DPS meters would effectively cut the 64 class combos down to 10-15 and severely limit build diversity in those classes as well. It also a guaranteed way to make the community 5x as toxic as it needs to be.
Again you need to go reread things and understand that almost everyone is against what you are wanting.
It is not because you says it, you think it, you pray for it... it is true... various people after you began to speak there came and said they are fine with combat tracker...
You said nooani is biased for saying games with long experience of combat tracker are more toxic than wow, and a game with low use is more ? But it is factual, go see the situation of each of those games...
and you spoke about FFXIV... you mean the game when at least before i left people whined because they were tank and kicked for not doing door to door pulls ? or people complaining about the stupid gatekeeping you can find in PF ? This is also a part of the reality of FFXIV (and friends still playing confirm to me those are always issues... One of them do nearly all Xpert run with pack per pack pull and he says that often heal/DPS complains if they not just pull themselves and blame tank to not take aggro back...)
The reality is : both camp contain lot of people, and i am not a politician personally, i won't pretend on which camp is majority. And to be honest i don't care, the democratic solution is not the solution of majority for everything, sometime, a solution that is good for BOTH side is even better...
Instead of crying about how bad combat tracker are, night and day,
What are your arguments against nooani suggestion : limit combat tracker to a guild perk. Guild perk have to be selected, at a cost by guild leaders.
What are your arguments against this, why do you think it will generate toxicity inside the game ?
My answer : nothing, people like you who prefer to play without combat tracker (and you are absolutely right to do so) just have to join/lead guilds that will not use it, and not take this guild perk, in favor of others guild perk... And people who want to use it will take this perk, and play a fun game as you do.
Again you need to go reread things and understand that almost everyone is against what you are wanting.
It is not because you says it, you think it, you pray for it... it is true... various people after you began to speak there came and said they are fine with combat tracker...
You said nooani is biased for saying games with long experience of combat tracker are more toxic than wow, and a game with low use is more ? But it is factual, go see the situation of each of those games...
and you spoke about FFXIV... you mean the game when at least before i left people whined because they were tank and kicked for not doing door to door pulls ? or people complaining about the stupid gatekeeping you can find in PF ? This is also a part of the reality of FFXIV (and friends still playing confirm to me those are always issues... One of them do nearly all Xpert run with pack per pack pull and he says that often heal/DPS complains if they not just pull themselves and blame tank to not take aggro back...)
The reality is : both camp contain lot of people, and i am not a politician personally, i won't pretend on which camp is majority. And to be honest i don't care, the democratic solution is not the solution of majority for everything, sometime, a solution that is good for BOTH side is even better...
Instead of crying about how bad combat tracker are, night and day,
What are your arguments against nooani suggestion : limit combat tracker to a guild perk. Guild perk have to be selected, at a cost by guild leaders.
What are your arguments against this, why do you think it will generate toxicity inside the game ?
My answer : nothing, people like you who prefer to play without combat tracker (and you are absolutely right to do so) just have to join/lead guilds that will not use it, and not take this guild perk, in favor of others guild perk... And people who want to use it will take this perk, and play a fun game as you do.
You can keep trying to tell yourself that, or trying to skew peoples comments on being ok with trackers done in a very certain way where people cant' see stats of of other party members. Being ok and wanting something is two different things, the majority do NOT want that garbage it is clear in the comments, and even clear in the poll someone created how much you are in the tiny majority.
You are trying to push for something the community does NOT WANT, and your goal to be pushing for it to only track yourself is actually bs. You simply would use that as an excuse to further push it to be able to track all party members using the excuse its int he game so its not against TOS. Go play WoW of FF if you want a dps meter to track your members and be toxic about it. Again and again people jump in and say they don't want it and/or it is toxic.
DygzMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
edited August 2022
A person disagreeing with arguments is not the same thing as having no valid arguments against a suggestion.
Steven plans for Ashes to not support the use of combat trackers -not even as a guild perk- so, yes - we can expect to join/lead guilds that will not use combat trackers.
If you wish to cheat and risk being banned, you can cheat if you want to.
Most importantly, the devs will not be designing content with the expectation that most guilds will be relying on combat trackers to defeat content.
If you wipe you find out why you died, was it to a mechanic, was it to something the boss did skill wise. You break things down and communicate with your guild / group and figure it out piece by piece and hear peoples suggestions. The more times you run it the more you understand and can share with your group and figure out a stronger strategy to being able to beat the boss. I understand people have been babied for so long in games and don't want to think or communicate as a group and want one person to tell them what to do so they can be brain dead and not social.
What you are describing here is my experience of raiding using combat trackers.
I am unsure which part if it you think wont exist if we all use them.
If you wipe you find out why you died, was it to a mechanic, was it to something the boss did skill wise. You break things down and communicate with your guild / group and figure it out piece by piece and hear peoples suggestions. The more times you run it the more you understand and can share with your group and figure out a stronger strategy to being able to beat the boss. I understand people have been babied for so long in games and don't want to think or communicate as a group and want one person to tell them what to do so they can be brain dead and not social.
What you are describing here is my experience of raiding using combat trackers.
I am unsure which part if it you think wont exist if we all use them.
You don't be using them as they aren't going to be permitted, and you can do content without them just fine.
DPS meters would effectively cut the 64 class combos down to 10-15 and severely limit build diversity in those classes as well. It also a guaranteed way to make the community 5x as toxic as it needs to be.
