DPS Meter Megathread

Azherae wrote: »

I hope this doesn't seem like I'm trying to insult you, I promise not, but I really couldn't parse this line at all.

Yeah, that line has a CRITICAL lack of punctuation.

I think this is roughly correct?

We have not received permission from Mag7spy to share the quoted post.

And I think he means that we won't see out mates' numbers, because Intrepid don't want meters. And even if we did see all those numbers, meters wouldn't be required because... well, we see all the numbers.

And if I'm right in that assumption, I think your reply applies.

We have not received permission from Mag7spy to share the quoted post.

Yeah, got it.

My experience with games like that is general toxicity, but it's not like the Trackers actually stop that, since the sort of person who is toxic because they don't have objective data isn't usually less toxic once they get it from a third party.

Honestly if I thought for a minute that a better game would result from 'not showing damage' I'd be all for it.

Now I need to review something from my Alpha-1 footage...

This is why I stepped away from the toxicity argument. Toxic people are always toxic. A tracker would just be another tool for them to apply toxicity with.

I guess I should've been more clear in that comment. I'm saying that trackers do not make toxic people, they can just be used by them, but only if those people were already toxic. I agree with both of you. Which is why I said that I no longer use "toxicity" as a counter argument against meters.

I still dislike meters because they speed up the difficulty curve of the game and soon enough either lead to the majority of content being completely unclearable by your normal player or the top skill players leaving the game because devs can't keep up with their demand, at which point the initial difficulty spike that was supposed to keep those top skill players was kinda pointless and a waste of dev time.

But we've already discussed this in this thread before, so I don't think that repeating that discussion would bring us to any new place. Which is why I avoided bringing this up in that initial comment.

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Yeah, except, as Noaani likes to say, that decision will depend on the top players. Intrepid have already (allegedly) decided on the difficulty. There'll supposedly be content that only <10% of the playerbase can beat. That seems somewhat difficult. But it only does so to the normal player. To a player like Noaani or Azherae, I'd assume, that content will at best be somewhere below their favorite top quality pve.

So a theoretical guild (or a dozen of them) with people like those two can easily clear anything that Intrepid would find difficult. And those guilds would do so with the help of trackers (even if Intrepid say that they're banned). And Intrepid would now have a hugeass dilemma in front of them: do they keep making even harder content to keep those top players in the game or do they say "ya see, there's your <10% who managed to beat it! We succeeded in our goal".

If they go the first route, they're now concentrating a ton of their dev time on coming up with unique and super hard content that only those top guilds will be able to clear. And this will be repeated for each new content release. And Intrepid will either need to release new abilities or gear to help everyone else beat the last top difficulty content or they can say "fuck you" to 90% of the playerbase and keep the power creep at a slow pace. There's a third way of "let's make a ton of easier content too, so that 90% can play as well", but at some point you'll hit the devtime limit wall and will need to choose a path.

If they go the second route, they keep the difficulty at what they consider a perfect lvl, but lose the top 10% of players in the process (cause they got bored). And now there's a question of "will the other players follow them", because majority of normal people follow trends. And if there's a new trend from the trendy people (the strong dudes at the top and the content creators that work with them) of "we're leaving cause this shit is boring now" - there's quite a high chance that the majority will start doubting whether the game is really fun, which usually destabilizes the community and snowballs to "death of the game" sooner or later.

So overall we have a choice of "power creep the fuck out of your game if you don't want to lose players" and "disregard the top players that you attracted with a silly promise, which can potentially lead to failure". Imo both are kinda bad, so what would be the solutions?

The easiest solution would be to backtrack the difficulty promise as soon as possible. You'll lose some nerds now, but you won't risk losing a ton of people on release. And we all know how popular WoW was back in the day, due to it being waaaay easier than the competition, so this might be a winning strat. The other solution is "ban meters" and pretend that top players won't just still use them (the ff14 way). But, as Noaani says, Intrepid would still need to balance their bosses around the people who'll most likely use meters, so the ban wouldn't matter either way, which just brings us back to sped up power creep.

Now my personal solution to this is to tell those top players "just don't use meters 4Head", but I understand that this would the same as them telling me to shut the fuck up about corruption balancing, so it all would be a pointless discussion either way.

So the only true solution imo is Intrepid removing the promised difficulty from the game, but I somehow doubt that Steven would do that. As I see it rn, we'll either get a game that lied to top pvers and lose those pvers in the process or we'll hit a pretty fast power creep within the first 1-2 years of the game. I hope I'm just being too pessimistic here, but I really don't see another result coming from this.

