Guild tracker idea is stupid, it just paves the way for people to use third party trackers. It is simple manipulation and that is why he brought it up. Then he will simply say it cant be TOS to use third party trackers since they are already in game.
Don't trust a word Noaani says look at his god damn profile picture.
But IS can detect the use of trackers without even checking for external tools. Just like they observe if a player is a bot or not, the play-style pattern, they can detect if a team works as if has a tracker or not.
Having personally worked on this sort of bad-player detection, I don't see how.
Something that might be worth reiterating is that a lot of the 'pro-tracker' team here doesn't care that much about real-time data. Looking over the recordings/logs for efficient post-mortem analysis is a large part of what matters. There's literally no 'during the fight' behavior to detect.
The only 'tell' of a "using trackers" group, is that they manage to improve their strategies and performance more quickly (i.e. "in fewer attempts at the content") than a "not using trackers" group, for the same content. But that type of natural variation exists even without trackers. There are absolutely savants who can just do it all in their head, even at the highest levels. (They're the ones that others use trackers to 'get on the same level as'.) Do you ban them too?
Unlike you who worked on bad-player detection, I only used trackers long time ago. I am not up-to-date with modern trackers. All I can say is that I've seen players trying to be more efficient if you show them that you measure their performance.
Your statement is in contradiction with what I was told here
I think the topic is, if those who get the drops are favored by using external tools.
This may be true, but those tools will exist regardless of what Intrepid do in regards to this thread. They will also not be against any ToS or EULA.
If you want to be a guild that gets those drops, you will have those tools.
There is no alternative.
But you also kind of confirmed this possibility in this post when you said and those who do not have access to it do so either slower, or not at all
So based on what you say, there are two ways to detect those who use trackers: speed and the "not at all" behavior, the reason of the failure.
The speed can be tracked for each player all the time, based on wiki:
The difficulty of PvE content, such as raids and dungeons will adapt based on the performance of the raid or group against previous bosses in that encounter.[17]
I do not see this as a tracking which starts only when that group formed and entered the raid but a longer pattern detection. As long as it needs to be.
Regarding: "Making it something that a hostile guild or node can prevent you from having, or take away from you means that the first guild to have and hold one gets an advantage"
No, it gets only the option to use the tracker and possibly to defeat stronger versions of bosses.
The game is in control of how difficult the content will be and what the boss drops.
My point is this: If the tracker helps you optimize your performance and defeat stronger content more efficiently, then you get the rewards (which presumably provide progression) of the stronger content, and those who do not have access to it do so either slower, or not at all. You are right.
Difficulty: The game does decide how difficult the content is. In fact, there is one thing that some of the posters here occasionally remind us of: If the raids are too easy to benefit from (not 'need', just benefit from) a tracker, then... yeah, it won't matter. But because groups benefit from trackers on any raid that pushes their personal limits, all this means is that no raid will push most people's limits and the game will have unengaging high-end PvE.
Drops: If the drops make you stronger than you otherwise could have been, then they have the potential to make you stronger than your rival guild that you somehow managed to deny a tracker to. If no drops from difficult raid content make you stronger than you otherwise would have been... then yeah, the competitive disadvantage won't snowball. But I feel like a lot of players will complain that they don't get "meaningful" rewards from high-end raids.
You asked if the savants should be banned.
Banning from game should not happen unless the game is modified, plugins are used, botting etc
But what to do with them is also tied to what you said: "a lot of players will complain that they don't get "meaningful" rewards from high-end raids."
If we look at individual level, ethically, the savant deserves to be spared from negative effects and maybe even rewarded.
If trackers will be used anyway, using recordings/logs then the game has to react in a way or another. The amount of legendary tier resources and items flowing into the economy should be balanced at least to some degree. That has to happen without thinking why players are faster than expected.
In this case both savants and tracker users have the same effect onto the server.
So how do we deal with that? The decision seems to scale up the raid difficulty dynamically, by design.
That will limit the inflow of materials and at the same time attempting to avoid big RNG. You defeat the boss, you most likely get something. A small RNG will exist though according to wiki.
If you want to disincentivize external trackers, and keep the "anti-toxicity" feature of keeping trackers to groups of people who have chosen, as a group, to use them, you shouldn't add serious barriers beyond that choice of whether to participate. The more you do, the less you've disincentivized someone just making an external one, and if you've made access to it limited and competitive? You went from disincentivizing the creation of an external tracker to practically requiring it. And once it's done, it's done. That tracker's out there and available forever.
So you say that trackers will still be created. If Intrepid Studios decide to add a tracker as I suggested, it means that has already accepted it's use. It is not about me wanting to be used it or to prevent it's use.
If IS does that step, then it will have less concern that some players who are not good enough to obtain the perk still want it and will switch to external tools. External tools can still be detected more or less and if they are running on the same PC, they also reduce the performance.
As I read through your post a second time, I think that I don't understand what your goal is. You do not want to prevent the use of trackers, but you do want to limit them and tie them to in-game progression mechanics. What is the benefit that you see to doing this? What is the purpose of denying access to a built-in tracker to most or even many players?
Perhaps this hinges on something else: Detection.
That is the trick, isn't it? As has been brought up here before, trackers can be run on another computer just as easily. You'd have to ban streaming and recording to ensure it's even theoretically possible to detect them. As such, I'm not sure what this argument actually gets you? You still have tracker use by people you 'didn't intend'. At best, you have made it somewhat pay to win. (i.e. own a second computer, or perhaps in the future 'a phone')
Right, I do not want to prevent the use of trackers.
Like people here, I also suggested integrating trackers into an MMO too long time ago. (was only one post though)
That doesn't mean that I was right back then or the situation these days is the same. It might still be a mistake on my side suggesting to add them now.
Many players already own a 2nd computer as we all upgrade constantly. I do not know how powerful that 2nd computer has to be. I am not sure how efficient a recording can be as it shows the perspective of one player only and only if he looks constantly around and can see all team members.
It might still be better to put together the combat logs which the game already wants to provide.
Of course things can change regarding the combat logs too, just as the deep ocean became a pvp area suddenly.
Regarding the toxicity or the "anti-toxicity" of the tool I am not convinced. This is a relative thing and it is up to IS to decide what kind of audience to attract to the game. For now they want the anti-tracker people.
