DPS Meter Megathread

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Guli

dps meter would be nice, same type as Gw2 ty

Ludullu

Noaani wrote: »

What will happen (feel free to save this to quote in a few years) is that they will make content that 500+ people will fight over, and since the "kill" only goes to the raid that is awarded loot rights, that means only 40 people will "get the kill".

Yeah, that's my expectation as well. I'd just hope that they clarify this point so as to not needlessly attract more players such as yourself. Would just be fairer towards such players. This would be completely in line with the L2ness of the game's design in this relation too.

I also doubt their ability to keep adding hundreds if not thousands of top quality bosses into the game too, so even if they did go for the "proper" difficulty, I don't think they'd be able to keep up with people coming from EQ2 or FF11 (cause Azhe said it was somewhat similar to EQ in this respect).

Noaani

NiKr wrote: »

I also doubt their ability to keep adding hundreds if not thousands of top quality bosses into the game too, so even if they did go for the "proper" difficulty, I don't think they'd be able to keep up with people coming from EQ2 or FF11 (cause Azhe said it was somewhat similar to EQ in this respect).

There is something of a misnomer here.

A game like EQ2 has thousands of boss mobs, for sure. However, it only has a handful that are "top quality".

That is all you need.

While some people think that players like me are asking for the world from game developers, we are really only expecting 2 or 3 encounters a year targeted at us.

Sure, a raiding cycle will have about 60 - 70 boss mobs. However, assuming the developers have done an adequate job in fostering a raid community, 95% of that content will be for 50%+ of the player base. It is only a few bosses that could be considered just for top end players - and even then the next tier of players below will probably still run that content at the start of the next combat cycle.

A specific boss in EQ2 was only actually killed by 2 guilds game wide before the release of the next expansion. Within a month of that new expansion though, over 100 guilds had killed it.

So, it really is something of a misunderstanding that people have when they talk about top end content, and a game developers ability to keep top end raiders happy.

Solvryn

NiKr wrote: »

Solvryn wrote: »

Devs will always decide how difficult their game is, which I'm hoping for advanced AI.

Yeah, except, as Noaani likes to say, that decision will depend on the top players. Intrepid have already (allegedly) decided on the difficulty. There'll supposedly be content that only <10% of the playerbase can beat. That seems somewhat difficult. But it only does so to the normal player. To a player like Noaani or Azherae, I'd assume, that content will at best be somewhere below their favorite top quality pve.

So a theoretical guild (or a dozen of them) with people like those two can easily clear anything that Intrepid would find difficult. And those guilds would do so with the help of trackers (even if Intrepid say that they're banned). And Intrepid would now have a hugeass dilemma in front of them: do they keep making even harder content to keep those top players in the game or do they say "ya see, there's your <10% who managed to beat it! We succeeded in our goal".

If they go the first route, they're now concentrating a ton of their dev time on coming up with unique and super hard content that only those top guilds will be able to clear. And this will be repeated for each new content release. And Intrepid will either need to release new abilities or gear to help everyone else beat the last top difficulty content or they can say "fuck you" to 90% of the playerbase and keep the power creep at a slow pace. There's a third way of "let's make a ton of easier content too, so that 90% can play as well", but at some point you'll hit the devtime limit wall and will need to choose a path.

If they go the second route, they keep the difficulty at what they consider a perfect lvl, but lose the top 10% of players in the process (cause they got bored). And now there's a question of "will the other players follow them", because majority of normal people follow trends. And if there's a new trend from the trendy people (the strong dudes at the top and the content creators that work with them) of "we're leaving cause this shit is boring now" - there's quite a high chance that the majority will start doubting whether the game is really fun, which usually destabilizes the community and snowballs to "death of the game" sooner or later.

So overall we have a choice of "power creep the fuck out of your game if you don't want to lose players" and "disregard the top players that you attracted with a silly promise, which can potentially lead to failure". Imo both are kinda bad, so what would be the solutions?

