DPS Meter Megathread

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Noaani

NiKr wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

If you look at combat tracker use in most games, it starts off as player driven. I'll use a tracker because I enjoy using them.

At that point, it absolutely is the content that requires people at the top end to use trackers - but the content is only designed that way because people use trackers.

Nkw, if that new content was made without the assumption of trackers, those using them would breeze through it in days rather than weeks, leaving the developer outright unable to keep up with new content.

Case in point It's the people - not the game.

To start with, absolutely.

However, players have the right and the ability to play the game using combat trackers, and so many of us just will. As you say, this is not something that will change.

Trying to get us to not use combat trackers in any given MMO is literally the same thing as trying to get someone like Dygz to not participate in RP in any given MMO. It isnt something I would do, it is something that occasionally negatively impacts those not playing the game that way (I've seen someone 'RP' a limp through a dungeon, among a number of other things), and people often do ise out of game tools to participate in RP (especially if using voice chat).

Yet, the game caters to them, and indeed should cater to them. There is no reason it shouldn't.

Same with those wanting to use combat trackers. Sure, some people may not enjoy using them. Cool, dont - just as I dont RP.

The only residual effect you will see in the game if guild based trackers exist and you dont belong to a guild using them is that the games meta will be more varied (assuming the developers do a good job of class design - which I am assuming they will).

Ludullu

Noaani wrote: »

The only residual effect you will see in the game if guild based trackers exist and you dont belong to a guild using them is that the games meta will be more varied (assuming the developers do a good job of class design - which I am assuming they will).

I see 2 paths from that though. It's either "Intrepid stops making content that's being pushed ever further by trackers and all the top pvers leave because of that, pulling a ton of lower tier pvers with them, which snowballs into game "dying"" or we get what you described in a previous post, where Intrepid is pretty much just trying to outpace the top pvers' ability to clear content, which creates an ever-bigger divide between the top 1% and the bottom 99%, because, just as you said, most people who won't use trackers won't be able to clear that top content and will be behind in gear by miles. All while the top 1% pvers can farm top gear for their pvpers and pretty much dominate most pvx encounters. And this then snowballs into the top 1% being happy, while the bottom 99% are not only failing to clear pve but also failing to win pvp.

I've seen both of these situations happen in L2 servers. Except there it was all based around pvx, so the top 1% would usually just get bored because people would stop fighting them after realizing that they just can't win. I'd assume hardcore pvers wouldn't really care about that because they'll have their super hardcore bosses to farm, while everyone else either leaves or just goes around telling everyone that game is dying, which in turn just manifests it into a fact.

I'm sure EQ2 somehow avoided this issue, but I'd assume that mainly stems from its playerbase being on the older side and not caring about such things too much. While in this day and age it'd already be very difficult to hold your audience's attention. And it'll be waaay harder to do that when said audience start to hear that the game is dying.

So while I completely understand the hunger and drive to push the limits of gameplay, I personally see the presence of trackers as a detriment to the longevity of the game. I'm sure that there's enough people like you who'll use them even if Intrepid tries their hardest to ban that use, so imo the downfall of the game is kinda inevitable. I hope I'm wrong on this, but I've seen this snowballing happen too many times even with oldschool hardcore players, let alone the current gen of "I'll play this game for a few weeks while my favorite streamer plays it and then leave it" gamers.

Aerlana

NiKr wrote: »

Case in point It's the people - not the game.

While i defend combat tracker there, another game where i play high end and don't care tracker is Lost Ark.
How the game is designed, how fights are designed, when you have your build, your cycle, well trained, you can easily know when you are underperforming or not on a fight even when discovering it.

