DPS Meter Megathread

We have not received permission from Songcaller to share the quoted post.

The beauty of pvp is that it doesn't really need expansions. I've seen L2 servers live for years with the same content, but it wasn't an issue because people just pvped with each other for castles and for the super rare loot that this content had. And if you keep adding pve stuff for the players who don't find pvp fun - you'll have yourself a game with high longevity.

Oh, we're at a new stage of necroposting now we're necroing the "tab vs action" thread in another thread!

NiKr wrote: »

Oh, we're at a new stage of necroposting now we're necroing the "tab vs action" thread in another thread!

I hope that at this point, given the niche nature of this topic, we can ignore Mag to discuss it properly.

A lot of this depends way too much on the quality of game experience offered by games recently. But I don't think it is ALL nostalgia, it's staying power.

We remember the games that survive long enough to be remembered. This is a common thing in all genres. Less people remember the 20 bad ones, particularly the buggy ones. They look at what succeeded, at 'what most people experienced one way or another', and discuss those.

The MMO industry is in the almost-unique position where the better an MMO is, the less 'people' play it, probably because MMOs started to pull in gamers that don't actually like MMOs, and then tried to keep them.

Azherae wrote: »

The MMO industry is in the almost-unique position where the better an MMO is, the less 'people' play it, probably because MMOs started to pull in gamers that don't actually like MMOs, and then tried to keep them.

I either missed some context or am just too sleepy to properly string together the messages that led to this comment.

And in case you were just saying this as a new topic starter, yes, I agree that mmos have fucked themselves over by trying to appeal to the broadest audience. And the more they tried to do that, the faster the snowball rolled down the mountain, and now we have morpg that are barely even "m" at this point because the people that the patryfinder gives you don't even talk. But because people now see mmos in this light, any "true mmo" just dies immediately because the truest target audience have gone the way of the dodo.

NiKr wrote: »

We have not received permission from Songcaller to share the quoted post.

The beauty of pvp is that it doesn't really need expansions. I've seen L2 servers live for years with the same content, but it wasn't an issue because people just pvped with each other for castles and for the super rare loot that this content had. And if you keep adding pve stuff for the players who don't find pvp fun - you'll have yourself a game with high longevity.

One of the things most important here is a thread common to both PvP games that are fun and PvE games that are considered fun (let's exclude people who don't like challenge AND ALSO don't bother to understand mechanics from the 'fun' aspect, mainly because we already know that Ashes is supposed to be challenging, and there's some implication that you will need to understand actual mechanics).

Just doing the content has to be fun, somehow. Not just socially fun, and not just 'Woo I got a reward' fun. Complexity and randomness of a certain type (This Or That) is reaction-based fun for most players who enjoy challenge, and adds depth for players who want to understand mechanics.

Idk about PvE players in general but as you know, Noaani and I both react positively to 'this boss is doing random-ish things, the combination of particular random things it can do is itself an emergent challenge'.

The tracker 'measures how well you adapted to the randomness'. Why is this important? Because the 'am I having fun' part is sometimes not decided by if you win or lose the encounter or even how quickly you downed it. It is a way to measure your own goals or synchronization, in retrospect, quickly.

In a weird way, I don't see how, in a good enough game, people who want a Combat Tracker for any OTHER REASON make sense. Toxicity 'doesn't make sense' in the realm of trackers. I can absolutely believe that 'at the high end of EQ2, Noaani never encountered Tracker-based toxicity', because EQ2 top-end would probably have been raiding for fun somewhat moreso than for reward.

An example is the ZNM system in FFXI which I remember celebrating the most 'getting the item from the first tier boss to unlock the second tier boss', yet at the moment I cannot remember a single reward for any of them.

I would go over combat logs to see why we lost. I would go over them to see 'why did we win extra hard today, did we do something cool that we can learn from for others?'

I would go over logs to see why I had too MUCH MP and what we did that made it so I did not need to heal as much.

I don't remember or know the DPS of any of my teammates because FFXI DPS is complex and 'shared' anyway (Skillchains) so all I really care about is 'did my DPS time a damage burst correctly' and not necessarily 'how big was it'?

That's therefore another point on the pile. I don't so much MIND if the game somehow explicitly blocks tracking (no Combat Log for example) but the association of these tools with toxicity when in certain designs they are explicitly 'fun multipliers' is the issue I have here. When I think "I'll just write a parser" it is so I can have more fun, the fight is the reward.

