DPS Meter Megathread

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From a very very very rough understanding of the ACT thing, I thought it was just a glorified combat log. My only problem with it is that it's omniscient and gives you information that you wouldn't have had otherwise. And the arguments of "have mechanics that can only be noticed through parcing the tracker" only reinforce that for me.

I personally don't want that kind of design. If that leads to a "boring" encounter that can only be made more interesting through pvp (well, more fun for those who even care about pvp) - so be it. But Intrepid have talked themselves into a corner with their current promises so my current position doesn't mean shit really.

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And either of those statements can only be clarified by Intrepid, which is literally what I want from them at this point. Some details or a clarification on their position, be it updated or not.

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

How is this possibly better?

If undetectable botters can easily beat any boss that Intrepid makes, then how would Intrepid even counter that? Trackers wouldn't change that in any way.

If Intrepid sticks with the open world boss goal and then the botters create bots that can both kill the difficult boss and anyone who comes to pvp them - at that point I'd just say let them, because there's literally nothing you can do.

I guess I'm a defeatist when it comes to that kind of a scenario? Cause I literally see no way where Intrepid could combat an untraceable bot raid that excels at both pve and pvp. Designing with trackers in mind would not change that situation, because the botters would be literally the same as you or Noaani. They'll figure out how to beat the boss, write the bot for it and go do it. And no one will stop them because the bots are literal best players in the game (allegedly).

So if the ultimate result is "botters will win no matter what you do", then I'd rather play w/o trackers in the game and enjoy it as long as I can for what it is. To me, those botters would be ruining the game in the same way the tracker people would if Intrepid stays with the "no addon/meter/tracker" rule, because both would be breaking the rules of the game to have their fun, completely disregarding what other people think about it. But maybe I'm just too big of a stickler for the rules, or just like the currently presented rules and want everyone to follow them and live happily ever after. Though I know that no one will, cause people don't care if their fun ruins someone else's fun.

You're missing my point again I think?

If the boss is difficult, bots are hard, but Trackers are likely to be used.

If the boss/Mechanic is easy, Trackers are unlikely to be necessary but bots are easy.

If you must make a tradeoff between the supposed 'toxicity of a tracker' and the actual toxicity of 'bots that can win at the game', you'll choose the bots? You probably don't see it as being that binary, and it definitely is not, but as I've said before, this is 'being offered a solution to some of the real part of an otherwise illusory problem' and then 'choosing to perceive the illusion as the bigger problem than the flipside'.

Being defeatist is EXACTLY what you need to not do here, because this ISN'T a matter of 'Intrepid should just give up'. They can design bosses that are hard enough that bots are not worth writing (because the code for ACTING on information gathered is much more complicated), but the 'information gathering' part of the code is going to be written by SOMEONE (which affects content consumption speed, but if the content is fun, the 'problem' can be somewhere between 'elitists complaining that the game is too easy while they keep playing it' and 'harmless').

So I'm trying to convince people to NOT be defeatist. DON'T give in to Botters because some asshole said that someone's DPS wasn't good enough. Don't give in to RMT bot farmers because 'Intrepid will have a strong stance against botting'. There are design solutions to these things. They may not all be painless, but is it really just not worth it? Is it so hard to just believe the EverQuest player who tells you 'it's fine it's not all that toxic if the game is good'.

We are hoping for the game to be good, right?

NiKr wrote: »

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

From a very very very rough understanding of the ACT thing, I thought it was just a glorified combat log. My only problem with it is that it's omniscient and gives you information that you wouldn't have had otherwise. And the arguments of "have mechanics that can only be noticed through parcing the tracker" only reinforce that for me.

I personally don't want that kind of design. If that leads to a "boring" encounter that can only be made more interesting through pvp (well, more fun for those who even care about pvp) - so be it. But Intrepid have talked themselves into a corner with their current promises so my current position doesn't mean shit really.

It's not information you wouldn't have had otherwise generally, its information that overloads a normal person's cognition.

And here is my problem with that, precisely. Analogy time? This one's probably good.

You can play Chess online. Chess is a very complicated game and sometimes you are 10 moves PAST the point where you made the losing move when you realize you are losing. On a computer you can probably review by quickly loading up and checking the previous few moves (yes, even while the game is going on). But you're still losing.

The 'information that the Tracker gives you' is equivalent to being able to VISUALIZE THE BOARD instead of 'having to do it all in your mind'. Imagine it. You have no board, you have no pieces, you're effectively 'in a room with the log of the game floating in front of you'.