And more than that, the mvp screen after allows you to have confirmation on it. (and soon we will have a more detailed one)

On FFXIV, tracker is less usefull than wow to find out the good build and rotation. Because the secundary stats are not a big deal, and just READING skills is enough to understand how to play each... (yes still lot of people are deeply underperforming... ).
I used tracker on FFXIV to test some rotation in specific part of boss fights, or to see why some friends or guildmate had so low DPS to be able to give them advices as good as possible...

on both, some people are using tracker, FFXIV even have fflogs

Sure it is at first how people want to experience the game with what they have or not, and what do they aim or not.
but in the end, combat tracker, Vocal, guild forums, etc
They are the same things : tool to ease the QoL of players.
Don't say "vocal are mandatory to kill bosses" ... i already did raid lead on some tough fight without it. But yes... A LOT MORE comfortable with vocal

akabear

Mag7spy wrote: »

If we are talking about the 1% then it doesn't matter if they have no content as far as I'm concerned or should it effect the development of the game, you don't create content experiences around a tiny faction of your player base.

People will want to cheat to optimize or look for any gaps they can take advantage of without actually doing the work. Its the same people that will try to ruin games for other people at the end of the day. And the same toxic people that spread that none sense to other players to use it in a even more toxic way.

And why people keep saying they don't want meters, if people find ways to get around and use them anyway, if they are caught you simply ban them. And take certain things into consideration on releasing new content in ways meters aren't as effective and that be relying more on action combat, be it 20% more or 60% more until the difficulty gets where you want it.

Fair point.

In the construction industry, 30% of a buildings cost goes into making it 2-3% safer.

I would imagine that trying to keep engaging content to the 1% player base would be a similar significant development resource drain.

Greed94

Even if you remove dps meters, people will find some mob or easy fight to judge dps compared to others. They might have some well geared tank and healer aggro a mob and have dps take turns to see how fast they can kill the mob and time it. The question is, how convenient do you want it to exclude people? Personally, I would rather be excluded right off the start because I have low dps than to jump through hoops only to perform a test and not perform well enough.

Mag7spy

Greed94 wrote: »

Even if you remove dps meters, people will find some mob or easy fight to judge dps compared to others. They might have some well geared tank and healer aggro a mob and have dps take turns to see how fast they can kill the mob and time it. The question is, how convenient do you want it to exclude people? Personally, I would rather be excluded right off the start because I have low dps than to jump through hoops only to perform a test and not perform well enough.

Why can you not use a combat log to test your damage and gauge?

Everyone jumps through hoops and socialize together, its a experience where you can find cool new effective builds people make. Not using a cheat to find the most optimal thing at a much faster pace and say stats back it up when AoC will work different than mmorpgs in the past as there is action based combat. People don't need to be using trackers to attempt to trivialize content using a dps meter over actually viewing what is going on and understanding it through proper trial and error.

Noaani

Mag7spy wrote: »

If we are talking about the 1% then it doesn't matter if they have no content as far as I'm concerned or should it effect the development of the game, you don't create content experiences around a tiny faction of your player base.

You absolutely do.

The content the 1% is running today is the content the remainder of the top 10% is striving for. Without that carrot to reach, the rest of the content for the 10% is meaningless.

As to the content for the 10%, that is essentially content the 80% will be running either in a few months, or in a year.

A few months if the expectation is that the 80% will just run the content later than the 10%, but a yearsor so if this is not the case. The reason for this one is that top end content is where they introduce new mechanics and learn both how the mechanics work, and how players will react to them. Once a mechanic is established in top end content, it will be filtered down to content for the 80%, and then maybe even on to content for the lower 10%.

Noaani

NiKr wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

The only residual effect you will see in the game if guild based trackers exist and you dont belong to a guild using them is that the games meta will be more varied (assuming the developers do a good job of class design - which I am assuming they will).

I see 2 paths from that though. It's either "Intrepid stops making content that's being pushed ever further by trackers and all the top pvers leave because of that, pulling a ton of lower tier pvers with them, which snowballs into game "dying"" or we get what you described in a previous post, where Intrepid is pretty much just trying to outpace the top pvers' ability to clear content, which creates an ever-bigger divide between the top 1% and the bottom 99%, because, just as you said, most people who won't use trackers won't be able to clear that top content and will be behind in gear by miles. All while the top 1% pvers can farm top gear for their pvpers and pretty much dominate most pvx encounters. And this then snowballs into the top 1% being happy, while the bottom 99% are not only failing to clear pve but also failing to win pvp.

