fazool said:Talonguard said:...I see a lot of people in here hating on DPS meter, and it really does not make much sense to me, it's just a tool that gives info so you can make better decisions....This is the fundamental difference and everything that Pantheon is about. It let's you make better twitch-based video game decisions.
I've never seen a DPS meter that lets you make better twitch-based video game decisions. If one exists that does (highly doubt it) then that type DPS meter should be excluded from the game for sure.
DPS meter's that I have used just gave you info, Info that was basically useless until after the fight is over, info you would then look at and see if your new axe worked better than your old short sword.
Some DPS meter would show others DPS as well, then you could see if Bob from accounting was AFK half the fight or maybe that he was doing more dmg than you, you might ask Bob why and he might tell you to try fire-based spells on that mob next time, for a dmg boost.
DPS meter's don't tell you to push x button or when, they just add up all the numbers in your combat log so you can understand them without hours of data parsing.
I'm against threat meters / external parser (lots of people use two monitors these days, parsers are pretty much the same as meters) as I feel it takes away player skill, it use to show the difference between a good dpser and a great dpsers, you should be able to control your threat while maximizing your damage. If you rip agro due to doing to much dps, you've made a mistake. If you can see a threat meter saying your about to over take the tanks threat it removes that entire aspect. And in my opinion it's an important part of being a dpser.
Talonguard said:I've never seen a DPS meter that lets you make better twitch-based video game decisions. If one exists that does (highly doubt it) then that type DPS meter should be excluded from the game for sure.
DPS meter's that I have used just gave you info, Info that was basically useless until after the fight is over, info you would then look at and see if your new axe worked better than your old short sword.
Some DPS meter would show others DPS as well, then you could see if Bob from accounting was AFK half the fight or maybe that he was doing more dmg than you, you might ask Bob why and he might tell you to try fire-based spells on that mob next time, for a dmg boost.
DPS meter's don't tell you to push x button or when, they just add up all the numbers in your combat log so you can understand them without hours of data parsing.
If your DPS suddenly drops to zero, you'd better believe a meter's going to give you the advantage in noticing your limited damage output.
But I get what you're saying. And I agree, it's just a tool; the problem is how people use that tool to paste logs in chat, among other things.
An interesting point you bring up about addons adding to possibilities for socializing, but that's fodder for another thread.
fazool said:A DPS meter is great for a COD-type video game but not for a virtual reality world.
I hear you about DPS meters lending themselves well to faster paced games, but let's break down what the DPS meter is actually doing. Without it, I would have to kill one mob enough times to know a given mob / con combination's health, then I time how long it takes to kill one mob, then I do some math and come out with my DPS. Wouldn't a meter be so much easier? It'd save the devs from having to hear about how a certain section of the population wants a DPS meter, and losing business etc, etc, etc. Bad stuff.
Anyway. I'm 100% pro-UI mod, and don't care about the DPS meter because all the devs have to do is release combat logs and programs like ACT will parse them for us, leaving the problem of whether you want a DPS meter in your game to be one of what you choose to download. As to the problem of grouping with people who post logs like it's their self worth, I suggest communally shunning jerks. So, in the end, business as usual. :)
Instead of Add-ons I would like you as a gaming company to provide a UI that can be customized/moved around like how it was done in EQ/Rift. I would also like a personal damage meter (Only shows your personal DPS) this way you can if you choose, to work on your rotation to maximize your DPS, but not telling you what the group has (Since people are super opposed to this idea).
I would just like you to give us the ability to customize our UI/be able to track our personal DPS so for people like me who want to play my class the best I can, that I can figure out an optimal rotation.
I want to be able to put the group window were it feels good to me, put chat windows in a way that I like visually, and my action bars ect to be able to place them were I want. All using the UI design that you have just able to drag them around.
shaolinmaster said:.... a personal damage meter...this way you can if you choose, to work on your rotation to maximize your DPS,...