Not having combat trackers would still see a meta created. The problem is, the meta will be subjective based rather than objective. This will mean that even if you are able to come up with a better build, people wont accept it because they do not recognize it. They would rather run with someone they know works than something they are unfamiliar with.
A combat tracker is the best way to prove an off-meta build works.
As to toxicity, there is no connection at all between combat trackers and toxicity levels in MMO's. There are games with high toxicity and hugh use of combat trackers (WoW), games with high toxicity and very little combat tracker use (Archeage), and games with high combat tracker use and low toxicity (EQ, EQ2, Rift, LotRO, and many more).
The common thread between games with high toxicity is a lower reliance on community, whereas games with low toxicity have a greater reliance on a smaller community.
What if the difficulty didn't go up? It was still only <10% of the playerbase who can farm it, but for said 10% it was super easy because they used trackers and everyone else didn't.
Would you, at that point, see the game as boring? Cause at that point the content's general difficulty didn't change, while you yourself brought the boredom onto the content through the use of a tracker.
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DygzMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
edited August 2022
I expect Intrepid to do something similar to FFXIV.
We'll see how good they are at catching cheaters.
Since you've already said that you will be cheating, I also expect them not to use your data to increase their raid design difficulties.
What if the difficulty didn't go up? It was still only <10% of those who can farm it, but for said 10% it was super easy because they used trackers and everyone else didn't.
Would you, at that point, see the game as boring? Cause at that point the content's general difficulty didn't change, while you yourself brought the boredom onto the content through the use of a tracker.
Difficulty can scale in other ways besides increased damage and hp. They simply can rely more on action combat which will throw trackers off on getting effective data.
Difficulty can scale in other ways besides increased damage and hp. They simply can rely more on action combat which will throw trackers off on getting effective data.
I mean yes, but the whole point of Noaani's eagerness to have them is the fact that Steven wants to have a raiding scene with his "we'll have <10% bosses" statement. And Noaani sees dps meters as the main tool that will let you beat those bosses and keep beating them, even if Intrepid increase the difficulty in whichever way.
But what if the 90% of players still couldn't beat the bosses, but the 10% that were using the meters could beat them easily? The generally perceived difficulty would remain the exact same, while the "true" difficulty for the 10% would now be super low, because they made it easy for themselves with their objective super meta.
Difficulty can scale in other ways besides increased damage and hp. They simply can rely more on action combat which will throw trackers off on getting effective data.
I mean yes, but the whole point of Noaani's eagerness to have them is the fact that Steven wants to have a raiding scene with his "we'll have <10% bosses" statement. And Noaani sees dps meters as the main tool that will let you beat those bosses and keep beating them, even if Intrepid increase the difficulty in whichever way.
But what if the 90% of players still couldn't beat the bosses, but the 10% that were using the meters could beat them easily? The generally perceived difficulty would remain the exact same, while the "true" difficulty for the 10% would now be super low, because they made it easy for themselves with their objective super meta.
And what if that wasn't the case and people with meters were not as good in other raids because of the action elements and meters not reading as effective.
We can do what ifs all day but a game shouldn't be built on what ifs when it involves people wanting to cheat int he game rather than socialize and figure things out over time.
AoC is not a old style mmorpg with how it will play it is going to be modern, things will be different. The reason why DPS meters were so effective is because you can play a game blind folded and tap the right buttons and hit your target. AoC will be designed different as the combat is different and it will create different elements of challenge. Assuming things will work with a game like EQ2 with relic 20 year old combat is not how AoC will play. And trying to use arguments that related to older mmorpgs shouldn't apply to this one.
This is exactly why meters a toxic like look at this chat someone literarily saying i will do what I want and not care about your rules, i will do what i want in attempt to try to ruin the experience for other and base my argument off of it. I will ignore the fact the community doesn't want meters and try to force it on them. This is all I hear while the same few people say meters aren't toxic. Game hasn't even released and we already have a toxic mentality here lmfao.
Honestly thankfully its just a small group but you never know when that group can ruin it for everyone. By release they might decide to now show dmg numbers and simply shows, hits, miss, crits and when certain effects go off so there is no information for them to even attempt to track.
But what if the 90% of players still couldn't beat the bosses, but the 10% that were using the meters could beat them easily? The generally perceived difficulty would remain the exact same, while the "true" difficulty for the 10% would now be super low, because they made it easy for themselves with their objective super meta.
the top server will clean due to a far better masteries of their class/build, a far better understanding of the game, and a better visual analysis of the fight event (which can only be seen directly, no tool can show it... )
This is how top players are first, even in FFXIV/WoW. they have a far better way to understand boss mechanics while discovering it, and adapt to it (and also, faaaar more gametime so far more try)
Those information are mostly visuals : visual sign, like size of AOE, a mark on a player before a bad things or good thing happens around him etc etc.
Then, guides will be produced and people with a lesser understanding will be able to clean.
Also, guides will be produced for each of 8 primary archetype, saying what to play for easy gameplay but high efficiency.
With those 2 kind of guides, and sure, some time, people will get thru more and more content, except those who don't care to do hard contents.
The problem here is so clearly guides... right ?
Combat tracker will help to do guides, more accurate... but guides will come out, With or Without combat tracker. it will be a thing
and people without personnal thougt, no will to learn, to improve themselves will try to follow it, and will try to force other to follow guides... With or Without combat tracker this is what will happen...
