DPS Meter Megathread

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

The most basic thing that would have to be done first:

"Don't design stuff where the player is just reacting to things that are visible on screen without making any true decisions."

Then:

"Don't design stuff that is scripted and does the same things in approximately the same order or timings."

And then most important for Ashes:

"Don't design stuff so that player Synergies are just part of a 'rotation', even if that 'rotation' differs by which party the player is in."

'AI' is quite good at things where you have to recognize patterns and save internal states and events. It will eventually be good at complex stuff. The ones I have can play certain games, even complex state games, fairly well. But those have also taken years to work out.

Basically, AI will always be able to play, but the things listed above drastically change (for now) the amount of effort and time it takes to develop and calibrate one. Even if the game itself isn't super difficult or complicated, requiring people to 'have an intention', then 'observe a semi-random event that affects their intention', then 'take the information from the last 7-10 seconds combined with the outcome of that event, and apply it to their intention', would raise the difficulty of calibrating or training most 'basic AI' enough. It would change the task from 'ok I can just throw a basic Finite State Machine at the problem' up to 'I need thousands of hours of training data before this even starts to do the things I have decided it should do, and I have to set those goals carefully'.

This can be achieved without applying the same complexity to the game's internal 'mob AI', because it isn't a 1v1 style game with equalized parameters or any assumption of fairness.

At this point, the Tracker is just 'a memory assistant/checker', as it should be.

People, please, all it takes is literally just removing the @ I curse mag for pinging me every time he wants my opinion on smth.

@Mag7spy I read (or at least skim) all the threads, so you can just mention my name and I'll see it. There's no need to ping me, cause people cannot press a single button on their keyboard

Ah right, I wonder if that's changeable, since it's usually that the first person would need to remove the @.

So that's my bad here, as you noted.

It's more of a runaway train now, though.

EDIT: Now removed from mine, at least. Won't help relative to 'mine quoted before this point' ofc.

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

This thread is just where the 'overly' engaged forumers put all the stuff that only they're interested in discussing, y'know?

We just end up talking about the same things in other threads no one cares about otherwise. So, best to let it all be sucked into the black hole of the Megathread.

That said, Mag7's 'discovery' of the AI-infused MSI monitor technically has added some 'real' discussion points to the thread, so I guess 'Mag brought the pop item' this time.

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

Maybe so, but that conclusion relies on three ideals.

1) That it's technology and not 'accessibility' of specific types that did that.
2) That the physical difficulty challenges of the game were intended by the developers of that game (in a way that the peripheral actually bypasses)
3) That gaming 'integrity' was ever a real thing once you left the subculture of 'people who actually kept playing long enough to be talking about it years later on a 'RetroStyle MMO Revival' forum like this one'.

This is why this thread keeps going, after all.

It's going to come down to what Steven greenlights for PvP content. I don't actually expect that the trackers are going to be a PvE-primary thing, based on what little I've seen of their encounter design. It's PvP where you'll see the larger amounts of tracker/parser usage.

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

And why exactly can they not do that? You can see mobs not being CCed, you can see people not being healed, you can see buffs not being on when needed, you can see pretty much all the things you've mentioned - especially if they were called out by the party leaders.

The only thing that would be somewhat "invisible" is the personal dps of every character. But that'll be apparent in the result of the encounter. You lost, while everyone played perfectly? Means you didn't have enough dps. And you'd then need to see who does what dmg and see what can be improved (I did this with my L2 guilds even w/o trackers).

And until we see hardcore pve and general encounter design (especially in the context of pvx), I'm not even sure dps tracker would even be important.