I think toxicity is a player attitude caused by lack of empathy, greed, selfishness...
I largely agree. Toxicity is caused by these things (which do not relate to trackers), but I believe that it can also be caused by clashing expectations. If Player A wants to go max optimization and try to clear content, even if it means doing certain forms of nonsense, and Player B wants to do their own thing, and figure out how to perfect themselves without necessarily 'cheesing things' or whatever, there will be problems when the two are in the same party, even if neither style is innately wrong.
The purpose of the 'guild trackers' compromise concept is to prevent this sort of "mixing oil and water" where trackers are concerned. If you don't believe that said "mixing oil and water" style effect results in toxicity, then it makes sense that you don't see a point to the offered compromise, since it implies that you are trying to solve a different problem than it is designed to.
But that brings me back to not understanding why you feel that tracker access should be limited at all. Even more specifically however, why nodes? Assigning it to nodes ties together the game experiences of players who may, in serious possibility, never directly play together or join the same party, even if they serve the interests of the same region or city independently.
Clashing expectations can happen for many reasons. I've seen story elements being also a distraction, some want them some already have... Players have to learn to talk with each other before raids : ) That will not happen easily if random players join together.
I also see the "mixing oil and water" as a source of toxicity.
For me, also seeing guilds with tracker and without tracker in the same node where I "live" bothers me.
I may be in a guild but I will interact with players in that node.
The game changer aspect of AoC is that it removes global group finders and provides instead bulletin boards at node level. Multiple guilds will live in that node and might help each other in dungeons, raids, defending the node. Some guilds can be large some small. But the node brings them together.
Also players can have alts but all alts must be citizens of the same node. That's how the game is designed.
Alts can however be part of multiple guilds, even part of guilds which are spread over the entire map.
So the player not the alt will vote and get the option to use trackers or to deny being tracked by those who have trackers.
Regarding: why you feel that tracker access should be limited at all
I see fun in both ways of playing the game, with and without trackers.
Steven will get his option too, to see players without trackers going through the content.
Then regarding detection of trackers. Having them in game, the game can see easier the difference between how players with trackers play and the ones who vote against it play. Will also notice if some pretend that they have no trackers and use an external one as the data to compare is more reliable, assuming some players are honest.
Then you raised the competition problem. If a guild becomes stronger because gets sooner the legendary drops. Note that I say sooner not more of them.
Those guilds will be in different nodes. Each node will have a different relic specific to how the vote concluded.
Each relic can bring different benefits, to balance out differences between how players decided.
Or can influence drops in raids or raid difficulty. (The raid difficulty adjustment I mentioned above. According to wiki, will happen anyway dynamically. Might even disregard sudden low performance if statistically the player was marked as suspicious - with or without in-game trackers)
These relics can cushion out that some guilds will get these items a bit later and when all of them have the top tier items, then that adjustment can fade.
Is hard to say how and what to balance as exact data is not available, like how much stronger one side is related to the other. Especially when PvP is involved too.
There might be issues during the first 3 months after release until players start winning raids. But things will settle and players with strong opinions pro and against trackers can avoid each other by moving into the appropriate nodes. They will still interact in a way or another, as allies or foes.
September 12. 2022: Being naked can also be used to bring a skilled artisan to different freeholds... Don't summon family!
Guild tracker idea is stupid, it just paves the way for people to use third party trackers. It is simple manipulation and that is why he brought it up. Then he will simply say it cant be TOS to use third party trackers since they are already in game.
Don't trust a word Noaani says look at his god damn profile picture.
I noticed the picture when I checked that tracker and how plugins work and if there is already a plugin for AoC or not. Apparently the ACT tool provides plugins in form of dll files. I don't like having on my PC executable code created by 3rd party unknown developers.
I have no idea how many players will defy the TOS either. With a declared interdiction of them, Steven might prevent them to even join the game.
But detecting players who are better than expected can be done. And the game can deny giving them drops.
Savants can also be a collateral damage, for the greater benefit of the community.
If you feel that you can be one of those very good players who can defeat a raid without trackers and be banned by mistake, then try to drink a beer or two before each raid.
And the game can even give rewards only to the lower half of those "too skilled" players who defeat the bosses.
If players cheat the game can cheat too.
It can happen that they will know and will not be able to prove the game is unfair without telling that they used a tracker. And those who don't use a tracker, they better start being nice citizen in their node and not rush to get legendary drops.
I really have the feeling that these extremely hard raids are there as traps to lure and see who has to be banned. And not for the non-tracker players.
September 12. 2022: Being naked can also be used to bring a skilled artisan to different freeholds... Don't summon family!
My opinion is that if you can't stop it, can't detect it, and it gives the player an advantage, then you should implement it as a feature.
If you don't want players to know what hps something has, or know what actual dps they are doing, then you need to limit information sent to the client from the server. This means no damage numbers or combat log. A lot of people wont like this because you essentially will never get feedback on how you are performing, or what build or attack order is actually doing more damage.
I'm not a game designer so i don't really know the exact limitations but I would assume that there are only a few bits of information that are actually required to be sent between server and client for gameplay. Again this might not be a practical solution, but if you want to make this game feature unhackable you need to do something like this.
Server to client:
Tell them when they have been hit and how much damage they have received, to update health bars.
Tell them whether or not their attacks hit the hitbox, to update animation frames regarding hits.
Client to server:
Tell the server what actions the player has taken, do the hit and damage calcs server side.
The more information the server sends to the client, the more open the game is to 3rd party apps intercepting that information and creating an addon out of it.
My opinion is that if you can't stop it, can't detect it, and it gives the player an advantage, then you should implement it as a feature.
If you don't want players to know what hps something has, or know what actual dps they are doing, then you need to limit information sent to the client from the server. This means no damage numbers or combat log. A lot of people wont like this because you essentially will never get feedback on how you are performing, or what build or attack order is actually doing more damage.
I'm not a game designer so i don't really know the exact limitations but I would assume that there are only a few bits of information that are actually required to be send between server and client for gameplay. Again this might not be a practical solution, but if you want to make this game feature unhackable you need to do something like this.