If one doesn't understand this, once again, Monster Hunter. I don't think most of the 'people who play that game a lot' play it for any 'reward'. You play it because Fighting Giant Monsters In Crazy Terrain Is Fun. The 'Meter' users in that game are usually playing in the 'Time Attack' mode and raising their DPS to compete with each other for that type of fun (in contrast to the other, because the more damage you do, the less the monster gets to fight back, the more it 'stops feeling like an opponent')

If Ashes drove away every player who didn't think PvE was fun for just the sake of it, and every player who didn't think PvP was 'fun for the sake of it', it would probably be a better MMO. But if it did that, and then made the game a specific type of competitive race (PvP in most designs is inherently this) even those people will stop, I think.

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

The MMO industry is in the almost-unique position where the better an MMO is, the less 'people' play it, probably because MMOs started to pull in gamers that don't actually like MMOs, and then tried to keep them.

I either missed some context or am just too sleepy to properly string together the messages that led to this comment.

And in case you were just saying this as a new topic starter, yes, I agree that mmos have fucked themselves over by trying to appeal to the broadest audience. And the more they tried to do that, the faster the snowball rolled down the mountain, and now we have morpg that are barely even "m" at this point because the people that the patryfinder gives you don't even talk. But because people now see mmos in this light, any "true mmo" just dies immediately because the truest target audience have gone the way of the dodo.

Yeah sorry, see above for how this relates to Trackers.

EDIT: I don't think they have. I think they're mostly 'playing old games', 'waiting for things similar to those old games', 'playing through FFXIV expansions when they come out', and 'playing old games on private servers'.

Like an army waiting for the Call Of The Sandal Lord to rise again and return to the True World, to experience the 'Verracity' of a social breathing world again, as their worlds have lost their magic.

Sorry, waxed poetic too much there.

Azherae wrote: »

Like an army waiting for the Call Of The Sandal Lord to rise again and return to the True World, to experience the 'Verracity' of a social breathing world again, as their worlds have lost their magic.

Yep, that's me and a dozen or so of my friends. Waiting for a great mmo, while trying to enjoy other games or replaying the same old mmos of yesteryear.

And I agree with the previous post that Ashes has to have each of its components be fun, first and foremost. And if the game is fun, both sides of the pvx spectrum could somewhat ignore any features they dislike from the other side, mainly because their own side is super fun. Hope it works out that way. And on that hopeful note I'm going to sleep, cause I had to reread that big post several times to properly understand it

We have not received permission from Hatham to share the quoted post.

I only did basic analysis on the fall of Wildstar, but I encountered three 'critical fail points' pretty early in so I just assumed the rest of the design was at approximately that quality. They had good ideas but felt like lacking cohesion that was required for sustainability.

I often worry that Ashes is the same, and I see a DIFFERENT three 'critical fail points' in Ashes, but they might still be changed, and they have already been talked to death in threads (I guess the glaring ones are easy to see and the others aren't visible yet if they exist).

It can obviously be my bias, but Combat Trackers are not one of them. Combat Trackers are a 'potential issue' that can create a failpoint if a different part of the design is bad, but we don't have any information on that other than promises, and the promises are the entire basis of this thread.

All Ashes has to do to make ME personally ignore this entire 'debate' is say 'We don't plan to have challenging PvE-heavy content, we expect the challenge for bringing down bosses to be PvP with bosses being incidental, and if you can get the boss to yourself you will almost always be able to win'.

That will make me just go 'sure, fine, don't need the Tracker, I'll worry about just PvP balance/Frame Data'. I'd still expect the game to die or be very niche (considering its systems) for the other reason, but I'd expect to play my entire 11 (?) months sub from launch before the majority of people moved on and the cracks in the systems started showing up without them.

I believe Noaani has said this before, probably multiple times. If Trackers are causing toxicity in your game in a serious way, your game is designed wrong .

We have not received permission from mcstackerson to share the quoted post.

How is that what I seem to want?

Trackers aren't primarily for DPS.

If Intrepid decided to hide the damage numbers in the log, I'll still need to write the same parser.

If Intrepid has a good design for Bard, the Bard will probably decide more about anyone's DPS than any other party member, and it's the Bard who will want to know that.

The whole 'people will be mistreated for underperforming in damage' is not a Tracker problem, it's a design problem. I have no more interest in DPS check bosses than any other kind.