This is I think why we should *NOT* have DPS meters.
What we do in this scenario is, watch "gauges" on our video game UI and play a more efficient game. Instead we should be experiementing and simple learning through experience of which rotations worked better for us. We make those decisions based upon our in game experiences not based on what an out of game data source tells us.
Immersion versus video-game
Nevron said:Tralyan said:This cried out to me.
My question is, how exactly is that skill? In EQ, skill was knowing the timers on your buffs and mezzes so well through constant repetitive use that you could keep them up or keep mobs on lockdown without a single break. Skill was knowing, through trial and error, which mobs can be single pulled and how they'll path to you. Skill was never failing to spin the mob while tanking, being able to cycle through all of your utility even while performing your major group function, and being so used to the patterns of your hits that you can tell when you're doing more damage.
But a DPS meter? That's just something telling you what to do.
To take the metaphor someone used earlier about a scale. If I'm trying to lose weight, stepping on the scale isn't part of the process of losing weight. It didn't help me to lose weight. What helped me was portion control, caloric intake, exercise. Things that took effort and dedication. The scale just told me what I needed to do. Lose more weight, or stop.
There isn't skill in reading a chart. Skill is in being so familiar with the issue that a chart isn't needed.
Maybe "skill" is the wrong word to use, but it is another layer, as in you still have to figure out how to maximize your damage. The rest of my post that you left off essentially mirrors what you are saying.
Also, being familiar enough with an issue where a chart isn't necessary is not exactly a skill, it's experience. You don't need skill to have experience. The two definitely impact each other, though.
Like I said, you basically agree with my overall premise, you just got hung up on the semantics of a word I probably could have replaced.
Edit: You edited while I was typing a reply. I think we're on the same page here.
In a slower paced game, I seriously doubt you will need to figure out how to max your damage. You will know when to do the right thing. If you have 2 wizards and 1 can get 3 nukes in per mob without drawing aggro, and other other can get just 2 nukes without drawing aggro, nobody needs a DPS meter and having one won't help the 2nd wizard learn how to control aggro. If one monk hits flying kick every 20 seconds and another every 10 seconds, what good is it to either of them to have a DPS meter? If the 1st monk is that lazy/inattentive then he/she is probably bad at other things to and it will be noticed by other players. No need for a DPS meter. I don't see how it makes you a better player.
Additionally, in a game like this, there will be MANY common situations where it is best to NOT do as much damage as possible. Maybe the soloing necro shouldn't cast all 3 DOTs because the 3rd one isn't as mana efficient and it leads to more downtime. Maybe a rogue should skip a round of backstab to avoid drawing aggro and causing a mana drain on the healer, etc, etc. These things are dynamic and will change from situation to situation and recognizing when to do what is vastly more important than knowing exactly what damage you're doing at all times. I'm as theory-craftery as they come, but there's still a need for some unknowns.
I could go either way on add-ons, however, I fully support the ability to parse. As with any MMO, Pantheon will undoubtedly receive calls for balancing from the community. Parsing allows players to test and present numerical data to developers instead of just providing the "feelz."
oneADseven said:Add-ons are a slippery slope, I think most people would agree with that. It always starts off simple and before you know it, players have access to various "tools" that directly affect not only their experience, but also the players they associate with and eventually the community at large. EQ2 had a combat system where you always wanted to maximize your "auto attack" damage and the various "combat arts" had a cast time. WoW did the same. So if your auto attack was .3 seconds away from going off and you use an ability or combat art that has a 1 second cast time, you're losing .7 seconds from your auto-attack "up-time." Mastering the "up-time" was considered a skill. You learn your class, the timers, and combat animations. Eventually there was a tool added that showed you a timer for how close you were to your next auto-attack and when utilized you totally lose your own personal sense of timing and coordination to keep an eye on contrived triggers.