What tends to happen - in my experience - is the content gets developed for that 10% (it may be 1% clearing it, but it is 10% attempting it).

The reason for this is fairly simple.

Imagine you are a content developer at Intrepid. You have your 6 monthly performance review coming up in 12 weeks, and have been asked to create a piece of mid tier raid content (target difficulty is usually the first thing known about a potential encounter)⁵. That content is going to go live just before your performance review.

Now, since it is mid tier content in terms of difficulty, you dont want it defeated the day it is released - but you do want it defeated within the week. Obviously, that developer will just look at how complex an encounter needs to be for guilds to kill it in 3 or 4 days - they wont even consider whether that is with or without trackers.

As an aside, the time it takes to kill a mob (assuming there are no adjustments needed) is about the only measure developers have in terms of how difficult an encounter is. If a developer attempted to not use this metric to determine mob difficulty for what ever reason, the games content would be all over the show.

So, since content will eventually be designed with trackers in mind (knowingly or not), players wanting to kill top end content will simply use trackers.

Since it is only a handful of people per guild that even need to use them, many individualnplayera in the 11 - 20% range may not even be aware that their guilds success is built on the back of a combat tracker. This is only more likely to be true if there is any ambiguity as to whether or not a given tracker is against the rules or not.

The notion of a guild that wants to be taking on top end content, but where literally no one is willing and able to use a tracker (that is against the 1aa1wants of the developer, but not the rules) is not something that is actually likely to happen even one time. Not with 40 person raids.

Ludullu

Noaani wrote: »

The notion of a guild that wants to be taking on top end content, but where literally no one is willing and able to use a tracker (that is against the 1aa1wants of the developer, but not the rules) is not something that is actually likely to happen even one time. Not with 40 person raids.

Guess I'll just have to see what kind of top end content Intrepid envisions before making my decision to either agree or disagree with this statement.

Yes, they want to have content that's only clearable by <10%, but I don't think they've explained how exactly they wanna achieve that kind of difficulty. And my limited experience with top end pve just can't allow me to imagine an open world encounter that's so truly complex that you need a tracker to defeat it. Dearly hope we see such a boss in the earlier stages of alpha2 rather than later ones.

Dygz

NiKr wrote: »

I'm sure that there's enough people like you who'll use them even if Intrepid tries their hardest to ban that use, so imo the downfall of the game is kinda inevitable. I hope I'm wrong on this, but I've seen this snowballing happen too many times even with oldschool hardcore players, let alone the current gen of "I'll play this game for a few weeks while my favorite streamer plays it and then leave it" gamers.

I don't think the lack of DPS Meters has been the downfall of FFXIV.

Ludullu

Dygz wrote: »

I don't think the lack of DPS Meters has been the downfall of FFXIV.

FF14 is a difficult thing to compare to other things, because it's so story-driven that majority of people couldn't care less about how to beat the top-end content. And as have been said before here, ff14 has guilds that use trackers, so it's not like there's none there either.

Btw, on the topic of ff14, I forgot to ask @Aerlana . Have you played ff14 from the early expansions or just the recent ones? I was interested in the information about whether ultimates became more complex/harder throughout the expansions. I'd imagine they did, but by how much (at least feel-wise)? And just to cast a broader net, @Azherae do you have people on your team that have played ff14 at top lvl for a long time? Same question for them, if you have.

Azherae

NiKr wrote: »

Dygz wrote: »

I don't think the lack of DPS Meters has been the downfall of FFXIV.

FF14 is a difficult thing to compare to other things, because it's so story-driven that majority of people couldn't care less about how to beat the top-end content. And as have been said before here, ff14 has guilds that use trackers, so it's not like there's none there either.

Btw, on the topic of ff14, I forgot to ask @Aerlana . Have you played ff14 from the early expansions or just the recent ones? I was interested in the information about whether ultimates became more complex/harder throughout the expansions. I'd imagine they did, but by how much (at least feel-wise)? And just to cast a broader net, @Azherae do you have people on your team that have played ff14 at top lvl for a long time? Same question for them, if you have.