This is were we will have to face the "META" law... and it will happen even without combat tracker, because people don't care about the mathematics behind guides... they just follow guides
And this is a real problem i always disliked... and was always one even in "old good time"
The problem here is so clearly guides... right ?
Combat tracker will help to do guides, more accurate... but guides will come out, With or Without combat tracker. it will be a thing
Well Noaani disagrees with you there, cause he's been saying that some EQ2 bosses never got guides because people wanted to be the only one who's able to beat it. AoC's bosses will most likely have a similar attitude, because bosses will be super contested, and if you know a mechanic that lets you beat the boss while any other guild hasn't even attempted the boss (cause you won in pvp against them), they wouldn't even know where to start and you'd have a huge upper hand.
But even outside of that. Why do you need meters then? If boss difficulty comes from visuals, you have no need for meters. But meters will allow you to figure out the best objective approach to the boss, so the boss will become trivial much faster and now you'll require Intrepid to make a "more difficult" boss, otherwise the content becomes easy for you.
Also, guides don't give every viewer the ability to beat the boss because there's still the high physical requirement to be able to push buttons correctly, move in a timely matter and have the ability to track everything and remember the whole guide. So even with guides, bosses could be <10% cleared.
But once the "meter people" clear them - they'll need better faster harder bosses or it'll be boring. Absence of a meter for the masses would delay this boredom. But obviously people will still use them and get bored and leave, if Intrepid doesn't make content just for them. I'm fairly sure that's the situation with WoW's current bosses, where most people don't even clear basic difficulty bosses cause after years of making bosses for "meter people", the skill floor was way too high.
Now obviously that's more of a WoW issue than an EQ2 (or maybe some other pve mmo) one, but even here Noaani said that people with meters will just clear difficult content and will need more.
What if the difficulty didn't go up? It was still only <10% of the playerbase who can farm it, but for said 10% it was super easy because they used trackers and everyone else didn't.
Would you, at that point, see the game as boring? Cause at that point the content's general difficulty didn't change, while you yourself brought the boredom onto the content through the use of a tracker.
This is unlikely to happen.
Top end content is developed with a very specific target audience - a much smaller target audience than regular content.
For better or worse, top end content can basically be looked at as being bespoke.
Since the idea of top end content (I Ashes, according to Steven) is to be aspirational (as in, people not running it aspire to run it), the entire function of that content relies on those that are running it actually enjoying it.
If Intrepid is not tuning it to the people that are running it, it will not succeed in its function.
The problem here is so clearly guides... right ?
Combat tracker will help to do guides, more accurate... but guides will come out, With or Without combat tracker. it will be a thing
Well Noaani disagrees with you there, cause he's been saying that some EQ2 bosses never got guides because people wanted to be the only one who's able to beat it.
I think a more accurate statement here would be that combat trackers and the existence of guides are unconnected.
If guilds dont want others knowing how they killed a mob, they wont let anyone do a guide on it. If they dont care, they will let people do a guide.
Since the idea of top end content is to be aspirational (as in, people not running it aspire to run it), the entire function of that content relies on those that are running it actually enjoying it.
Does it though? If the 90% still can't clear it, then it's still aspirational, no? They still can't clear it so it can't just suddenly become non-aspirational. The gear from that content will still be super rare in any group of people outside of the very top of the server.
I can see that point if you mean it in the way "if the hardcore top people leave - everyone else will follow", but definitely disagree with the aspirational part of the equation.
Now obviously that's more of a WoW issue than an EQ2 (or maybe some other pve mmo) one, but even here Noaani said that people with meters will just clear difficult content and will need more.
People with a bigger experiment on the game (with the various element i said) will clean first, and faster they master their class and the game mechanics the faster they will clean harder content.
This is where the combat tracker is the most efficient help (as i uses it a lot to help people to improve in their gameplay... even if some here call helping others "toxicity" it seems)
But except if they don't share the knowledge this will spread...
Now lets see about this knowledge :
The class mastery one, the build to do (be it the really efficient one or the one people think is) it will exist in any kind of way. People in PU will try to focus on it... like it happened in EQ, wow vanilla and after until now... from "old good time" to our days.
The general guide about how game works : same, will be shared... Will be fun to have some drama here or there because people are not playing efficiently to grow the node :')
For hard boss : sure we can have a situation like EQ2, but in fact, it will be more real the harder those fight are.
The more people manage to kill it, the more risk some guild decide to share the information.
Also my message could look as "guides are bad" : in reality my thought is "how people use them are bad"
Too many (far too many) people follow them blindly... and THIS is a problem. Like some people for sure, read combat tracker, and says "lol you are low DPS LMAO" ...
And i think those are the exact same people, they are not only toxic, but are in my opinion a plague for the game. Misleading younglings forcing them to play "what they have too".
This is the same problem...
But even outside of that. Why do you need meters then? If boss difficulty comes from visuals, you have no need for meters. But meters will allow you to figure out the best objective approach to the boss, so the boss will become trivial much faster and now you'll require Intrepid to make a "more difficult" boss, otherwise the content becomes easy for you.
Because while i love to find out strategies on bosses, i dislike to spend too much time to find out how to maximize my DPS. I will use combat tracker because it will avoid to spend minutes and minutes (ending to be hours and hours) to compile all datas to then compare from one cycle/build to another. I prefer to try, and see fast differencies, than spending hours to just compile data. And this is exactly what do a combat tracker, no more no less.
