DPS Meter Megathread

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Noaani

NishUK wrote: »

It's an incredibly huge undertaking and my utlimate vision of a raid will probably not co-incide with yours (PvX, not instanced), of which I'll, brief as I can say is:

As a raid encounter/experience, this sounds perfectly fine to me. However, it is worth pointing out a few things.

First, this is instanced. Even if not technically instanced, it is functionally instanced. It just isn't instanced for a single raid.

Second, as an encounter, this is fine. However, a raid game that wants to attract raid players needs no less than 20 raid encounters that are current content - if it has a large number of open world encounters, you realistically want 50+. This kind of thing wouldn't be suitable for all of them, as variation is key.

This is why things like your idea should be mixed with large scale open dungeons with many bosses, open world bosses, and even a few instanced encounters thrown in.

Well I'll just say for starters, as a non "excellent PvE" enthuiast, if I can't get everything I want from expert PvE players, IE "trade me that dungeon cosmetic, price?" then I will sure want an add on that will warn me to jump, duck, "hide behind the rock, ultimate attack!" because I cannot be arsed with it.

This is a combat assistant, not a combat tracker.

A combat tracker only tells you what has already happened, not what will happen, nor what you need to do.

A combat tracker can help but in my eyes, leads to a focus on being an expert at damage delivery and quickness which is certainly not my vision of ultimate PvE gameplay as I also value defense strongly, regardless of it having an automatic presence

A combat tracker has as much use defensively as offensively.

It is, admittedly, a more advanced use for a combat tracker (most are initially set up just for DPS), but it is absolutely something they are made to also do.

Well, I'm practically saying the hard focus on making PvE a very challenging and precise measure has its price when comfortably working with players and will always suffer limitations when we could instead focus on PvX elements as player characters are a forever changing "AI".

Why not both?

The great thing about a tab target game is that the difficulty of an encounter is literally limited to that encounter. A hybrid game that is leaning more to tab than action (which seems to be what Ashes will be) has this same advantage.

This means the only people that need to consider the precision needed for top end encounters are the subset of players that are killing those encounters.

Keep in mind, it is Intrepids own goal that this is less than 10% of players. It is not something 90% of players need to even consider.

I agree that PvX is the way forward (at least for this game). However, PvX does not mean it has to always be PvP and PvE together - this is an argument against an arena as much as it is against raids.

What PvX means is that the game is both. Sometimes it is equal amounts of both, sometimes it is more of one or the other.

Tragnar

The need for combat trackers stems from 1 simple player need - to know what happened

if the game fails to inform you why you died or why you failed the boss fight then people will inevitably use trackers to get that information

this is especially important since we don't really know how extensive combat log is going to be and what information you can filter in there, because if combat log is actually well implemented then there is basically no need for 3rd party tracker since all information can be filtered through ingame means

Any attempt to obfuscate objective information to "promote" nontoxic player interaction is hurting players on a fundamental level

yes with blindly trying builds without doing the math behind them can get you a decently strong build, but if you do the math and theorycraft behind it then you can get way stronger build that wasn't outright obvious

being a better player consists of many things and one of those is to work with facts - you can be a decent player without using any facts whatsoever, but nobody can deny that if you try to use facts that you wouldn't be a better player than you are now

Noaani

Tragnar wrote: »

you can be a decent player without using any facts whatsoever, but nobody can deny that if you try to use facts that you wouldn't be a better player than you are now

This is the point I Was working towards a few posts above.

And in that case, it was a player that said they were helping others. So in their case, it isn't just a case of that one person getting better by using objective data, it is a case of everyone around them getting better if they use objective data.

To me, this seems like a no-brainer.

Tragnar

I know that some players like to avoid meters and facts in general as a form of iron man challenge where their superficial rule of not using facts gives them more emotional value for their gameplay performance

a good analogy to those players is like making a casual race with your friends and giving them a 10 second headstart and still beating them to the finish line

For them (and I believe @NiKr is that type of player) beating anyone without objective analysis and only with what they came up with for what "seemed" good to them has more value than if they would properly theorycraft their build with facts, numbers and spreadsheets

Noaani

Tragnar wrote: »

I know that some players like to avoid meters and facts in general as a form of iron man challenge where their superficial rule of not using facts gives them more emotional value for their gameplay performance

a good analogy to those players is like making a casual race with your friends and giving them a 10 second headstart and still beating them to the finish line

For them (and I believe NiKr is that type of player) beating anyone without objective analysis and only with what they came up with for what "seemed" good to them has more value than if they would properly theorycraft their build with facts, numbers and spreadsheets

For sure, this type of player exists - and that;s great and such.