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Yeah, that's my expectation as well. I'd just hope that they clarify this point so as to not needlessly attract more players such as yourself. Would just be fairer towards such players. This would be completely in line with the L2ness of the game's design in this relation too.

I also doubt their ability to keep adding hundreds if not thousands of top quality bosses into the game too, so even if they did go for the "proper" difficulty, I don't think they'd be able to keep up with people coming from EQ2 or FF11 (cause Azhe said it was somewhat similar to EQ in this respect).

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

This is what I was talking about though. Say they keep a half-year cycle of expansions. Each expac would need at least a few new top lvl bosses, right? And the previous top bosses would have (or at least should be) to be beatable by more people, either through gear or new abilities (cause decreasing difficulty would probably be frowned upon).

And with meter use, those new top lvl bosses would have to be even harder, cause more people would have better gear and more people would've progressed in their gameplay skill. So you have ever-growing difficulty and ever-growing power creep on a pretty big scale.

Maybe you can avoid direct relation between difficulty and gear/char stats, but unless I misunderstood you, that's kinda how it was in EQ2, right? New bosses would give new gear that would let people farm new bosses. But even if you do avoid stat-dependence, how long would the design uniqueness last in the race against the meter-supported groups. There's only so much stuff you can add to a boss that would keep it super difficult w/o making it impossible.

Rng mechanics could probably do that, but at that point how effective would a meter even be, if the boss has enough rng on it to create completely new encounters each and every time.

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And, as I'm sure Noaani would tell you, that pvx experience would be considered a trash lvl difficulty for any pve-centric player. And only pve-centric players care about meters to a ridiculous degree. Sure, some pvpers might care about it to check for builds and stuff, but 1v1 pvp will be RPS and any group pvp could vary from 8v8 to 8vX, at which point your meter wouldn't really matter, so the impact gets diluted a bit too much imo.

But the main point would still be "the difficulty is too low, so top pvers are gone, which might pull other players with them". And even before that, if pvx is what's bringing the difficulty - Intrepid would've kiiiinda lied? Yes, effectively it'd be what Noaani described, but I'd assume that most pvers would just call Steven on his bullshit at that point and call him a liar.

NiKr wrote: »

Rng mechanics could probably do that, but at that point how effective would a meter even be, if the boss has enough rng on it to create completely new encounters each and every time.

In MY experience this is a misunderstanding of what Trackers are for.

Trackers in FFXI do two things.

1. Help you confirm that your build/gearset is achieving the goal you built it for.
2. Make sure everyone is on the same page without having to save and scroll through every combat log (game provided) for long battles.

While an FFXI boss is not exactly 'a new encounter every time', because just as Steven says, you need to be able to plan your builds, and your team composition, beyond that you can get some wild streaks. I believe I've mentioned it before but some days Jormungand acts like a Mage, constantly using AoE and blasting out paralysis, and some days it acts like a brawler Warrior, attacking an insane amount, building lots of TP, and shredding the Alliance with TP attacks such as Spike Flail and the hate reset Horrid Roar.

People literally argued about the best way to defeat it because group A had a long streak of 'Mage Jormy' and groups B and C mostly met 'Warrior Jormy'.

So the Tracker in that case would be telling you things like 'If I build to counter the Dragon by adding more Ice Resistance, and I think that I will still do enough DPS because I don't think it is THAT evasive, am I correct?'

And similarly 'If I build for more DPS and accuracy to make sure that I keep hitting it, will I still fail because the rate of the Paralysis Proc is too high for me to use all that Accuracy and Damage?'

We're talking about a fight that takes 30 minutes, in which some characters perform 900+ melee attacks. A lot of the more 'casual' Tracker users that I'm aware of, this is what it is for.

You can't test a change in the accuracy of your build 'on Jormungand' by fighting a dummy/scarecrow. You can't work out 'how often out of my 900 attacks was I paralyzed' without spending more time number crunching than you do playing the game unless you have a certain specific weird 'skill'.

So I guess people could theoretically just 'guess and hope', particularly because they could be attacked mid combat anyway. But if builds are meaningful, and the game has Acc and Eva aspects that matter in this way, the amount of frustration from 'not parsing' will often change the behaviour of many players.

RNG build stats -> Tracker usage. There's a clear benefit, almost always.

Azherae wrote: »

RNG build stats -> Tracker usage. There's a clear benefit, almost always.

