DPS Meter Megathread

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So wait, you DON'T actually play MineCraft on 2b2t?

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I see... well... uh... bye I guess.

I recommend it though, it seems like your kind of thing.

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Again, that's my bad. You've shared some very specific and precise perspectives and insights on gaming and what would make a good game, so I offered the one I know that comes closest to what you mentioned.

That was my error in thinking that your time spent detailing the concepts of the game were because you were actually a more dedicated gamer who had experienced many games in ways that would cause those opinions to form.

I hope that you find what you are looking for in Real Life, I just didn't understand that you're not actually interested in playing Ashes as much as the rest of us probably are.

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So you just came here to shit on the game and the devs. Got it. You seem like a very nice person.

@Strevi , you have to be careful with this.

If you use relics, you have to make sure the Tracker ones are abundant. If you use votes, you have to be sure they can't be manipulated by rival guilds. Making it a guild perk means it sorts "people who use trackers" and "people who don't" cleanly based on their choice of association with like-minded people, preventing any "clash of expectations" toxicity while keeping it available to all who want it (and are willing to spend a nominal amount on it).

Making it something that a hostile guild or node can prevent you from having, or take away from you means that the first guild to have and hold one gets an advantage. The strong get stronger. And the "losing rival guild" can't accept this. There's now a strong incentive to write an out-of-game tracker. The very thing that the proposed system is partly intended to prevent by de-incentivizing . This tracker won't have any such "anti-toxicity" limitations on it (because why would anyone do the extra work to add them?), and once it's made, it'll be out there.

If you want to disincentivize external trackers, and keep the "anti-toxicity" feature of keeping trackers to groups of people who have chosen, as a group, to use them, you shouldn't add serious barriers beyond that choice of whether to participate. The more you do, the less you've disincentivized someone just making an external one, and if you've made access to it limited and competitive? You went from disincentivizing the creation of an external tracker to practically requiring it. And once it's done, it's done . That tracker's out there and available forever.

The key to avoiding "clash of expectations" toxicity with trackers is exactly the "guild perk" compromise offered. Give it a low barrier to entry so no-one bothers to bypass it, but make it a communal choice for each individual player group so that there's an automatic self-selection so players who want to play that way, and those that don't, don't automatically mix. It's the same reason you can't make it a node choice. Beyond limited node citizenship making it immediately competitive, you don't get the social self-selection effect from that because "a node" isn't an individual play-group of like-minded players, even if its a "shared environment" community, with all the related incentives. Like most problems in life, you have to solve it on the right level, or you haven't solved anything at all.

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My point is this: If the tracker helps you optimize your performance and defeat stronger content more efficiently, then you get the rewards (which presumably provide progression) of the stronger content, and those who do not have access to it do so either slower, or not at all. You are right.

Difficulty: The game does decide how difficult the content is. In fact, there is one thing that some of the posters here occasionally remind us of: If the raids are too easy to benefit from (not 'need', just benefit from) a tracker, then... yeah, it won't matter. But because groups benefit from trackers on any raid that pushes their personal limits, all this means is that no raid will push most people's limits and the game will have unengaging high-end PvE.

Drops: If the drops make you stronger than you otherwise could have been, then they have the potential to make you stronger than your rival guild that you somehow managed to deny a tracker to. If no drops from difficult raid content make you stronger than you otherwise would have been... then yeah, the competitive disadvantage won't snowball. But I feel like a lot of players will complain that they don't get "meaningful" rewards from high-end raids.

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As I read through your post a second time, I think that I don't understand what your goal is. You do not want to prevent the use of trackers, but you do want to limit them and tie them to in-game progression mechanics. What is the benefit that you see to doing this? What is the purpose of denying access to a built-in tracker to most or even many players?

Perhaps this hinges on something else: Detection.

That is the trick, isn't it? As has been brought up here before, trackers can be run on another computer just as easily. You'd have to ban streaming and recording to ensure it's even theoretically possible to detect them. As such, I'm not sure what this argument actually gets you? You still have tracker use by people you 'didn't intend'. At best, you have made it somewhat pay to win. (i.e. own a second computer, or perhaps in the future 'a phone')

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I largely agree. Toxicity is caused by these things (which do not relate to trackers), but I believe that it can also be caused by clashing expectations. If Player A wants to go max optimization and try to clear content, even if it means doing certain forms of nonsense, and Player B wants to do their own thing, and figure out how to perfect themselves without necessarily 'cheesing things' or whatever, there will be problems when the two are in the same party, even if neither style is innately wrong.

The purpose of the 'guild trackers' compromise concept is to prevent this sort of "mixing oil and water" where trackers are concerned. If you don't believe that said "mixing oil and water" style effect results in toxicity, then it makes sense that you don't see a point to the offered compromise, since it implies that you are trying to solve a different problem than it is designed to.

But that brings me back to not understanding why you feel that tracker access should be limited at all. Even more specifically however, why nodes? Assigning it to nodes ties together the game experiences of players who may, in serious possibility, never directly play together or join the same party, even if they serve the interests of the same region or city independently.

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Having personally worked on this sort of bad-player detection, I don't see how.

Something that might be worth reiterating is that a lot of the 'pro-tracker' team here doesn't care that much about real-time data. Looking over the recordings/logs for efficient post-mortem analysis is a large part of what matters. There's literally no 'during the fight' behavior to detect.

The only 'tell' of a "using trackers" group, is that they manage to improve their strategies and performance more quickly (i.e. "in fewer attempts at the content") than a "not using trackers" group, for the same content. But that type of natural variation exists even without trackers. There are absolutely savants who can just do it all in their head, even at the highest levels. (They're the ones that others use trackers to 'get on the same level as'.) Do you ban them too?

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You were never going to get different drops either way by using a tracker. You were going to get the same drops faster . If you have a tool to help you analyze and optimize your performance, you're going to manage to improve (and therefore clear content and get its drops) faster than your competition. This means you have an advantage in both PvP (better gear) and gold generation (a (temporary) monopoly on the top drops until others can catch up).

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If it was a vote of guild members rather than a choice of the guild leader, would that work for you? That would mean that it's not in the leader's power, but rather in the hands of the people it affects.

The only difference is that the members of a guild are much more likely to be like-minded than the members of a node.

Nodes aren't homogeneous. If there's 4 guilds living in a node who don't like trackers, and 4 living in the same node who do, the outcome of a vote is going to be a coin flip. Then it's nobody's choice. By choosing to do it at the node level you remove the concept of actual choice altogether. I recognize, as you say, that this could become a whole big 'objective' for some guilds to take over a node and get that vote. But it'll be faster and easier to just write a video parsing plugin for an existing tracker, and they'll lose less time to guilds that 'got lucky' directly. Which then entirely bypasses any limitations you wanted to have on the tracker.

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To really think about the "forced to move" concept, I think I need to better understand the goals of your mechanics, so I'll leave that for now.

The "mix of players in a raid" is actually an interesting concern. You'd be creating a situation where some players have data in front of them to discuss after the raid, and others don't, which I feel would make for a complicated or annoying debrief for both sides. But if 'temporary switching' is involved, you start to lose the effect of having a vote that matters in the first place.

Anyway, I do hope you can help me understand your goals and intentions, so I can think about your suggestion in greater depth.