In fact, the combat tracker simply allows me to... play more the game. In EQ or WoW vanilla i didnt use them (didnt know it exist while... some friends on both already used it ^^') i did all with my little hand and it was NOT FUN AT ALL...
Then in BC i used combat tracker... i did the exact same work, but the non fun part was now reduced to 0 second spent. My joyce to find way to improve myself was the same
Back in Vanilla, i rarelly helped other to improve themselves : didnt wnat to spend hours to have the data in a format i can easily read to understand what was the problem. in BC was the moment i began to help people, to the point that even now, as casual, some people still are happy to see me back in wow, remembering all mentoring time i spent with them.
This was how i had fun in game before i had internet... improving myself, at what i am playing. And also, gathering knowledge in the game. to share it after
Also, guides don't give every viewer the ability to beat the boss because there's still the high physical requirement to be able to push buttons correctly, move in a timely matter and have the ability to track everything and remember the whole guide. So even with guides, bosses could be <10% cleared.
And Combat tracker don't give every user the ability to beat the boss.
But while combat tracker gives informations that could help to understand part of bosses (never all) and help players to have a better rotation for this specific fight, it still ask them to use their brain to discover how to deal with the boss. (and then need to apply the strategy they found)
The guide remove all the brain step. and people are directly at the "apply strategy" step
People toxic with the "combat tracker says you are bad" will be toxic saying "all guides says that you are playing summoner bad" (even if the guy just do a non conventionnal build... that remain really efficient) And will be also toxic complaining that many other people in their node are dumb because are not doing the most efficient activities to increase faster the node... And they also will be toxic because...
Toxicity is just the only way people have to say "combat tracker is bad" even when we suggest a way to have a combat tracker without toxicity (like the idea of nooani, that mag7spy avoid to read ... didnt even answer about "why are you against guild perk combat tracker that is limited to the guild members" ...
And I agree with all of those points, but my main counter to dps meters is the increased speed of going through the content. And while I understand that EQ2 was able to introduce enough content for all those hardcore people to eat while the devs made more (and I hope Intrepid can copy that pace), I'd personally prefer if that process was longer.
One of the reasons why people blindly follow guides and try to push any non-top-dps person from the party is because they're trying to clear the content as fast as possible. They want to consume the content immediately and then, I dunno, do some other shit and complain that the game become boring cause they already beat all the interesting content (even if they just followed a guide instead of figuring it out themselves).
Now, if Intrepid can prove to me during alpha2 that they can pump out several super complex bosses, that also can be farmed in the context of open world pvp, every other month - I'd have fewer problems with dps meters speeding up content clearing, just because there'd always be enough of it. But until then, I'll keep thinking that meter people are just ruining the game for themselves.
Since the idea of top end content is to be aspirational (as in, people not running it aspire to run it), the entire function of that content relies on those that are running it actually enjoying it.
Does it though? If the 90% still can't clear it, then it's still aspirational, no?
Only if the 10% say it's good content.
If you know people that have done something you haven't, and they all unanimously say its shit, how excited would you be to give it a go yourself?
That leaves the gear as the only reason to want to do that content, and people running content just for the gear is why so many people in WoW hate on the game while still logging in every day.
If you know people that have done something you haven't, and they all unanimously say its shit, how excited would you be to give it a go yourself?
I guess I'm just a unicorn when it comes to stuff like that I'd be completely fine with doing mundane boring stuff if it meant I'd get smth good for doing it.
Well, I'll just keep hoping that Intrepid can make a ton of bosses for every expansion then.
Because while i love to find out strategies on bosses, i dislike to spend too much time to find out how to maximize my DPS.
~I don't like to spend time learning and getting better at the game I want dps meters to do that for me.~
Exactly what I have been saying, people don't want to think they want to do the content and turn their brain off without spending their own time learning all aspects to improve, and having social discussions with people learning more elements of the game. + the toxic element.
One of the reasons why people blindly follow guides and try to push any non-top-dps person from the party is because they're trying to clear the content as fast as possible. They want to consume the content immediately and then, I dunno, do some other shit and complain that the game become boring cause they already beat all the interesting content (even if they just followed a guide instead of figuring it out themselves).
(did edit previous message for other part if you want. )
yes combat tracker as i said will help a lot to master more the game mechanics and the classes/builds. so a faster progress early. and will be a help for each balance patch, and a small help on bosses (mainly to adapt your build/rotation for this specific boss with its specific timing, etc etc)
And i can understand you think sad/problematic to have this speed up. But the slow due to lack of data can be considered a false difficulty.
Personally, i hope to have the fight designer able to generates fights like the hardest we saw in other MMORPGs. Because those really hard fight were not only about strong DPS but a really good personnal analysis from the players. It would reduce the impact of combat tracker to master the fight to really low, but ALSO would reduce impact of guides a lot.
To answer to what i quoted :
From my own experience : top guilds (not top world but top server, and one of top in my language, french) then casual guilds...
Those kind of people are those under the tops that dreams to be at top without understanding the long term investment... Those are the gold/plat players in LoL, but also those silver or lower complaining about "Elohell"
they dream about summit, and think they are good, the other are bad. They also consider that they are good enough to just have to follow a guide.