However, if a player wants to give them self this added dimension of gameplay where they try and beat others that have better objective data, surely that requires other players having access to that data. Such a player would then want trackers in the game as much as I do - as their presence allows them this additional gameplay challenge.

TO me, someone wanting this kind of challenge in a game where trackers don't exist would be like a casual race with your friends where you give them that head start, only you don't give them that head start.

Tragnar

Not necessarily, because those players can view gameplay achieved with theorycraft and facts as worthless (because doing "nerdy" research is a kind of cheating in their view) and thus the only gameplay that is "worth" is their own approach and thus they try to apply those rules on others

Noaani

Tragnar wrote: »

Not necessarily, because those players can view gameplay achieved with theorycraft and facts as worthless (because doing "nerdy" research is a kind of cheating in their view) and thus the only gameplay that is "worth" is their own approach and thus they try to apply those rules on others

But that literally is saying they want to give their friend a 10 second head start, and then not giving their friend a 10 second head start.

That person is a dick, and I think we all know it.

I'm all for including people that want to give themselves an extra challenge. Great. Good for them. However, the kind of people that would fit in to the above are the kind of people any community is better off without.

While we have indeed had people in the past like that, I don't personally think any of the more recent posters in this thread fit that description.

Dygz

We shouldn't need to do math to defeat content.
We also shouldn't need to have combat trackers to defeat content.
Needing either of those indicates extremely poor game design.
Some playstyles might WANT those things. Sure.

Noaani

Dygz wrote: »

We shouldn't need to do math to defeat content.
We also shouldn't need to have combat trackers to defeat content.

The encounters we are talking about are mobs you are likely to never even see, let alone consider taking on.

As such, you have no need to either do that math, nor use a combat tracker.

Ludullu

Tragnar wrote: »

The need for combat trackers stems from 1 simple player need - to know what happened

if the game fails to inform you why you died or why you failed the boss fight then people will inevitably use trackers to get that information

this is especially important since we don't really know how extensive combat log is going to be and what information you can filter in there, because if combat log is actually well implemented then there is basically no need for 3rd party tracker since all information can be filtered through ingame means.

Yes. And to this point, @Noaani how much more info did you get from the tracker than you did from EQ's battle log? I feel like my bias might stem from my skewed L2 experience where I just had a "tracker" within the game itself, because my battle log would show dmg dealt/received and chance of debuffs on mobs (though not on all servers). And when I clicked on the mob/boss, I could see his current info (buffs, agro list, skill list).

This wasn't the normal L2 experience, so I guess, in a way, I was playing with a form of addon/tracker, but they were just built into the game itself. And I used all that info to make my calculations when I needed that.

I'd be fine if Ashes showed this kind of info in the game and had smth like a dps dummy in nodes just for people to train their rotations.

Noaani wrote: »

However, if a player wants to give them self this added dimension of gameplay where they try and beat others that have better objective data, surely that requires other players having access to that data. Such a player would then want trackers in the game as much as I do - as their presence allows them this additional gameplay challenge.

To me it's just a "whatever the Admin/Dev decide - I'll go with it". As I stated above, I had L2 servers where I had a ton of info on stuff and I also had servers where none of it was present. In either case I just played the game and enjoyed it for what it was. And that's why I said that if Intrepid does have/allow trackers - I'd be fine with it, even if I wouldn't use them myself (though if they just had a good battle log, then I guess I would be using it

).

I prefer to play the game my own way and then find people who are ok with me playing like that. I'm not trying to push my own beliefs on others, but, exactly because of that, I don't like when others push their beliefs onto me, which has often been the case with addon/tracker/3rd party tools suggestions on reddit/forums in the past 2 years (not necessarily saying you're doing it here rn). And that pushing might've made me a bit more defensive on this topic.

And one more thing on the topic of PvX, how long were the raids in EQ(2)? And if short then could you run multiples of them in the same day? I know that wow/ff14 players usually run their dungeons for hours, but from what I understand it's just you repeating the exact same motions until you succeed at doing them in a very precise manner.

But in L2's "raiding" you'd usually spend from 1 to 12 hours pvping your enemies and then fight the boss for another 1-2h (longer on epic dragons), depending on your party composition. And because of the difference in pvp and pve combat, you wouldn't be repeating the same actions all that time, so by the time you'd get to fight the boss your brain would already be fried, so easier pve on said boss was justified.

And I find it hard to imagine how that kind of interaction would fit a super complex boss fight after a few grueling hours of pvp for that boss. I hope Intrepid gives us a few of their "1% beatable" bosses in the alpha2 and let us pvp for it, just as we would on release.

