DPS Meter Megathread

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Ruerik

I mean, I could say the same thing to the folks that dont want the maths to happen.

You dont need that, but some people want that. Cant always get what you want.

How many more until we complete the 200 thread ending push?

Mag7spy

Moment someone says i need to track you would be the moment they are getting the boot.

Azherae

Mag7spy wrote: »

Moment someone says i need to track you would be the moment they are getting the boot.

Agreed. Anyone who says this to someone who has even a chance of saying no, it shows a lack of social skills.

And ofc there's those who say it to people who aren't in a position to say no, which is a different set of social 'skills' but not the good kind...

Noaani

Azherae wrote: »

Mag7spy wrote: »

Moment someone says i need to track you would be the moment they are getting the boot.

Agreed. Anyone who says this to someone who has even a chance of saying no, it shows a lack of social skills.

And ofc there's those who say it to people who aren't in a position to say no, which is a different set of social 'skills' but not the good kind...

I've never asked anyone if I could "track" them.

As it isn't invasive, and as it isn't as if I can just track some people and not others, I just don't see the point.

Ludullu

Noaani wrote: »

The challenge with encounters should come from dealing with those abilities.

But my point is - how can you deal with an ability that you don't even know about? If a 3rd party tool has to parse the game for you and tell you when the boss is doing a thing - that's not "dealing with the ability", it's "dealing with a 3rd party tool outside of the game".

Noaani wrote: »

Take cast bars for example, above I said I don't like them because it is a game mechanic, not an encounter mechanic. I could have gone to greater lengths to explain that adding a game mechanic like cast bars to mobs prevents things like them using multiple abilities, or having instant cast abilities that require attention, but the post was long enough without going in to that detail.

Basically, my point is that the difficulty should come from dealing with encounters, not in knowing what they will do, and that any mechanic that limits what they can do (ie, requiring cast bars) goes against that.

The visual representation of cast bars that I suggested would allow bosses to cast other stuff while the bar is progressing. If anything, it feels like my suggestion is exactly what you're talking about. And it could also be very encounter-specific because it could be linked to surroundings or mob designs, or whatever else.

In other words, I simply want WoW's addon features, but cooked into the game itself. Proper audio feedback, proper visual feedback, proper base UI settings, holistic difficult encounter design that requires each player in the raid to pay attention to their own game window that gives them all the information they'll need w/o any outside tool.

I support battle logs, because that was always what I used to see what ultimately killed me in a big fight. And that very support is the reason why I say that trackers will be inevitable.

Azherae

NiKr wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

The challenge with encounters should come from dealing with those abilities.

But my point is - how can you deal with an ability that you don't even know about? If a 3rd party tool has to parse the game for you and tell you when the boss is doing a thing - that's not "dealing with the ability", it's "dealing with a 3rd party tool outside of the game".

Noaani wrote: »

Take cast bars for example, above I said I don't like them because it is a game mechanic, not an encounter mechanic. I could have gone to greater lengths to explain that adding a game mechanic like cast bars to mobs prevents things like them using multiple abilities, or having instant cast abilities that require attention, but the post was long enough without going in to that detail.

Basically, my point is that the difficulty should come from dealing with encounters, not in knowing what they will do, and that any mechanic that limits what they can do (ie, requiring cast bars) goes against that.

The visual representation of cast bars that I suggested would allow bosses to cast other stuff while the bar is progressing. If anything, it feels like my suggestion is exactly what you're talking about. And it could also be very encounter-specific because it could be linked to surroundings or mob designs, or whatever else.

In other words, I simply want WoW's addon features, but cooked into the game itself. Proper audio feedback, proper visual feedback, proper base UI settings, holistic difficult encounter design that requires each player in the raid to pay attention to their own game window that gives them all the information they'll need w/o any outside tool.

I support battle logs, because that was always what I used to see what ultimately killed me in a big fight. And that very support is the reason why I say that trackers will be inevitable.

It's SLIGHTLY complicated to explain why this works out.

In a multiplayer setting, you can approach this in one of three ways.

1) A player is in charge of 'seeing' everything
This is the most common method, and is my role in things like Elite Dangerous Conflict Zones. Shot-caller, who may or may not also be tactical commander depending on the game.

2) Everyone is in charge of seeing what they are supposed to be the one dealing with
MOBAs and mid level PvE, most games fall in here, you benefit from comms but as you get more in tune with a group you can theoretically train to synchro well enough to not need much comms.