Server to client:
Tell them when they have been hit and how much damage they have received, to update health bars.
Tell them whether or not their attacks hit the hitbox, to update animation frames regarding hits.
Client to server:
Tell the server what actions the player has taken, do the hit and damage calcs server side.
The more information the server sends to the client, the more open the game is to 3rd party apps intercepting that information and creating an addon out of it.
Trackers will still have more limited information, since they cant touch game files and will be banned if you do so, which that will be detected.
The trackers won't be as effective since it is not within the game already, and the game isn't being built around them and has action combat and not just tab (tab being very clear when you miss all attacks).
It is why they are trying to get in game trackers so they will be able to pull more information than normal, which in turn will also normalize 3rd party trackers and will be able to be enhanced with more information more than likely and eventually surpass first party ones.
The few people that are trying to convince people honestly can't be trusted. They are trying to word it in ways and not being actually honest. Rather then talking about how it make trackers as useless as possible they are trying to create weird arguments to say they need trackers like not trusting the developers and needing to check the game for bugs for example.
Cause noaani is going to reply to everyone to try to convince them with bias and manipulation. Then a year from now say everyone wanted dps meters regardless of their answers.
"reply" means there are messages
As nooani said (and is easy to check) he won't answer if people don't speak.
The more you are speaking here, the more you make this topic go up, the more people will post in it, the more nooani will answer... Myself also never necroanimated this topic (or any other)...
But, you help a lot to have this topic alive, to allow us to share our opinion, and explanation, so kind of you
"Someone says something so I need to answer to everyone to convince them to see my way so i can get trackers in the game"
lmfao, literarily a few people will fight to keep this thread alive else it have been buried and come back up once in awhile.
You don't need to answer to everyone let people voice their thoughts and leave it at that, but we all know that won't happen Noaani needs to keep this thread alive and till respond any chance he gets.
@Xeeg
You don't need to update precise health to the client; you can just update the UI to change a certain amount, whether that's entirely accurate or not.
Time to kill (or abilities to kill) could be the only reliable metric and even then there's always variability of damage and possibly health & resistances between identical mobs.
Maybe a mob has crazy regen. It doesn't show it but at some point you may notice one's health tic up rather than down after half an hour of fighting these mobs. Then you know they heal or regen; but most healing show an animation. Thus it must be regen.
Some creatures may not show their health at all because they're literally made of stone and show no damage until they die.
All in all I don't think Intrepid or most studios can handle the burden of problem solving and creative design lmao. Too much nuance involved.
Sure, it is a thing you can enjoy, but I thoroughly enjoy my job. However, my job is not entertainment.
To you.
It's tedious and obnoxious how you try and recreate reality from your head, without understanding the in-between heads.
Some people are entertained by working out and you can turn red in the face and cry yourself to sleep thinking about it.
Working out, breakdancing, acrobatics, dancing, fighting, martial arts, training even. ffs
Anything can be entertaining. Hiking and looking at plant/ animal life can be the most entertaining thing in the world for someone. Not everyone is YOU.
And everything I mentioned just now is less of a time waster than MMOs.
Leave your echo chamber.
We are talking about entertainment activities, not entertaining.
This may seem the same thing to you, but it is not.
An entertainment activity is one which is primarily engaged with for entertainment. As such, activities such as working out dont fit, because the main reason most people have for engaging in them is fitness.
That doesnt mean YOU dont participate in said activity for enjoyment. In all honestly a single persons perspective is irrelevant here, as we are talking about activities, and as such we are talking about all peoples reason for engaging in said activity.
By the very nature of the word entertainment activities need to be perused for enjoyment. If an activity is persued primarily (by the collective of all people engaging in said activity) for any other reason, the activity is simply not entertainment.
It would seem, perhaps, that you assumed we were talking about things from an individual's perspective, rather than from the perspective of the activity. If we are going to look at classifying activities, you cant look at it from a personal perspective.
If there are cars in the MMO then go ahead and have racing. WHO GIVES A SHIT.
I thinknyouve lost sight of the context of comments at this point, and are just replying to snippets of posts in a somewhat angry demeanor.
I never said an MMO cant have races. In fact,both of the MMO's I have played the most had races in them.
That doesnt mean they are racing games - which is what I said. We use genres in discussion as it allows people to quickly understand. This is why genres exist - not just in games but in everything.
Again, we talk about MMO's in the context of MMO's so that people who have played MMO's understand easier.
As to you seeming to be pissed off at me for wanting ashes to be like some existing MMO's- that isnt a *me* thing, it is an Intrepid thing. They want Ashes to be reminiscent of older MMO's - hell they were even wearing "Make MMO's Great Again" hats in the early live streams.
I'm here because I want to play what Intepid want Ashes to be.
I am.unsure why you are here, as you clearly do not want to play whatIntrepid want Ashes to be.
I didn't want Trackers in the game so clearly I don't want the same function Trackers provide in the game ffs. I gave my reasons for it and took into consideration the broader playerbase (and potential playerbase) for why I do not want Trackers in the game.
You did no such thing.
In fact, you still haven't got your head around everything a tracker can and can not do, and what players like me are able to do with them.
You also have not even bothered going over my main point that is "as it stands, we have trackers I the game that are unlimited in function, my suggestion places limits on them, including not being able to use them on someone not in your guild".
In arguing AGAINST my point here, you are arguing FOR unlimited combat trackers, because I am arguing AGAINST unlimited trackers, and offering up the only solution that will ser that happen.
Your token 'rhythm' class from some game is hardly relevant.
Just name the class and game so I can tear your token argument apart.
No.
If you want to get in to a discussion as to what MMO's should and should not do, you should first of all educate yourself on what they have and have not done, what did and did not work, and the reasoning behind all of that.
All you are doing now is ranting about something you have no knowledge of, everyone reading can see it. I have no incentive at all to assist you.
Guild tracker idea is stupid, it just paves the way for people to use third party trackers. It is simple manipulation and that is why he brought it up. Then he will simply say it cant be TOS to use third party trackers since they are already in game.
If making a third party tracker that worked on others were trivial, I would agree with you that there would be no reason at all to make a first party tracker. Indeed, I would never have even suggested it.