The easiest solution would be to backtrack the difficulty promise as soon as possible. You'll lose some nerds now, but you won't risk losing a ton of people on release. And we all know how popular WoW was back in the day, due to it being waaaay easier than the competition, so this might be a winning strat. The other solution is "ban meters" and pretend that top players won't just still use them (the ff14 way). But, as Noaani says, Intrepid would still need to balance their bosses around the people who'll most likely use meters, so the ban wouldn't matter either way, which just brings us back to sped up power creep.

Now my personal solution to this is to tell those top players "just don't use meters 4Head", but I understand that this would the same as them telling me to shut the fuck up about corruption balancing, so it all would be a pointless discussion either way.

So the only true solution imo is Intrepid removing the promised difficulty from the game, but I somehow doubt that Steven would do that. As I see it rn, we'll either get a game that lied to top pvers and lose those pvers in the process or we'll hit a pretty fast power creep within the first 1-2 years of the game. I hope I'm just being too pessimistic here, but I really don't see another result coming from this.

Ashes was never for the instanced raider or the PVP arena player, people should not hold out hope for it. The best we can get is dynamic AI that creates challenging fights in the open world which you compound on top of PvP to create an intense PvX experience, which is where some of the difficulty will lie.

*If* they can create a good and meaningful AI, then it'll be just as much tactics as it will be short term strategy in those scenarios, so DPS will matter, but it'll be just as much as the mechanical execution as it will be the preparation.

Keep in mind, Intrepid can also tie boss spawns and drops to the other systems that take place, so you may have to war and change the map in terms of nodes and nodes levels to even get to certain bosses.

Tack on long term and short-term strategy from logistical operations and apparatus' and that's going to be what Ashes is in a nutshell.

You have to *get* to the end game, I don't think it'll be as easy as people think.

Ludullu

Noaani wrote: »

A specific boss in EQ2 was only actually killed by 2 guilds game wide before the release of the next expansion. Within a month of that new expansion though, over 100 guilds had killed it.

This is what I was talking about though. Say they keep a half-year cycle of expansions. Each expac would need at least a few new top lvl bosses, right? And the previous top bosses would have (or at least should be) to be beatable by more people, either through gear or new abilities (cause decreasing difficulty would probably be frowned upon).

And with meter use, those new top lvl bosses would have to be even harder, cause more people would have better gear and more people would've progressed in their gameplay skill. So you have ever-growing difficulty and ever-growing power creep on a pretty big scale.

Maybe you can avoid direct relation between difficulty and gear/char stats, but unless I misunderstood you, that's kinda how it was in EQ2, right? New bosses would give new gear that would let people farm new bosses. But even if you do avoid stat-dependence, how long would the design uniqueness last in the race against the meter-supported groups. There's only so much stuff you can add to a boss that would keep it super difficult w/o making it impossible.

Rng mechanics could probably do that, but at that point how effective would a meter even be, if the boss has enough rng on it to create completely new encounters each and every time.

Solvryn wrote: »

Ashes was never for the instanced raider or the PVP arena player, people should not hold out hope for it. The best we can get is dynamic AI that creates challenging fights in the open world which you compound on top of PvP to create an intense PvX experience, which is where some of the difficulty will lie

And, as I'm sure Noaani would tell you, that pvx experience would be considered a trash lvl difficulty for any pve-centric player. And only pve-centric players care about meters to a ridiculous degree. Sure, some pvpers might care about it to check for builds and stuff, but 1v1 pvp will be RPS and any group pvp could vary from 8v8 to 8vX, at which point your meter wouldn't really matter, so the impact gets diluted a bit too much imo.

But the main point would still be "the difficulty is too low, so top pvers are gone, which might pull other players with them". And even before that, if pvx is what's bringing the difficulty - Intrepid would've kiiiinda lied? Yes, effectively it'd be what Noaani described, but I'd assume that most pvers would just call Steven on his bullshit at that point and call him a liar.