Now obviously some guilds would probably just have 2 separate groups of players for those kinds of raids, but we'll have to test how Intrepid's anti-zerg mechanics work out in that kind of setup.

Noaani

NiKr wrote: »

And one more thing on the topic of PvX, how long were the raids in EQ(2)? And if short then could you run multiples of them in the same day?=

While this is an odd question, I'm happy to answer it.

In terms of length, anywhere from 5 minutes to 15 hours.

In some cases, you would zone in to a raid zone, have the only mob right in front of you, kill it and leave. Traveling for these took longer than killing them.

In other cases, you would zone in to an raid zone, knowing full well you weren't clearing it that day, and would spend three or four nights of the week working on that one zone.

Note that all of the above times are for if you already knew the encounters. In some cases, it takes months to get to that point.

Or there were the open world raid bosses, which on the PvP servers were literally never killed, because if you have an actual difficult raid encounter, it is simply not possible to kill if there is also PvP happening at the same time. People spent weeks on them, and failed. A single opposing player getting to you would easily be able to stop you from killing it.

EQ2 is the only game I know of that had truly hard PvE encounters designed for a setting where PvP is straight up not possible put in to a setting where open PvP was enabled. The results of that (literally zero kills, yet the servers were often in the top few to kill instanced raid content) speaks volumes for any raid content in a PvP setting.

Ludullu

Noaani wrote: »

While this is an odd question, I'm happy to answer it.

I wanted to know the mental taxation a raid would have on people. Even with easy pve in L2, the mental taxation of the whole process was high because you had to pvp for hours before the boss itself. And that was a single boss farm on a single day. You'd usually have several such bosses within a week, on top of all the other smaller bosses that helped you to farm gear that let you clear the epic bosses.

Noaani wrote: »

In terms of length, anywhere from 5 minutes to 15 hours.
In some cases, you would zone in to a raid zone, have the only mob right in front of you, kill it and leave. Traveling for these took longer than killing them.

In other cases, you would zone in to an raid zone, knowing full well you weren't clearing it that day, and would spend three or four nights of the week working on that one zone.

Note that all of the above times are for if you already knew the encounters. In some cases, it takes months to get to that point.

What was you longest farm within one day? Was there ever a time where those 15h were all done within a day or was it always broken up into several days-worth of farming a location?

Noaani wrote: »

Or there were the open world raid bosses, which on the PvP servers were literally never killed, because if you have an actual difficult raid encounter, it is simply not possible to kill if there is also PvP happening at the same time.
People spent weeks on them, and failed. A single opposing player getting to you would easily be able to stop you from killing it.

EQ2 is the only game I know of that had truly hard PvE encounters designed for a setting where PvP is straight up not possible put in to a setting where open PvP was enabled. The results of that (literally zero kills, yet the servers were often in the top few to kill instanced raid content) speaks volumes for any raid content in a PvP setting.

And this is why I'm veeeery interested in how Intrepid's planning to tackle this issue. Especially considering that they want to have anti-zerg mechanics. I hope they manage to come up with smth good, but for now I highly doubt it.

The super obvious solution that I see is the L2's one. You have a semi-instance that has a door that only opens for some limited time once the boss has respawned. While the door is open, anyone can enter the boss room. Usually the doors would close once the boss "wakes up or is awaken by someone". Once the doors close, no one else can enter unless the boss is killed or everyone inside is dead. This type of system allowed to have pvp around the boss right up until his full farm and sometimes even after that, because the farming party might've wiped and you'd repeat the "pvp around the door, then inside, then boss farm" cycle again (the doors would close for a bit after the wipe).

But even if they decide to go with this mechanic, I can't even imagine how taxing it'll be to farm a top lvl "1% boss". You pvp for hours at the peak of your abilities and then you have to perfectly fight the boss at, potentially, even higher player ability. And if you fail, you repeat these actions all over again.

And even if you go with separate groups of people for pve and pvp, all that your enemies have to do is to PK your pve healers and pretty much stop you from farming the boss at that particular cycle (that is if there's no other ways to revive a player outside of a healer archetype).

Noaani

NiKr wrote: »

I wanted to know the mental taxation a raid would have on people. Even with easy pve in L2, the mental taxation of the whole process was high because you had to pvp for hours before the boss itself. And that was a single boss farm on a single day. You'd usually have several such bosses within a week, on top of all the other smaller bosses that helped you to farm gear that let you clear the epic bosses.

What would happen if no one showed up to fight back?

What was you longest farm within one day? Was there ever a time where those 15h were all done within a day or was it always broken up into several days-worth of farming a location?

