DPS Meter Megathread

This discussion was created from comments split from: DPS Meter Megathread.

I’ve instructed the mods to focus any dps meter threads into a single mega thread to help focus and centralize the discussion 👍

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Ruerik

Dygz wrote: »

The point is devs should not implement a UI for DPS meters and therefore not design mobs with the expectation that we must rely on precise calculations derived from DPS meters in order to defeat boss encounters.

We agree that no one should be required to eek out the max dps possible just to defeat a boss. Fight design should be such that someone of average dps can win. (Known as, good enough). So long as they have the skill to perform any required mechanics and enough damage to clear before any dps checks on the fight, no reason they shouldnt be able to clear.

There might be some high end pve content where that bar for "doing enough" is higher, to make some bosses and content more challenging, this is in every game.

My point is, there is nothing wrong with players wanting to also do more, and for that, we do maths. Simple as that. In MMORPG games, it turns out we can have our cake and we can eat it too.

Dygz

Yes. Which is why Ashes will provide a personal combat log, but not a public combat tracker/DPS meter.

Ruerik

Which is great, so long as the personal log has all the relevant data (all of it), wont even need to view the network traffic.

Azherae

Dygz wrote: »

Taerrik wrote: »

These are fun ideas to be fair,

Its just, if the point is to prevent any possibility of a dps meter, then its necessary to look at the network traffic.
Since data is sent from the server, to your computer, about how much damage or healing you did to update your client on the world status, as a end user you actually have access to that, because it is data on your computer.

Even if the screen doesnt show anything to us as a player. Its a very challenging problem to keep information private.

The point is devs should not implement a UI for DPS meters and therefore not design mobs with the expectation that we must rely on precise calculations derived from DPS meters in order to defeat boss encounters.

The problem is that devs have a lot of difficulty, in my experience, tuning content because of their own innate abilities showing through and affecting the requirements.

We can use the same Monster Hunter example, actually. Enemy HP doesn't show in Monster Hunter, until they are low enough to be captured, then you can see them have a visual 'tic' to show it, but ONLY if they aren't pushing to kill you, basically, you have to give them a breather.

If the objective of the quest is to capture, this means you can miss it, and kill the monster, without meaning to, in some cases.

My team relies on me to 'somehow' know its HP well enough with EVERYTHING going on, to line it up so that you can 'set the trap, use the tranquilizers, have it fall into the trap and the damage that is done to it WHILE it is in the trap is what brings it to the HP threshold'.

Why can I do this? We don't know, but there are many things like it, in life. Devs design things off what they THINK is the minimum requirement of skill that they want to work for the content, and can miss the fact that one of their natural talents is making it possible.

Similarly the other way, if a Dev finds a specific thing very hard to do personally and builds an encounter around it and their QA are average/similar to them, then the moment that encounter makes contact with someone who has the related talent, they down it without thinking.

I know that your point is sorta that the game shouldn't necessarily be particularly challenging in the first place, but designing mobs to be a challenge 'without certain talents' doesn't feel like a good strategy for application to the bulk of content.

Azherae

Dygz wrote: »

Yes. Which is why Ashes will provide a personal combat log, but not a public combat tracker/DPS meter.

I'm actually a little confused here, Dygz, because I think you've previously implied awareness that most of the time, people just 'upload logs to a website which does the parsing'.

I felt like we were on the same page in terms of your 'understanding' that the two things are minimally different in practice... is this the same as the FF14 thing where as long as no one can talk about it, you're fine with it, so the combat log is ok?

Azherae

Actually, I suppose I can ask that question much more precisely.

"Is it ok for Devs to design encounters knowing that players will parse their combat logs, as long as there is no UI for 'DPS Meters'?"

(I probably wouldn't understand any reasoning either way, so if you are willing to answer, I'll take yes/no and not pester you more about it).

Dygz

Azherae wrote: »

We can use the same Monster Hunter example, actually. Enemy HP doesn't show in Monster Hunter, until they are low enough to be captured, then you can see them have a visual 'tic' to show it, but ONLY if they aren't pushing to kill you, basically, you have to give them a breather.

Looks like in Monster Hunter, you gauge your own Health to decide when to disengage and regain enough Health to continue your attack.
And that is still a visual Health meter. Seems like there are no numbers.
But, the visual Health meter is there because we lack senses, like pain, to help us guage when Health is low.
Obviously as tech gets better, it becomes easier for us to rely on more nuanced cues to guage the Health of our prey. We can expect those to still be mostly visual.
At some point the tech will be good enough that Health meters become obsolete.

Azherae wrote: »

I know that your point is sorta that the game shouldn't necessarily be particularly challenging in the first place, but designing mobs to be a challenge 'without certain talents' doesn't feel like a good strategy for application to the bulk of content.

That is not my point at all.
My point is that we should not need to crunch numbers to defeat an encounter.
We should be able to stack our attacks strategically enough with the attacks of our group members to be successful.
Looking at a DPS meter should not be a required tool for successfully completing dungeons.
If the devs provide a DPS meter, that will design the dungeon encounters expecting that DPS meters will be the primary tool used to anylyze dungeon combat.
Just as they will design encounters assuming most players will rely on Health meters if they provide Health meters.

