that can do the 1300dps
However if you cannot cross server group up and waiting for players to get to the entrance takes quite some time then you will generally want at least one best meta build in there, but you are comfortable to fill all other spots with mediocre ones, because you could just wait whole day for the perfect group comp
― Plato
Having hard numbers to prove optimal builds/combinations is more damaging in this game than most. Because certain enchants will be exclusive, because of the dynamic existence of bosses and their loot tables (and server differences) and all the other sources of variation like the season etc having numbers to prove some combination is better than all others is much more likely to make people feel like they are playing the game "wrong". Nor do you want them to try to match all possible augments to the "optimal build". There feels like a ton of sources of customization and variability in this game where it will be hard to replicate someone's exact build anyways, but to tie a hard number to it where you compare your DPS may make people feel like they made the suboptimal choice like choosing the "wrong" diety/religion. More importantly, if other people who don't know your archetype and context ask for a DPS report and see you not performing at the level of the youtuber, they will assume you're bad and have the wrong build which creates social friction, snobbiness and baseless exclusivity.
No I think you are misunderstanding, it's not about having all builds&customizations perform to the same level, it's about having all classes perform well enough where it isn't considered stupid to go down that path. These 64 "classes" are not going to be homogenous within themselves. You should still be able to build a bad battlemage for example but you should never be considered bad by default because you chose the battlemage, does that make more sense?
In any given patch of the game, some "classes" will perform better than others but it would be tragic to see all mages play a battlemage because the numbers are 2% higher than other class options for mages. Having hard numbers that are readily available in game makes people more likely to make decisions based on those numbers rather than what feels cool or what thematically appeals to them more etc.
And there lies one of the biggest problems and why Steven himself is against them. You should have to pay attention and learn from what is happening on screen what you can do better, not by looking at pie charts. I for one could not agree more with Steven.
I mean this is a bit much, you can tell if a build is significantly better than another. Theorycrafting simple tank and spank can still help you min/max if you want but if you don't have the hard numbers to easily find out what's the best and what isn't then I contest that most people wouldn't just do what is popular because there will be no single popular option (because it is unlikely there will be universal agreement... that only happens when you have hard DPS meter numbers to prove optimal), therefore players will be much more likely to branch out to what they think sounds good or feels good or looks good or w.e.
Nobody can solve players excluding others, nor should they. Some reasons for the exclusion however, are less desirable than others and having a DPS meter allows for a lot of it (again, refer to the video link above).
To what Steven says about back when MMO's were good I wholeheartedly agree about everything EXCEPT raiding. Those raids back in the day are laughably easy and any difficulty is about finding the one trick that makes the whole fight a netflix session. I don't want raiding in Ashes to have the same difficulty as those old MMO's. And again I do not want for Ashes to have 16 man raid group of hardened top-end raiders to perform miles better than the average 40man guild raid group.
I do not want a stacked 8man group of top-end players to worry only about movement abilities, because they can clear a dungeon in 10minutes while the average group is struggling to clear it under an hour.
I honestly do not want raiding to become a participation award, because players learned to not stand in fire.
Plus I think it is severely hurting the game if you want to hide class imbalance with hiding meters.
And if you want avoid the amount of toxic interactions that are created by bad players misusing the meters then I think we should work on creating restrictions around them and not forbidding them. You know the same way as countries control the distribution of alcohol and tobacco and not allow children to use them.
And if you want raid bosses to become laughably easy after you figure out the strategy, then I am really disappointed in that, because raiding should be about a group of people trying their hardest to work together and not about "Huh so if we do this then he just dies for free"
― Plato
Hiding class imbalance with DPS meters is also silly, you already acknowledge balancing will be hard, there are tons of customization options and context matters. More importantly, Intrepid has said over and over and over again that they balance around 8 player groups, so your individual performance vs another builds/players will not even matter. Still, people will cry so much about balance in an open world PvP setting you won't believe, IS doesn't need random people putting flawed DPS meter comparison screenshots in their posts too thinking it justifies their outrage when the game is balanced around 8 player group play anyways.
Plus, how are you going to prevent misuse? Do I need to get a license? Who administers the test? It's nonsense, if you provide it, you accept the many ways it can be used positive and negative. If it is deemed the negative uses outweigh the positive, then that's it. Asking for x number of development hours to account for and counteract all the possible negatives just to have your luxury function is ridiculous imo.