I only have two friends that bothered, and one of them quit quite early due to being relatively 'bored'.

The gulf created by the style difference of the two games is hard to bridge.

(the EDIT: Zumi poster in that thread is the Mag7 expy)

I didn't receive any information about 'harder', but that is probably because my friends would not count 'react to this in time' or 'move to this spot when you see this move start' as difficulty until they got really deep in, and they stopped before that, so I don't think I have any useful data there.

But the link given is probably a clear enough 'extension' to explain why.

Noaani

NiKr wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

The notion of a guild that wants to be taking on top end content, but where literally no one is willing and able to use a tracker (that is against the 1aa1wants of the developer, but not the rules) is not something that is actually likely to happen even one time. Not with 40 person raids.

Guess I'll just have to see what kind of top end content Intrepid envisions before making my decision to either agree or disagree with this statement.

Yes, they want to have content that's only clearable by <10%, but I don't think they've explained how exactly they wanna achieve that kind of difficulty. And my limited experience with top end pve just can't allow me to imagine an open world encounter that's so truly complex that you need a tracker to defeat it. Dearly hope we see such a boss in the earlier stages of alpha2 rather than later ones.

Honest question here - do you think it matters how they want to do it?

If 15% of players are in competent guilds that are using a tracker, how can Intrepid maintain content that less than 10% can kill, and still maintain that trackers are not necessary?

When trackers are picked up by players en masse (my guess is 9 months after release, when people realize bans for using them just aren't happening), what choice do Intrepid have?

I will say that you are correct about encounter complexity in relation to open world content (where PvP exists). You cant have an encounter that is overly complex, expect PvP and expect a kill to ever happen.

However, the other thing that cant exist in that same situation is an encounter that less than 10% of the population can kill.

They may be able to make an encounter that less than 10% do kill, but they could accomplish this same feat with solo mobs and long respawn timers (a solo mob that spawns once a week will see no more than 53 players a year kill it - well below the 10% target). However, that comment was made in relation to encounter difficulty, as opposed to encounter rarity or expected PvP during the encounter.

In a vacuum, I'm sure you can see how an encounter can be made complex enough to need a tracker. I am also sure you can see how any encounter designed to meet Inteepids stated goal of less than 10% of players able to kill it cant be done in the open world.

Obviously, this leads to some speculation that could happen in regards to the form raid content I Ashes could take.

Noaani

Dygz wrote: »

NiKr wrote: »

I'm sure that there's enough people like you who'll use them even if Intrepid tries their hardest to ban that use, so imo the downfall of the game is kinda inevitable. I hope I'm wrong on this, but I've seen this snowballing happen too many times even with oldschool hardcore players, let alone the current gen of "I'll play this game for a few weeks while my favorite streamer plays it and then leave it" gamers.

I don't think the lack of DPS Meters has been the downfall of FFXIV.

FFXIV is remarkably high in tracker use.

I've seen links for plug ins to trackers for that game with multiple millions of downloads.

Mag7spy

These post wreak of, I don't care what the developer thinks I'm going to do it anyway and force this on other people so they have to do it. Then i can't get banned once I get enough people to do it.

All while saying meters aren't toxic lol?

Noaani

Mag7spy wrote: »

Why can you not use a combat log to test your damage and gauge?

Why should we?

If it is intended functionality to be able to review data from combat, why should they not add tools to facilitate that?

I mean, we want tools to assist in guild management, to assist on keeping track of who our friends are, to make purchasing off other players smoother, to make maintaining a discussion with other players easier - so why should reviewing combat be the one thing where Intrepid dont make tools to assist with?

Ludullu

Noaani wrote: »

In a vacuum, I'm sure you can see how an encounter can be made complex enough to need a tracker. I am also sure you can see how any encounter designed to meet Inteepids stated goal of less than 10% of players able to kill it cant be done in the open world.