Tragnar

I don't know how it got to this hilarious topic of health numbers being shown or not, because it doesn't matter at all for a functioning meter.

DPS Meter only needs to have displayed every damage number for it to work - everything else is excess information.

If you want dps meters to "stop" working then you need to stop showing numbers and start showing "That's a lot of damage!" type of combat text feedback

and why i have "stop" in quotation marks is that there are ways to reverse engineer numbers from text feedback and even the health numbers, it takes research and a lot of data, but it can be done - it's basically the same type of work as physicists found out the laws of physics

Xeeg

Taerrik wrote: »

These are fun ideas to be fair,

Its just, if the point is to prevent any possibility of a dps meter, then its necessary to look at the network traffic.
Since data is sent from the server, to your computer, about how much damage or healing you did to update your client on the world status, as a end user you actually have access to that, because it is data on your computer.

Even if the screen doesnt show anything to us as a player. Its a very challenging problem to keep information private.

Absolutely correct. Any information that is client side can be hacked and then the devs have to chase hackers. Many of which will not be detectable. My opinion is that if a rule can't reasonably be enforced, then you are only punishing those that follow it and the devs might as well make it easy for all players to do it.

Xeeg

First off, thank you Dygz for keeping your response respectful, it's appreciated. I am starting to see what you guys are talking about, and maybe misunderstood some of the arguments here.

Dygz wrote: »

Ideally, we should be Roleplaying rather than rollplaying.

This is a matter of personal preference. Not everyone agrees with that.

HOWEVER, I am starting to come around to what you guys are talking about. I used to play a game called MajorMUD. It was a full loot PVP MUD, and when you "looked" at another player or a monster it would have tiers of health descriptions, with no numbers. It would say things like "Unwounded", "Barely Wounded", "Moderately Wounded", "Heavily Wounded", "Critically Wounded", etc.

You would still see your own health and mana numbers and you would see damage dealt each round. You could figure out how much health a monster had by just adding up damage over all the rounds. Eventually addons came out that had all the information and you could min/max the game. They had average round calculators, a synonym for "DPS meters" at the time, etc. So this just goes to show that DPS meters have been around longer than graphics have been around on the internet. MUDs were like the early text versions of MMOs.

On a side note, when Baldurs Gate 3 came out I asked my old group of buddies to start a campaign, go into the game blind (not watching youtube), roleplay our characters, and play turn based. That seemed like it would be fun. One of the guys completely ignored this and started linking youtube videos about the game right away. Then, because of one youtube video, someone had to pick the "face" of the party, and suddenly we were all sectioned off into different roles we were allowed to be. Another guy was a hardcore D&D player and wanted us all to preplan or min/max our characters from levels 1-12 (prior to character creation), and would critique every decision we made as being "not good", or not synergizing with the team. So it took forever to even make a character. Then they didn't want to play turn based because it would take too long. The whole thing turned into a total disaster because people would accidentally trigger events that the "face" was supposed to trigger and everyone quit after the first session and just said its probably better as a single player game.

Now I could blame the game for this disaster, which they did and maybe there is some truth to that. Or I could blame the group of people I played with for turning something that could have been a fun experience into something that was a total train wreck.

This anecdote means that I understand where you guys are coming from. Sometimes too much information in a game ends up creating needless conflict and time spent on things other than just playing the game and having fun. Still, though, there will inevitably be conflict and how the people you play with handle conflict resolution is also important.

Noaani

Xeeg wrote: »

Now I could blame the game for this disaster, which they did and maybe there is some truth to that. Or I could blame the group of people I played with for turning something that could have been a fun experience into something that was a total train wreck.

This is just a classic case of a group of people going in to a piece of content with differing expectations.

If everyone went in wanting to either min/max or everyone going in blind, you wouldn't have had the issue.

Now, I'm not pointing finger specifically at any of the people involved in your story, but it was very much a people based issue rather than anything else. As your story here points out, it is an issue that is completely removed from the question of combat trackers - it will exist any time people attempt to go in to a piece of content with differing expectations.

This comes down to a point I made probably 180 pages ago or so - people like myself and Dygz shouldn't ever be trying to run content together. He wants to roleplay (as is his right), and I want to be as efficient as possible (as is my right).

You may note that even in this small example, combat trackers aren't involved. That is because combat trackers don't give players a mindset, players already have their mindset.

Sago65

Just wanted to give my 2 cents in this cluster of a thread, and to say it's really refreshing to see the mods (at least from the first few pages) having meaningful discussions with players.

I like the idea of dps meters in theory, as I obviously want to play my class to the best of my ability and pull my weight. Even if I'm not a hardcore player, it's great to know which builds / rotations work best and just to kinda see how I'm doing.

However, I do not think a dps meter works in practice. I've played wow up to cata, I was in a pretty good guild in wotlk and even got a few world first kills. I totally understand why people would want to measure dps to improve. But trying to use one simple number to gauge if someone is pulling their weight just does not work and I don't think people understand why it's a bad measurement.