3) Take as many people immune to the mechanics or able to shut them down without being able to see everything, as possible.
This is often the response that mid level players have, and because guides from top players post-analysis tend to be efficiency related, what happens is that someone tells the mid level players 'if you want to just win, get X class, 3 Y, a healer, and a Z, and that should make it easy.

The idea being that for mid level groups that have some number of Dumbass Casuals, many don't want to have to understand mechanics or coordinate. They want to just clear the thing.

The issue here for high difficulty stuff is simply that 2 only works in the absolute tightest of groups, where 'everyone is at the skill level/type where they could be the shot caller that day if needed'. And even then, it's well known that you'd STILL be better off having a single shot-caller who ISN'T EVEN PLAYING, if possible.

As for why you still 'need' the trackers beyond that, it's related to it. Figuring out 'who isn't seeing what they need to be seeing' in games that are not binary, can be hard. I believe that given this, you would still want the game to be so hard that 'you have to get that group of Shot-caller tier high level players' together in one place to win.

But at the end of the day, someone has to 'work out that we're failing the encounter because you don't know your Ricochet range'. How exactly that happens, is up to the group, but without the tracker or the 'savant', it's possible that it doesn't happen.

The game will either be built for 'the savants' (which, I should warn, tends to happen because the DESIGNERS are in this category, hence the nerfs in AC6) or 'so that you don't need them' in which case they blow others out of the water, which is fine in single player games but not MMOs (for me).

Noaani

NiKr wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

The challenge with encounters should come from dealing with those abilities.

But my point is - how can you deal with an ability that you don't even know about? If a 3rd party tool has to parse the game for you and tell you when the boss is doing a thing - that's not "dealing with the ability", it's "dealing with a 3rd party tool outside of the game".

You seem to be confusing "dealing with the ability" and "knowing what ability is happening".

Dealing with the ability is the thing that needs to be done so the fight continues past that abilities effect. It is the thing that stops people dying, or the raid as a whole wiping.

This could be as simple as some healing or an AoE avoid ability, but could be as complex as a 12+ step process that needs to be followed by multiple people.

It is THIS process that is what encounters should be about - not about watching an animation to know what ability is coming.

Azherae

Or if you care we can discuss Karkinos which is super easy as noted whenever I talked about it.

Karkinos isn't about dodging the abilities. It's not about 'seeing'. It's about 'this has happened, choose what to do about it, you have 2 seconds to commit to a single course of action as a group, failure to synchronize will lose this fight'.

But the problem is that your list of 'single courses of action' is like 16 'choices' long and depends on 20+ datapoints, most of which you should not all (sanely) have been tracking. So you lose.

Then comes the combat tracker part.

"Given the datapoints that we now have to go back and check, why did we lose? Who wasn't on board with the chosen option, or whose datapoint did the shot-caller(s) drop?"

You can do it by reading a log or watching the fight if you recorded it and can see everyone else's damage and buffs status. It just takes long. Doesn't matter to me. If you can prevent the trackers and I knew this was definitely true...

Then I'd just feel sorry for all the people who don't have time to rewatch a 15 minute fight from 5 different perspectives. Not really my concern at all.

EDIT: This is also why I don't care whether the mechanics are 'you must do these things to prevent dying to the big HP damage' or 'you have been affected by statuses that prevent you from being able to clear this enemy in some other way', except in PvPvE games.

I care a little bit because I somewhat like the second more, and Action players tend to complain a bit more about 'unavoidable damage' which does 'unavoidable damage' to the game's reputation. but overall, the experience is similar.

Noaani

NiKr wrote: »

The visual representation of cast bars that I suggested would allow bosses to cast other stuff while the bar is progressing. If anything, it feels like my suggestion is exactly what you're talking about. And it could also be very encounter-specific because it could be linked to surroundings or mob designs, or whatever else.

If cast bars are the thing that is used by a game to tell players, well, what a mob is casting, it would be inadvisable to then put in abilities on boss encounters that players need to be aware of before hand that don't use cast bars.

Mechanics like this condition players - the idea of having them is so that players know where to look to see what is happening.

While subverting that is a real option, it is one that needs to be done VERY infrequently - as is the case with all subversion of basic game systems.

This is why I have a dislike to having too much like this built in to the game, and prefer things built in to each encounter.

Noaani

Azherae wrote: »

This is also why I don't care whether the mechanics are 'you must do these things to prevent dying to the big HP damage' or 'you have been affected by statuses that prevent you from being able to clear this enemy in some other way', except in PvPvE games.

