DPS Meter Megathread

Btw, have there been mmos with 0 combat info? Did they have complex pve and did it require or at least result in tracker use? I'm not sure if I've ever heard about or seen such an mmo, so I wouldn't even know how people would react if Intrepid went so hard on their anti-addon spiel that they removed any hp/dmg indicators. Like, to a point where you don't even know your own HP values, so that you couldn't just extrapolate damages from pvp fights.

I'd assume quite a lot of people would dislike that huge of an info absence, but I dunno if there's a precedent for it either way.

edit: I guess you'd need to have somewhat randomized mob/boss hp on top of unknown values, because people could still just get their ttks and then compare them. In other words, it's literally impossible to stop people from deconstructing a game and then using that deconstruction to their benefit.

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I mean, that's a given in any fun game, but I was mainly talking about the tracker people. They'll always find a way to have their way, so these past 120 pages of discussion were pretty much useless But what else is new.

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Yeah, I agree, cause I've been doing this for 12 years in L2. But as have been stated multiple times here, trackers/meters will still be made if there's a combat log. And I'm fairly sure it'd be made if there even wasn't a log. And Intrepid can't do anything about it. And as specifically Noaani's comments point out, there can't even be an assumption of "good faith" when it comes to the tracker ban, because someone somewhere will use them. Someone else will see (or at least assume) that the other person is using them and will use one themselves. And it'll just snowball from there.

And then there's people like Azherae who can just extrapolate way more stuff from simply the combat log itself, to the point where some people might accuse her of using a tracker. And this would start the same snowball effect as someone really using one.

I wish people didn't want to use them, but this is one of the rare things in mmos where the dev studio can't just prevent people from doing it through any in-game means.

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You're just asking me to do useless busywork. I need to decide whether my buffs are what my team needs or not. I have DECISIONS to make. When I know how much my team is missing the enemy, and how much damage my Tank is taking, I can START to play the game. I'm here to make decisions, not do arithmetic.

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How sure are you that this will be the case though?

Cause to me this just seems like the middle ground I tried to find from my pov, except from Noaani's pov. Yes, some guilds will just use that perk. But what are the chances that there won't be some other perk that gives you better parsing in raids, that you can't get purely because you spent a point on the tracker. At which point, the guild that is at Noaani's lvl of hardcoreness and not caring about the rules will just go "fuck the guild perk, we're making our own tracker". And then they'll be better than other guilds because that one perk gave them a better parse. And now other guilds do the same, because there's already precedent. And now that 3rd party tracker is also tracking other people, cause why da hell would it not. And now you have the exact problem that you see in FF14.

Again, it's all about people who will not act in good faith under the rules presented by the developer. And there'll always be someone who takes it to the extreme. Except in this case Intrepid literally can't do anything about those extremes. And if they implement their own tracker, they'd just give those bad actors the tools to make an amazing 3rd party tracker, cause they'd have all the information they need to properly calculate anything they want already in the game.

NiKr wrote: »

And if they implement their own tracker, they'd just give those bad actors the tools to make an amazing 3rd party tracker, cause they'd have all the information they need to properly calculate anything they want already in the game.

No, this information always ALWAYS already exists.

There just needs to be a UI and even the most rudimentary combat log.

The code for literally 'finding damage numbers on a screen, figuring out what those numbers are, and putting them into the data parser' is well known. If a player can see it, and has any control at all over the display of those numbers, the parser can see it. This is why you can parse just from the screen.

A packet sniffing tracker would be easy to find.

The way to make people not care about trackers as often is to make designs where bothering to run the tracker is more work than doing it yourself, as you noted. That's not a matter of 'ok so now we can punish people for running them'. It would stop being NECESSARY.

"Being worried about trackers" in a game like Ashes is telegraphing to me that understanding (or confidence in) class design and encounter design is low, given what Ashes is supposed to be. You keep making the same very correct point, but the outcome 'should' be different. If Ashes has a specific design type, it won't be 'no one needs trackers', it would be 'no one cares about them enough to worry about if someone else is using one or not'.