Then I guess I had unrealistic expectations of rng within boss fights. I was thinking more along the lines of "there's so damn many variables in the fight that the best your tracker could tell you is that your rotation is good (or maybe your party's)". But if that's an impossible design within the current dev ability, then I guess meters are absolutely unavoidable.

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

So say one top boss a year. How long would that have to be unsolvable to satisfy top pvers? 2 months? 6? Obviously in the context of them using trackers. And whatever the answer is, how long would other bosses have to take to get solved for pvers not to get bored? And how many of those would you need to have in weekly rotation to consider the game's content fulfilling? 7 a week or more?

If Intrepid utilizes UE5's dev tools to the max, I'd assume they could pump out enough new land masses to fit a ton of dungeons in it, so that they'd have enough instanced dungeons to provide truly hardcore pve content within them. Say they manage to create bosses that take ~3 weeks of daily attempts to solve. And say they add 8 such bosses each dlc, with a multi-month boss every 2 dlcs. Would that be enough content? That is if the quality itself is satisfactory.

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

RNG build stats -> Tracker usage. There's a clear benefit, almost always.

Then I guess I had unrealistic expectations of rng within boss fights. I was thinking more along the lines of "there's so damn many variables in the fight that the best your tracker could tell you is that your rotation is good (or maybe your party's)". But if that's an impossible design within the current dev ability, then I guess meters are absolutely unavoidable.

Wait, no, that's not what I meant.

You CAN do that. People will complain. I would assume a lot of them. It's not that FFXI doesn't have these , it's that they are impossible to properly prepare for.

They make really nice mid-tier content for exactly this reason. The sort of person who doesn't want to prepare much, who just wants to have an average experience, who isn't looking for the type of challenge where they gather together a bunch of top players (or alternately, try to do it with fewer because it's a good way to get a benefit out of shorter play sessions).

That leads to an easy situation where the top end hardest thing is 'scripted' and the mid-tier single-group fights are perhaps Gudanna-type.

I don't think anyone cares if a mid-tier single group content can 'randomly be easy'. People will probably care if 'the first kill of X happens because it literally doesn't spawn with certain abilities that were the only things stopping the third-strongest guild on the server'.

But aside from all that...

Once again, the 'tell you that your rotation is good' is often the ONLY thing the Tracker is FOR in FF (except that there are no rotations). The randomness is then the reason you need it . I don't need a Tracker in FF but my friends do, and I don't need a Tracker in almost any other game because anything other than 'bugged ability not working as intended' I can figure out what to do mid-battle, and my friends don't need it because in that situation I'm 'command'.

If we fought a 'Gudanna' and 'just couldn't seem to beat it when we normally do' for no clear reason, the Tracker would be there to tell us 'It spawned with a large Evasion Buff to go with its random White Magic', or I'd just notice, but it's quite possible my friends would be upset because they wouldn't notice.

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

Would it be though? If the difficulty is high enough for top end dudes to take a week or two of proper prep to clear a single boss, any non-meter non-hardcore group would probably take months on that single boss (probably even if they look up how to beat it).

And with, say, 15 of these getting added every year, majority of players would never catch up. And if the game provides gear that lets even the 50% clear this, that would mean that the power creep got high enough to trivialize that hardcore content. Which imo is just too damn fast.

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

That other content would probably be completely trivial for those top players, right? Otherwise those 50%s wouldn't be able to clear enough content. And I'd assume that trivial content would get real fucking boring if it was the same daily bosses, right? So the game would probably need a few hundred higher quality bosses to provide at least some variety for several group types of people.

And considering gear progress, each dlc would probably need to add several hundred new ones. And I personally don't see any current dev company keeping up with that kind of pace. Maybe UE5 can help out with that, which would be great, but will have to wait till there's way more UE5 mmos out there.

Azherae wrote: »

Once again, the 'tell you that your rotation is good' is often the ONLY thing the Tracker is FOR in FF (except that there are no rotations). The randomness is then the reason you need it .

This is why I'd be fine with a dummy that helps you perfect your rotation, so then you know your limit and will have to figure out how your limit matches up with your current encounter.

But I also support a good combat log and I understand that people will just write their own parsers for it (or use act I guess), so no matter how much I might be against the increased pace of content clearing that meters bring, I understand that they're completely inevitable in the context of "players have the info to know what's happening during a fight". And I want players to have that, because otherwise it's a feelbad situation.

Guess this is the biggest contradiction with my current views