I care a little bit because I somewhat like the second more, and Action players tend to complain a bit more about 'unavoidable damage' which does 'unavoidable damage' to the game's reputation. but overall, the experience is similar.

I don't understand the argument of action combat people when it comes to this - they are basically saying "I didn't do the thing the encounter wanted me to do to avoid the damage, why can't I avoid the damage?".

Seems to me as if they missed the point.

Azherae

Victory! Good job everyone. It was getting dicey at the end there with all the running around and derailing, so it wasn't our best run.

I'll put it through the parser and see if we can do better on the next hundred pages.

And thanks to George for shot-calling in that last 10% and getting us there after that 3 month break. Was beginning to think that Alpha-2 might hit before we made it.

Ruerik

Maybe we can ask steven for a reward for making it this far!?

Noaani

Taerrik wrote: »

Maybe we can ask steven for a reward for making it this far!?

Perhaps a combat tracker built in to the game as a guild perk would be suitable.

Depraved

lets get to 300

Ludullu

Azherae wrote: »

I believe that given this, you would still want the game to be so hard that 'you have to get that group of Shot-caller tier high level players' together in one place to win.

Yep

I'd like a #2 large with large fries

So in the context of such levels of difficulty, how much you or @Noaani would be upset (as analytical players) if the game literally told you what you did wrong at the end? In other words, we'd jump my entire damn argument by, like, a hundred lvls, make me a complete hypocrite in the process, and completely circumvent the tracker usage by the game simply giving you the result of said tracker's analysis.

This would only apply to instanced encounters and those instanced encounters would only reward cosmetics/titles.

And an additional question for Noaani. Would you still use your own tracker on top of that for ow stuff, even if it was way easier to parse on the fly?

Noaani wrote: »

It is THIS process that is what encounters should be about - not about watching an animation to know what ability is coming.

Noaani wrote: »

This is why I have a dislike to having too much like this built in to the game, and prefer things built in to each encounter.

Maybe I'm mistaken in this take (and I'd ask @Azherae as a third party to check me), but it feels to me that I want a much more difficult and complex design than you, Noaani

To me, "reacting to the ability post-factum" and "every mob has the same basic set of features" seems like the laziest possible game design ever. Maybe I'm just still misunderstanding Noaani's point? Or missing (forgot?) some context?

Ludullu

Also, yeah, congrats everyone on this absolutely silly achievement.

With that said...

Azherae

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

I believe that given this, you would still want the game to be so hard that 'you have to get that group of Shot-caller tier high level players' together in one place to win.

Yep I'd like a #2 large with large fries

So in the context of such levels of difficulty, how much you or @Noaani would be upset (as analytical players) if the game literally told you what you did wrong at the end? In other words, we'd jump my entire damn argument by, like, a hundred lvls, make me a complete hypocrite in the process, and completely circumvent the tracker usage by the game simply giving you the result of said tracker's analysis.

This would only apply to instanced encounters and those instanced encounters would only reward cosmetics/titles.

And an additional question for Noaani. Would you still use your own tracker on top of that for ow stuff, even if it was way easier to parse on the fly?

Noaani wrote: »

It is THIS process that is what encounters should be about - not about watching an animation to know what ability is coming.

Noaani wrote: »

This is why I have a dislike to having too much like this built in to the game, and prefer things built in to each encounter.

Maybe I'm mistaken in this take (and I'd ask @Azherae as a third party to check me), but it feels to me that I want a much more difficult and complex design than you, Noaani

To me, "reacting to the ability post-factum" and "every mob has the same basic set of features" seems like the laziest possible game design ever. Maybe I'm just still misunderstanding Noaani's point? Or missing (forgot?) some context?

I feel like the game cannot.

Because what you did wrong is based on what you were trying to do, sort of.

I'll try using Predecessor (or Karkinos, but Pred might be better, so I'll start there).

When you start a match, you look at the enemy team. You don't necessarily think about their skills, just the combination of characters. If you see a lot of CC, you build CC protection. Simple enough to think about.

But 'you building CC protection' only matters if your team benefits from your specific character building CC protection because you expect a specific situation to happen during the match based on the enemy team comp.

As soon as the enemy team tosses this concept, your build is wrong. But what if they only toss it temporarily? Like, they realize "we have a situation that can only occur at this one moment in the match, we can go against what we appear to be normally be relying on and make this 'surprise' play".

In the grand scheme of a Pred match (40m let's say), that moment might not even look important. Sometimes it's bizarre because it looks like team A won whatever was happening, when really, the way it changed things made Team B then win without changing anything much else.