You expressed what I intended to in a way that was easier to consume/interpret. I tip my fedora to you.
I wouldnt like to see this either. I think these things are more likely to happen with the availability of dps meters, tbh.
When you have balancing concerns as you play, give feedback. Is certain content too easy for your build? Report it!
If that content IS too easy, it will be doubly so with an optimized meta.
Obviously report your feedback regarding that as you experience it. Otherwise, we need to trust in Intrepid to handle it with their own data bro. Regardless, we dont have a choice lol
It's a luxury, are you just afraid you're too bad to perform well without the curated information served up to you on a platter? Get over it. The game will be balanced around 8 player groups, it's not bad balance if individuals perform differently because that is explicitly not what is being balanced.
If there is a game feature that you want, but that introduces negative aspects to the game, you design that feature around those aspects to minimalize them.
If you want to have PvP in your game, but you don't want people to go on murder-hobo rampages, you don't just decide "oh well, I guess we won't have PvP then". Instead. you design your PvP system so they can't do that.
If you want a family summoners in your game, but you don't want people to be able to bypass the caravan system, you don't decide "oh well, I guess we won't have a summons then". Instead, you design your family summons so they can't do that.
If your reason for not wanting a combat tracker is so that people have to look on screen to see what is happening, you don't decide "oh well, I guess we won't have a combat tracker then". Instead, you design your combat tracker so people have to do that.
That is why none of the stated reasons for not having a combat tracker hold any weight - all of them are things that can be easily designed around (as per the suggestion I have made a number of times in this thread).
The fact that Steven is willing to work on a summons to iron out the issues, but not a combat tracker, says literally nothing more than he decided he didn't want a combat tracker without any critical thinking put in to it, and that is that. If you talk to any veteran content designer, they will tell you that they had to make content considerably more complex when developing it for a game after combat trackers became prolific.
If you talk to any veteran raider, they will tell you that combat trackers allowed them to focus on more enjoyable things in combat - such as the actual encounter - rather than having to literally man a stopwatch, which was important in raids but not at all fun.
They will also tell you that before combat trackers, there was no top end raiding scene - there was simply a scene in which everyone was welcomed to the raid because literally the more people present, the easier the fight was (this was before instances where raids were open content - which ironically Ashes will have).
Rather than guilds needing to actually be good at the game to kill the hardest to reach boss in the game (which is really the only way to rank encounters without a combat tracker), all they needed to do was to bring along more people. That is the type of raiding Intread seem to have in mind for Ashes - and it just isn't enjoyable for anyone.
The evidence that combat trackers made top end raiding content harder is self evident to people that have seen the change, and people that have been in charge of designing the content during that change. It is not easy to explain to someone that hasn't seen it, especially if that person has never played a game with open world raid content.
Rather than allowing us to focus on the encounter, not having a combat tracker would mean a quarter of the raid will be staring at a stopwatch rather than looking at the encounter. This is literally how AoE's used to be dealt with - someone (several people, just in case) would literally use a stopwatch to time how long it took the AoE to go off, and then call out for everyone to joust it - or to mitigate it in what ever way worked best. The people timing the AoE's in encounters had literally the most boring responsibility I have ever seen in an MMO - watching seconds tick away.
That is not the stated desired result - which again goes towards proving that the stated result is a fabrication.
Combat trackers allowed this to be automated, which meant those players could then focus on other mechanics - or, heaven forbid, they could actually fight the damned encounter.
The impact on content is a valid concern, and is a real and direct result of the presence of combat trackers in a game and the willingness of the developers to accept their use.
Without combat trackers, developers need to target content at the average build (in terms of a raid more than an individual character).
Since there will be some people (such as myself) that will figure out something close to the best way to build a raid, we will steamroll through content, because that content is designed around people that do not have the best build.
WIth combat trackers, they can target content at the best builds, because all players taking on top end content will know how to build a raid properly.
A combat tracker allows all players wanting to be at or near the top end to fit within a smaller competence tollerance, meaning developers only need to target content at that smaller window of player ability.
since every top end player wants to be as good as they can be, this is not a bad thing at all to top end players. I would agree it would be bad if this notion trickled down to all aspects of the game - but that is why you design combat trackers in a way that prevents this.
