DPS Meter Megathread

SnapKick wrote: »

DPS meters/trackers are just information, if you're scared of information and wanting to censor it because you're afraid of what people will do with it or being bullied over it, than you're probably just scared you're going to do bad and won't be able to play whatever you want whenever you want. Get over it, Intrepid can learn to balance the game instead of obscuring bad balance because we can't see it. The burden should be on the developers to have good balance rather than on the players to "just be nice and work with whatever you feel like "

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.

neuroguy wrote: »

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.

That is the issue here - it is poor development.

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.

neuroguy wrote: »

I have no idea why the difficulty of the content came up in the conversation but I think it explains your rationale/true concern. You are worried that if you can clear content without DPS meters that it's going to be too easy, but I mean that's a different conversation altogether and entirely a bias/concern you have in your head without any evidence.

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.

Chunks wrote: »

Tragnar wrote: »

First if builds differ by 2% of power then I will call Intrepid balance gods

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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

I wouldnt like to see this either. I think these things are more likely to happen with the availability of dps meters, tbh.

Nope.

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.

Noaani wrote: »

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.

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.

Noaani wrote: »

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.

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).

Sylvanar

After reading 6 page worth of comments, the downsides of ACT are:
- 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.

neuroguy wrote: »

The sheer arrogance of this lmao. Well I think your solution is awful and does nothing to prevent the issues frankly.

Which issues?

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?

Well I've been raiding since WoW TBC and I disagree

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.

Sylvanar wrote: »

Let me summarise my point, the downsides of ACT will exist regardless but not having ACT definitely will introduce more toxicity.

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.

Sylvanar

neuroguy wrote: »

Sylvanar wrote: »

Let me summarise my point, the downsides of ACT will exist regardless but not having ACT definitely will introduce more toxicity.

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 exaggerated by having it.

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 feel like DPS meters are a carry on of the more toxic side to MMOs. Steven talked about this a few times on stream, how it can be used to prevent group entry to players who play for fun more than any sort of competitiveness.

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.

Oh and forgot to mention that with 64 classes being made up of hybrid holy trinity roles, along with the inclusion of support rather than outright healing/dps abilities it becomes impossible to gauge a players worth. I remember getting booted from a ZG pug because on one of the witch doctor bosses I spent 90%of the fight decursing my team while the other mages tunnel vision dpsed. I performed a vital role but was punished because a noob had group lead and stared at his meters the whole time.

ThePeacekeeper

There are many MMOS without dps meters and everyone is doing just fine.

You all need to relax and wait for the game to be released and take it from there!

Sylvanar wrote: »

neuroguy wrote: »

Sylvanar wrote: »

Let me summarise my point, the downsides of ACT will exist regardless but not having ACT definitely will introduce more toxicity.

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 exaggerated by having it.

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 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.

neuroguy wrote: »

Sylvanar wrote: »

Let me summarise my point, the downsides of ACT will exist regardless but not having ACT definitely will introduce more toxicity.

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 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.

Noaani wrote: »

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?

Nikai wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

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?

Developers can stop mods - which are things that directly alter the game client in one way or another. Things that launch as a part of the game.

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.

Tragnar

@Nikai

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.

Sounds like you play and want to keep playing current WoW. Well aware of how to turn it off, but when im in a 20 man raid, everyone using meters and scrutinizing everyones dps I'm obliged to do so also to stay competitive. I dont raid in WoW currently after playing on and off since vanilla in all expansions and raiding in all of them at least one patch.

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.

Nikai wrote: »

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.

I can't argue with that at all.

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.

Tragnar

It just comes down to the minimum difficulty level and the reward scaling with the difficulty scaling. I just would hate to see if the meta for raiding is about speedrunning and not actually clearing hard content.

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.