Yes you are right, they are consumers and not players. But it remains a big problem this is where most toxicity in PvE environment is generated. They don't want to lose time : kick anyone low in DPS, or kick tank in FFXIV that don't do door to door pulls. They will ask their guildmate to follow the last guide for their class on icyveins blindly. and to learn the strategy, watch videos before the guilds goes to the boss.
they are a problem for a simple reason : they are those younglings will encounter soon enough when they want to progress in the game, and they will force into them this way to play that could be fun for them... but absolutely NOT fun for lot of people... I won't say "majority" or "minority" but most people i know that don't want to be "in top" literally hate to have to watch video before going to fight, and many prefer to learn fight... while doing it (this is what with my FC we did for all people who didnt care about "top content" and just wanted to progress at their pace.)
They simply forgot that at first people come on a game to play a game. not to read guides or be spoiled fight before doing it
yes combat tracker as i said will help a lot to master more the game mechanics and the classes/builds. so a faster progress early. and will be a help for each balance patch, and a small help on bosses (mainly to adapt your build/rotation for this specific boss with its specific timing, etc etc)
And i can understand you think sad/problematic to have this speed up. But the slow due to lack of data can be considered a false difficulty.
Personally, i hope to have the fight designer able to generates fights like the hardest we saw in other MMORPGs. Because those really hard fight were not only about strong DPS but a really good personnal analysis from the players. It would reduce the impact of combat tracker to master the fight to really low, but ALSO would reduce impact of guides a lot.
And this is kind of my point. If you require a tracker to figure out how to beat a boss - to me that's a badly designed boss. Why would I need a separate tool to figure out which % of damage I'm missing on top of all the other mechanics that I need to do?
And from what I understand, all boss designs usually come down to just dps gates. Yes, you can have countless cool mechanics, but there's always gonna be some form of dps gate, because that's where the difficulty comes from in the fight. If the boss is on an arbitrary timer (or especially a literal one) that counts down to its ultimate raid wipe ability - of course you'll have to squeeze out your raid group until the very last drop of dps comes out, because you gotta beat the timer.
And the more bosses you make and the more stronger gear you give to the players - the more those players will have to use the tracker to figure our where they're lacking. And I dearly hope that Intrepid can somehow find a way to avoid this pitfall of endless boss hp/atk growth, but I somehow doubt they can.
And if the pitfall remains, so will the vicious cycle of trackers that increase the speed of content clearing that increase the "difficulty" of content that increase the requirement of the tracker. I see this as very sad indeed, but I guess that's partially because I don't see pve as the final frontier of great content in mmos.
And as for toxic people - they'll always be toxic, no matter what features the game has. And there'll be more toxic people in Ashes purely because it's gonna be a competitive game rather than a cooperative one (at least in most places).
yes combat tracker as i said will help a lot to master more the game mechanics and the classes/builds. so a faster progress early. and will be a help for each balance patch, and a small help on bosses (mainly to adapt your build/rotation for this specific boss with its specific timing, etc etc)
And i can understand you think sad/problematic to have this speed up. But the slow due to lack of data can be considered a false difficulty.
Personally, i hope to have the fight designer able to generates fights like the hardest we saw in other MMORPGs. Because those really hard fight were not only about strong DPS but a really good personnal analysis from the players. It would reduce the impact of combat tracker to master the fight to really low, but ALSO would reduce impact of guides a lot.
And this is kind of my point. If you require a tracker to figure out how to beat a boss - to me that's a badly designed boss. Why would I need a separate tool to figure out which % of damage I'm missing on top of all the other mechanics that I need to do?
And from what I understand, all boss designs usually come down to just dps gates. Yes, you can have countless cool mechanics, but there's always gonna be some form of dps gate, because that's where the difficulty comes from in the fight. If the boss is on an arbitrary timer (or especially a literal one) that counts down to its ultimate raid wipe ability - of course you'll have to squeeze out your raid group until the very last drop of dps comes out, because you gotta beat the timer.
No, this is just, unfortunately, again, your limited experiences.
Part of the reason this is a problem, is that there are some people who have more mental... 'slots', let's call them. They can calculate and simulate and track many more things that the average person.
For those people, everything is happening too much and too fast. The DPS meter is 'taking the place of those extra slots', for those people, so that they can attempt the content by spending time reviewing the outputs, instead of using 'mental slots' they may not have.
I'm not sure what is worse, personally, bosses that a certain subset of people can't beat because they literally don't have enough focus basically 'no matter what they do', or the frustration of people who don't want to be subjected to DPS meters, but there's another outcome, the one you were suggesting.
If Intrepid could somehow completely prevent DPS meters, either by design or by ... I dunno, magic... they could make bosses that only the people with enough 'focus slots' could beat. The problem would be that those people would find them easy, other people would find them hard, and there would be less ways to understand why in both cases.
Comments
It is not because you says it, you think it, you pray for it... it is true... various people after you began to speak there came and said they are fine with combat tracker...
You said nooani is biased for saying games with long experience of combat tracker are more toxic than wow, and a game with low use is more ? But it is factual, go see the situation of each of those games...
and you spoke about FFXIV... you mean the game when at least before i left people whined because they were tank and kicked for not doing door to door pulls ? or people complaining about the stupid gatekeeping you can find in PF ? This is also a part of the reality of FFXIV (and friends still playing confirm to me those are always issues... One of them do nearly all Xpert run with pack per pack pull and he says that often heal/DPS complains if they not just pull themselves and blame tank to not take aggro back...)