The sheer arrogance of this lmao. Well I think your solution is awful and does nothing to prevent the issues frankly. Second, you don't add features for the sake of adding them. Steven wanted PvP and family porting etc because they add something to the game and the effort to design it well enough to avoid its potential problems is then warranted. You don't start from the problems and work backwards, you must first be convinced you want it in the game for positive reasons and Steven so far is thinking nah, it's not worth the effort because it doesn't add enough positives. There are lots of decisions they've made that prioritize fun and positive game impact.
Well I've been raiding since WoW TBC and I disagree and I'm sorry if you think half the raid is required to stare at a stopwatch to clear content. I think you grossly underestimate the cognitive capabilities and creativity of the player base. Without combat trackers people will clear content, it may be slower (and I'd argue more rewarding) but it is still a luxury. No game depends on it, if it does it's bad design (or the players are bad frankly).
- Introduce toxicity: Really? Are guns to blame or the people who use them to kill people irl and school shootings? And will removing ACT magically make everyone happy and not toxic?
- Elitism: Elitist mentality will exist regardless of whether ACT is there or not. Blaming a tool for peoples shortcomings is so not the solution to this. Infact there is no solution to this. People have personality and opinions. Lets say a guild manages to hold a castle for couple of months. There are pretty good chances of elitism being introduced right there.
- Cookiecutter builds: There are 8 primary classes, with 8 secondary classes which has 4 schools of augment. So all in all 256 different combinations. Again there is huge level of customisability wrt to the skills the players chose to level up using skill points. I cant explain the level of respect I have for AoC for introducing the level of uniqueness a person can explore in this game. Cookiecutter builds are for people who play casually, which is okay. If not for these builds then the casual players will follow their friend or guildmate who plays best. Or is it okay to let under-performers stew in their incompetence?
- DPS meter: Well dps is important, no doubt. But if in a 40 man raiding team, people are only looking at dps meter to find the weak link in the team then they are hardly going to kill the boss anyway.
As the game is heavily reliant on a players interaction with the community, introducing ACT will hardly affect player interaction.
Lets talk about the upside now:
- It can help skilled players who truly understand their class will experiment on their own to get that extra edge which will help with both PvP and PvE. Taking away their primary tool to do so is plain toxic.
- It can make raiding efficient. There are only 40 man raids afaik. I have done 25 man end game raids in WoW and its not easy to find who is making that mistake which is wiping out the raid. How is wasting the time of rest of the team justifiable?
- It can get rid of misinformation. Lets say we ask players of a raid about what happened in a failed attempt and absence of objective data can easily lead to blame game with no real way of getting to the crux of the matter, not to mention personal bias involved here.
Let me summarise my point, the downsides of ACT will exist regardless but not having ACT definitely will introduce more toxicity.
Regardless of whether ACT is implemented or not, addons should forever be banned. Peace.
I've been asking peopel to point out any issues they see that are remaining so that I can attmpt to "develop" around them. So, what is it you had in mind? WoW in general, let alone TBC, was all post combat tracker.
So you can disagree all you like if you want - you've not experienced what I am talking about.
You can't just apply binary logic to the negatives and highlight the enhancement of the positives. You can equally argue that experimenting as a skilled player, finding ways to make raids efficient and enhancing information gathering can all also occur without combat trackers, and all the negatives will be exasperated by having it. Neither your, nor my statement are fair. They provide some benefit and some harm although I thought your summary, despite its bias undertone was pretty good actually haha.
I am not denying that the negatives will be enhanced to an extent and all the good stuff can be accomplished without it also. But the effort required would be exponentially more.
This would pose a bigger issue for the players who have jobs (me) and family as they wont be able to spend that much time compared to younger crowd. Again leading to the cookiecutter issue if we want to keep up.
I've always had dps meters in every mmo that has allowed them and i can say with certainty that i enjoy the game more when I am not anxiously multitasking my meters, the other dps meters, my rotation, boss mechanics and my positioning. The first 2 of those 5 variables in encounters do not belong. It gets to the point where i will spend more time staring at my meters and timers more than i do the boss.
I believe meters break the immersion experience in a very underrated way and that they become mandatory as soon as you start playing competitively. Doesn't matter what systems you have in place to try stop that from being true, it is a tool to min-max that if it is there will always be utilized.
So instead of creating a system that forces you to make a choice based on performance vs enjoying the game, i believe you shouldn't give players the option to overanalyze their min-max gameplay. It's an option thats led me and many of my mates to detest competitive raiding, especially in WoW.
