DPS Meter Megathread

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Percimes

Some players use trackers to improve their performances.
Other players use trackers to blame their failures on others.

About as concise as I can make my understanding of the issue.

Ruerik

NiKr wrote: »

Taerrik wrote: »

I'm going to be real honest with you, and I dont meant to say this in a toxic or negative way, its just how it is.

My numbers were there just for an extreme example, but the point still stands. PvE difficulty will get out of hand much quicker if Intrepid decides to completely accept the existence of meters/trackers. Obviously that existence is inevitable, but it's more about how Intrepid approach that inevitability rather than the sheer argument of what they should do about allowing or prohibiting meters.

I fully agree we should have more concern about how Intrepid plan to deal with 3rd party apps. I very much like the squareenix approach of ban if caught, but dont waste their time to go hunting for users. Its very practical because there really is no way to stop development or use of them.

PVE difficulty will not scale up forever just because DPS meters exist also. I am not sure where that argument comes from, maybe WoW because of DBM. But once again, DBM style addons are a plague on gamers, and even a good raider using them will start to lose his skill and proficiency he spent years developing. Things like raid awareness, or mechanical understanding just go away when you dont do it yourself but let a program do it for you.

A DPS meter (which is what the title of the tread is) doesnt impact a teams ability to clear as much as some of yall are letting on.

Ludullu

Taerrik wrote: »

A DPS meter (which is what the title of the tread is) doesnt impact a teams ability to clear as much as some of yall are letting on.

I mainly took that from Noaani's statements about what meters let him do. The example of advanced math and all that shit.

If the entire game becomes "advanced math" because that's what the pvers are asking for, then you're excluding majority of players from said game.

And if meters don't allow you to make all the encounters easy to clear then why da hell is there 200 damn pages of people arguing for them to be in the game?

Mag7spy

NiKr wrote: »

Taerrik wrote: »

A DPS meter (which is what the title of the tread is) doesnt impact a teams ability to clear as much as some of yall are letting on.

I mainly took that from Noaani's statements about what meters let him do. The example of advanced math and all that shit.

If the entire game becomes "advanced math" because that's what the pvers are asking for, then you're excluding majority of players from said game.

And if meters don't allow you to make all the encounters easy to clear then why da hell is there 200 damn pages of people arguing for them to be in the game?

Back to my argument pages maybe a year ago at this point. These older games they are basing them on have pretty much 0 action combat. When you starting adding more needing to aim, needing to dodge and plenty of movement you are adding a higher skill ceiling and dps meters not being as important as people able to clear the content.
You can do many things to make it less important and take a stance not allowing it either, leading to less people caring about it and less people using it.

Ruerik

200 pages of gaslighting, where half the commenters talk about DPS meters, the other half talk about combat trackers. The issue will solve itself when the game is playable anyway.

Ludullu

Mag7spy wrote: »

Back to my argument pages maybe a year ago at this point. These older games they are basing them on have pretty much 0 action combat. When you starting adding more needing to aim, needing to dodge and plenty of movement you are adding a higher skill ceiling and dps meters not being as important as people able to clear the content.

Nah, I'm sure tracker would help in action combat as well. Help with noticing patterns of boss moves and responses, patterns of movement (if they can track it in ashes) and all that stuff. And then on top of that they always allow for better analysis of the fight itself, so that you know who did what wrong and when.

All of that will always allow players who use trackers to make the encounter easier for themselves. I'm against that, Steven is against that, but it's inevitable so I think we'll simply see that hardcore pvers will leave the game once they realize that the difficulty won't be there (given that they even play the game in the first place, which is a big IF

)

Mag7spy

NiKr wrote: »

Mag7spy wrote: »

Back to my argument pages maybe a year ago at this point. These older games they are basing them on have pretty much 0 action combat. When you starting adding more needing to aim, needing to dodge and plenty of movement you are adding a higher skill ceiling and dps meters not being as important as people able to clear the content.