The reality is : both camp contain lot of people, and i am not a politician personally, i won't pretend on which camp is majority. And to be honest i don't care, the democratic solution is not the solution of majority for everything, sometime, a solution that is good for BOTH side is even better...
Instead of crying about how bad combat tracker are, night and day,
What are your arguments against nooani suggestion : limit combat tracker to a guild perk. Guild perk have to be selected, at a cost by guild leaders.
What are your arguments against this, why do you think it will generate toxicity inside the game ?
My answer : nothing, people like you who prefer to play without combat tracker (and you are absolutely right to do so) just have to join/lead guilds that will not use it, and not take this guild perk, in favor of others guild perk... And people who want to use it will take this perk, and play a fun game as you do.
You can keep trying to tell yourself that, or trying to skew peoples comments on being ok with trackers done in a very certain way where people cant' see stats of of other party members. Being ok and wanting something is two different things, the majority do NOT want that garbage it is clear in the comments, and even clear in the poll someone created how much you are in the tiny majority.
You are trying to push for something the community does NOT WANT, and your goal to be pushing for it to only track yourself is actually bs. You simply would use that as an excuse to further push it to be able to track all party members using the excuse its int he game so its not against TOS. Go play WoW of FF if you want a dps meter to track your members and be toxic about it. Again and again people jump in and say they don't want it and/or it is toxic.
Steven plans for Ashes to not support the use of combat trackers -not even as a guild perk- so, yes - we can expect to join/lead guilds that will not use combat trackers.
If you wish to cheat and risk being banned, you can cheat if you want to.
Most importantly, the devs will not be designing content with the expectation that most guilds will be relying on combat trackers to defeat content.
What you are describing here is my experience of raiding using combat trackers.
I am unsure which part if it you think wont exist if we all use them.
You don't be using them as they aren't going to be permitted, and you can do content without them just fine.
As such, if top guilds breeze past the initial content, Intrepid will kick it up a notch and see how they do.
Thus, if those top guilds are using trackers, top end content will be designed around people using them, even if Intrepid doesnt realize it.
Not having combat trackers would still see a meta created. The problem is, the meta will be subjective based rather than objective. This will mean that even if you are able to come up with a better build, people wont accept it because they do not recognize it. They would rather run with someone they know works than something they are unfamiliar with.
A combat tracker is the best way to prove an off-meta build works.
As to toxicity, there is no connection at all between combat trackers and toxicity levels in MMO's. There are games with high toxicity and hugh use of combat trackers (WoW), games with high toxicity and very little combat tracker use (Archeage), and games with high combat tracker use and low toxicity (EQ, EQ2, Rift, LotRO, and many more).
The common thread between games with high toxicity is a lower reliance on community, whereas games with low toxicity have a greater reliance on a smaller community.
It isnt a case of knowing or not. I mean, they wont know, but that isnt the point.
I will be running a combat tracker on a second computer. However, there is nothing Intrepid can do about that. They can not ban my account.
Now, they can try and say I am not allowed to talk about it in game, just as FFXIV does. That's fine, Discord exists.
So, what is it you expect Intrepid to do?
Would you, at that point, see the game as boring? Cause at that point the content's general difficulty didn't change, while you yourself brought the boredom onto the content through the use of a tracker.
We'll see how good they are at catching cheaters.
Since you've already said that you will be cheating, I also expect them not to use your data to increase their raid design difficulties.
Difficulty can scale in other ways besides increased damage and hp. They simply can rely more on action combat which will throw trackers off on getting effective data.
But what if the 90% of players still couldn't beat the bosses, but the 10% that were using the meters could beat them easily? The generally perceived difficulty would remain the exact same, while the "true" difficulty for the 10% would now be super low, because they made it easy for themselves with their objective super meta.
And what if that wasn't the case and people with meters were not as good in other raids because of the action elements and meters not reading as effective.
We can do what ifs all day but a game shouldn't be built on what ifs when it involves people wanting to cheat int he game rather than socialize and figure things out over time.
AoC is not a old style mmorpg with how it will play it is going to be modern, things will be different. The reason why DPS meters were so effective is because you can play a game blind folded and tap the right buttons and hit your target. AoC will be designed different as the combat is different and it will create different elements of challenge. Assuming things will work with a game like EQ2 with relic 20 year old combat is not how AoC will play. And trying to use arguments that related to older mmorpgs shouldn't apply to this one.
This is exactly why meters a toxic like look at this chat someone literarily saying i will do what I want and not care about your rules, i will do what i want in attempt to try to ruin the experience for other and base my argument off of it. I will ignore the fact the community doesn't want meters and try to force it on them. This is all I hear while the same few people say meters aren't toxic. Game hasn't even released and we already have a toxic mentality here lmfao.
Honestly thankfully its just a small group but you never know when that group can ruin it for everyone. By release they might decide to now show dmg numbers and simply shows, hits, miss, crits and when certain effects go off so there is no information for them to even attempt to track.
the top server will clean due to a far better masteries of their class/build, a far better understanding of the game, and a better visual analysis of the fight event (which can only be seen directly, no tool can show it... )
This is how top players are first, even in FFXIV/WoW. they have a far better way to understand boss mechanics while discovering it, and adapt to it (and also, faaaar more gametime so far more try)
Those information are mostly visuals : visual sign, like size of AOE, a mark on a player before a bad things or good thing happens around him etc etc.
Then, guides will be produced and people with a lesser understanding will be able to clean.