I honestly believe the only thing that matters in any raid encounter is: having fun > killing the boss > getting loot. As long as those three things are enabled by the game systems, nothing else needs to be. Even without addons or an in game dps meter i guarantee the community will come up with some sort of gauge for skill in game.
Even if it was so that to join certain raids you had to prove your strength in comat by participating in 1v1 pvp duels for the dps slots. Picking or being picked as a champion of the raid team that newcomers must face off against in order to prove their worth in combat. A game without logs and raider.io to imeddiately check like its an employer in 2020 looking at an employees facebook to see if their memes r 2 spicy.
Anyway rant over; TLDR keep the anxiety and toxicity meter out of the game and allow the community to create player made systems in order to adapt and evolve with the game.
You all need to relax and wait for the game to be released and take it from there!
I get your concern, but I think there are too many variables in AoC that make this not really a concern. If I picture most current MMOs without a DPS meter, I understand your anxiety, I really do. But with such variability in sources of augments/customization (I just picture trying to replicate or optimize in a game like path of exile, it's just too ridiculous), the variable boss difficulty tier based on performance etc I think we should give it a chance to see how the game plays without a DPS meter.Ultimately they could add one later down the line if it's that big of an issue, all they'd have to do is make the UI since the data will exist and will be collected anyways.
I actually agree.
If we were just talking about a combat tracker as per how other games have it (though not WoW, as it is a little extreme), then we have to assume that either having it or not having it will each have it's pros and cons.
I personally think the pros with that situation (even just the ability for players to peer review the developers work) outweigh the cons - but I fully accept that others do not see this.
That is where the creative development should start. You see pros and cons on both sides, and figure out what the best option is. You could not have a combat tracker and try to negate the cons of that choice, or you could have a combat tracker and try to negate the cons of that choice. In negating the cons though, you should also be trying to provide the pros of the option you are rejecting.
So, if one of the pros of having a combat tracker is that it allows players to peer review the developers work in detail, and assist in finding and reporting bugs that are deep within the combat system, the next question to ask is if this pro can be achieved without a combat tracker.
The answer to that is a no, as far as I can see. If you can tell me a reasonable way to collect 10k data points on a single ability to see if it is indeed bugged as suspected though, I'm happy to listen. What this means is that of the two options - having a combat tracker and trying to negate the cons.
So you develop a combat tracker that removes as many of the cons of them as possible.
This discussion happened last year, we are past that aspect (even if Intrepid have currently rejected it). Where we were up to was in collecting the cons of having a combat tracker, and working on "developing" them out of the system.
So far, every con has been "developed" away.
People don't want to have others boot them from pick up groups due to a combat tracker? Not possible with the suggestion.
People don't want to feel forced to use a combat tracker? They won't with the suggestion.
People don't want to have their eyes glued to a chart instead of the content? This isn't possible with the suggestion.
People don't want raiders having an advantage on content outside of raiding due to a combat tracker? They don't with the suggestion.
People don't want to be forced in to a meta? A meta will exist without a combat tracker anyway, this is a different issue.
I am still waiting to hear of more issues people have with combat trackers, as I have no doubt the suggestion could be altered to work around them.
The problem is, many people are not interested in a compromise solution to an issue - they want to win. Due to this, people aren't really that willing to work on a compromise, as that is akin to working on their own defeat.
The big issue I have with this stance is that people that think this have it all wrong. If there is no built in combat tracker, there will be third party ones that people will use. This means all of those cons that people don't want will exist in the game - which means those people may win the debate, and Intrepid may not add a combat tracker to the client, but they will lose the war and people like me will have a more open combat tracker than we would if my suggestion were implemented.
How will you have any mods when the devs are saying they wont allow them?
Combat trackers are not mods though. They are (or at least - can be) completely separate applications. These applications don't even need to run on the same computer as the game client. All you need to do is feed one of these applications with data from the game - this is the tricky part, but it is not at all impossible.
Once you have that data, you can easily feed it in to an existing combat tracker.
The dev's don't need to allow them in order to make this happen. They can even be explicitly against the rules and Intrepid wouldn't even be able to see it happening - as it can be on a computer that doesn't even have the gamea client installed.
GW2 developers didn't allow trackers. Nor did FFXIV. Both games have them, and they are used by as fairly high portion of the playerbase.
