I lost my point in that last post. I was trying to get at the point of "trackers might not give you the perfect solution for mass pvp, so their presence or absence wouldn't really be felt there".
Well remember that we are on the Meritocracy tangent atm.
I agree with everything you say about the design itself, which could put us back at 'the issue with challenging PvE being disrupted by other groups' instead.
Mostly I was addressing
@MrPockets
flow. The game creates the Meritocracy and this incentivizes some people to use Trackers to keep up with the crazy savants. I think I can clarify something else though.
I care about other people having fun. Without tools, many people have less fun. I won't use Trackers in Ashes, but I know that 'not being able to figure out what to do' in MMOs for your own style and build is
not generally fun
. And MMOs are complicated, or at least I figure this one could be.
If it were me, I would not be willing to tell a person who is not good at figuring these things out 'well you have to wait for someone to explain it to you'. There are SO many random bullshit issues with the WAY human minds see patterns that datasets on the scope of 'MMOs' just straight up trick people. Clusters, streaks, all completely misleading.
One of my tests for my own game has me convinced that a certain mob in it just rolls Nat 20 more often for no clear reason. I am leaning into it for the story, and it's both 'unlikely to be for any in-code reason' and even more likely to be a specific form of observational bias, but I have checked and purely by CHANCE, this mob type crits more often.
I've seen the code, I know that it isn't based on some hidden thing. But that's a good example. If you had gear that would protect more against crits but less against regular damage, in Ashes, how would you ever know if it was worth wearing it? Against my mob, you should always wear it (based on the data from the streaky sample set). In 'expected reality', you should never wear it.
I want the person who is frustrated that this mob SEEMS to always crit them at the worst times, to be able to get the data to confirm that isn't true statistically across all usage without having to ask EVERY guild member they have for their own combat logs, and then go through the combat logs of over a hundred people by hand to verify 'no this mob does not have a higher critrate'.
Because otherwise they're going to have to convince everyone else 'yeah this mob crits extra so I bought some crit-resist gear'. And because (in this scenario) they are WRONG, then if the mob does NOT crit but just does consistent damage, then they've made things harder for their group by coming to the wrong conclusion.
I don't fault your reasoning that somehow it's important that this unlucky person needs to figure it out with the help of others. I just don't want their experience to be everyone else going 'man idk doesn't seem that way to me, but you can go through everyone's logs if you want'.
Guild Tracker version of the same situation:
"Guys I keep getting crit by Minotaurs do they have higher critrate to you?"
"Lemme check my parser... nope, actually seems a little lower than I expect?"
"Nah mine's normal I think."
"Also lower, my dude, it's just you."
"Oh ok I won't worry about getting this no-crit gear."
"Maybe we should check if your OTHER gear has some sort of hidden 'enemy critical hit rate up'?"
"Oh yeah that'd be good, but that could take days..."
"You can lend it to us and we'll help test it."
I know you've said many times that to you, the other way is how it should be. I just don't think the other way's fun.