Also, guides will be produced for each of 8 primary archetype, saying what to play for easy gameplay but high efficiency.
With those 2 kind of guides, and sure, some time, people will get thru more and more content, except those who don't care to do hard contents.
The problem here is so clearly guides... right ?
Combat tracker will help to do guides, more accurate... but guides will come out, With or Without combat tracker. it will be a thing
and people without personnal thougt, no will to learn, to improve themselves will try to follow it, and will try to force other to follow guides... With or Without combat tracker this is what will happen...
This is were we will have to face the "META" law... and it will happen even without combat tracker, because people don't care about the mathematics behind guides... they just follow guides
And this is a real problem i always disliked... and was always one even in "old good time"
So, nothing?
But even outside of that. Why do you need meters then? If boss difficulty comes from visuals, you have no need for meters. But meters will allow you to figure out the best objective approach to the boss, so the boss will become trivial much faster and now you'll require Intrepid to make a "more difficult" boss, otherwise the content becomes easy for you.
Also, guides don't give every viewer the ability to beat the boss because there's still the high physical requirement to be able to push buttons correctly, move in a timely matter and have the ability to track everything and remember the whole guide. So even with guides, bosses could be <10% cleared.
But once the "meter people" clear them - they'll need better faster harder bosses or it'll be boring. Absence of a meter for the masses would delay this boredom. But obviously people will still use them and get bored and leave, if Intrepid doesn't make content just for them. I'm fairly sure that's the situation with WoW's current bosses, where most people don't even clear basic difficulty bosses cause after years of making bosses for "meter people", the skill floor was way too high.
Now obviously that's more of a WoW issue than an EQ2 (or maybe some other pve mmo) one, but even here Noaani said that people with meters will just clear difficult content and will need more.
This is unlikely to happen.
Top end content is developed with a very specific target audience - a much smaller target audience than regular content.
For better or worse, top end content can basically be looked at as being bespoke.
Since the idea of top end content (I Ashes, according to Steven) is to be aspirational (as in, people not running it aspire to run it), the entire function of that content relies on those that are running it actually enjoying it.
If Intrepid is not tuning it to the people that are running it, it will not succeed in its function.
I think a more accurate statement here would be that combat trackers and the existence of guides are unconnected.
If guilds dont want others knowing how they killed a mob, they wont let anyone do a guide on it. If they dont care, they will let people do a guide.
Combat trackers have no real impact on this.
I can see that point if you mean it in the way "if the hardcore top people leave - everyone else will follow", but definitely disagree with the aspirational part of the equation.
People with a bigger experiment on the game (with the various element i said) will clean first, and faster they master their class and the game mechanics the faster they will clean harder content.
This is where the combat tracker is the most efficient help (as i uses it a lot to help people to improve in their gameplay... even if some here call helping others "toxicity" it seems)
But except if they don't share the knowledge this will spread...
Now lets see about this knowledge :
The class mastery one, the build to do (be it the really efficient one or the one people think is) it will exist in any kind of way. People in PU will try to focus on it... like it happened in EQ, wow vanilla and after until now... from "old good time" to our days.
The general guide about how game works : same, will be shared... Will be fun to have some drama here or there because people are not playing efficiently to grow the node :')
For hard boss : sure we can have a situation like EQ2, but in fact, it will be more real the harder those fight are.
The more people manage to kill it, the more risk some guild decide to share the information.
Also my message could look as "guides are bad" : in reality my thought is "how people use them are bad"
Too many (far too many) people follow them blindly... and THIS is a problem. Like some people for sure, read combat tracker, and says "lol you are low DPS LMAO" ...
And i think those are the exact same people, they are not only toxic, but are in my opinion a plague for the game. Misleading younglings forcing them to play "what they have too".
This is the same problem...
Because while i love to find out strategies on bosses, i dislike to spend too much time to find out how to maximize my DPS. I will use combat tracker because it will avoid to spend minutes and minutes (ending to be hours and hours) to compile all datas to then compare from one cycle/build to another. I prefer to try, and see fast differencies, than spending hours to just compile data. And this is exactly what do a combat tracker, no more no less.
In fact, the combat tracker simply allows me to... play more the game. In EQ or WoW vanilla i didnt use them (didnt know it exist while... some friends on both already used it ^^') i did all with my little hand and it was NOT FUN AT ALL...
Then in BC i used combat tracker... i did the exact same work, but the non fun part was now reduced to 0 second spent. My joyce to find way to improve myself was the same
Back in Vanilla, i rarelly helped other to improve themselves : didnt wnat to spend hours to have the data in a format i can easily read to understand what was the problem. in BC was the moment i began to help people, to the point that even now, as casual, some people still are happy to see me back in wow, remembering all mentoring time i spent with them.
This was how i had fun in game before i had internet... improving myself, at what i am playing. And also, gathering knowledge in the game. to share it after
And Combat tracker don't give every user the ability to beat the boss.
But while combat tracker gives informations that could help to understand part of bosses (never all) and help players to have a better rotation for this specific fight, it still ask them to use their brain to discover how to deal with the boss. (and then need to apply the strategy they found)
The guide remove all the brain step. and people are directly at the "apply strategy" step
People toxic with the "combat tracker says you are bad" will be toxic saying "all guides says that you are playing summoner bad" (even if the guy just do a non conventionnal build... that remain really efficient) And will be also toxic complaining that many other people in their node are dumb because are not doing the most efficient activities to increase faster the node... And they also will be toxic because...