Solvryn

NiKr wrote: »

Solvryn wrote: »

Ashes was never for the instanced raider or the PVP arena player, people should not hold out hope for it. The best we can get is dynamic AI that creates challenging fights in the open world which you compound on top of PvP to create an intense PvX experience, which is where some of the difficulty will lie

And, as I'm sure Noaani would tell you, that pvx experience would be considered a trash lvl difficulty for any pve-centric player. And only pve-centric players care about meters to a ridiculous degree. Sure, some pvpers might care about it to check for builds and stuff, but 1v1 pvp will be RPS and any group pvp could vary from 8v8 to 8vX, at which point your meter wouldn't really matter, so the impact gets diluted a bit too much imo.

But the main point would still be "the difficulty is too low, so top pvers are gone, which might pull other players with them". And even before that, if pvx is what's bringing the difficulty - Intrepid would've kiiiinda lied? Yes, effectively it'd be what Noaani described, but I'd assume that most pvers would just call Steven on his bullshit at that point and call him a liar.

Yeah, but I already said that the game isn't for the end game raider, especially if they don't enjoy PvP.

This game is for those who truly enjoy PvX and logistics. Not even the arena or battlegrounds player will play this game.

Maybe the answer is to restrict and filter heavy amounts of statistical data and make the guessing that much harder. Who knows, we have to see how challenging the AI is.

Azherae

NiKr wrote: »

Rng mechanics could probably do that, but at that point how effective would a meter even be, if the boss has enough rng on it to create completely new encounters each and every time.

In MY experience this is a misunderstanding of what Trackers are for.

Trackers in FFXI do two things.

1. Help you confirm that your build/gearset is achieving the goal you built it for.
2. Make sure everyone is on the same page without having to save and scroll through every combat log (game provided) for long battles.

While an FFXI boss is not exactly 'a new encounter every time', because just as Steven says, you need to be able to plan your builds, and your team composition, beyond that you can get some wild streaks. I believe I've mentioned it before but some days Jormungand acts like a Mage, constantly using AoE and blasting out paralysis, and some days it acts like a brawler Warrior, attacking an insane amount, building lots of TP, and shredding the Alliance with TP attacks such as Spike Flail and the hate reset Horrid Roar.

People literally argued about the best way to defeat it because group A had a long streak of 'Mage Jormy' and groups B and C mostly met 'Warrior Jormy'.

So the Tracker in that case would be telling you things like 'If I build to counter the Dragon by adding more Ice Resistance, and I think that I will still do enough DPS because I don't think it is THAT evasive, am I correct?'

And similarly 'If I build for more DPS and accuracy to make sure that I keep hitting it, will I still fail because the rate of the Paralysis Proc is too high for me to use all that Accuracy and Damage?'

We're talking about a fight that takes 30 minutes, in which some characters perform 900+ melee attacks. A lot of the more 'casual' Tracker users that I'm aware of, this is what it is for.

You can't test a change in the accuracy of your build 'on Jormungand' by fighting a dummy/scarecrow. You can't work out 'how often out of my 900 attacks was I paralyzed' without spending more time number crunching than you do playing the game unless you have a certain specific weird 'skill'.

So I guess people could theoretically just 'guess and hope', particularly because they could be attacked mid combat anyway. But if builds are meaningful, and the game has Acc and Eva aspects that matter in this way, the amount of frustration from 'not parsing' will often change the behaviour of many players.

RNG build stats -> Tracker usage. There's a clear benefit, almost always.

Noaani

NiKr wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

A specific boss in EQ2 was only actually killed by 2 guilds game wide before the release of the next expansion. Within a month of that new expansion though, over 100 guilds had killed it.

This is what I was talking about though. Say they keep a half-year cycle of expansions. Each expac would need at least a few new top lvl bosses, right? And the previous top bosses would have (or at least should be) to be beatable by more people, either through gear or new abilities (cause decreasing difficulty would probably be frowned upon).

They won't maintain a 6 month expansion cycle.

A 6 month DLC cycle, sure, but a cycle like this would probably need 4 DLC's to equal a full expansion (EQ2 expansions were basically full game sized - proper expansions rather than the DLC that is common these days)

If a game had a 6 month DLC cycle, a new top end boss would be expected every 2 DLC's - as opposed to expecting two every DLC.