Now, to be clear, making a tracker that only tracks the user is trivial - even without the game having a log file.
Getting that individual user tracker and setting it up on a server, asking each member of a group or raid to log in to said server, that is also fairly easy.
This is the base level of what will happen in Ashes in the absolute worst case scenario. This may well see people not invited to guilds (and potentially even groups) without being willing to log in to that tracker server. As long as that discussion happens on Discord and not in the game, there is nothing any developer can do about it (not even with an FFXIV style "trackers are like Fight Club" rule).
However, when I talk about how Ashes will have trackers, the above is not what I am talking about. I am talking about a small number of people that both able and are in a position to be able to make a tracker that works on your guild or raid in Ashes. They will make these trackers because - like me - they KNOW that a game is better off if players have access to trackers. To be perfectly clear, there are only about a dozen or so people in the world that fit the above criteria - I am trying to be as vague as I can here, but I have talked about exactly this with a few posters on these forums, they know what I am talking about.
If a first party tracker is added to the game, that reason they have for making a tracker simply goes away. The game will be better for having a tracker, but the game has a tracker, so there is no need to develop a third party tracker.
So, if those dozen or so people from above are convinced that Ashes doesn't need a third party tracker because the game has a suitable first party tracker, then third party trackers that can track others are not likely to ever actually exist for Ashes.
Those trackers that can only track the user will still exist (people can patch one together in about half an hour). However, I doubt people would then set up servers to run them, as there wouldn't be much point, and the work/cost involved wouldn't be worth it if an in game tracker were available.
Additionally, as I have said earlier, it is within the scope of a piece of softwares ToS to say that any function of that software can not be reproduced outside of that software. This could be taken to mean that you can't use a third party combat tracker if the game ships with a combat tracker.
If the game had a tracker, and included language like this in the ToS, I can tell you now that I wouldn't want to be the one to test out that could to see if it was legally sound. I would simply not run a third party tracker in that game - assuming the first party tracker had all necessary functionality (if it didn't running a third party tracker to provide said functionality wouldn't be against the ToS, as you are not reproducing a function, you are performing a new function).
Edit, as to this comment
Don't trust a word Noaani says look at his god damn profile picture.
It is as it is because a while back, some regular posters were commenting about how they were somewhat annoyed that I had not changed my forum name to have a capital first letter (those that have been around here long enough will know), and then when I changed it, they then commented that I should also change from the default picture.
So I did. It was right around the time this thread was created/merged, and so I used the icon of my preferred third party tracker. If you want to look in to it any more than that, you are welcome to do so. I've had people suggest that I much be the "owner" of ACT or something in order to use their icon here (nope, copy/paste works great), and so I must just be posting here to try and get more people to use ACT so that I somehow make more money.
I assume you are smart enough to realize that 1, ACT is free, so even if I were the "owner" of it, there is no money to be made and 2, if I were the owner of it and were trying to make money from more users, Ashes not having a first party tracker would see more people look for a third party one. As such, I am actually arguing for there to be fewer people in Ashes using ACT.
But as I said, surely you are smart enough to realize that.
@Noaani
I'm literally not reading past your first 2 lines.
You are getting what you deserve, to be honest.
The first interaction you and I had on these forums was in relation to your idea on inspect rather than a tracker. I was overly polite (out of character for me) in pointing out to you that your suggestion may be a valid thing to add to the game, but it isn't a replacement for trackers as you claimed.
You then argued that point with me. Later on, we learned that you didn't even know what a tracker is actually even used for - yet you had argued with me in relation to your suggestion.
Then we have the whole debacle of your post formatting. Not just the OP of that other thread, but your insistence to use spoiler tags for quotes which is a needless hassle to anyone that may be reading while doing some other task.
You don't deserve to have people engage with you at this point. You can earn back that right, and people will begin to engage with properly you once again, but in order for that to happen you kind of need to realize that you are the one here that doesn't know what they are talking about in relation to MMO's, and if someone that does know what they are talking about corrects you, you need to simply accept that correction (don't worry, if the person that corrected you was wrong, someone will correct them).
An example of this would be the above suggestion you had in relation to inspect. You had a suggestion for an alternative to combat trackers, someone that has been using a combat tracker for more than two decades informs you that your suggestion will not replace combat trackers. The appropriate thing for you to do is to accept that, and then either drop your idea and discussion on it, or attempt to modify your idea so that it covers the shortfalls it had.
I mean, the suggestion of a guild based tracker wasn't just my idea. I agreed with someone else early on in this thread that said a built in tracker would be a good idea, and then as people pointed out issues with it, I came up with ways around that system. People said they didn't want anyone to track them, I said cool, the tracker should be opt in. People said group leaders will require people to opt in to be bought along on content, I said cool, make it opt in at the guild level (you should be joining a guild with like minded players - if you do not want to use a combat tracker, you should not be in a guild with people that do, and vice versa).
I never understood people that proclaim to others that they are now on ignore.
All you ignoring me means is that I can point out the flaws in your statements without needing to get in to a worthless debate with you.
And keep in mind, the bulk of my posts are for the benefit of other readers. If someone says something untrue, I will post a rebuttal for others that are reading - not for the person that posted something untrue. Generally speaking, if someone is ready to proclaim untruths as being fact, I am not going to be able to persuade them otherwise - but I may be able to prevent someone else from assume that untruth is true.
Now, to be clear, making a tracker that only tracks the user is trivial - even without the game having a log file.
Doesn't that depend on client/server information exchange? If the client only tells the server that the players did X attack at Y location, and the server does all the calculations, the client never has to know exactly how much damage was applied.
The server could just send back something to indicate that u hit them, and a status "unwounded, slightly wounded, heavily wounded, critically wounded" of the enemy.
Now, to be clear, making a tracker that only tracks the user is trivial - even without the game having a log file.
Doesn't that depend on client/server information exchange? If the client only tells the server that the players did X attack at Y location, and the server does all the calculations, the client never has to know exactly how much damage was applied.
The server could just send back something to indicate that u hit them, and a status "unwounded, slightly wounded, heavily wounded, critically wounded" of the enemy.
I'd be both 'okay with this' and sort of 'surprised that is what anyone wanted'.