Before you know it, players are trained to play around a little visual indicator that tells them when they should attack. Now everybody who uses that program is squeezing out extra damage and the game needs to be programmed around that which puts everybody else at a disadvantage. Keep add-ons as far away as possible from this game, please. They will only lead to players milking them for maximum efficiency and artificially raising the "performance" floor/ceiling by leveraging 3'rd party tools/programs. Nobody wants to play a game on rails and when combat is ultimately "buffed" to compensate for those who do, it really messes everything up for those who want a more authentic experience. We should all be playing the game the way it was intended to be played. If VR wants to give us a visual indicator that tells us when we should attack then it should be hard-coded into the game with an on/off toggle.
The counter argument is that the content is now tuned to the lowest denominator, this leaves little challenge to those that are exceptional players.
A dps parser is nothing more then a calculator , as a raid lead it is used to know when someone is ninja afk , needs help with there rotations or casting orders.
There is not a game out there that does not have a "rotation" this includes eq1 and FF7. The removal of having these types of tools compounds a already hard job of those that wish to strive and complete top tier content.
I will give you a perfect example , there will be a mob that will be a DPS check one way or another. Just for argument sake the raid size is 24 players and all members on average need to do xxx amount of damage or it is a wipe.
Bob , runs and ninja afks to grab a soda or missed a pull count .... the dps for him is subpar for the encounter and you fail the dps check. The raid wipes , now Sarah does it on the 2nd attempt causing a wipe , then its Mike and so on.
Without a DPS parser , there is no way for you to know who is failing the raid or why, you are simply dying for some unexplained reason at 10 % of the mobs life. Because Bob might not be geared enough , has a bad rotation or a million other reasons. What is the solution , to wasting 24 peoples time? With a DPS parser , I know in 1 minute where the short fall is and can start making corrections , without it im banging my head against the wall.
This can be a rather frustrating part of raiding , this also does not take into consideration the designer aspect long term of the game.
The removal of visual numbers will now force designers to step by step provide you a realistic "way" of know how to beat the above encounter. That or design encounters at the lowest denominator.
To be fair, I don't have an issue with DPS parsers. I just don't want add-ons that help players artifically boost their DPS if that makes sense. A good example would be the auto-attack indicator I mentioned. Another example is anything that automatically highlights an ability that will help you escape CC whenever you're affected by it. I want players to do these things the old-fashioned way rather than responding to add-on prompts. If leveraging these prompts ends up offering a legitimate advantage to combat then combat should be designed around them being universally available, and if they are going to be universally available, they should be hard-coded into the game rather than being some sort of optional download for people who want that extra layer of cheesing. I don't mean to sound hypocritical because I know I said to keep add-ons far away from the game, but I just don't look at DPS parsers the same way. Anything beyond a basic DPS parser or UI customization would be going too far, IMO, but I wouldn't mind hearing suggestions people might have for a "limited add-on" option.
I don't like DPS parsers. but I think oneADseven is drawing a very rational distinction.
There is an enormous difference between something that helps you actually *do* something in the game and something that merely gives you *information* to help you judge your skill or the value of your race/class/spec combination.
Xxar said:The counter argument is that the content is now tuned to the lowest denominator, this leaves little challenge to those that are exceptional players.
A dps parser is nothing more then a calculator , as a raid lead it is used to know when someone is ninja afk , needs help with there rotations or casting orders.
You've proven exactly why we should NOT have parsers DPS meter and such add-ons.
The example you gave has nothing to do with an immersive game. Everything you just talked about is the video game combat argument. The players who are "exceptional" at living in the virtual fantasy world are the ones who play in the virtual world and adapt based upon their in-world experiences. The players who are using an out of game add-on to tell them what and when to do things are applying the arcade video game approach that ruined the genre
No need in my eyes. I prefer games where you have to discover, remember and even wonder about certain aspects of why things happen the way they do!