If the game has actual good content (as in, best in the genre), they could get away with one top end content every three DLC's.

The key then (realistically with both) is that the raid content other than that top end encounter needs to still be interesting.

Noaani

Solvryn wrote: »

Yeah, but I already said that the game isn't for the end game raider, especially if they don't enjoy PvP.

This game is for those who truly enjoy PvX and logistics. Not even the arena or battlegrounds player will play this game.

Maybe the answer is to restrict and filter heavy amounts of statistical data and make the guessing that much harder. Who knows, we have to see how challenging the AI is.

While I agree with most this, I have a few points I want to make.

First, I've yet to come across someone in a top end raiding guild that didn't also enjoy PvP. I'm sure they exist, I've just never met such a person.

Most top end players in general just enjoy a challenge. Top end PvE players know (as I have said many times) that you can't have PvE challenge in the presence of PvP. That doesn't mean we don't like PvP, it doesn't mean we don't like PvX - it just means that we love the challenge that can literally only ever be had by developers creating intestinally difficult content for players to consume in the absence of other factors.

Second, there is no inherent reason this game can't be for gamers that enjoy good PvE, the game has all the pieces in place other than the desire. That desire is more important than any one of the individual pieces.

Third, the idea of restricting data won't do anything to people that want a tracker. There are always ways of obtaining that data, though I won't go in to those methods here.

Ludullu

Azherae wrote: »

RNG build stats -> Tracker usage. There's a clear benefit, almost always.

Then I guess I had unrealistic expectations of rng within boss fights. I was thinking more along the lines of "there's so damn many variables in the fight that the best your tracker could tell you is that your rotation is good (or maybe your party's)". But if that's an impossible design within the current dev ability, then I guess meters are absolutely unavoidable.

Noaani wrote: »

They won't maintain a 6 month expansion cycle.

A 6 month DLC cycle, sure, but a cycle like this would probably need 4 DLC's to equal a full expansion (EQ2 expansions were basically full game sized - proper expansions rather than the DLC that is common these days)

If a game had a 6 month DLC cycle, a new top end boss would be expected every 2 DLC's - as opposed to expecting two every DLC.

If the game has actual good content (as in, best in the genre), they could get away with one top end content every three DLC's.

The key then (realistically with both) is that the raid content other than that top end encounter needs to still be interesting.

So say one top boss a year. How long would that have to be unsolvable to satisfy top pvers? 2 months? 6? Obviously in the context of them using trackers. And whatever the answer is, how long would other bosses have to take to get solved for pvers not to get bored? And how many of those would you need to have in weekly rotation to consider the game's content fulfilling? 7 a week or more?

If Intrepid utilizes UE5's dev tools to the max, I'd assume they could pump out enough new land masses to fit a ton of dungeons in it, so that they'd have enough instanced dungeons to provide truly hardcore pve content within them. Say they manage to create bosses that take ~3 weeks of daily attempts to solve. And say they add 8 such bosses each dlc, with a multi-month boss every 2 dlcs. Would that be enough content? That is if the quality itself is satisfactory.

Noaani

NiKr wrote: »

So say one top boss a year. How long would that have to be unsolvable to satisfy top pvers? 2 months? 6?

If we are talking about content being done properly, it should take a top end guild a few months to even reach that encounter.

Imagine the DLC has a raid zone with 15 bosses, the last one being the top end boss we are talking about. We'll also assume this raid zone has a lockout timer of a week (basically, you can attempt this zone one time per week - you can wipe many times in that attempt, but once the attempt is over, that is it until the following week).

A top end guild in this scenario would expect to kill 3 or 4 of those bosses on the first night, and collect data on the next boss. From there, the remaining 10 or so bosses should be going down one every two weeks or so, with a loop of collecting data, analyzing that data during the week to form a plan, and then executing that plan the following week. Sometimes you will get that spot on and the kill will come the following week, but more often than not that first week will see you come across some kind of change to the encounter (adds at 50% or some such), and require a new plan to be formulated during that following week, and perhaps the week after.