I'm not saying 'this shouldn't be how games are'. I'm saying that someone who watches a Chessmaster figure out the right thing to do due to their ability to just visualize a chessboard, and can't do it, has more incentive to go 'that's unfair, I'm gonna go get a chess set so I can do it without being some kind of savant/spending 5 hours to do what they did in 10 minutes'.

And I BELIEVE that Noaani is saying the equivalent of 'Why would you bother to do it without a chessboard when there's going to be one within arm's reach of everyone else anyway?'

Harder bosses overwhelm 'normal people'. The 'purity' of the game might be retained if you could somehow make all those people unable to use a tool to help them, but you can't. So now you can probably be sure that some subsection of 'normal people who can't do it without the Tracker' will go get the Tracker. Because this is a competition, and they're losing it.

One of the main reasons developers don't ever know how difficult something is to do, is because the human brain is one of the best pattern matching systems we know to exist. So devs make errors like 'Well, no one can consistently do this 1-frame counter' or 'no one could notice the statistical variance structure of this' or 'no one could figure out that there's one frame on which if you stand right here the hitbox for this attack won't get you', and my favorite 'no one could keep perfect track of exactly how much damage they have done to this mob'.

Until someone does. And then others want to, and if they find tools to let them, they use those tools. But this doesn't mean Devs should give up on designing cool things. It means they should give up on designing what they think are 'hard' things and focus on making those things chaotic and fun so that no one even cares about the fact that using the tracker is part of the game at high levels for non-savants.

Azherae wrote: »

We are hoping for the game to be good, right?

Yes. And my problem with trackers is not the alleged toxicity, I got past that too after reading this thread. My lack of knowledge of hardcore pve just can't let me think of a boss that's super easy for bots, but somehow not super easy for people.

Noaani says that half the players will use trackers, even if they're forbidden. That might be the case, just as it allegedly is in FF14, but iirc someone (I think it was Aerlana) said that FF14's bosses haven't really increased in their difficulty too much throughout the years, even though top players all apparently use trackers for them. That leads me to believe that the difficulty of the game doesn't necessarily need to increase, even if people with trackers are able to beat it sooner rather than later. Which in turn leads me to believe that Intrepid's position can remain on the "no addons/meters/trackers" point w/o sacrificing anything really.

Ultimately I want Intrepid to work hard in their hinting designs rather than their dps checks designs. Have some patterns in the boss' mechanics that indicate why/how/when/where he will do another mechanic that leads to a wipe. If the tracker people see that hint through their trackers and not through the fight - good for them, they had their spreadsheet fun. But imo the tracker must not be required to notice that hint pattern.

But Noaani says that this kind of design is impossible to make truly difficult, so what do I know.

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

Yeah, and like I said before, the speed at which the tracker allows you to go through all that information is my main issue with it. W/o a tracker you'd either need to record video pov of all players and then go through each and go through their battle logs and then match them up and probably know all the buff/ability/positioning information on top of that, just to properly reference all that info across each other.

The tracker presents all of that in a concise packaged form that lets you dissect the encounter immediately after it has happened. I personally dislike that, mainly because I'm a stubborn ram who wants to bash his head against the content instead, until the content finally breaks. But that's just my opinion on it, which seemingly happens to coincide with Steven's. And as I said already, discussing opinions is an endless activity, with this thread being the biggest proof for that.

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

I just rant because I don't like when people don't understand the core aspects of arguments, so it's probably ignorable.

Competitive games cause some people to want to catch up to the naturally talented by any means necessary.
You can say that you don't like some of those means, but if you can't detect them to ban them, doesn't matter.
Might as well even the playing field while finding some way to keep all the people who don't care about catching up from associating with all the ones that want to catch up and causing toxicity.

Yay for summaries.

Azherae wrote: »

Until someone does. And then others want to, and if they find tools to let them, they use those tools. But this doesn't mean Devs should give up on designing cool things. It means they should give up on designing what they think are 'hard' things and focus on making those things chaotic and fun so that no one even cares about the fact that using the tracker is part of the game at high levels for non-savants.

And we've agreed on this before. I'm all for complete or, at the very least, semi-controlled chaos that somewhat disregards trackers.

As for the chess analogy, I'm too content with the unfairness of the world to compete with the savants. In my ideal world the rules of unfairness would be perfectly upheld, so that the savants are always at the top because they should be, while everyone else is lesser. But obviously that doesn't apply to the real world, so people will always use tools to equalize the playing field. If Intrepid manage to outdesign either of those approaches - awesome. If they just go "fuck it, do whatever you want and we'll give you our own trackers too", I won't necessarily care all that much and just won't use a tracker out of principle.