There's no way for anything less than a highly trained AI with a huge dataset to be able to pick out 'why you lost', from the coding side. Because sometimes it's the order of your choices that matters, and small things like that.

In short, the game can't tell you what you did wrong at the end. The tracker isn't 'telling you' either. It's giving you a context to figure out where your expectations didn't match reality, so you can adjust it.

I feel like that's the strongest point I can generally make here. The tracker 'tells me' very little other than 'here is everything that happened, objectively' and I can look and go 'wait that didn't match what I expected to happen, why not?'

And as noted, I can do that just by watching a replay. Trackers exist for people who 'can't do it from just watching the replay, because they need data tabulated' and 'people who don't have that kind of time'. I believe your general wish is that people who don't have ~40 minutes a day to just rewatch a match, in Predecessor (obv you could just skip through certain parts, but you also need to rewatch certain parts more than once from different perspectives), don't get to improve by using a shortcut of 'being able to get a quick-summary'.

Interestingly, one of the main features of old Armored Core games is that when you fight an Arena opponent, you can watch replays of the fight, and you can switch it to be either your perspective, theirs, or 'external to both'. I miss this feature...

Anyways lmk if this all was missing your point and I'll try the Karkinos route.

Ludullu

Azherae wrote: »

Anyways lmk if this all was missing your point and I'll try the Karkinos route.

Didn't miss the point, just clarified some stuff that I didn't take into account.

I was just thinking about the core of my general argument against trackers in the context of pve difficulty (at least how I'd prefer it to be at the top). If Intrepid could, in theory, make the hardest possible encounter then my argument of "trackers let you clear hard encounters faster and ask for harder encounters" doesn't quite apply, because the difficulty would already be at its theoretical peak. And devs could then just tweak personal difficulty per player per encounter per variable.

And I then thought, from that standpoint, what I'd probably want from the game. If the encounter is already at peak design (of hybrid combat with a multitude of thing to concentrate on) then the performance itself is valued higher than the ability to know what was wrong post-factum (to me that is).

And if the game is designed in such a way that all the info you need to beat it, on a personal lvl, is perceivable by the player during the fight itself w/o any external tools, then there's also no need for a wow-like tracker, because its features would already be imbedded into the encounter's design.

And for it to be the peak difficulty for me, the encounter would have to have some rng to its composition, which means that importance of the performance goes up even higher and that failure rate goes higher as well.

One of the biggest arguments for trackers I've seen is the "how would I (as a player or as a RL) know that there was a failure". So I tried to think of a way to minimize this issue. "Game showing you where you failed" was the kneejerk solution, but I do get your point of "not what was expected happened".

If we deconstruct the encounter, there'd be: dps, personal mechanics, group mechanics, raid-wide mechanics. I'd imagine the game could track all of those things, because it registers them already, right? So if playerA from party1 failed to do personal mechanic C while succeeding in doing party mechanic 2 - that would be seen by the game and could be put into the post-encounter summary.

And I envisioned the summary UI as a "movie timeline", with colored sections. Colors would indicate how the player did the mechanics throughout the encounter and would also take into account the player's dps as related to an "optimal" value that was intended by the devs.

If I'm understanding tracker use correctly, this is pretty much what people are doing with the battle log, right? You look at what happened, when it did and then try to figure out why it did. The why would still remain a mystery to solve in my suggestion, but I think that's only solvable through video recording and analysis (unless trackers can parse player movement? I forget if they would be able to in Ashes). Otherwise you just gotta attempt again, while paying attention to your previous fail point.

Party and raid leaders would get the whole timeline for their respective groups, so it'll be easier to discuss the fail points afterwards (with potentially other people remembering that point better and/or from another perspective).

If the encounters do have rng, would your "what we expected didn't happen" still apply as much? You might be able to anticipate a variety of things, but unexpected would still often happen, right? In other words, I think this relates to Jormun (or whichever was the name of the FF11 rng dragon). Would what I envision help you figure out the problem you might've had at that encounter, or would you still need a more detailed tracker-base dataset?

Azherae wrote: »

I believe your general wish is that people who don't have ~40 minutes a day to just rewatch a match, in Predecessor, don't get to improve by using a shortcut of 'being able to get a quick-summary'.

At this point it's kinda the opposite. My current idea is "the encounter is so damn difficult that I'm fine with people forgoing the analysis part almost completely". Obviously there might be raid-sized savant groups who manage to just completely outplay the devs' design, but at that point they just deserve that imo, and I also think that per server there might only be 1-3 such groups, if at all.

p.s. I don't think I know what/who Karkinos is

Azherae

https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/comment/403705/#Comment_403705

Anyways, I'll stay in that realm by going back to AC6.