This means it could well be expected to be 20 weeks or so before even arriving at that actual difficult boss. Keep in mind that all of that content can be assumed to be content for the 50% - it isn't made for top end raiders specifically.

From there though, it may well be a further 10 - 12 weeks before you get a kill on that final boss - meaning it isn't unreasonable to assume it could take 32 weeks from content release until first kill of the boss. The thing is, an encounter isn't suddenly rendered boring content by guilds that have killed it, and in fact I have had encounters that have taken well over a month of effort before getting a second kill (no changes to the mob, it was just truly hard).

Now, to be sure, I would expect there to be other raid content in the game that is being run on other nights of the week, and in that 32 or so week period I would expect to see other raid content released - just not necessarily with a top end encounter, which is what we are talking about here.

So basically, developers should (imo) be releasing interesting and varied raid content for the masses every 3 - 6 months, but once a year that content release should be capped off with a truly top end encounter - and this will keep most top end raiders content.

Azherae

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

RNG build stats -> Tracker usage. There's a clear benefit, almost always.

Then I guess I had unrealistic expectations of rng within boss fights. I was thinking more along the lines of "there's so damn many variables in the fight that the best your tracker could tell you is that your rotation is good (or maybe your party's)". But if that's an impossible design within the current dev ability, then I guess meters are absolutely unavoidable.

Wait, no, that's not what I meant.

You CAN do that. People will complain. I would assume a lot of them. It's not that FFXI doesn't have these, it's that they are impossible to properly prepare for.

They make really nice mid-tier content for exactly this reason. The sort of person who doesn't want to prepare much, who just wants to have an average experience, who isn't looking for the type of challenge where they gather together a bunch of top players (or alternately, try to do it with fewer because it's a good way to get a benefit out of shorter play sessions).

That leads to an easy situation where the top end hardest thing is 'scripted' and the mid-tier single-group fights are perhaps Gudanna-type.

I don't think anyone cares if a mid-tier single group content can 'randomly be easy'. People will probably care if 'the first kill of X happens because it literally doesn't spawn with certain abilities that were the only things stopping the third-strongest guild on the server'.

But aside from all that...

Once again, the 'tell you that your rotation is good' is often the ONLY thing the Tracker is FOR in FF (except that there are no rotations). The randomness is then the reason you need it. I don't need a Tracker in FF but my friends do, and I don't need a Tracker in almost any other game because anything other than 'bugged ability not working as intended' I can figure out what to do mid-battle, and my friends don't need it because in that situation I'm 'command'.

If we fought a 'Gudanna' and 'just couldn't seem to beat it when we normally do' for no clear reason, the Tracker would be there to tell us 'It spawned with a large Evasion Buff to go with its random White Magic', or I'd just notice, but it's quite possible my friends would be upset because they wouldn't notice.

Bobsyns

I personally think DPS meters are Ok as long as you are the only one that can see them.
If everyone can see them - that makes the player's experience of the Majority really really bad, since they don't really care that much and the Hardcore gamers will always try to blame people over numbers instead of actually focusing what it's in their control.
That being said DPS meters will have negative impact overall shifting the focus from immersion and decision making and just in general having fun with the boys - to one dimensional Numbers game and incentivize the blame game.
Before the "Party/Raid leaders" say a word that they need "DPS meter to know who does more damage and who doesn't" I really want to tell you if You are good Leader you don't need numbers, because being a Leader in 98% of the cases is based on Psychology, Mental Strength and Concentration.
It has nothing to do with Mathematics.

Also DPS meter isn't at all always accurate since players aren't straight forward sitting in one spot spamming buttons for absolute maximum damage done.
You have to account avoiding getting killed etc. There is so many things aside from DPS check that makes you a good party member or a bad one.
So that means don't give opportunity for people to circumvent everything and using DPS meter to play a Blame game.

If DPS meter is made that You are the only person who can see it and serves as Feature for the people who care about those numbers - they can turn it On for themselves only.