I just can't understand why people are against players processing information given to them by the game. Why would the game give you information in utterly unintelligible ways (combat logs that stream hundreds of lines of text per second) if it weren't for the sole purpose of enabling you to post-process that data? I know the devs have talked about re-thinking what information is sent to the client, but I hope that they consider that from a gameplay standpoint as well as their anti-botting and optimization standpoints.
Determining what information is given to the player should be well thought out and calculated by the developers, but players should not be restricted from using the information intentionally provided to them by the game. If the game sends a real-time combat log, then that is an explicit endorsement of real-time dps/threat meters.
Hyperium said: While your out cutting down a bear with your machete, watch the damage your doing, and besure to have your calculator out adding up the damage and averaging it all after each whack.
I understand you were just being a smart-A$$ to Ainadak and not actually trying to make a constructive point about the topic of add-ons, but if you did run into a bear while hiking and were forced to defend yourself with a machete your brain would, in fact, be keeping track of the damage you did to the bear and trying to calculate how much more it would take to run the bear off or kill it. It would probably even be averaging each swing with all the ones you made before to see if you're swinging at the right spot, or if you should try a new spot to wack.
Human brains are pretty cool, a quick google search and I found this:
Human brain contains about 100 billions neurons (10^11) and about hundred trillions synapses (10^14). Each neuron can fire about 100 times a second. If we model brain as a simple neural network, then it would be equivalent to machine that performs 10^16 operations per second.
This is a lower bound, which it is equivalent to capability of best current supercomputers. (Titan, Sequoia and K computer). (this is from 2012)
So anyways thanks for helping me realize that if the game wants to be realistic and immersive then it needs to give more info to the gamer not less, the bottleneck of data from the game to our "supercomputer" is breaking immersion because its not giving enough data to be believable.
Tal
Talonguard said:...So anyways thanks for helping me realize that if the game wants to be realistic and immersive then it needs to give more info to the gamer not less, the bottleneck of data from the game to our "supercomputer" is breaking immersion because its not giving enough data to be believable.
Actually that's a common misconception.
There are a lot of studies on cognitive psychology and what our brain absorbs. The fact is, we make up the majority of it. Why do people say "the book was better than the movie?" Because in the bookm their brain filled in the details for them. In the movie they were overloaded with sensory input and couldn't create the reality in their own mind.
It is counter-intuitive (but true). In video games, hyper-realistic graphics are very "sexy" but they actually impede immersion. The reason is that the player's brain never has a chance to fill in the story - and they are a spectator not a participant.
I know it sounds opposite of everything everyone believes, but it's true.
fazool said:There are a lot of studies on cognitive psychology and what our brain absorbs. The fact is, we make up the majority of it. Why do people say "the book was better than the movie?" Because in the bookm their brain filled in the details for them. In the movie they were overloaded with sensory input and couldn't create the reality in their own mind.
It is counter-intuitive (but true). In video games, hyper-realistic graphics are very "sexy" but they actually impede immersion. The reason is that the player's brain never has a chance to fill in the story - and they are a spectator not a participant.
I know it sounds opposite of everything everyone believes, but it's true.
That is really interesting Faz, thank you for taking the time to post.
I'm gonna to have to give that some serious thought, what you say does kinda make sense, the book is sometimes better than the movie.
For me, though generally, the book was better than the movie because the movie left out so much information that was in the book. All that extra information that I got from the book let me picture and understand the story better. So I'm not sure if I completely 100% agree with you.
Honestly, I think it's probably someplace in the middle of our two thoughts on immersion, not enough information and you can't picture it fully and too much information and you become overwhelmed and lose focus and thus immersion.
Tal
Here is my simple answer... I hate these things, basically a cheat.
EQ1 when it first came out we never used this stuff, and we did really good at understanding the mechanics and all that. Nowadays if a player doesn't have one, they basically suck. It's like the level of actual understanding a game is lowered all because these dumb add ons. DPS meters, not needed, all it does is create min maxers and people that only want people that play to the min/man scale. If you have a build of anything other than what has been determined as the best then you were worthless. These programs that time AoE's, why? We used to do this all by ourselves, and had less wipes. These things created bad players that rely on them to do what you should be doing without them. Therefore, caused the skill level of most players to decline, and bad.