The longest in one day that I did was 12 hours, but that was before the game set up the ability to re-enter an instance. Once they added that in, they made instances longer, but it meant guilds could spread them out over as many nights a week as they wanted.

The super obvious solution that I see is the L2's one. You have a semi-instance that has a door that only opens for some limited time once the boss has respawned. While the door is open, anyone can enter the boss room. Usually the doors would close once the boss "wakes up or is awaken by someone". Once the doors close, no one else can enter unless the boss is killed or everyone inside is dead. This type of system allowed to have pvp around the boss right up until his full farm and sometimes even after that, because the farming party might've wiped and you'd repeat the "pvp around the door, then inside, then boss farm" cycle again (the doors would close for a bit after the wipe).

But even if they decide to go with this mechanic, I can't even imagine how taxing it'll be to farm a top lvl "1% boss". You pvp for hours at the peak of your abilities and then you have to perfectly fight the boss at, potentially, even higher player ability. And if you fail, you repeat these actions all over again.

And even if you go with separate groups of people for pve and pvp, all that your enemies have to do is to PK your pve healers and pretty much stop you from farming the boss at that particular cycle (that is if there's no other ways to revive a player outside of a healer archetype).

This is why all encounters in games that are set where PvP is possible (other than a handful of encounters in EQ2 on the few PvP servers the game had) are simply easier encounters.

They are designed to be taken on while there is the possibility of PvP, and indeed in many of them (all that I have ever seen, but I am not willing to say all), the encounters themselves are dead easy without that PvP (I have talked about the Red Dragon in Archeage a number of times in this regard),

Again, this idea works as an encounter, but it will not work for all encounters. Not if you plan on having a raiding scene in the game.

There are two groups of people I can see this working on - those that have nostalgia for exactly this kind of thing, and t hose that do not know any better content. Indeed, it may even work as all raiding content if you only want raiding content to be a PvP aspect of the game, and aren't at all interested in having a raiding scene at all.

However, if Intrepid take this kind of thing, but also have world bosses that are just out in the open where players are not subject to corruption at all, have some encounters that are force spawned by players, and corruption is absolutely a thing, have some encounters that are in massive open dungeons where multiple raids can happen upon each other (diplomacy would rule the day here), and also some outright instanced encounters that both allow the developers to create true raid encounters (as you would imagine I would define them), then the game has that potential to have that raiding scene.

A thing to keep in mind with instanced content - it is designed as much as anything to ensure a game has enough content for all players. Open world content can only achieve this if the majority of that content is other players.

Do some basic math here. 50,000 active accounts per server, with up to 10% of them able to kill the hardest encounters. I'm going to be generous and say only 5% are able to kill top end raid content, which would mean anywhere from 10 - 25% are trying.

Lets work on 10%, to be generous. This means there are 5,000 players attempting raid content. If we assume 50 people per raid guild (that is more than I would have), that means 100 guilds are attempting this content.

With open world content, in my experience of it, there are 2 or 3 guilds at the most on any given server that have any real shot at it.

Thus, 97 of those 100 raid guilds would have no chance at all of taking on open world raid content successfully. Keep in mind, these are players that have played anywhere from 2 to 24 other MMO's. They know what is and is not possible.

Imagine you are Steven. What content do you give them to keep them playing this game rather than some other game?

It all comes down to whether you want a raiding scene along with your PvP scene, or if you want raiding to be sub-servant to PvP. Once you make that call, the answer to the above question becomes fairly obvious - but that call does need to be made first. L2 had all PvE content sub-servant to PvP, but I personally do not see Intrepid heading that way with Ashes.

Ludullu

Noaani wrote: »

Imagine you are Steven. What content do you give them to keep them playing this game rather than some other game?

It all comes down to whether you want a raiding scene along with your PvP scene, or if you want raiding to be sub-servant to PvP. Once you make that call, the answer to the above question becomes fairly obvious - but that call does need to be made first.

Yep. And I think alpha2 will be one of the things that helps Steven to make that call. They'll have to be a toooon of testing of all kinds of encounters and in all kinds of setups with all kinds of players. And if Steven sees that some of those encounters work out much better in the context of his vision, he should definitely go for those (imo). But only Steven himself will know which kind of encounters will fit what he wants in Ashes.

Noaani

NiKr wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

Imagine you are Steven. What content do you give them to keep them playing this game rather than some other game?

It all comes down to whether you want a raiding scene along with your PvP scene, or if you want raiding to be sub-servant to PvP. Once you make that call, the answer to the above question becomes fairly obvious - but that call does need to be made first.