Nah, I'm sure tracker would help in action combat as well. Help with noticing patterns of boss moves and responses, patterns of movement (if they can track it in ashes) and all that stuff. And then on top of that they always allow for better analysis of the fight itself, so that you know who did what wrong and when.

All of that will always allow players who use trackers to make the encounter easier for themselves. I'm against that, Steven is against that, but it's inevitable so I think we'll simply see that hardcore pvers will leave the game once they realize that the difficulty won't be there (given that they even play the game in the first place, which is a big IF )

It doesn't matter if you know the pattern if you are bad at it, and you make it random and chaotic enough. Its like knowing the mechanic on harder action based based but still dying because of mistakes.

The whole point is not one solution prevents it but it is a bunch of things that change general player mentality.

Also this concept of people using phones or second computers to run dps meters is such a small amount of people willing to go through all those loops. That is not common place. The more pressure, mentality, and less availability will reduce general people using it.

That is why you have arguments for it though they don't want these things to cause people to not use them, they want it to the community desires it and not negative aspects against it. So you get weasel like points saying make it optional to slowly push the goal post. Which eventually leads to other things.

Which earlier on in the thread you saw one of the few people saying they wanted all 3rd party features, and has no issue with combat assistance.

It is the internet though where there is a will there is a way, just make the way so annoying so people don't care for it. It is impossible to prevent everything, its about disincentivizing it.

Ludullu

Mag7spy wrote: »

It doesn't matter if you know the pattern if you are bad at it, and you make it random and chaotic enough. Its like knowing the mechanic on harder action based based but still dying because of mistakes.

I hope we'll get really randomized bosses, but I somehow HIGHLY doubt we will.

Mag7spy

NiKr wrote: »

Mag7spy wrote: »

It doesn't matter if you know the pattern if you are bad at it, and you make it random and chaotic enough. Its like knowing the mechanic on harder action based based but still dying because of mistakes.

I hope we'll get really randomized bosses, but I somehow HIGHLY doubt we will.

Idk, they plan to make things difficult but we don't know how they will do it. Last QA was pretty good, but some of the questions were good and some were bad.

Having a QA about some more information we don't know and how they might tackle some challenges would be great lol.

Enhancement - we literarily know nothing

How dynamic will boss fights be, will they have certain elements *use hard raid boss as an example to point to exactly

*nooani referenced one from WoW and said you couldn't just do it in AoC. I don't actually believe that, most mechanics from the boss can be added in. It just be a long fight between pvp and pve if it were to happen. And it be a good boss to scale to more people around with the sanity effect mind controlling people and such.

What are requirements for starting guild wars between other players (important question to me because that will be the highest amount of pvp in the game between players most likely)

Noaani

NiKr wrote: »

Taerrik wrote: »

A DPS meter (which is what the title of the tread is) doesnt impact a teams ability to clear as much as some of yall are letting on.

I mainly took that from Noaani's statements about what meters let him do. The example of advanced math and all that shit.

If the entire game becomes "advanced math" because that's what the pvers are asking for, then you're excluding majority of players from said game.

And if meters don't allow you to make all the encounters easy to clear then why da hell is there 200 damn pages of people arguing for them to be in the game?

Keep in mind the point I have made many times about how few encounters even the games I am talking about have that I consider top end.

EQ2 has about 1100 raid encounters. Of then, but 12 are top end.

There is no real scope (imo) to say this kind of thing excludes players from the game.

Ludullu

Noaani wrote: »

There is no real scope (imo) to say this kind of thing excludes players from the game.

Were there any stats on how many bosses were cleared by how many people or anything of that sort? WoW has the unfortunate upper hand in this because they have at least rough stats of clears, which can provide some insight into the masses' gameplay, but I'm not sure how many other games do.

Hell, I'd love if Ashes did release these numbers, at least in the %s, if they're scared to show direct numbers of players cause that might lead to speculation as to player loss and stuff like that.

Noaani

NiKr wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

There is no real scope (imo) to say this kind of thing excludes players from the game.

Were there any stats on how many bosses were cleared by how many people or anything of that sort?