Bobsyns

One more note:
DPS meters only serve delivering some flat data in a final form without giving any details of why said person did more or less of said numbers.
There is no positivity out of DPS meter system.
Only gain is that neckbeards and ego players can brag about something and feel better for themselves Personally.
In an MMO game the major impact from DPS meters is negative. This meter isn't going to gauge your Fun factor and that's what most people play games to begin with - FUN.

Numbers does not contribute in a positive manner to the Fun factor, more often than not contributes in a negative manner to the Fun factor.
So the real question is - will this be a Fun game to play, or a Numbers game to play.

Ludullu

Noaani wrote: »

This means it could well be expected to be 20 weeks or so before even arriving at that actual difficult boss. Keep in mind that all of that content can be assumed to be content for the 50% - it isn't made for top end raiders specifically.

Would it be though? If the difficulty is high enough for top end dudes to take a week or two of proper prep to clear a single boss, any non-meter non-hardcore group would probably take months on that single boss (probably even if they look up how to beat it).

And with, say, 15 of these getting added every year, majority of players would never catch up. And if the game provides gear that lets even the 50% clear this, that would mean that the power creep got high enough to trivialize that hardcore content. Which imo is just too damn fast.

Noaani wrote: »

Now, to be sure, I would expect there to be other raid content in the game that is being run on other nights of the week, and in that 32 or so week period I would expect to see other raid content released - just not necessarily with a top end encounter, which is what we are talking about here.

That other content would probably be completely trivial for those top players, right? Otherwise those 50%s wouldn't be able to clear enough content. And I'd assume that trivial content would get real fucking boring if it was the same daily bosses, right? So the game would probably need a few hundred higher quality bosses to provide at least some variety for several group types of people.

And considering gear progress, each dlc would probably need to add several hundred new ones. And I personally don't see any current dev company keeping up with that kind of pace. Maybe UE5 can help out with that, which would be great, but will have to wait till there's way more UE5 mmos out there.

Azherae wrote: »

Once again, the 'tell you that your rotation is good' is often the ONLY thing the Tracker is FOR in FF (except that there are no rotations). The randomness is then the reason you need it.

This is why I'd be fine with a dummy that helps you perfect your rotation, so then you know your limit and will have to figure out how your limit matches up with your current encounter.

But I also support a good combat log and I understand that people will just write their own parsers for it (or use act I guess), so no matter how much I might be against the increased pace of content clearing that meters bring, I understand that they're completely inevitable in the context of "players have the info to know what's happening during a fight". And I want players to have that, because otherwise it's a feelbad situation.

Guess this is the biggest contradiction with my current views

Mag7spy

Noaani wrote: »

Mag7spy wrote: »

If they have already stated game is not going to allow third party add ons, them talking about difficulty is not going to be based on that.

You still seem to not be getting it.

It seems perhaps you are unaware that developers actually never know what kind of power level top end players are going to have. They make the game, but players very quickly come to understand it better than the developers do. We take advantage of things developers never considered, combine effects and classes in ways developers didn't foresee.

Literally the only way developers have of seeing how hard a new piece of content will be is to put it on live and see how hard players in top end guilds find it.

Based on the above, would you please explain to me, good sir, how Intrepid are going to fine tune content to be a serious challenge to players, but without taking combat trackers in to account, when they have no means of telling who is and who is not using combat trackers?

It is worth pointing out that the tracker I have right now connects to a server, so I can get everyone in my guild/raid to join the same server. Rather than parse each individual player locally, all clients connected to the server are collated in to a single log file which is then simply run through ACT.

I'm going to keep this short, if devs are saying content can only be complete by 10% of people and they balance difficulty overtime this point doesn't mean anything. You are talking about a faction of a faction that is going to be far below 10% the more hoops needed to be jumped through int order to cheat and advert the rules of the system. Both of less people will do it, and it will be easier to take action against certain people if people within notify what is going on.

A tiny faction isn't going to be the main amount of people at the end of the day so that won't change balance of what the devs are doing.

Azherae

NiKr wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

This means it could well be expected to be 20 weeks or so before even arriving at that actual difficult boss. Keep in mind that all of that content can be assumed to be content for the 50% - it isn't made for top end raiders specifically.

