NiKr wrote: » 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).
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'.
Azherae wrote: » You're really stubborn, and as you said, you can just go look for help. Do you see how someone who is similar to you in skill type but has seemingly exhausted every other option, gets to the same conclusion of 'I want something else to do the analysis part for me'?
Azherae wrote: » The only thing that matters here is if some members of that 94% (let's say tacticians who could figure out what to do, but can't see enough data to try) get frustrated because there are no 'Genetic Lottery WInners' in their group, and go 'screw it, let's use the Combat Tracker'.
NiKr wrote: » Azherae wrote: » You're really stubborn, and as you said, you can just go look for help. Do you see how someone who is similar to you in skill type but has seemingly exhausted every other option, gets to the same conclusion of 'I want something else to do the analysis part for me'? My elitism "prevents" me from saying anything else rather than "they've failed the other genetic lottery of having a great imagination" What I can't see is how more info would let them have that imagination? Or maybe you wanted to say "someone else"? Cause I definitely understand how a second/fresh pair of eyes can come up with a new solution that the og player might've not thought about, but I think that's just an issue of "you haven't explored every avenue", be it due to lack of imagination or lack of trying. But if you did mean "smth else", then maybe I misread and/or misunderstood the context of this question? Is it in the context of my suggestion and someone ignoring it until they can't figure out the encounter through their own observational skills? Or is it someone using my suggestion, but it not providing them enough info so they now want a more detailed tracker? I'm not sure I completely understood that. Also Azherae wrote: » The only thing that matters here is if some members of that 94% (let's say tacticians who could figure out what to do, but can't see enough data to try) get frustrated because there are no 'Genetic Lottery WInners' in their group, and go 'screw it, let's use the Combat Tracker'. I think I'm yet again misunderstanding how trackers would be able to influence direct performance or help in any way to change your non-lottery-winnerness. If the encounter requires you to track a ton of stuff all at the same time to clear it - how exactly does post-factum analysis helps you track all that stuff in the moment of the repeated fight?
Azherae wrote: » Then they successfully focus on that, but their focus causes them to drop something else or start to do something slightly different. But they're focused on the grenade howitzer, so they don't notice what else changed. So they just spin in circles 'changing the reason they lose'.
NiKr wrote: » Azherae wrote: » Then they successfully focus on that, but their focus causes them to drop something else or start to do something slightly different. But they're focused on the grenade howitzer, so they don't notice what else changed. So they just spin in circles 'changing the reason they lose'. But this is what I'm talking about. If they can't keep track of several things during the fight itself - how would the tracker help them during the fight? Say they learn how to deal with the howitzer, but can't keep internal track of the targeted rockets' timer, so they get hit too many times by them. Tracker would show that they got hit 20 times, instead of 10 times back when the howitzer was killing the player. How would that information help the player keep both in mind, if the inability to do that was the reason they failed in the first place? Or do you mean that my suggestion wouldn't show that they got hit 20 times instead of 10? Cause this is the thing I mentioned in the previous comment. I envision the timeline showing info relating to mechanics. In other words, targeted rockets and howitzer would be such mechanics during stage one. If player gets hit by either of those - it's a fail point on the timeline saying "got hit by X targeted rockets" or "hit by howi". This is the same thing that a tracker would do, right?
Azherae wrote: » So you go back and back through the log/your encounter timeline, looking for 'a thing you can change to help with that situation when it comes up again'. Or sometimes you find a thing you can change about an entirely different situation, so that the Tank has to track one less thing, so that they can refocus on the Threat Values of the Healer with whatever focus you freed up by coordinating to take a focus point off them. At the top level, almost all games of this type are 'pushing to overwhelm the group's focus, and seeing how they arrange the focus they have'. You win by 'reshuffling the focus points until everyone has their most comfortable and natural slots' relative to the enemy.