Toxicity is just the only way people have to say "combat tracker is bad" even when we suggest a way to have a combat tracker without toxicity (like the idea of nooani, that mag7spy avoid to read ... didnt even answer about "why are you against guild perk combat tracker that is limited to the guild members" ...
One of the reasons why people blindly follow guides and try to push any non-top-dps person from the party is because they're trying to clear the content as fast as possible. They want to consume the content immediately and then, I dunno, do some other shit and complain that the game become boring cause they already beat all the interesting content (even if they just followed a guide instead of figuring it out themselves).
Now, if Intrepid can prove to me during alpha2 that they can pump out several super complex bosses, that also can be farmed in the context of open world pvp, every other month - I'd have fewer problems with dps meters speeding up content clearing, just because there'd always be enough of it. But until then, I'll keep thinking that meter people are just ruining the game for themselves.
Only if the 10% say it's good content.
If you know people that have done something you haven't, and they all unanimously say its shit, how excited would you be to give it a go yourself?
That leaves the gear as the only reason to want to do that content, and people running content just for the gear is why so many people in WoW hate on the game while still logging in every day.
Well, I'll just keep hoping that Intrepid can make a ton of bosses for every expansion then.
~I don't like to spend time learning and getting better at the game I want dps meters to do that for me.~
Exactly what I have been saying, people don't want to think they want to do the content and turn their brain off without spending their own time learning all aspects to improve, and having social discussions with people learning more elements of the game. + the toxic element.
(did edit previous message for other part if you want.
yes combat tracker as i said will help a lot to master more the game mechanics and the classes/builds. so a faster progress early. and will be a help for each balance patch, and a small help on bosses (mainly to adapt your build/rotation for this specific boss with its specific timing, etc etc)
And i can understand you think sad/problematic to have this speed up. But the slow due to lack of data can be considered a false difficulty.
Personally, i hope to have the fight designer able to generates fights like the hardest we saw in other MMORPGs. Because those really hard fight were not only about strong DPS but a really good personnal analysis from the players. It would reduce the impact of combat tracker to master the fight to really low, but ALSO would reduce impact of guides a lot.
To answer to what i quoted :
From my own experience : top guilds (not top world but top server, and one of top in my language, french) then casual guilds...
Those kind of people are those under the tops that dreams to be at top without understanding the long term investment... Those are the gold/plat players in LoL, but also those silver or lower complaining about "Elohell"
they dream about summit, and think they are good, the other are bad. They also consider that they are good enough to just have to follow a guide.
Yes you are right, they are consumers and not players. But it remains a big problem this is where most toxicity in PvE environment is generated. They don't want to lose time : kick anyone low in DPS, or kick tank in FFXIV that don't do door to door pulls. They will ask their guildmate to follow the last guide for their class on icyveins blindly. and to learn the strategy, watch videos before the guilds goes to the boss.
they are a problem for a simple reason : they are those younglings will encounter soon enough when they want to progress in the game, and they will force into them this way to play that could be fun for them... but absolutely NOT fun for lot of people... I won't say "majority" or "minority" but most people i know that don't want to be "in top" literally hate to have to watch video before going to fight, and many prefer to learn fight... while doing it (this is what with my FC we did for all people who didnt care about "top content" and just wanted to progress at their pace.)
They simply forgot that at first people come on a game to play a game. not to read guides or be spoiled fight before doing it
And from what I understand, all boss designs usually come down to just dps gates. Yes, you can have countless cool mechanics, but there's always gonna be some form of dps gate, because that's where the difficulty comes from in the fight. If the boss is on an arbitrary timer (or especially a literal one) that counts down to its ultimate raid wipe ability - of course you'll have to squeeze out your raid group until the very last drop of dps comes out, because you gotta beat the timer.
And the more bosses you make and the more stronger gear you give to the players - the more those players will have to use the tracker to figure our where they're lacking. And I dearly hope that Intrepid can somehow find a way to avoid this pitfall of endless boss hp/atk growth, but I somehow doubt they can.
And if the pitfall remains, so will the vicious cycle of trackers that increase the speed of content clearing that increase the "difficulty" of content that increase the requirement of the tracker. I see this as very sad indeed, but I guess that's partially because I don't see pve as the final frontier of great content in mmos.
And as for toxic people - they'll always be toxic, no matter what features the game has. And there'll be more toxic people in Ashes purely because it's gonna be a competitive game rather than a cooperative one (at least in most places).
No, this is just, unfortunately, again, your limited experiences.
Part of the reason this is a problem, is that there are some people who have more mental... 'slots', let's call them. They can calculate and simulate and track many more things that the average person.
For those people, everything is happening too much and too fast. The DPS meter is 'taking the place of those extra slots', for those people, so that they can attempt the content by spending time reviewing the outputs, instead of using 'mental slots' they may not have.
I'm not sure what is worse, personally, bosses that a certain subset of people can't beat because they literally don't have enough focus basically 'no matter what they do', or the frustration of people who don't want to be subjected to DPS meters, but there's another outcome, the one you were suggesting.
If Intrepid could somehow completely prevent DPS meters, either by design or by ... I dunno, magic... they could make bosses that only the people with enough 'focus slots' could beat. The problem would be that those people would find them easy, other people would find them hard, and there would be less ways to understand why in both cases.