Would it be though? If the difficulty is high enough for top end dudes to take a week or two of proper prep to clear a single boss, any non-meter non-hardcore group would probably take months on that single boss (probably even if they look up how to beat it).

And with, say, 15 of these getting added every year, majority of players would never catch up. And if the game provides gear that lets even the 50% clear this, that would mean that the power creep got high enough to trivialize that hardcore content. Which imo is just too damn fast.

Noaani wrote: »

Now, to be sure, I would expect there to be other raid content in the game that is being run on other nights of the week, and in that 32 or so week period I would expect to see other raid content released - just not necessarily with a top end encounter, which is what we are talking about here.

That other content would probably be completely trivial for those top players, right? Otherwise those 50%s wouldn't be able to clear enough content. And I'd assume that trivial content would get real fucking boring if it was the same daily bosses, right? So the game would probably need a few hundred higher quality bosses to provide at least some variety for several group types of people.

And considering gear progress, each dlc would probably need to add several hundred new ones. And I personally don't see any current dev company keeping up with that kind of pace. Maybe UE5 can help out with that, which would be great, but will have to wait till there's way more UE5 mmos out there.

Azherae wrote: »

Once again, the 'tell you that your rotation is good' is often the ONLY thing the Tracker is FOR in FF (except that there are no rotations). The randomness is then the reason you need it.

This is why I'd be fine with a dummy that helps you perfect your rotation, so then you know your limit and will have to figure out how your limit matches up with your current encounter.

But I also support a good combat log and I understand that people will just write their own parsers for it (or use act I guess), so no matter how much I might be against the increased pace of content clearing that meters bring, I understand that they're completely inevitable in the context of "players have the info to know what's happening during a fight". And I want players to have that, because otherwise it's a feelbad situation.

Guess this is the biggest contradiction with my current views

Relative to the content release part:

Weaker content can still be a puzzle, especially when the game doesn't have large power creep in terms of Damage stats leading directly to output, which is exactly what Ashes plans to be. The groups I've been in and know of 'solve this problem' differently, by splitting up the raid or running the lower tier content on those weeks and times where everyone can't get organized.

So you actually get the situation where the Mid Tier bosses are 'Top End Content' for the Mid Tier players, but they are the 'fun off-week content' for the Top Tier players. The thing you do with half the team or less when your main tank's got a wedding to go to or something.

The issue is just of content flow itself. There's no 'raiding scene' if there's no time where the whole Raid Group has to come together and give it their all, but the mid content isn't the thing you run 'at your full power'. You use it to do things like test entirely new builds, build up synergy and camraderie with new recruits, etc. Note that most people will do this only because the content is known to be simple. When they have already established themselves as one of the top groups by taking down or being the closest to taking down the big one.

Relative to the dummy:

I don't play games where the dummy would matter, because again, your moment-to-moment reactive stuff changes as soon as 'Jormungand' does. There is no 'rotation'. The Tracker is just there to give the statistical part. The argument used by some, that 'numbers shouldn't matter as much if the game is good', I'm gonna be that person.

Those people are nowhere near top end. Yeah, I said it. If you play this type of MMO, and you somehow think that your physical skill is going to be the thing that matters enough so that you don't need the statistical output of your hitrate or 'figuring out which moments your target has some sort of hidden-ish front guard', you're not good enough to be concerned.

The physical skill of top-end gamers in games like BDO and Tera, especially on things they actually practice, is so high relative to the game requirements that they hit the ceiling for that really early in. I'm fine with games that have a low 'physical twitch skill' ceiling, but anyone who argues that the game should have more of that in order to 'make the Trackers less important' has either never risen to the top 5% of skill in a game or isn't referring to games where the Accuracy stat has any real meaning.

There is no 'rotation' for Katzvariak or Nouver in BDO, you adapt and react what you are doing every 2-3 seconds, if even that.