Specific damage done doesn't matter to me when I'm using parsers, but similarly having to just 'trust that you're doing more damage now after X change' as a generality is kind of weird.
Plus, it would just make people use 'PvP' for the tests.
BDO already does this (if you aren't familiar with how to get a specific additional set of data), but I feel like that led to more harm than good since games almost always apply some sort of scaling or 'hidden aspects' of a formula somewhere.
If Ashes has simplistic damage formulas, that'd surprise me, but I guess it wouldn't be too weird.
Doesn't that depend on client/server information exchange?
Not specifically.
A log file is a text file the game creates that has, well, a log of everything. This is where trackers like ACT get their data from. It is why they are able to function without needing to interact with the game client at all - the client produces a file for ACT, and ACT only interacts with that file.
Ashes will not have a log file, but we do know it will have a combat log. As such, in order to get a text file for ACT to read, all you need to do is turn that combat log in to a text file, and point ACT at it.
All we really need the game to provide in order to be able to do this easily is floating combat feedback, which again is something we know we will have.
Developers of Western MMO's aren't usually keen on keeping players in the dark as to what is happening - this includes Intrepid. We can expect a reasonable amount of information to be sent to the client.
@Xeeg
Have you used trackers before?
Steven's intention is to reduce, not to make completely impossible the use of trackers
See https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Addons
to prevent a majority of potential third party trackers
and on the same page
The goal is to mitigate and make the practice less prevalent
You may find ways to achieve more but for practical reasons that is not the intention the developers have.
September 12. 2022: Being naked can also be used to bring a skilled artisan to different freeholds... Don't summon family!
@Xeeg
Have you used trackers before?
Steven's intention is to reduce, not to make completely impossible the use of trackers
See https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Addons
to prevent a majority of potential third party trackers
and on the same page
The goal is to mitigate and make the practice less prevalent
You may find ways to achieve more but for practical reasons that is not the intention the developers have.
You are missing the point, that is clearly in reference that its impossible to stop people doing everything but make it so it isn't a normal thing as it is not desired to be.
You need to simply go by what is the meaning of what they want not with how you can try to change the meaning. "They are not allowed"
@Xeeg
Have you used trackers before?
Steven's intention is to reduce, not to make completely impossible the use of trackers
See https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Addons
to prevent a majority of potential third party trackers
and on the same page
The goal is to mitigate and make the practice less prevalent
You may find ways to achieve more but for practical reasons that is not the intention the developers have.
You are missing the point, that is clearly in reference that its impossible to stop people doing everything but make it so it isn't a normal thing as it is not desired to be.
You need to simply go by what is the meaning of what they want not with how you can try to change the meaning. "They are not allowed"
Of course we know they are not allowed.
But it also indicates that they are aware that they cannot prevent 100% of them just like they cannot prevent bots or gold sellers on 3rd party sites.
I understand that for now they want to make the life of those who use trackers difficult.
And players to convince eachother to stop using them because that is what Steven wants. That is the purpose of the thread.
September 12. 2022: Being naked can also be used to bring a skilled artisan to different freeholds... Don't summon family!
Dont think you can convince people wanting to use trackers for a advantage to not use it. Only thing that will convince will be enforcement action from the devs. So if given proof and they act on it and make it clear less people will be willing to mess around. Even more so if combat is not designed around trackers and not effective for trackers to really be used.
It will make the risk not worth it and not talked about much or used.
They can't be lax on it or things grow in time its better to make your statements clear and for others to see it. If it isn't clear then you get people like ones in new world creating a tracker for resources and knowing when they spawn exactly on the servers and where as well. People will always get out of hand to get an advantage over other players with tools out of game.
Dont think you can convince people wanting to use trackers for a advantage to not use it. Only thing that will convince will be enforcement action from the devs. So if given proof and they act on it and make it clear less people will be willing to mess around. Even more so if combat is not designed around trackers and not effective for trackers to really be used.
It will make the risk not worth it and not talked about much or used.
They can't be lax on it or things grow in time its better to make your statements clear and for others to see it. If it isn't clear then you get people like ones in new world creating a tracker for resources and knowing when they spawn exactly on the servers and where as well. People will always get out of hand to get an advantage over other players with tools out of game.
You cannot convince 100% of people but trying to do that is what Steven wants.
You described in-game enforcement, by making the combat designed to not be effective. That might be the other way, more practical than not giving combat loggs at all and limiting data from server to client as @Xeeg seems to suggest.
I cannot say much about it as I have no idea how modern trackers work. Is it related to tab targeting vs action combat?
September 12. 2022: Being naked can also be used to bring a skilled artisan to different freeholds... Don't summon family!
I'll be honest, I think you are the one missing the point.
My entire argument as to guild based trackers is how Intrepid can achieve their stated goal.
If you read that quote from Steven, their idea is to give players the tools in game that they need in order to be convinced to not use a third party tracker. Steven knows full well that they can't just say "don't use trackers" and expect people to not use them - the only way to achieve the goal of no third party trackers is to supply suitable first party tools.
My suggestion (guild based tracker, option on the guild level, only works within the guild, only gives data at the end of fighting) is the minimum viable product to achieve Steven's stated goal.
Realistically, the only major difference between my suggestion and Stevens (personal log that can be filter and analyze) is that mine works with your whole guild, but only with your guild.
The ability to look at this information on the guild level rather than the individual level is absolutely key.
Comments
Don't trust a word Noaani says look at his god damn profile picture.
Unlike you who worked on bad-player detection, I only used trackers long time ago. I am not up-to-date with modern trackers. All I can say is that I've seen players trying to be more efficient if you show them that you measure their performance.
Your statement is in contradiction with what I was told here
There is no alternative.
But you also kind of confirmed this possibility in this post when you said
and those who do not have access to it do so either slower, or not at all
So based on what you say, there are two ways to detect those who use trackers: speed and the "not at all" behavior, the reason of the failure.
The speed can be tracked for each player all the time, based on wiki: I do not see this as a tracking which starts only when that group formed and entered the raid but a longer pattern detection. As long as it needs to be.
You asked if the savants should be banned.
Banning from game should not happen unless the game is modified, plugins are used, botting etc
But what to do with them is also tied to what you said: "a lot of players will complain that they don't get "meaningful" rewards from high-end raids."