Implementing inhouse trackers as a Guild Perk isn't remotely about 'making people pay for the use of one', it's about separating players who don't like them from players who do at the mid levels quickly enough to avoid the clashes.

Azherae wrote: »

"Being worried about trackers" in a game like Ashes is telegraphing to me that understanding (or confidence in) class design and encounter design is low, given what Ashes is supposed to be. You keep making the same very correct point, but the outcome 'should' be different. If Ashes has a specific design type, it won't be 'no one needs trackers', it would be 'no one cares about them enough to worry about if someone else is using one or not'.

I'm trying to stay as cautiously neutral as possible, with a tint of negativity to stop myself from falling into hype too much. There have been countless games (let alone mmos) with countless promises. And veeeeery rarely have those promises become reality. Even rarer in mmos. And then we consider the sheer scale of what Intrepid is trying to do and the scale of promises they've made, and I become full with doubt of whether they can truly achieve their goal. As I keep saying, I dearly hope they do, but I'd rather complain about the negative possibilities now and then be super happy that I was wrong, than try and believe each and every Steven's word (as Dygz quite often does) and then be disappointed when those plans fall through.

As I've stated before, Ashes is the only mmo for me that has even the slightest potential of really being my "final" mmo. It has the exact design choices I like, it doesn't have the corporate greed that ruined my favorite mmo and it has a fairly headstrong leader that doesn't seem to budge under the general pressure (at least so far and from what I've seen). This whole game is almost exactly what I would've done if I had the millions to fund it. And all of that would only make it that much more painful if the game completely dies for one reason or the other. Which is why I doubt Intrepid's convictions, I doubt their promises and I doubt its success. It's a defensive mechanism

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

"Being worried about trackers" in a game like Ashes is telegraphing to me that understanding (or confidence in) class design and encounter design is low, given what Ashes is supposed to be. You keep making the same very correct point, but the outcome 'should' be different. If Ashes has a specific design type, it won't be 'no one needs trackers', it would be 'no one cares about them enough to worry about if someone else is using one or not'.

I'm trying to stay as cautiously neutral as possible, with a tint of negativity to stop myself from falling into hype too much. There have been countless games (let alone mmos) with countless promises. And veeeeery rarely have those promises become reality. Even rarer in mmos. And then we consider the sheer scale of what Intrepid is trying to do and the scale of promises they've made, and I become full with doubt of whether they can truly achieve their goal. As I keep saying, I dearly hope they do, but I'd rather complain about the negative possibilities now and then be super happy that I was wrong, than try and believe each and every Steven's word (as Dygz quite often does) and then be disappointed when those plans fall through.

As I've stated before, Ashes is the only mmo for me that has even the slightest potential of really being my "final" mmo. It has the exact design choices I like, it doesn't have the corporate greed that ruined my favorite mmo and it has a fairly headstrong leader that doesn't seem to budge under the general pressure (at least so far and from what I've seen). This whole game is almost exactly what I would've done if I had the millions to fund it. And all of that would only make it that much more painful if the game completely dies for one reason or the other. Which is why I doubt Intrepid's convictions, I doubt their promises and I doubt its success. It's a defensive mechanism

Ah yes but then you have the "Option Select" as we like to call it. Let's take a random player that says:

"I don't want trackers because I think it will make people figure out the Meta much faster!"
And I respond "What meta? This is Ashes of Creation."

The fact that this person believes that Ashes COULD have a Meta that could be damaged by a tracker existing, means that Ashes didn't achieve the level intended. Why are they/you playing?

If the argument for the tracker is just 'I just really want another average MMO to play and trackers ruin average MMOs, don't ruin this for me with your fast-tracked Meta bullshit', then that person is completely fine. I will never even want to use a tracker for Ashes, I will not be playing.

So for me, it's easy. Either trackers might as well be allowed because the game will be so good (and the better it is, the more GOOD they do), or the game is average and I have no opinion on their existence, and from what I gather, after a few months, neither would you.

Azherae wrote: »

Ah yes but then you have the "Option Select" as we like to call it. Let's take a random player that says:

"I don't want trackers because I think it will make people figure out the Meta much faster!"
And I respond "What meta? This is Ashes of Creation."