I re-played classic wow on the official blizzard servers and got into a pretty good guild again. However that guild was always trying to push the meters and have their raiders be on the server top damage for a boss. I thought this was cool and tried to support this. One way I did this, as a mage with not as good of gear as everyone else, was to make sure to de-curse everyone asap. One hilarious story from this is that on the shazzrah fight no one would de-curse because everyone wanted to be top on the meters and the melee were upset. They offered 50g to whoever had the most de-curses, and I made sure I got the 50g lol. Because the melee didn't have to worry about getting 1 shot, they could stay in and eat the aoe and do more dps. We actually ended up killing that boss faster than any other of the guild previous attempts. However I got reprimanded by the raid leader for having terrible dps. I tried to explain on that fight I was de-cursing the melee, but they didn't care: "Thats the healers job and we need more dps". He didn't care that we were already low on healers so we could fit more dps in the raid, he didn't care that we actually did more overall dps when I help the melee instead.

It's funny to think that this guild had many of the top dps spots for bosses on that server, but couldn't get past C'thun. This is what I mean by dps being a worthless measurement: It doesn't matter if you're the best guild on the server with top dps if you can't do the boss mechanics and actually beat the boss. Dps meters just encourage people to play the game like it's single player and just stand there and mash buttons so they can have the biggest numbers.

Ruerik

Apples and Oranges, one doesnt impact the other.
Doing top dps doesn't have anything to do with failing mechanics.

If anything, the existence of mechanics making it harder to actually perform doing DPS makes it more necessary to have the measurement tools.

After all, with 64 combinations of classes types and even further many more builds and gear layouts than that, it is not possible there will be "one build or one strategy fits all" solution.

Sure you can feel your way out to victory being just good enough, but as you said, the folks wanting to push top numbers have to look in to each encounter separately, using data from that encounter, to find the right balance of gear/skill/class to do those top numbers.

Its a per encounter thing, cant just max out on a combat dummy and expect to do the same in a fight.

Solvryn

Been in a group with a few Parsebots lately, couldn’t do simple mechanics and died on every encounter in every dungeon.

Made me think of this thread.

Mag7spy

Like i said before u can't remove it, but just have things lean more towards skill and such and you can curb how much people will care about it. Making people need ones that have skill and ability over just numbers.

Xeeg

I mean they could always make the game with DPS meters and then a whole bunch of monsters/bosses that troll you for trying to get top dps with some mechanic... shrug...

Ruerik

Xeeg wrote: »

I mean they could always make the game with DPS meters and then a whole bunch of monsters/bosses that troll you for trying to get top dps with some mechanic... shrug...

This actually exists in modern games and is a part of optimization to clear the encounter. I can think of a half dozen in FF14 alone (since I'm currently playing that game for the moment).

Plenty of cases where if you DPS too hard you cause a wipe, or if you push the boss too low in HP before dealing with some other mechanic you are punished.

Its not about doing the max possible theoretical dps a build can do, its about doing the max possible you can do in the encounter and get the clear. And for that, we have data, so we can push the limits if we want to.

Xeeg

Taerrik wrote: »

Taerrik wrote: »

Xeeg wrote: »

I mean they could always make the game with DPS meters and then a whole bunch of monsters/bosses that troll you for trying to get top dps with some mechanic... shrug...

This actually exists in modern games and is a part of optimization to clear the encounter. I can think of a half dozen in FF14 alone (since I'm currently playing that game for the moment).

Plenty of cases where if you DPS too hard you cause a wipe, or if you push the boss too low in HP before dealing with some other mechanic you are punished..

Then what’s the problem? I didn’t read all the posts, but if people are just complaining about guild leaders kicking you for low dps just get a new guild cause your leader is an ass, or “get good” cause it’s possible you just suck at the game.

Tragnar

Xeeg wrote: »

Taerrik wrote: »

Taerrik wrote: »

Xeeg wrote: »

I mean they could always make the game with DPS meters and then a whole bunch of monsters/bosses that troll you for trying to get top dps with some mechanic... shrug...

This actually exists in modern games and is a part of optimization to clear the encounter. I can think of a half dozen in FF14 alone (since I'm currently playing that game for the moment).

Plenty of cases where if you DPS too hard you cause a wipe, or if you push the boss too low in HP before dealing with some other mechanic you are punished..

Then what’s the problem? I didn’t read all the posts, but if people are just complaining about guild leaders kicking you for low dps just get a new guild cause your leader is an ass, or “get good” cause it’s possible you just suck at the game.

That goes against the view of anti-meter people (including steven), because that reason for kicking is toxic, taints way too many people and should not be in the game, so the "solution" is to not allow meters

Xeeg

Tragnar wrote: »

That goes against the view of anti-meter people (including steven), because that reason for kicking is toxic, taints way too many people and should not be in the game, so the "solution" is to not allow meters

Toxic people are going to be toxic, any excuse will do. If its not DPS meters its going to be something else.

There are people in this forum that are toxic. Is the solution to have no forums?

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