So far, Intrepid have said they won't build a combat tracker in to the client ( which is the single best option for the game), and they have said they think they have removed most of the avenues players can get data to run a combat tracker with. They have not said they will make their use against the rules - though they have also not said that it is within the rules (they are likely to keep it a grey area, to offer some deniability to people that don't know better).
Think, and most, are like saying "we know there are still some ways to get that data", which there will be.
I know your struggle with watching meters during encounter, do you know what I do when I notice myself glancing over it in a way that impacts how I play? I just type /recount hide
Blaming the tool, because you are misusing it is a very bad practice. You don't blame the gun for firing when you pull the trigger.
Also this suggestion has been here many times, to have meters be a guild only perk that the management needs to activate (maybe even with an achievement or leaderboard placement) in order to use meters for the raiders. The guild will not be able to track anyone except its own members and can fully focus on improving themselves.
As Noaani said before not having meters can easily lead to ego inducing arguments about who did a mistake in a fight. As a raid leader you never want to ask this question "Who fucked up?". You just open the goddam meter and find where is the issue. People in newly formed guilds will never admit that they are the ones who made the mistake.
I honestly don't understand why there are going to be leaderboards when they are against meters. You dont climb everest with a t-shirt and flip flops.
― Plato
Not keen to raid at all in AoC if the raiding experience of WoW is replicated. There wasnt anything wrong with the raid gameplay created by Blizzard, just the social experience.
Raiding is all about everyone present doing everything they can to perform at the highest level possible - or at least at the highlest level assumed to be possible.
If you are in a guild that scrutinizes each other that much, a lack of combat trackers won't stop them doing that. People will still find ways to scrutinize - that is simply the nature of these people.
That said, Blizzard absolutely is to blame for the social experience in WoW.
Raid guilds in WoW have a recruitment pool of literally every player in the game. It isn't even remotely an issue to move to a different server in order to join a guild.
This means raids can treat players as expendable, disposable. If you don't like that, leave - there are more people wanting to raid than there are guilds accepting new recruits.
Guilds are absolutely able to behave like this.
If you take away the ability for players to transfer servers though, all of a sudden the potential pool of recruitments for each guild is drastically smaller. Suddenly, the guild finds itself needing to actually hold on to players.
I spent almost 3 years in a guild in EQ2 without recruiting a player - we didn't need to, because the players we had didn't have any reason to leave.
Honestly, in regards to how guilds as a whole will treat their members, the lack of server transfers is the factor that will have the single greatest effect of any other thing in the game - just as how the lack of an automated group system will have the single biggest impact on how pick up groups act towards each other out of everything in the game.
What I really dislike about WoW raiding - I guess you'd agree with this is that they are creating the encounters with combat assist mods in mind. Which makes the whole raiding experience a nightmare if you dont download the mod (especially the required weak auras)
The want to do more damage is a natural thing, because doing more of it makes you kill things faster so you spend less time acquiring things in the world so by proxy you have more time to do what you want when your primary interests are on "cooldown" or on "standby".
There is tangible difference if you can clear the raid in 2hours or it takes you 2x 4hour raid nights.
And the social experience around raiding is entirely dependant on the people you play with. Blaming the game for guilds not meeting your social expectations is not the game's fault.
Plus watching dps meters during encounter is only hurting your actual dps, because you are dividing your attention to it instead of the encounter. Meters are for post fight checkup on what you did and see if you can do better. Watching meters during the fight can do nothing for your performance or can severely impact it in negative way.
I honestly want the game to be good for as many people as possible and I really dislike that the top-end players will use 3rd party tools, because Intrepid says "no" to a thing that gives players information to make informed decisions.
― Plato
Again from EQ2 - that same guild that didn't need to recruit anyone for years - we had a guild we were friendly(ish) with that used to raid the same nights as we did. We had 3 nights a week for raiding as standard - and then another night that we would add to clear new content faster when it was introduced.
One specific week, about half way through our second raid night of the week, someone from the other guild asked me how we were going. I told him we had finished - and he asked me what it was we had finished. I told him we had finished all the current raid content - five raid zones over 1 and a half nights raiding.
They were almost finished on their second zone for the week.
We were able to clear all non-contested content in baout 7 hours worth of raiding a week - which means some of the highest performing raiders on that server at the time were playing a total of 8 hours a week.
This isnt' a complaint - this was a great situation to be in - but it is only a situation that you can be in if you have a combat tracker and put in years of effort with it (the notion that a combat tracker automatically makes you as good as possible can only come from people that have never been as good as possible).