NiKr wrote: » Azherae wrote: » So you go back and back through the log/your encounter timeline, looking for 'a thing you can change to help with that situation when it comes up again'. Or sometimes you find a thing you can change about an entirely different situation, so that the Tank has to track one less thing, so that they can refocus on the Threat Values of the Healer with whatever focus you freed up by coordinating to take a focus point off them. At the top level, almost all games of this type are 'pushing to overwhelm the group's focus, and seeing how they arrange the focus they have'. You win by 'reshuffling the focus points until everyone has their most comfortable and natural slots' relative to the enemy. So ultimately it's just about organized trial and error. Then I think my suggestion would still work, cause the battle log part is still present. It's just that the game would point out the obvious (from developer's design pov) fail points, while if the players are not satisfied with that, they can comb through it themselves. In other words, in theory, my suggestion would let those 94%ers to clear a bigger part of hardcore instanced dungeons even if they don't have the lottery winners among them. Well, given that the players themselves still have the skill to utilize the info they'd get from the timeline. So the only thing left would be to see if Noaani would still use his own tracker for any ow stuff, cause while I can definitely see how trackers provide a big benefit in instanced (or at least pure pve) fights, I'm not sure how beneficial would the analysis result of "well, a whole guild came in the middle of our farm and fucked us up" be when you're trying to figure out what went wrong I guess there's still the possibility of "we're usually fighting the same group of people in this location so let's go through the tracker to see if we can optimize anything", but I feel like trying to optimize against potentially everchanging builds (especially at group scale) is somewhat counterproductive? So unless the game's build progression becomes so static that people's builds don't change for weeks on end - I don't quite see as much point in a tracker for ow.
NiKr wrote: » If the encounter requires you to track a ton of stuff all at the same time to clear it - how exactly does post-factum analysis helps you track all that stuff in the moment of the repeated fight?
Azherae wrote: » So now you have something that looks like this: "HeroAC fired Coquillet at Target Baltheus, Distance 92m, Forward Vector, Assault Boost: Inactive. Baltheus: Angular Vector 47 degrees: Bullet hit 22f later, Ricochet, Damage 18." "HeroAC fired Coquillet at Target Baltheus, Distance 101m, Forward Vector, Assault Boost: Inactive. Baltheus: Angular Vector 41 degrees: Bullet hit 23f later, Ricochet, Damage 8." Am I understanding correctly that this is what you're suggesting?
Azherae wrote: » But as I was telling you before, this works for Predecessor too. It's much more meaningful when the margins are razor thin, as noted. There are fights in Predecessor where if you had 2% more Physical Penetration you could be reasonably sure to kill the entire enemy team by focusing down the regenerating bruiser jungler, and without it, he kills someone and goes on a rampage. My job is to be able to look at the fight and go 'we needed 2% more Physical Pen or so, there, should have bought the 6% Pen item instead of the 10 damage one with the bonus bleed'. This analysis is just as beneficial. Pred is 5v5 but I can do it for up to 16 opponents (I know my limit from FFXI PvP mode and BDO). And even when the information is varied, sometimes if the game only gives you 4 or 5 choices in the moment, you only need enough information to know 'which of these choices even had a chance of working'.
NiKr wrote: » Azherae wrote: » So now you have something that looks like this: "HeroAC fired Coquillet at Target Baltheus, Distance 92m, Forward Vector, Assault Boost: Inactive. Baltheus: Angular Vector 47 degrees: Bullet hit 22f later, Ricochet, Damage 18." "HeroAC fired Coquillet at Target Baltheus, Distance 101m, Forward Vector, Assault Boost: Inactive. Baltheus: Angular Vector 41 degrees: Bullet hit 23f later, Ricochet, Damage 8." Am I understanding correctly that this is what you're suggesting? This would mostly depend on how much info Ashes provides to the player's client (cause I assume that's what trackers could go through, right). I'd ideally try to keep the info at as base of that lvl as possible. In other words, what you see is what you get. If the tracker can parse player location/movement perfectly, because it can read data packets that tell your game that info, then I think it would be fine to have that kind of detail (if the game accounts for that kind of minute scale), mainly because the same stuff could be ultimately seen on a video as well. If trackers can only perceive stuff that directly happens to the player or as a result of player actions (so, you got hit for X from Y or you hit Y for X) - then I think movement details would be left out and only the top hardcores who're willing to go through video recordings could know that stuff for sure. I'd assume we'll have at least directional dmg (to the back, to the side, to the front type stuff), so that should definitely be included in the summary. I would also hope that Intrepid provides us with detailed descriptions of stats, so that the threat issue that FF11 had wouldn't happen. This kinda goes along the "do better" spiel. I'd prefer if Intrepid were open with their tools, but could still make content that pushed people to the brink.