Yep. And I think alpha2 will be one of the things that helps Steven to make that call. They'll have to be a toooon of testing of all kinds of encounters and in all kinds of setups with all kinds of players. And if Steven sees that some of those encounters work out much better in the context of his vision, he should definitely go for those (imo). But only Steven himself will know which kind of encounters will fit what he wants in Ashes.

This notion has me a little concerned.

Traditionally, a game doesn't get it's best PvE content until the game has been live from 2 to 3 years. Developers don't know what is and is not possible, and players haven't fully understood the combat system to the depths that we will at that stage (yes, even using combat trackers).

Making a call on how well PvE will work years before either the players or the developers have hit their stride seems to me like a recipe for total failure.

Ludullu

Noaani wrote: »

Making a call on how well PvE will work years before either the players or the developers have hit their stride seems to me like a recipe for total failure.

I mean, they don't need to know how well it'll work. They need to know whether their planned pve designs will work at all. Yes, a ton of games have failed at owpvp bosses or have failed at instanced pve (for one reason or the other), but Intrepid needs to show us at least what they have in mind so that we can give some kind of feedback on it.

Steven has made a ton of promises and claims, but, unless at least the base idea of those promises works on a small scale, none of them would matter if the game can't survive for a few years, to let players and devs figure out best PvE.

The main things I'll be looking at during the testing are their anti-zerg mechanics, their boss combat mechanics and the overall system of open world bosses. If the first one is great then I'll have more belief in the overall premise of their ow bosses. If the second one is good, I'll believe in their ability to develop good instanced bosses (though opinions of people like you would obviously be more important at that point). And if the third one has a few variables, I'll believe that they can make more good bosses in the future w/o running into content walls.

Noaani

NiKr wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

Making a call on how well PvE will work years before either the players or the developers have hit their stride seems to me like a recipe for total failure.

I mean, they don't need to know how well it'll work. They need to know whether their planned pve designs will work at all. Yes, a ton of games have failed at owpvp bosses or have failed at instanced pve (for one reason or the other), but Intrepid needs to show us at least what they have in mind so that we can give some kind of feedback on it.

Steven has made a ton of promises and claims, but, unless at least the base idea of those promises works on a small scale, none of them would matter if the game can't survive for a few years, to let players and devs figure out best PvE.

The main things I'll be looking at during the testing are their anti-zerg mechanics, their boss combat mechanics and the overall system of open world bosses. If the first one is great then I'll have more belief in the overall premise of their ow bosses. If the second one is good, I'll believe in their ability to develop good instanced bosses (though opinions of people like you would obviously be more important at that point). And if the third one has a few variables, I'll believe that they can make more good bosses in the future w/o running into content walls.

The first of these absolutely can be tested in alpha, and is without a doubt important.

The second one though, these are things I expect to evolve over time. I don't expect them to be good by the time the game launches, let alone in alpha.

As to preventing content walls, this kind of depends on how you define a content wall. To me, this is more a matter pertaining to itemization than to content, and in that regard is basically impossible to prevent in a primarily open world setting - regardless of PvP.

Ludullu

Noaani wrote: »

As to preventing content walls, this kind of depends on how you define a content wall. To me, this is more a matter pertaining to itemization than to content, and in that regard is basically impossible to prevent in a primarily open world setting - regardless of PvP.

In this particular context what I meant by a content wall is making the same, or very similar, boss encounters. There's only so many "there's a boss on a flat field surrounded by mountains" encounters you can make before your players grow tired of them.

Noaani

NiKr wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

As to preventing content walls, this kind of depends on how you define a content wall. To me, this is more a matter pertaining to itemization than to content, and in that regard is basically impossible to prevent in a primarily open world setting - regardless of PvP.

In this particular content what I meant by a content wall is making the same, or very similar, boss encounters. There's only so many "there's a boss on a flat field surrounded by mountains" encounters you can make before your players grow tired of them.

I have to assume you are not literally talking about the setting of the encounter, but rather the encounter proper, and what is asked of players to kill it.

Due to the variation in content that is possible in tab target games, I have never come across this issue. After several hundred encounters in EQ2, I can't think of any that are so similar that players would get tired of them.

Ludullu

Noaani wrote: »

Due to the variation in content that is possible in tab target games, I have never come across this issue. After several hundred encounters in EQ2, I can't think of any that are so similar that players would get tired of them.

I treat it the same way I do with Intrepid's intention to somehow be the best pvp mmo out there. If they wanna hit 1 in a howevermany previous attempts chances of succeeding, then why couldn't they fail with boss design so much that they hit 1 in a 100s of games that have done good pve before. As Shia said "Nothing is impossible!"

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