Auto clickers and stuff? There's no need for that garbage, we did it all on our own, and it really made us appreciate all the aspects of the game. Before, you would click away at a door for a rogue to get pick lock up, and it really made you appreciate the skill and understand it, now you just auto click a door while you AFK and it really makes no difference, it's just another skill now.
Force your players to understand the game on it's basic levels and you will see a player base that will cherish every single thing they have worked for. Sure, it's tough and boring sometimes, but that sense of accomplishment when you were done was so good it made it worth spending all that time actually clicking the door.
I think I made every point I wanted to make on this subject lol.
I'm not a big fan of add-ons or extensive macro support but if they go that way they need to make sure the UI customization options are there because pretty much no one likes playing with the base UI of any MMO ever. Some want the party frames on the top left, others like them bottom right. Some want the char info at the bottom center, others want their chat logs there, etc.
On the meter arguments, I can some small justification for DPS meters to point out if people are afking or trying to stealth DPS when they signed up to heal, and that sort of thing BUT the general use in every game I've played is about bragging and often leads to people worrying more about the meter and less about winning the fight. HPS meters are basically an abomination that has zero use as healing is a zero sum game that should be done with teamwork not some sort of competition.
I can be utterly immersed in a book and utterly immersed in a movie to what feels like the same degree. I would often have the feeling fazool stated that the book is better than the movie, but that doesn't mean I didn't get immersed in both.
If we're discussing how much information is too much or too little for good immersion, the quality and style are also vitally important. I think getting immersed in a book shows that you can be given information in a very abstract form (squiggles on a page) and your brain does a perfectly fine job of piecing it together. Getting immersed in a movie shows that visual stimuli doesn't inherently ruin immersion either, but you could certainly make a movie that breaks immersion through excessive visual stimulation. The most clear cut connection between this and the addon discussion is that addons can dramatically increase the impact and noticability of the stimuli that the game provides. The boss could provide a line of text in the chat box, but the addon turns that into a blaring siren and flashing light. The amount of information hasn't changed, but the form that it comes in is immersion breaking. I am against the vast majority of addons for this reason.
As far as it pertains to dps parsing, I think the quality and style of information presented in combat logs is all wrong. Hyperion sarcastically pointed out that you wouldn't keep your calculator with you when you fought the bear. That hypothetical is clearly ridiculous, but not because you brought your calculator, but because you hit the bear and determined that your action resulted in a number value of damage and miraculously the bear's ability to sustain damage is also a number that you can determine. If you're living in a world of numbers, then you're a fool to neglect your calculator. If you don't want players to use calculators, then stop giving them numbers. Replace "Hyperion hit a wild black bear for 15 damage" with "Hyperion hit a wild black bear with a machete: the bear barely notices the blow".
fazool said:
You've proven exactly why we should NOT have parsers DPS meter and such add-ons.
The example you gave has nothing to do with an immersive game. Everything you just talked about is the video game combat argument. The players who are "exceptional" at living in the virtual fantasy world are the ones who play in the virtual world and adapt based upon their in-world experiences. The players who are using an out of game add-on to tell them what and when to do things are applying the arcade video game approach that ruined the genre
That is a opinion , a dps parser has nothing to do with emersion. If you simply do not want to use one , do not use one.
It is simply a calculator that does the work , that I can do with a basic combat log for me faster.
A dps parser does not tell you when to do things , that is silly to even say. I think you are talking about some other type of addon ?
Also a dps parse is in a sense "pass tense" in the consideration that the combat action has already happend for it to be registered on the parse .
So once again , how does using a already in game mechanic Ie combat log , turn into a arcade video game approach ? Eq1 has a combat parser , combat meters and has since Kunark.