NiKr wrote: » Azherae wrote: » But as I was telling you before, this works for Predecessor too. It's much more meaningful when the margins are razor thin, as noted. There are fights in Predecessor where if you had 2% more Physical Penetration you could be reasonably sure to kill the entire enemy team by focusing down the regenerating bruiser jungler, and without it, he kills someone and goes on a rampage. My job is to be able to look at the fight and go 'we needed 2% more Physical Pen or so, there, should have bought the 6% Pen item instead of the 10 damage one with the bonus bleed'. This analysis is just as beneficial. Pred is 5v5 but I can do it for up to 16 opponents (I know my limit from FFXI PvP mode and BDO). And even when the information is varied, sometimes if the game only gives you 4 or 5 choices in the moment, you only need enough information to know 'which of these choices even had a chance of working'. How would you know that kind of precision in pvp? Are item builds in Pred visible to the enemy or would you just extrapolate info from your attacker's stats against all possible combinations of items on the target? What I'm trying to say is that we, in theory, won't know our enemy's builds (and potentially even buffs), so how would you determine the smaller differences in attack/defense matchups?
Azherae wrote: » So, keeping with that for a moment... If you use a machinegun in AC6, you'd want it to give you this information for every shot, and then you would read through it and personally put all the data into a spreadsheet to figure out if you had the right arms for the fight based on reading and counting through all 300+ machinegun rounds? Remember that with less information than that, you can't tell what your ricochet rate is (you have to know how far away you are to judge some things, and you have to know your vector because your movement and Assault Boost affect this too). The information shown above is insufficient to work out the Arms issue, btw, because the above isn't factoring the bullet trajectory being 'off' due to recoil.
Azherae wrote: » Basically, even without looking at the enemy builds, yes, I can do this for PvP, it's easier than for PvE because in PvE, the designers could hide stuff from me, whereas in PvP, I just have to memorize every item and buff in the game.
NiKr wrote: » Azherae wrote: » So, keeping with that for a moment... If you use a machinegun in AC6, you'd want it to give you this information for every shot, and then you would read through it and personally put all the data into a spreadsheet to figure out if you had the right arms for the fight based on reading and counting through all 300+ machinegun rounds? Remember that with less information than that, you can't tell what your ricochet rate is (you have to know how far away you are to judge some things, and you have to know your vector because your movement and Assault Boost affect this too). The information shown above is insufficient to work out the Arms issue, btw, because the above isn't factoring the bullet trajectory being 'off' due to recoil. This comes back to the info provided by the game and the precision requirement on utilization of said info. I feel like AC is much more about the precision and the little details than what Ashes will be, so its encounter timeline would be more detailed accordingly. For AC I'd probably have separate fail points for each weapon, so if you're using machinegun the fail points would come up if you used it outside its optimal range, or missed, or the control of the spread didn't line up with the supposed amount of dmg (which would tie back to the angle of the attack). Movement vectors would probably be included in the auto calculation of what's "optimal" for that state of the character. My point is, I'd want the info given, but also auto-analyzed to as big of a degree as possible. Lower the knowledge skill floor, w/o lowering the execution skill floor. Also, the "optimal" in this case would be per weapon, so if the build still fails even when you're "fully optimal" then the person would know that the build doesn't match. Azherae wrote: » Basically, even without looking at the enemy builds, yes, I can do this for PvP, it's easier than for PvE because in PvE, the designers could hide stuff from me, whereas in PvP, I just have to memorize every item and buff in the game. And I think this is the core difference here. I want the reverse I want pve to be transparent as glass, but hard as nails, while pvp info is mostly hidden to the enemy. Obviously lottery winners can keep winning in pvp if their info extrapolations are correct, but, as you know - I'm completely fine with that and consider it as "it should be this way". Human enemy should be at roughly the same difficulty as high difficulty pve, but I think that in an equally-matched pvp fight (mechanical-skill-wise) that can only be reached if some of the details about your enemy are hidden. And it's on both of the opponents to try and bridge that knowledge gap with their own knowledge skill.
Azherae wrote: » Those people will probably never Excel.
Azherae wrote: » I just hoped that you understand that what you're asking for has the exact same result as the thing Steven says 'no' to, and some people in this thread have opposed over its long life.
Taerrik wrote: » 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.