If we look at individual level, ethically, the savant deserves to be spared from negative effects and maybe even rewarded.
If trackers will be used anyway, using recordings/logs then the game has to react in a way or another. The amount of legendary tier resources and items flowing into the economy should be balanced at least to some degree. That has to happen without thinking why players are faster than expected.
In this case both savants and tracker users have the same effect onto the server.
So how do we deal with that? The decision seems to scale up the raid difficulty dynamically, by design.
That will limit the inflow of materials and at the same time attempting to avoid big RNG. You defeat the boss, you most likely get something. A small RNG will exist though according to wiki.
Right, I do not want to prevent the use of trackers.
Like people here, I also suggested integrating trackers into an MMO too long time ago. (was only one post though)
That doesn't mean that I was right back then or the situation these days is the same. It might still be a mistake on my side suggesting to add them now.
Many players already own a 2nd computer as we all upgrade constantly. I do not know how powerful that 2nd computer has to be. I am not sure how efficient a recording can be as it shows the perspective of one player only and only if he looks constantly around and can see all team members.
It might still be better to put together the combat logs which the game already wants to provide.
Of course things can change regarding the combat logs too, just as the deep ocean became a pvp area suddenly.
Clashing expectations can happen for many reasons. I've seen story elements being also a distraction, some want them some already have... Players have to learn to talk with each other before raids : ) That will not happen easily if random players join together.
I also see the "mixing oil and water" as a source of toxicity.
For me, also seeing guilds with tracker and without tracker in the same node where I "live" bothers me.
I may be in a guild but I will interact with players in that node.
The game changer aspect of AoC is that it removes global group finders and provides instead bulletin boards at node level. Multiple guilds will live in that node and might help each other in dungeons, raids, defending the node. Some guilds can be large some small. But the node brings them together.
Also players can have alts but all alts must be citizens of the same node. That's how the game is designed.
Alts can however be part of multiple guilds, even part of guilds which are spread over the entire map.
So the player not the alt will vote and get the option to use trackers or to deny being tracked by those who have trackers.
Regarding: why you feel that tracker access should be limited at all
I see fun in both ways of playing the game, with and without trackers.
Steven will get his option too, to see players without trackers going through the content.
Then regarding detection of trackers. Having them in game, the game can see easier the difference between how players with trackers play and the ones who vote against it play. Will also notice if some pretend that they have no trackers and use an external one as the data to compare is more reliable, assuming some players are honest.
Then you raised the competition problem. If a guild becomes stronger because gets sooner the legendary drops. Note that I say sooner not more of them.
Those guilds will be in different nodes. Each node will have a different relic specific to how the vote concluded.
Each relic can bring different benefits, to balance out differences between how players decided.
Or can influence drops in raids or raid difficulty. (The raid difficulty adjustment I mentioned above. According to wiki, will happen anyway dynamically. Might even disregard sudden low performance if statistically the player was marked as suspicious - with or without in-game trackers)
These relics can cushion out that some guilds will get these items a bit later and when all of them have the top tier items, then that adjustment can fade.
Is hard to say how and what to balance as exact data is not available, like how much stronger one side is related to the other. Especially when PvP is involved too.
There might be issues during the first 3 months after release until players start winning raids. But things will settle and players with strong opinions pro and against trackers can avoid each other by moving into the appropriate nodes. They will still interact in a way or another, as allies or foes.
I noticed the picture when I checked that tracker and how plugins work and if there is already a plugin for AoC or not. Apparently the ACT tool provides plugins in form of dll files. I don't like having on my PC executable code created by 3rd party unknown developers.
I have no idea how many players will defy the TOS either. With a declared interdiction of them, Steven might prevent them to even join the game.
But detecting players who are better than expected can be done. And the game can deny giving them drops.
Savants can also be a collateral damage, for the greater benefit of the community.
If you feel that you can be one of those very good players who can defeat a raid without trackers and be banned by mistake, then try to drink a beer or two before each raid.
And the game can even give rewards only to the lower half of those "too skilled" players who defeat the bosses.
If players cheat the game can cheat too.
It can happen that they will know and will not be able to prove the game is unfair without telling that they used a tracker. And those who don't use a tracker, they better start being nice citizen in their node and not rush to get legendary drops.
I really have the feeling that these extremely hard raids are there as traps to lure and see who has to be banned. And not for the non-tracker players.
If you don't want players to know what hps something has, or know what actual dps they are doing, then you need to limit information sent to the client from the server. This means no damage numbers or combat log. A lot of people wont like this because you essentially will never get feedback on how you are performing, or what build or attack order is actually doing more damage.
I'm not a game designer so i don't really know the exact limitations but I would assume that there are only a few bits of information that are actually required to be sent between server and client for gameplay. Again this might not be a practical solution, but if you want to make this game feature unhackable you need to do something like this.
Server to client:
Tell them when they have been hit and how much damage they have received, to update health bars.
Tell them whether or not their attacks hit the hitbox, to update animation frames regarding hits.
Client to server:
Tell the server what actions the player has taken, do the hit and damage calcs server side.
The more information the server sends to the client, the more open the game is to 3rd party apps intercepting that information and creating an addon out of it.
This thread is addictive, isn't it?
Trackers will still have more limited information, since they cant touch game files and will be banned if you do so, which that will be detected.
The trackers won't be as effective since it is not within the game already, and the game isn't being built around them and has action combat and not just tab (tab being very clear when you miss all attacks).
It is why they are trying to get in game trackers so they will be able to pull more information than normal, which in turn will also normalize 3rd party trackers and will be able to be enhanced with more information more than likely and eventually surpass first party ones.
The few people that are trying to convince people honestly can't be trusted. They are trying to word it in ways and not being actually honest. Rather then talking about how it make trackers as useless as possible they are trying to create weird arguments to say they need trackers like not trusting the developers and needing to check the game for bugs for example.
Yes. Please help.
Cause noaani is going to reply to everyone to try to convince them with bias and manipulation. Then a year from now say everyone wanted dps meters regardless of their answers.
"reply" means there are messages
As nooani said (and is easy to check) he won't answer if people don't speak.