The fact that this person believes that Ashes COULD have a Meta that could be damaged by a tracker existing, means that Ashes didn't achieve the level intended. Why are they/you playing?

If the argument for the tracker is just 'I just really want another average MMO to play and trackers ruin average MMOs, don't ruin this for me with your fast-tracked Meta bullshit', then that person is completely fine. I will never even want to use a tracker for Ashes, I will not be playing.

So for me, it's easy. Either trackers might as well be allowed because the game will be so good (and the better it is, the more GOOD they do), or the game is average and I have no opinion on their existence, and from what I gather, after a few months, neither would you.

While thinking of an answer I came upon a small realization. Noaani says that AA barely used any trackers. In my experience L2 barely used them either (Noaani has a few people who used them, so I dunno whether my experience is special or theirs is). Steven is taking most of his inspiration from those 2 games. Neither of them required trackers to complete their content.

So what are the chances that Steven is somewhat like me in thinking "why would you need trackers? All I've heard from a lot of other people is that they've had bad experiences with them and that FF14 is against them. And all content I've cleared in my past never needed you to parse out your dps to clear it".

And with Steven's word being the final one when it comes to design paths, what are the chances that, even if someone on the team (mainly people from the EQ team) said that trackers are fine and maybe even great for the kind of pve Steven has promised, Steven just says "no, I see no point in them and they allegedly only bring negativity".

This would explain why there hasn't been a concrete reason for forbidding their use and the overall negative stance on them from him. And considering that Steven is the main face we see when we ask our questions, we wouldn't really know whether there's anyone in Intrepid that would wholeheartedly support trackers (iirc Margaret mentioned them in the past in a somewhat positive light?).

I think I've asked you this before @Noaani but I forget, what was the shape of meta in AA? Was it smth concrete or was there a fair bit of variety in approaches to party setups, both in pvp and in pve?

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There aren't. But 'non code guys' can be told there are. That's what happens in FFXIV.

I want you to have access to trackers, not just me and Noaani.

NiKr wrote: »

So what are the chances that Steven is somewhat like me in thinking "why would you need trackers? All I've heard from a lot of other people is that they've had bad experiences with them and that FF14 is against them. And all content I've cleared in my past never needed you to parse out your dps to clear it".

And with Steven's word being the final one when it comes to design paths, what are the chances that, even if someone on the team (mainly people from the EQ team) said that trackers are fine and maybe even great for the kind of pve Steven has promised, Steven just says "no, I see no point in them and they allegedly only bring negativity".

This would explain why there hasn't been a concrete reason for forbidding their use and the overall negative stance on them from him. And considering that Steven is the main face we see when we ask our questions, we wouldn't really know whether there's anyone in Intrepid that would wholeheartedly support trackers (iirc Margaret mentioned them in the past in a somewhat positive light?).

I figure the chances are high, or this thread wouldn't even be allowed to go on in the way it does (I'm assuming a roundabout 'good-faith' situation, as there IS another reason why this thread might be allowed to go on and was consolidated the way it was)

But there's also some indications it's a little more than that, Dygz quoted something awhile back about it.

The only confusing thing about it is that by now, Steven must know that trackers are functionally undetectable, so what's the point of implying they 'won't be allowed' outside of aiming at an FFXIV outcome?

Azherae wrote: »

The only confusing thing about it is that by now, Steven must know that trackers are functionally undetectable, so what's the point of implying they 'won't be allowed' outside of aiming at an FFXIV outcome?

Yeah, I feel like they'll just have a soft stance on it and have a very similar rule to ff14's. Cause the push for them definitely comes from the minority, so there's no real pressure on Steven to implement them, and if he can stand his ground against all the "remove pvp or make it opt-in" people then there's no reason why he wouldn't stand that same ground against the people telling him to allow trackers.

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So yeah, now I'm almost sure the thing I said is the case. Both Steven's biggest inspirations didn't require you to have a tracker to clear content so he doesn't see a point in allowing them. The issue comes from the juxtaposition of that stance and his promises for pve, but considering we've yet to see their top end content, there might not even be an issue in the first place. So yet again it comes down to "wait for alpha2 and see".