There aren't any over all stats like this.

However, due to the nature of raiding in EQ2, anyone that wanted to get started could get started. It was just a question of how far they get.

That is kind of the point of having an entire raid progression rather than just a few raid mobs, and of having low end stuff instanced - everyone that wants to get involved in raiding can do so.

Ludullu

Noaani wrote: »

There aren't any over all stats like this.

All the more reasons to ask for this from Intrepid. I'm sure EQ's devs had these stats behind the scenes and decided how to design future encounters based off of that info, but I wish that was more publicly known as well.

To me this is probably the only positive thing that came out of WoW's addon obsession. And with Ashes supposedly having leaderboards of boss clears and other stuff like that, I'd imagine that sharing the overall stats wouldn't go too far in terms of transparency for them.

Azherae

I was being semiserious in bringing up the Baltheus thing, btw.

If you use certain approaches to Baltheus, you probably don't notice nerfs at all. If you use other approaches, you now automatically win because you were close before.

But, the thing that the 'tracker' would be used for, in that case, is 'for a player who can't focus on fighting and tracking the damage values at the same time', to recheck quickly after the combat without recording and rewatching every fight.

The huge gap between 'log analytic of damage taken under what player condition' and 'add-on that tells you when it's about to do flameswords' is this thread, and honestly, this thread is about as durable.

Ludullu

Azherae wrote: »

But, the thing that the 'tracker' would be used for, in that case, is 'for a player who can't focus on fighting and tracking the damage values at the same time', to recheck quickly after the combat without recording and rewatching every fight.

And this is why I said that "pvpers want the good ol' days". My answer to all those who can't track things simultaneously is "git good". And other pvpers seem to give a similar answer (Steven included supposedly).

I know that's toxic and exclusionary, but it just seems to be the brand of toxicity that Steven is ok with (for whatever reason). It is kinda funny to me though. There's two super toxic sides of the spectrum, but even the middle is not really non-toxic, it's just more of a hidden toxicity.

One side says "fuck you, weakling, if you can't beat this completely on your own and only in the way that I consider meaningful", the other side says "you either follow the exact steps I tell you to follow or you're never even participating". Somewhere closer to the middle there's "but what if people just tried playing w/o all that stuff" and "let's have this stuff, but just restricted to those who want it". And the middle seems to be "well, the stuff exists either way so let's just pretend that we don't see it".

In other words, it's the classic gamer toxicity in all of its glory and colors.

Azherae

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

But, the thing that the 'tracker' would be used for, in that case, is 'for a player who can't focus on fighting and tracking the damage values at the same time', to recheck quickly after the combat without recording and rewatching every fight.

And this is why I said that "pvpers want the good ol' days". My answer to all those who can't track things simultaneously is "git good". And other pvpers seem to give a similar answer (Steven included supposedly).

I know that's toxic and exclusionary, but it just seems to be the brand of toxicity that Steven is ok with (for whatever reason). It is kinda funny to me though. There's two super toxic sides of the spectrum, but even the middle is not really non-toxic, it's just more of a hidden toxicity.

One side says "fuck you, weakling, if you can't beat this completely on your own and only in the way that I consider meaningful", the other side says "you either follow the exact steps I tell you to follow or you're never even participating". Somewhere closer to the middle there's "but what if people just tried playing w/o all that stuff" and "let's have this stuff, but just restricted to those who want it". And the middle seems to be "well, the stuff exists either way so let's just pretend that we don't see it".

In other words, it's the classic gamer toxicity in all of its glory and colors.

I mean, this whole thread was just revived by a specific poster who wasn't paying attention to the reason it exists in the first place.

If anything I only care that YOU don't get any weird perceptions of what they do based on Noaani's somewhat swingy word choices on the matter.

And Baltheus is a good example, because it has demos and guides online, it has recommendations for loadouts, and it probably has a TON of people who cleared or will clear it by 'shifting to the meta' because if you can't track what's happening, it just feels too hard to keep trying to improve with your chosen loadout or style.