The more you are speaking here, the more you make this topic go up, the more people will post in it, the more nooani will answer... Myself also never necroanimated this topic (or any other)...
But, you help a lot to have this topic alive, to allow us to share our opinion, and explanation, so kind of you
lmfao, literarily a few people will fight to keep this thread alive else it have been buried and come back up once in awhile.
You don't need to answer to everyone let people voice their thoughts and leave it at that, but we all know that won't happen Noaani needs to keep this thread alive and till respond any chance he gets.
You have my name and Mag's mixed up
@Xeeg
You don't need to update precise health to the client; you can just update the UI to change a certain amount, whether that's entirely accurate or not.
Time to kill (or abilities to kill) could be the only reliable metric and even then there's always variability of damage and possibly health & resistances between identical mobs.
Maybe a mob has crazy regen. It doesn't show it but at some point you may notice one's health tic up rather than down after half an hour of fighting these mobs. Then you know they heal or regen; but most healing show an animation. Thus it must be regen.
Some creatures may not show their health at all because they're literally made of stone and show no damage until they die.
All in all I don't think Intrepid or most studios can handle the burden of problem solving and creative design lmao. Too much nuance involved.
We are talking about entertainment activities, not entertaining.
This may seem the same thing to you, but it is not.
An entertainment activity is one which is primarily engaged with for entertainment. As such, activities such as working out dont fit, because the main reason most people have for engaging in them is fitness.
That doesnt mean YOU dont participate in said activity for enjoyment. In all honestly a single persons perspective is irrelevant here, as we are talking about activities, and as such we are talking about all peoples reason for engaging in said activity.
By the very nature of the word entertainment activities need to be perused for enjoyment. If an activity is persued primarily (by the collective of all people engaging in said activity) for any other reason, the activity is simply not entertainment.
It would seem, perhaps, that you assumed we were talking about things from an individual's perspective, rather than from the perspective of the activity. If we are going to look at classifying activities, you cant look at it from a personal perspective.
I thinknyouve lost sight of the context of comments at this point, and are just replying to snippets of posts in a somewhat angry demeanor.
I never said an MMO cant have races. In fact,both of the MMO's I have played the most had races in them.
That doesnt mean they are racing games - which is what I said. We use genres in discussion as it allows people to quickly understand. This is why genres exist - not just in games but in everything.
Again, we talk about MMO's in the context of MMO's so that people who have played MMO's understand easier.
As to you seeming to be pissed off at me for wanting ashes to be like some existing MMO's- that isnt a *me* thing, it is an Intrepid thing. They want Ashes to be reminiscent of older MMO's - hell they were even wearing "Make MMO's Great Again" hats in the early live streams.
I'm here because I want to play what Intepid want Ashes to be.
I am.unsure why you are here, as you clearly do not want to play whatIntrepid want Ashes to be.
You did no such thing.
In fact, you still haven't got your head around everything a tracker can and can not do, and what players like me are able to do with them.
You also have not even bothered going over my main point that is "as it stands, we have trackers I the game that are unlimited in function, my suggestion places limits on them, including not being able to use them on someone not in your guild".
In arguing AGAINST my point here, you are arguing FOR unlimited combat trackers, because I am arguing AGAINST unlimited trackers, and offering up the only solution that will ser that happen.
No.
If you want to get in to a discussion as to what MMO's should and should not do, you should first of all educate yourself on what they have and have not done, what did and did not work, and the reasoning behind all of that.
All you are doing now is ranting about something you have no knowledge of, everyone reading can see it. I have no incentive at all to assist you.
If making a third party tracker that worked on others were trivial, I would agree with you that there would be no reason at all to make a first party tracker. Indeed, I would never have even suggested it.
Now, to be clear, making a tracker that only tracks the user is trivial - even without the game having a log file.
Getting that individual user tracker and setting it up on a server, asking each member of a group or raid to log in to said server, that is also fairly easy.
This is the base level of what will happen in Ashes in the absolute worst case scenario. This may well see people not invited to guilds (and potentially even groups) without being willing to log in to that tracker server. As long as that discussion happens on Discord and not in the game, there is nothing any developer can do about it (not even with an FFXIV style "trackers are like Fight Club" rule).
However, when I talk about how Ashes will have trackers, the above is not what I am talking about. I am talking about a small number of people that both able and are in a position to be able to make a tracker that works on your guild or raid in Ashes. They will make these trackers because - like me - they KNOW that a game is better off if players have access to trackers. To be perfectly clear, there are only about a dozen or so people in the world that fit the above criteria - I am trying to be as vague as I can here, but I have talked about exactly this with a few posters on these forums, they know what I am talking about.
If a first party tracker is added to the game, that reason they have for making a tracker simply goes away. The game will be better for having a tracker, but the game has a tracker, so there is no need to develop a third party tracker.
So, if those dozen or so people from above are convinced that Ashes doesn't need a third party tracker because the game has a suitable first party tracker, then third party trackers that can track others are not likely to ever actually exist for Ashes.
Those trackers that can only track the user will still exist (people can patch one together in about half an hour). However, I doubt people would then set up servers to run them, as there wouldn't be much point, and the work/cost involved wouldn't be worth it if an in game tracker were available.
Additionally, as I have said earlier, it is within the scope of a piece of softwares ToS to say that any function of that software can not be reproduced outside of that software. This could be taken to mean that you can't use a third party combat tracker if the game ships with a combat tracker.
If the game had a tracker, and included language like this in the ToS, I can tell you now that I wouldn't want to be the one to test out that could to see if it was legally sound. I would simply not run a third party tracker in that game - assuming the first party tracker had all necessary functionality (if it didn't running a third party tracker to provide said functionality wouldn't be against the ToS, as you are not reproducing a function, you are performing a new function).
Edit, as to this comment It is as it is because a while back, some regular posters were commenting about how they were somewhat annoyed that I had not changed my forum name to have a capital first letter (those that have been around here long enough will know), and then when I changed it, they then commented that I should also change from the default picture.
So I did. It was right around the time this thread was created/merged, and so I used the icon of my preferred third party tracker. If you want to look in to it any more than that, you are welcome to do so. I've had people suggest that I much be the "owner" of ACT or something in order to use their icon here (nope, copy/paste works great), and so I must just be posting here to try and get more people to use ACT so that I somehow make more money.