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

You think this thread somehow stays on any kind of concrete discussion Oh sweet summer child.

Then all I ask is this. Idk about Noaani but I'm not here 'supporting tracker use'. If they could magicban them, I won't care if the general populace doesn't.

But they can't. So all I want is for the conversation to stop being about 'should we have trackers or not?' and move to being about 'how can we keep toxicity low, given that trackers will exist?'

I hope you find like-minded people who also want to ram their heads against the content tracker-less. I don't know what you will do if you find out your GuildMates are using them and giving you advice based on parsing you, but I believe you will always aim to be...

The GOAT.

Azherae wrote: »

But they can't. So all I want is for the conversation to stop being about 'should we have trackers or not?' and move to being about 'how can we keep toxicity low, given that trackers will exist?'

Imo toxicity doesn't have to do anything with the post-factum trackers. It's only the active dps meters that seem to be the problem. Though even those are just the catalyst for the underlying toxicity of the people who use them to be toxic.

Azherae wrote: »

I hope you find like-minded people who also want to ram their heads against the content tracker-less. I don't know what you will do if you find out your GuildMates are using them and giving you advice based on parsing you, but I believe you will always aim to be...

The GOAT.

This is mainly why I just started making my own guild ~4 years into my L2 "career". And I'm one hell of a tyrant when it comes to GLing. It's my way or the highway. No one can tell me what to do or how to do it. And they're always free to leave if they have an issue with my rulings.

But because I AM THE GOAT! (jk) I usually have pretty big and successful guilds (well, relatively speaking). Though I'd mainly chuck that up to my social skills and not really gameplay prowess or anything of that sort.

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

Well yeah, that's what I meant. They'd show a boss, say "this is the difficulty we're going for" and disregard any complaints from people saying it's too easy for them. And the alternative being them just making their own tracker. I highly doubt the former would ever happen, even if I want it to.

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

Elden Ring was my first souls game. And the Tree Sentinel (the golden knight on the horse) was my first mob in it (not counting the very first boss, cause you can't attempt it repeatedly). I fought with that boss for 8h straight and then another 2 hours on the next day until I finally beat it. I tried multiple different approaches and in time saw what I needed to do and just needed to get my skills to a point where I could execute my plan correctly. So I don't think that I can find a wall that I wouldn't want to bash my head against for a long period of time. The time required to beat it is only determined by the skill lvl of the player. Well, that is if all the info you need is presented to you during the encounter and not hidden somewhere deep in the combat logs.

Now obviously me playing a solo game is nowhere near the same thing as fighting an mmo boss with 39 other people. But the core principle remains. I want a game that gives you all the info you need right during the fight and it's then on you to see and recognize that info during the fight , be it the very first fight (if you're a pattern-recognizing savant) or your 100th fight (if you're a plain dude who's bad at puzzles and with no mechanical skill).

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

I've addressed this here before, mainly using FF14's devs as an example. Afaik they put out content that they themselves can clear and one that they find difficult. Obviously there'll be players who're better than them at the game. Awesome for those players! They've got great skill at the game. If they're so good that they found the fight super boring - cool, they've beat the game and can now either do other content or move on from the game.

Steven's a gamer and, from what he's said about his hiring practices, most of the team are gamers too. Their skill could be rusty, but they should have a rough vision of what's "difficult" in a fight (especially the EQ devs that you like to reference). They can then release the bosses to players and see how many players can beat the boss. If it so happens that over 50% of the playerbase does in fact use trackers in spite of the rules and can easily beat the boss - well, so be it, Intrepid will have to make a boss that's somewhat harder.

But depending on the overall design of the bosses (the thing that I've been talking about from the start of this particular conversation), not beating the boss might be a skill issue rather than a "do you have a tracker or not" one. At which point it won't even matter who's using illegal trackers, because the majority of players would not have the skill to beat the boss. And I think this is partially what Mag has been talking about with his "action combat" argument. If the super obvious and super easy to understand mechanics of the boss still require a ton of mechanical skill - you'll still have a low % of player beating the boss. A tracker would have no tangible impact on that, at least as far as I understand.

And this is what I'm waiting for from Intrepid. They could show us a mechanically super hard boss and say "we're still against trackers". Or they could have a somewhat easier boss but with hidden patterns and shit, that only tracker people would figure out, and say "we've changed our minds and gonna provide you with an official tracker".