The 'filter' then applies and you have a bunch of people who 'learned to play the game by going online to check recommendations from players who can do both things, when it gets hard'. Whereas if you gave some of them the combat tracker, they would instead 'see where the flaw in their approach with their preferred style is, and improve at it, and maybe beat Baltheus their own way and in the process become even more skilled'.

And that's in a game where they basically railroaded players and limited their choices until the point in question.

It's a really strong parallel to the whole thing. I'd want people in AC6 to have a 'combat log' of Baltheus so that they don't go online and find a 'Change to this loadout to beat Baltheus!' guide.

Ludullu

Azherae wrote: »

The 'filter' then applies and you have a bunch of people who 'learned to play the game by going online to check recommendations from players who can do both things, when it gets hard'. Whereas if you gave some of them the combat tracker, they would instead 'see where the flaw in their approach with their preferred style is, and improve at it, and maybe beat Baltheus their own way and in the process become even more skilled'

Do you speak on this from a personal experience of going over comparative data on both situations? Cause I truly doubt that the crossover between the people, who'd immediately go to guides after a death or two, and the people, who'd be willing to die enough times for the tracker to give them a good read out AND then go through that whole info to properly understand it and gain value from it, is miniscule.

I probably got lucky with my initial preference for my mech loadout, cause it let me beat the boss relatively fast (well, at least in comparison to my Elden Ring's "gate" of fighting the Tree Sentinel for 8 hours in starting gear until I beat him), but I'd imagine that most of the people that find that boss hard did so on their, maaaaybe, 10th try? And I feel like those kinds of people wouldn't really be "hardcore" enough to benefit from a tracker that simply tells them that they gotta "dodge to the front at this second after the rockets release".

If you are speaking from that comparative data and "normal" people would in fact try to understand the encounter themselves if given the tool to do so easier - well then I just hope that Steven is given the same data and that it MIGHT lead to a change in his views (though I doubt it).

Oh, also, if you're interested in how my thinking about the fight was evolving throughout the attempts here's a shameless plug

Azherae

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

The 'filter' then applies and you have a bunch of people who 'learned to play the game by going online to check recommendations from players who can do both things, when it gets hard'. Whereas if you gave some of them the combat tracker, they would instead 'see where the flaw in their approach with their preferred style is, and improve at it, and maybe beat Baltheus their own way and in the process become even more skilled'

Do you speak on this from a personal experience of going over comparative data on both situations? Cause I truly doubt that the crossover between the people, who'd immediately go to guides after a death or two, and the people, who'd be willing to die enough times for the tracker to give them a good read out AND then go through that whole info to properly understand it and gain value from it, is miniscule.

I probably got lucky with my initial preference for my mech loadout, cause it let me beat the boss relatively fast (well, at least in comparison to my Elden Ring's "gate" of fighting the Tree Sentinel for 8 hours in starting gear until I beat him), but I'd imagine that most of the people that find that boss hard did so on their, maaaaybe, 10th try? And I feel like those kinds of people wouldn't really be "hardcore" enough to benefit from a tracker that simply tells them that they gotta "dodge to the front at this second after the rockets release".

If you are speaking from that comparative data and "normal" people would in fact try to understand the encounter themselves if given the tool to do so easier - well then I just hope that Steven is given the same data and that it MIGHT lead to a change in his views (though I doubt it).

Yes, I do, but of course all things are skewed based on the genre and player type.

From the 'general observer' perspective in Fighters, the Average player who actually has interest (basically the person who cares at all beyond 'new game who dis') cares enough that the games have, in general, felt that the best way to retain those players was to add Frame Data information, but only lately have they also expanded to Tutorials, which don't help as much (replays help a lot, but the replays had to add the Frame Data).

From the 'personally did this and have the data' from the TCG perspective, we definitely lost more players when we were relying on 'articles and suggestions', but did better once certain visualization statistics such as mana curves and ways of calculating 'how similar your deck was to a specific playstyle'.

In the first case, I believe that the designers have concluded that the filter hasn't already hit people before they even reach the Frame Data.

