DPS Meter Megathread

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I'm already mega invested and gonna be a time-hardcore player that's gonna go for gameplay-hardcore stuff soon enough, but I'm against trackers because I think they speed up content consumption while also making said content so difficult that any non-tracker player would then have to use it to know how to beat it. Or at least that's how it seems to me after discussing this topic in this thread.

So considering that, I think I'm an exception to some part of the things I said, but that's just cause "I'm not like other girls "

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In time yeah, maybe. But as Noaani said about some EQ2 content, people didn't share any info about it until they had their fill with it.

And some people might be like me and would want to clear that content w/o a tracker, but, due to devs developing content around tracker use, it'd be almost impossible to do so.

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

I don't have any assumption. That whole thing was said so long ago that it's quite possible that they didn't know exactly what it meant, or didn't know what the game would be like.

Making claims about how many people you plan to have winning against your content very early into development is not necessarily meaningful.

I think that if Intrepid's stance on Meters/Trackers has changed, then their 'best' option is to take the FFXIV route. I do not LIKE this because I consider it manipulative, but for the health of the game and happiness of the most players, I think focusing on the actual gameplay and balance will resolve any problems with Trackers and toxicity much more than 'trying to stop Trackers and Parsers'.

I don't think they were 'hiding' anything because I feel that at the time that statement was made, there wasn't enough of anything designed to 'hide' yet'.

I've also said that if they make 'not very hard' content, it will still achieve their goal. If they make a lot of open world content, the same thing will happen. There are lots of ways to design the game so that their comments about raids are true, the only difference will be that it has nothing to do with the complexity of the raid content itself relative to what 'top end raiders' expect. I've heard multiple times that most people don't care about that, so I am interested to see if a game like this that has no top-end raiding scene actually succeeds (if that's the path they take).

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Information gets around so if someone sees a new piece of gear, they'll try learning where it came from. And if they learn that it comes from a boss that a lot of people have beaten but never gotten - people will assume that it came from the "top lvl clear" drop table. So I think that the result of clearing a boss at top speeds will be known, but not the way to do it. Though I might be wrong, especially depending on how Intrepid design loot tables.

NiKr wrote: »

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

Information gets around so if someone sees a new piece of gear, they'll try learning where it came from. And if they learn that it comes from a boss that a lot of people have beaten but never gotten - people will assume that it came from the "top lvl clear" drop table. So I think that the result of clearing a boss at top speeds will be known, but not the way to do it. Though I might be wrong, especially depending on how Intrepid design loot tables.

Ah but then you're back to the Top Guild behaviour type.

"If they learn that it comes from a boss--"

If .

The Internet age is powerful, but only as powerful as the strife between top guild members. If they are united, you'll be at the 2b2t scale of 'information flow'.

To clarify two things then.

1. I don't care about Trackers in Ashes and I don't intend to use one.
(Combat log availability is important to me, and I don't want to have no option to download it, but I'm a programmer who is on a Linux distro most of the time, the things that people consider 'Parsers' or 'scripts' are single-line commands to me, which is why I'm so concerned about what exactly their policy is)

2. I hope to play Ashes for all those reasons more than I care about the Raid content at all, personally.

But that leads into two additional conclusions.
I lose some of my desire to play Ashes if good gear and good builds are 'locked' behind stuff that the players who DO still use Trackers will definitely get first. And in my opinion, this WILL happen.

Secondly, if the combat/'puzzle-challenge' isn't great, then gathering up 6-8 players to go out into the world and fight mobs won't be interesting or challenging and then my interest in the game would fade and I'd wish I was using a Tracker just so I could find something interesting to do or learn. Skirmishing with other players is fine, right up to the point where you're losing because their gear or builds are much better... because they're using Trackers.

If somehow Intrepid avoids all those things, great.

My point is that, the situation as we currently predict it would have a considerably lower potential for retention of ME as a player. The prediction is based on a lot of priors and understanding of 'how trackers/bots/parsers work' and 'How often you can catch someone using them'. If Intrepid really does figure out a way to 'prevent the three basic steps I know would lead to parsers', then the prediction would not mean anything.

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No, you cannot.

I don't know if you're going to ask me 'why', and I don't mind explaining it if you do (this thread is basically almost the Off-Topic forum sometimes), but understand that it would take a LONG time to explain it, and you'd have to spend most of your time 'accepting things I say as true even if they go against your intuition'. Because it's a complex subject.

If you mean from the side of 'can you check if a person is consistently better than others', sure. But unfortunately, ESPECIALLY in a mostly Tab-Target game, that does not tell you anything about how they got there, so you'd just be 'targeting people who are naturally too good'.

If that happens, I won't have to worry about it because there's a good chance that Ashes would take action against me anyway even if I never use a Tracker.

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Then there would be trackers/parsers that use streams/videos, and can't be stopped. It's just "What if they ban trackers?", but applied to servers instead of universally. External trackers will be written and used, instead of the game's provided tracker. You don't get the benefit of "tracker players will move to a different server" because no-one is going to start over from level 1 just because their server changed it's mind eventually. They'll just write the ACT (not Ashes Client) plugin, and start parsing their combat video (on their other PC, if need be).

Remember that the goal of the "Pro Tracker" group here is not to have trackers for themselves. It is to remove their own competitive advantage by letting everyone have them, so the game is more fair. The ones that just want their own don't bother to post here, because you can't stop them.

The other idea proposed by the "Pro Tracker" group here, as you know, is to have trackers be guild-based. This lets people who want to "not be tracked" easily group with like-minded individuals who are encouraged by the system to respect their preferences. This only works if there is an in-game tracker provided (which doesn't happen if a server, or even node, eventually votes to turn it off). This provides a protection against more powerful external trackers by making it not worth the effort to write one. As a result, the "I will join a guild without the tracker perk" means the tracker will respect your limitation.

This is possible only because of the convenience of having a tracker provided. If it is more convenient to join a guild with trackers enabled, than for one player in the world to write a tracker for Ashes, then that is what will happen.

If an in-game tracker is not provided, is later voted away by the node or server, or is made too difficult to access by players who are interested, then an external tracker will be created because it is no longer pointless to do so. This works for tracker players, but removes ability for others to avoid trackers by choosing to play in a guild without the tracker perk, because there is now an external tracker available will not respect that limitation.

It's work to write an external tracker, but it's not that much work, and once one exists it will be shared. If you make it more convenient to not bother, you can do thing like have tracker-free guilds. If you don't, you lose even that option.

And so to finally address your question directly:

If a guild has a choice between "leave a node we have each invested hundreds of hours in, because they now voted to ban trackers" and "our programmer spends 30 hours writing a tracker as this week's hobby project", they're not gonna choose "abandon our node".

If a guild has a choice between "leave a server we have each invested thousands of hours in, and maybe have world firsts on, because they now voted to ban trackers" and "our programmer spends 30 hours writing a tracker as this week's hobby project", they're not gonna choose "abandon our server".

In any case where you say "no trackers allowed", or even "we'll only give you one if you give up your home" (node/server/etc), you're going to have external trackers that you don't control. The only "lever" you get is the temptation of convenience. It's not that hard to write an external tracker.