Obviously, this leads to some speculation that could happen in regards to the form raid content I Ashes could take.

Which is exactly my point. If they go down the path of "peak pve is open world" then, just as you implied, I can't see how they'll make it super complex w/o making it pretty much impossible. And if they go down the path of semi or full instance - then it kinda goes against the "open world" promise and would not even be repeatable if they go with full instance.

And if they go with a less complex open world boss - any real pvers like you would say it's boring as fuck (I'd assume) and there wouldn't be a "proper" pve scene.

In other words, currently it's just a mess of promises that tells us literally nothing, which is why I said that I want to wait until they show us a boss that's explicitly "top end".

Dygz

NiKr wrote: »

Dygz wrote: »

I don't think the lack of DPS Meters has been the downfall of FFXIV.

FF14 is a difficult thing to compare to other things, because it's so story-driven that majority of people couldn't care less about how to beat the top-end content. And as have been said before here, ff14 has guilds that use trackers, so it's not like there's none there either.

Ashes is a themebox with many path progressions. I expect the majority of Ashes players won't care much about the numbers associated with top-end content.
You defeat the Winter Dragon to end the perpetual Winter; not because you need to be in the top 1% of PvE.

Cheaters gonna cheat. Yes.
The FFXIV devs do not support Guilds using trackers.

Ludullu

Dygz wrote: »

Ashes is a themebox with many path progressions. I expect the majority of Ashes players won't care much about the numbers associated with top-end content.

But it is exactly because of Ashes being a themebox and not a themepark that there's a higher chance of more people being influenced by top end players. All of ff14 is cooperative, so the overall attitude towards content and players is positive and kind (with the sprout icon being the greatest example). But quite a huge chunk of Ashes will be competitive. Especially when it comes to bosses and their loot, because they'll be open world. I know that you don't care about the loot part of the encounter, but a ton of people will be fighting over being the ones to beat the dragon first and then do their best to keep being the only ones who kill that same dragon on his future spawns.

And a big part of the pvx spectrum will be looking at such events with huge interest. And if they hear from the pioneers of farming that these events turn out to be dull and boring (for whichever reason), I'd assume this would cast a pretty dark shade on the entire experience. Especially if those non-pioneers can't even get a chance to experience the event for themselves (which will most likely be the case).

Again, I hope this is not the case, but I can definitely see how it could go down exactly like this.

Azherae

Dygz wrote: »

NiKr wrote: »

Dygz wrote: »

I don't think the lack of DPS Meters has been the downfall of FFXIV.

FF14 is a difficult thing to compare to other things, because it's so story-driven that majority of people couldn't care less about how to beat the top-end content. And as have been said before here, ff14 has guilds that use trackers, so it's not like there's none there either.

Ashes is a themebox with many path progressions. I expect the majority of Ashes players won't care much about the numbers associated with top-end content.
You defeat the Winter Dragon to end the perpetual Winter; not because you need to be in the top 1% of PvE.

Cheaters gonna cheat. Yes.
The FFXIV devs do not support Guilds using trackers.

If the design philosophy around 'Raiding' is moreso going to be 'can you play this game at a reasonable level', then I would not bother to write a log parser (hypothetically, because I have no intention of doing this for Ashes).

I would also not feel like 'choosing to not use a Tracker/parser, knowing that many others will' would be a disadvantage, because the only advantage required among the 'high skill gamer population' will be 'show up' and 'make sure you are as coordinated as you usually are'.

I don't think this would invalidate the claim, gaming has become a large spread now, 7% of people being 'coordinated at all and understand mechanics' is valid. It's probably the same NUMBER of people as it has been for years, overall, but there are many more others now.

Raid content being 'inclusive' isn't an issue to me in a PvX game, so if the design goal (I'm trusting you know more than me here) is for it to be 'a way to pass the time' for skilled players, rather than a real challenge, then this is acceptable to me, as long as that is consistent throughout the game.

i.e. I don't want a game where the bosses are easy (to me) and then aspects of actually getting to fight them is quite hard.

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