When Baltheus does X, you do Y. There isn't a specific 'correct' Y, there's a Y that is correct 'relative to your idea of the next Y'.

When you expect Y to work and it doesn't work, you have to figure out why Y isn't working. Sometimes Y only comes up every 4 runs. You have to decide if to try to make Y happen more often or not, in case the reason you were failing it was unlucky RNG.

Most people give up pretty fast on a Y that isn't working, but sometimes, by 'design' or 'interaction of your team with the mechanics', the 'Y' is supposed to work. On razor's edge content, it may be that the Y is among your only options that will work.

In an AC6 situation, for example, you might encounter a boss where you feel like you want to use missiles, but the missiles keep failing and you don't know why. You keep changing missiles, you change ranges, you change movement... the missiles keep failing.

Most people respond by giving up on the missiles. But sometimes that means they just can't win anymore at all without changing MUCH more about their build, because their playstyle IS supposed to use the missiles. The devs 'tuned it so that the style they are using, wins that fight with missiles'. What's going wrong, then?

They have the wrong FCS equipped.

But it didn't have to be that. It could be that they were using the wrong arms, so they're slightly too slow on 5% of their dodges and get worn down. I've had this experience just the other day helping someone. They throw themselves against a boss for hours, I come and look at it for a bit, I go 'your FCS is wrong', they change it, they improve or win.

Taking all that into account remember one thing above all else. Ashes probably has RNG accuracy and evasion. As long as that exists, you don't have any reasonable way to achieve the data clarity you are talking about in a form that many people understand. The game just tells you 'you lost because you didn't do enough damage before you died' or 'you lost because the damage you got from this risk was not sufficient to justify the risk'.

Devs tune games to this level all the time. Then what happens? People get stuck on the boss because they don't know how to check the details, and the game can't give you the details because it honestly has no way to understand exactly what you're trying to do relative to the overall goal.

What you've been referring to is what we refer to, the combat log. A combat Tracker is usually 'a tool to read a combat log faster and extract statistics from it'. The problem is that since 'damage done in a specific window' can be a fail point, then the information given would include that. And then it will be 'a DPS meter'.

Ludullu

Azherae wrote: »

What you've been referring to is what we refer to, the combat log. A combat Tracker is usually 'a tool to read a combat log faster and extract statistics from it'. The problem is that since 'damage done in a specific window' can be a fail point, then the information given would include that. And then it will be 'a DPS meter'.

This is why I said that this suggestion would make me a hypocrite considering my entire history of arguments in this thread

I'm pretty much suggesting a damn wow addon, but it's just in the game instead of outside it.

As for accuracy, I'd imagine that would matter way more for the dps characters than anyone else, purely because the value of each of their hits is higher. A "solution" to this could be a boss mechanic that requires a certain amount of consequent hits to complete it. And then this mechanic could be a fail point on the timeline, so the player would see that they can't reach that amount, and if the player knows for sure that he was hitting the boss that whole period - accuracy would probably be one of the first things that comes to mind as a solution (or at least an option of one).

I guess this could be a bit too revealing of an info, but I'd hope that not all top lvl bosses would depend on perfect accuracy from players. Or, if they do, that the game has tools to circumvent that. Smth like "the target can't evade for a period of time" debuff or "you always land your hits in the next X time" buff and stuff like that.

As for "I've tried things, but nothing worked until I was told to change a thing" - imo that's on the player. Those who need help from others will always need it, no matter if they're given a tracker or not. I think I'm an example of that. AC provides players with the tools to figure out builds and approaches, I simply don't use them. If I ever get tired of failing on a boss - I can always go and "seek help", in case I decide not to try out another build myself.

The same applies to other people who need help. It's just that their amount of attempts might be lower than mine. But asking for help on smth is a social thing and I support that, which is why I said that PLs and RLs would see the full timeline of their groups. If a player keeps failing a particular point, I'd expect leaders to discuss that with that player.

Obviously there'll always be toxicity based on that, but as we've discussed countless times before - it'll always exist.

My point is, I want to automate as much of the analysis as possible, so that those who need help have a higher floor of when they ask for it. The encounter's difficulty would still remain super high, so even if they do get help it's not like it's gonna be a magic pill that will resolve everything (which, I believe, has been one of the arguments for trackers all along).

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