In the second personal case, I very strongly believe this, as the 'lead designer' (of the software, I only modified the game it is used to play for balance purposes).

And yes, luck could do it.

But I'm moreso saying that if the encounter is only hard because you are in the 'unlucky' or 'stubborn' camp, then the tracker isn't really changing the speed at which the content itself is consumed, only the rate at which 'average' players do it, and whether or not they get filtered through some other player's approaches.

"This is the best loadout for winning X."
"Oh man I can't even come close with the best loadout, this game is just too much for me." (when the truth is, their instincts would have got them the win with a slight change or two, to their natural one)

Those people are demoralized already. Helping them becomes even harder when you don't have a tool to help them WITH.

Azherae

NiKr wrote: »

Oh, also, if you're interested in how my thinking about the fight was evolving throughout the attempts here's a shameless plug

Data accepted!

Your head is in the way of your AP though which, in the context of this thread, is REALLY FUNNY.

Azherae

Data analyzed. Probably extremely useful for future discussion of all kinds.

Plus, if we manage to turn this thread into talking about Armored Core instead, at least I'll have something to do.

So, datapoints for all so it doesn't just end up a chat with my group (I'm gonna do the same amount of typing anyway).

The Baltheus fight is easier when you have sustained offense of a specific type (missiles help, but they're not the absolute), aggression powerful enough to limit the time it spends in Phase 2, and enough luck on the Phase 2 attacks it uses. It's not actually very durable, it's just hard to keep up with.

The win shown is a combination of the above. It's not 'mostly luck', nor is it actually that NiKr's build is specifically easy to do it with from the perspective of what is available at the time, but it is among the easiest to understand intuitively. A very similar build to what my own group's Fighter uses.

But if you're meaningfully slower (you can definitely be), and unable to maintain specific aggression types due to it, or you're missile-averse, or even just unlucky in Phase 2 and can't 'shut it down' as quickly Monster Hunter speedrun style, it's harder to 'work out a way to do it'.

To relate back, therefore:
A player who takes the entirely opposite approach to this fight, having evasion but not gap-closing speed, close range combat primarily (or only, which is kind of a thing here) has to learn entirely different approaches to Phase 1 and somewhat more complex positional combos (assume Rogue equiv).

Should you play like that? If you don't have the aggression instincts, you might fail doing it the other way anyway. But the standard perception of the 'DPS meter' would be that it will 'tell you to use NiKr's build' and it will work and a bunch of people will tell you 'why don't you just use what works?'

This is absolutely true. But the filter applies. And since there is no DPS meter for AC6 for most people, you'd get the equivalent of 'a bunch of people switching to NiKr's build' and 'a bunch of other people giving up' because no one can teach them the 'Rogue Stuff', because the 'first winner' (let's assume NiKr here) doesn't need any of it.

But the Rogue method is just as easy to execute,, if not easier (once you actually know how to do it), and can be done with slower heavier builds even.

Is anyone going to make content that is reasonable to find on how to do it? It wouldn't be sensible content to make, because what most people want is 'the easy-to-understand answer', and will just change to that. But for the 'Rogues' out there who want to do it 'the Rogue way', but aren't as analytic, what will they meet? A bunch of people telling them to 'switch to Fighter'.

This would happen more without the Tracker, than with the Tracker in an MMO with Accuracy/Evasion stats.

Because when you do find the 'Bruiser Build Baltheus' video, or the 'High mobility melee' video, those people often have much fewer subscribers, and their comment sections are full of 'glad I found this, I was failing so much the other way', but for both sides. The 'natural bruisers' talking about how they can't do it with the melee mobility builds, the 'quick melee' talking about how they can't seem to do it even with the bruiser builds (the sort of people who didn't learn all the melee tricks before trying something else out of frustration).

In Action Games where you can see 'I didn't dodge fast enough', 'I didn't have enough accuracy' every time, you can do this yourself.

As soon as someone adds a character based Accuracy/Evasion comparison, good luck.

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