I assume you are smart enough to realize that 1, ACT is free, so even if I were the "owner" of it, there is no money to be made and 2, if I were the owner of it and were trying to make money from more users, Ashes not having a first party tracker would see more people look for a third party one. As such, I am actually arguing for there to be fewer people in Ashes using ACT.
But as I said, surely you are smart enough to realize that.
I'm literally not reading past your first 2 lines.
You are getting what you deserve, to be honest.
The first interaction you and I had on these forums was in relation to your idea on inspect rather than a tracker. I was overly polite (out of character for me) in pointing out to you that your suggestion may be a valid thing to add to the game, but it isn't a replacement for trackers as you claimed.
You then argued that point with me. Later on, we learned that you didn't even know what a tracker is actually even used for - yet you had argued with me in relation to your suggestion.
Then we have the whole debacle of your post formatting. Not just the OP of that other thread, but your insistence to use spoiler tags for quotes which is a needless hassle to anyone that may be reading while doing some other task.
You don't deserve to have people engage with you at this point. You can earn back that right, and people will begin to engage with properly you once again, but in order for that to happen you kind of need to realize that you are the one here that doesn't know what they are talking about in relation to MMO's, and if someone that does know what they are talking about corrects you, you need to simply accept that correction (don't worry, if the person that corrected you was wrong, someone will correct them).
An example of this would be the above suggestion you had in relation to inspect. You had a suggestion for an alternative to combat trackers, someone that has been using a combat tracker for more than two decades informs you that your suggestion will not replace combat trackers. The appropriate thing for you to do is to accept that, and then either drop your idea and discussion on it, or attempt to modify your idea so that it covers the shortfalls it had.
I mean, the suggestion of a guild based tracker wasn't just my idea. I agreed with someone else early on in this thread that said a built in tracker would be a good idea, and then as people pointed out issues with it, I came up with ways around that system. People said they didn't want anyone to track them, I said cool, the tracker should be opt in. People said group leaders will require people to opt in to be bought along on content, I said cool, make it opt in at the guild level (you should be joining a guild with like minded players - if you do not want to use a combat tracker, you should not be in a guild with people that do, and vice versa).
Now on Ignore
All you ignoring me means is that I can point out the flaws in your statements without needing to get in to a worthless debate with you.
And keep in mind, the bulk of my posts are for the benefit of other readers. If someone says something untrue, I will post a rebuttal for others that are reading - not for the person that posted something untrue. Generally speaking, if someone is ready to proclaim untruths as being fact, I am not going to be able to persuade them otherwise - but I may be able to prevent someone else from assume that untruth is true.
Doesn't that depend on client/server information exchange? If the client only tells the server that the players did X attack at Y location, and the server does all the calculations, the client never has to know exactly how much damage was applied.
The server could just send back something to indicate that u hit them, and a status "unwounded, slightly wounded, heavily wounded, critically wounded" of the enemy.
I'd be both 'okay with this' and sort of 'surprised that is what anyone wanted'.
Specific damage done doesn't matter to me when I'm using parsers, but similarly having to just 'trust that you're doing more damage now after X change' as a generality is kind of weird.
Plus, it would just make people use 'PvP' for the tests.
BDO already does this (if you aren't familiar with how to get a specific additional set of data), but I feel like that led to more harm than good since games almost always apply some sort of scaling or 'hidden aspects' of a formula somewhere.
If Ashes has simplistic damage formulas, that'd surprise me, but I guess it wouldn't be too weird.
A log file is a text file the game creates that has, well, a log of everything. This is where trackers like ACT get their data from. It is why they are able to function without needing to interact with the game client at all - the client produces a file for ACT, and ACT only interacts with that file.
Ashes will not have a log file, but we do know it will have a combat log. As such, in order to get a text file for ACT to read, all you need to do is turn that combat log in to a text file, and point ACT at it.
All we really need the game to provide in order to be able to do this easily is floating combat feedback, which again is something we know we will have.
Developers of Western MMO's aren't usually keen on keeping players in the dark as to what is happening - this includes Intrepid. We can expect a reasonable amount of information to be sent to the client.
Have you used trackers before?
Steven's intention is to reduce, not to make completely impossible the use of trackers
See https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Addons and on the same page
You may find ways to achieve more but for practical reasons that is not the intention the developers have.
You are missing the point, that is clearly in reference that its impossible to stop people doing everything but make it so it isn't a normal thing as it is not desired to be.
You need to simply go by what is the meaning of what they want not with how you can try to change the meaning. "They are not allowed"
Of course we know they are not allowed.
But it also indicates that they are aware that they cannot prevent 100% of them just like they cannot prevent bots or gold sellers on 3rd party sites.
I understand that for now they want to make the life of those who use trackers difficult.
And players to convince eachother to stop using them because that is what Steven wants. That is the purpose of the thread.
It will make the risk not worth it and not talked about much or used.
They can't be lax on it or things grow in time its better to make your statements clear and for others to see it. If it isn't clear then you get people like ones in new world creating a tracker for resources and knowing when they spawn exactly on the servers and where as well. People will always get out of hand to get an advantage over other players with tools out of game.
You described in-game enforcement, by making the combat designed to not be effective. That might be the other way, more practical than not giving combat loggs at all and limiting data from server to client as @Xeeg seems to suggest.
I cannot say much about it as I have no idea how modern trackers work. Is it related to tab targeting vs action combat?
I'll be honest, I think you are the one missing the point.
My entire argument as to guild based trackers is how Intrepid can achieve their stated goal.
If you read that quote from Steven, their idea is to give players the tools in game that they need in order to be convinced to not use a third party tracker. Steven knows full well that they can't just say "don't use trackers" and expect people to not use them - the only way to achieve the goal of no third party trackers is to supply suitable first party tools.
My suggestion (guild based tracker, option on the guild level, only works within the guild, only gives data at the end of fighting) is the minimum viable product to achieve Steven's stated goal.
Realistically, the only major difference between my suggestion and Stevens (personal log that can be filter and analyze) is that mine works with your whole guild, but only with your guild.
The ability to look at this information on the guild level rather than the individual level is absolutely key.