But BDO contains an Accuracy stat and it is possible for my attacks to miss either of these despite me moving perfectly correctly, so if BDO was a serious game, I'd absolutely throw my general accuracy into the parser to find out if I should build more Accuracy or drop some for more damage. My physical play wouldn't change at all because it already has to be near cap to do the things I want to do (because BDO is so poor/dead, I get lots of chances to solo the more obscure bosses, but I think I've mentioned it takes about an hour and a bit to do so, and that's actually all the time you have before they despawn).

So yeah, nothing is going to change the general player desire to 'know their hitrate' or 'know whether or not the Accuracy Down debuff applied by this mob is actually a flat 15%, a decaying debuff that starts at 40% and wears off 1% per second, or actually a thing that ticks up and down based on if you are hitting the mob with a melee attack while you have it'.

Dygz

According to the design - Raids and Dungeons change session to session, so...
That same boss is not going to be there for months - and probably won't be there for weeks.
Even if you could repeat the same boss - it's not going to be exactly the same.

Iskiab

Bobsyns wrote: »

One more note:
DPS meters only serve delivering some flat data in a final form without giving any details of why said person did more or less of said numbers.
There is no positivity out of DPS meter system.
Only gain is that neckbeards and ego players can brag about something and feel better for themselves Personally.
In an MMO game the major impact from DPS meters is negative. This meter isn't going to gauge your Fun factor and that's what most people play games to begin with - FUN.

Numbers does not contribute in a positive manner to the Fun factor, more often than not contributes in a negative manner to the Fun factor.
So the real question is - will this be a Fun game to play, or a Numbers game to play.

This isn’t the use of a combat tracker.

A combat tracker parses the log file to tell you what’s happening in the encounter. You could tell if a boss is a swinger (lots of small hits) or does a large special for high damage of a certain element type (like poison so you needed specific resists).

So beating bosses was like a puzzle to figure out what you need to do to kill the boss, and the logs/tracker helped you prepare.

It’s been my experience that games with robust logs and trackers had better raid experiences. You have the tools to figure out what to do and create a plan.

In games without them what I see is the analysis part is gone. Instead you have are raid leaders without the tools to create a plan and have no other options then be a turd to everyone to put pressure on the team to perform better.

This is purely anecdotal, but it makes sense. Lack of information leads to frustration which leads to lashing out. Even in games you have lots of raid leaders who’re too dumb to figure out an encounter, but without trackers everyone has to devolve to that level.

This is something that’s lost to most WoW raiders because guilds put up videos on how to beat encounters, but for those who raided in other games they’ll know what I mean.

Noaani

NiKr wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

This means it could well be expected to be 20 weeks or so before even arriving at that actual difficult boss. Keep in mind that all of that content can be assumed to be content for the 50% - it isn't made for top end raiders specifically.

Would it be though? If the difficulty is high enough for top end dudes to take a week or two of proper prep to clear a single boss, any non-meter non-hardcore group would probably take months on that single boss (probably even if they look up how to beat it).

Keep in mind, with all of this here I am talking about a game that is fostering a raid community.

In such a game, non top end raid guilds will still be making use of combat trackers.

As to your comments about power creep - the above scenario would see a new tier of gear added to the game every year. With the above amount of content (15 bosses) added to the game every 6 months, an individual raider would expect to replace each slot on their character about once a year.

That other content would probably be completely trivial for those top players, right?

Trivial in terms of difficulty, but that doesn't mean they can't still be interesting in terms of design - or at least some of them.

And considering gear progress, each dlc would probably need to add several hundred new ones. And I personally don't see any current dev company keeping up with that kind of pace. Maybe UE5 can help out with that, which would be great, but will have to wait till there's way more UE5 mmos out there.

No, in terms of raid content, each new DLC would need to add about 15 - assuming 6 month DLC.

Even WoW doesn't add as many bosses as you are suggesting here. Keep in mind with that though, WoW is a game that needs to add far more bosses due simply to the fact that they mostly release bosses to live servers after players have killed them on test servers, rendering that 12 or so week period to perhaps 1 or 2. A game that doesn't do this and instead leaves players to work out how to kill mobs on the live servers doesn't need to add nearly as many new encounters.

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