We have not received permission from Noaani to share the quoted post.
You see it that way because you agree with Steven's views on pvp (or at least understand their reasoning), but disagree with him on the trackers. Any pve carebear will gladly tell you that pvp will destroy the game and that implementing opt-in features would be better than sliced bread.
But, if Steven is anywhere close to my thinking, the reasoning is "the game needs pvp to work properly, but it doesn't need trackers to work properly, so there's no reason to implement them". Yes, several people in this thread have made a good case for tracker usage, but a ton of people have bad associations with them so just saying "we won't have them" is already appealing to them. Now it could be argued that the same crowd might not enjoy a ton of other features in the game, but that's on Intrepid to figure out who exactly they're trying to appeal to with their designs and how they present them.
What is kinda obvious is that right now there's some confusion in terms of trying to appeal to pve players. Especially when it comes to the hardcore part of that community. So there's gotta be some disconnect between either just Steven, or maybe even most of Intrepid, and those hardcore players.
The difference is actually that Steven just is telling those players 'Ashes may not be for you'.
That's fine. Steven might be saying that from the 'We will make hard content and then use our built in surveillance equipment to monitor what other applications are running on your computer, all the way down to custom scripts you wrote yourself in C++" side...
Or from the 'Our content is not going to require this because it won't be hard enough/the numbers will be simple enough/the situations won't be the same type of challenge anyway' side.
Again, Steven's never actually said, that I have seen, that 'Hardcore PvE' is the way Intrepid intends to achieve that 'single digit percentage' thing. But the things we HAVE been told are things that would make me think 'Ok, sometimes we're going to want a Combat Log parser to verify something'.
Because, again, remember, the outcome of having NO parser, even by magic, is usually bad. The outcome of having hidden parsers that no one will talk about is worse:
"Sorry we've decided you're just not the right sort of player for our guild."
"Why not, I'm always ready, I'm helpful, I show up to basically everything, I don't make trouble with anyone..."
"We just feel the need to go in a new direction."
But that's worse for me if you allow me no tracker, because I still 'have to do this' if the content is hard. After the 7th 'sus' performance from someone, if I have the tracker I can go, objectively 'this thing here is the reason you are failing, are you okay with changing it?'
Some people want me to guess. Some people want me to 'figure it out later'. I'll give an example of 'figure it out later'.
FFXI's Hate mechanics were not known for YEARS. No 'parser' gave you a way to discover them. During those years, two really important things happened around the ability Provoke.
1. Some people claimed that if you were playing warrior as Main Job rather than Secondary, Provoke was just better, while others claimed it was improved by the Charisma stat.
2. People claimed that Provoke was vital for holding hate as a tank and anyone trying anything else was ruining the party in most cases.
The Meta breakers ignored this. Some built Warrior Tanks and continued to be successful (and mocked). Some built groups where there was no Provoke at all, and were somewhat successful (and mocked).
Then some crazy number crunchers, bless their hearts, spend 3 straight days deconstructing it, and then the Director had to 'cave' and make a big post explaining it. This information wasn't clear to people until they were working on FFXIV, mind you. We went years without understanding this.
The result was that nearly everything people thought they understood about Enmity, and Provoke in general, was wrong... except the Meta-breakers (Provoke does not, afaik, actually operate better on Warrior, but because of the WAY it works, plus the ROTATION of warriors, it is more effective).
"Upon usage, a large amount of time-volatile enmity (enmity that decays over time, but not with damage taken) is added to the user.
The amount of enmity added decays by 1/30 per second. After 30 seconds, all enmity gained from Provoke will have worn off."
Note that this has NOTHING to do with parsers. And I am sure that there are some people out there who will feel 'congratulations, that's so impressive that someone finally figured that out, I bet it made the game much better when you didn't know all that precisely'.
Nope. It sucked. Exclusionary behaviour, no way to prove certain tank builds worked so you had to literally get people to take it on faith that you could do the same thing as someone else, and lots and lots of frustrating battles where the 'obvious correct' decision would fail because of the PRECISE way Provoke works.
Just obfuscation.
I shouldn't care. I 'should' be a toxic elitist. I 'should' be taking advantage of the fact that I am confident that 'take longer' for ME is 2 months whereas 'take longer' for the average person just wanting a build that is good, but others don't believe in, is way longer, reducing competition.
No. I hate that shit, it's stupid. It didn't cause a better community, it didn't bring people together, the only reason it even came up as actual information is because the people doing it were so FED UP with it being unknown, and it's a PvE game that was later in its life by then.
If you have to hide information in a way that leads the average player to make the wrong decision until someone does a 3 day controlled trial, for your game to feel good and not 'get figured out quickly' in this era, then nah, you don't care about even mid-serious PvE players in terms of challenge, you just want to artificially extend the lifeflow of the game while rewarding the ones with the most understanding of statistics/math.
It isn't even that they specifically hid information about Enmity/Hate mechanics, because MOST of it works as you'd expect it to just from eyeballing. But I'm gonna call out that team on their BS too (they were the original developers of FFXIV also, we all know how the first release of that went).
I've just ranted as usual because it's good to vent sometimes, honestly. If I see any signs that Intrepid doesn't want people to 'understand abilities easily' or 'be able to reverse engineer their stat effects', I think I'm out. It's literally against my principles to play games where the designers have purposely pushed it so that my main competition is either 'cheaters' as some would say, or 'people with the same genetic aptitude as me' when it's not that type of game.
Maybe to Steven it IS that type of game, though. A real Yoo Byung Jun. But I'm no Weed, as inspiring as he is.
). And trackers would help both of those kinds of people to do what they would've done even if there were no trackers (toxic people will find something else to judge people by and practical people will find some other objective metric to properly calculate validity of someone's build).