DPS Meter Megathread

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I don't really care about toxic players using or not using meters as an excuse. I started my argument in this thread from that point mainly because I've mainly heard others complain about toxicity that stems from meters, but, yes you're right, toxic people will be toxic even w/o meters.

My biggest point on meters is the increase in content consumption speed. But as we've discussed here already, no matter what Intrepid do, people who will use meters will consume that content as fast as possible either way and will then influence other people who can't yet consume said content.

And while the first batch of pve might be exciting and interesting, if Intrepid don't keep up with tracker people's pace of content consumption and don't constantly increase the difficulty/variety of pve - all the tracker people will get bored, which in turn will influence others. So my point there is useless and I just hope Intrepid can somehow avoid this situation, even if seems almost impossible to do so.

And as we've discussed with Azherae today, the influence of trackers on pvp will mostly depend on a ton of different game design part, so it's kinda early to say how big the impact will be (though obviously the potential is quite big). Though my pov on the issue is just "there'll be several other influences, so presence of trackers doesn't imbalance the scales at all".

As for guides and stuff. That's where my selfishness and stubborn elitism shines the brightest. I'm gonna be figuring my builds w/o any additional tools outside of the combat log. Intrepid doesn't want to have trackers, so I'm just gonna use the info that they give me. If guide makers need additional tools for their job - they can get them themselves. I won't be reporting them for use of trackers, but I wouldn't argue against their ban if, for some reason, Intrepid goes that hard on their rules enforcement.

In other words, the "toxicity" argument is mainly Mag's. I'm sure that the game will definitely have toxicity that's based on meters/trackers, purely because Ashes will be a competitive game. It'll probably be the ff14's flavor of toxicity though, so I doubt we'll see much of "your dps was shit so you're kicked" as the main reason for kicking people. But even that wouldn't really matter to me because I'll either be with a constant party who'd be fine with how I play the game, or I'll be the leader of the party and I just wouldn't care how others play the game.

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Oh, the slow players is the least of my worries because they can just go at their own pace w/o any real issues. The main problem is people who already have trackers set up and will pretty much squeeze out all of the fun from the game before it even releases. And they'll mainly be doing that to themselves. I mean, obviously, for them the "squeeze" is the fun, so it's not like they won't have fun in the game overall, but I'm pretty sure they'll have at least a rough understanding of what the "next to best, if not the best" build is. So they'll kill any and all bosses in the game within the first few days/weeks, unless, as you said, Intrepid somehow prevents them from doing so on purpose. But then we have a whole different problem, which is in no way better than just tracker folk boring themselves out after having cleared all of content way before the first expansion comes.

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As I see it, the problem would come directly after you've helped people see what the objectively better build is. At that point all the toxic people (who're always toxic) would just use objective numbers to judge people.

And if Intrepid manages to design their builds in such a way that there's dozens of different ways to have the same amount of dps output - the "dps check" for any given party invite could just be done with some random mob, even w/o a tracker, so you don't really need an objective tool to tell a toxic dude off. And if that dude still doesn't believe that your "off-meta" build has the same dps (even though we'd know that there's dozens of equal builds) then fuck him.

And as you said yourself, it will also come down to boss design. But I'd say that this whole 126+ page thread exists purely because Steven said that he wants to have difficult pve in the game and even some time-based competition on top of that. If he had said "nah, we don't really care for pve", then I doubt that this whole dps meter discussion would've gone this far, cause it mainly stems from all the pve people. Yes, obviously there's some pvpers who use trackers to try and be better than others, but I find it interesting that boss of Steven's inspirations barely had any tracker use.

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Yes, we agree on this, but any hardcore pver won't. Well, at the very least they'll just say that it wouldn't be enough to justify the "<10% clearable content". Which is why we've discussed the contradictions in the design promises. If Steven just wanted us to use the super obvious counters to super obvious bosses, it'd be kinda pointless to say that not everyone will be able to clear some content. Which is why I said that Steven's words is the reason for this looooooong discussion.

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My english comprehension isn't enough to properly comprehend that almost triple negative

And while yes, there's more options that just "tracker" or "super obvious easy" one, the discussion around dps meters mainly talks about the harder side of pve and especially the "<10% clearable" stuff. In context of any other discussion it might've been way more than just 2 choices, but in context of trackers you either have no use for them or there's potential use for them. Yes, not everyone would even want to use them, but the potential use is still there.