Combat Log Details

[Perringaiden]

BioWare Devs, now that Gabe A. has let the cat out of the bag on Combat Logs in 1.2, is there any more details you can give us?

 

Questions I have:

1. Will it be viewable in game in real time? - No
   
2. Will we be able to save it out to disk for later review? - Yes
   
3. Will it just be "my" details, or will it be everyone in X radius or within party etc? - Yes
   
4. What will be the format? (i.e. will it have enough to be parsed , or will it simply be text?)
   

 

Edit for answers from Ops pane,.

Edited March 6, 2012 by Perringaiden

[jarjarloves]

pretty sure they said before that only you would be able to see your own damage.

[Perringaiden]

pretty sure they said before that only you would be able to see your own damage.

 

BioWare never said you'd only be able to see yours. People support it with quotes about "You'll be able to review your performance" but no-one's ever shown me a yellow post saying you can only see your own stuff.

Edited March 4, 2012 by Perringaiden

[Ebbikenezer]

I suppose when 3rd party addons start coming out people will blame BW when it doesn't do what they want.

 

On Topic: I imagine you'll be able to get/see/upload the info from combat logs as well as the addon works.

[jarjarloves]

BioWare never said you'd only be able to see yours. People support it with quotes about "You'll be able to review your performance" but no-one's ever shown me a yellow post saying you can only see your own stuff.

 

show me a quote saying otherwise.

[Perringaiden]

I suppose when 3rd party addons start coming out people will blame BW when it doesn't do what they want.

 

On Topic: I imagine you'll be able to get/see/upload the info from combat logs as well as the addon works.

 

Addons will definitely NOT be in 1.2. So they won't be able to blame BioWare for anything but a website. I guess we'll be able to see the difference between offline and in-game DPS meters to see if there's really an effect.

[Perringaiden]

show me a quote saying otherwise.

 

You can't prove a negative, so unless I link you every single yellow post, I can't prove that they haven't said it. My point was that your statement has no basis in fact, so I'm asking BioWare one way or the other. I'm not trying to prove anything.

[Akirator]

You can't prove a negative, so unless I link you every single yellow post, I can't prove that they haven't said it. My point was that your statement has no basis in fact, so I'm asking BioWare one way or the other. I'm not trying to prove anything.

 

So a Georg Zoeller quote where he intentionally emphasizes being able to see "your" damage, is not fact and doesn't mean it's for you only? Then why even put emphasis on the word "your"?

[Perringaiden]

So a Georg Zoeller quote where he intentionally emphasizes being able to see "your" damage, is not fact and doesn't mean it's for you only? Then why even put emphasis on the word "your"?

 

Link?

 

EDIT: I found the post you're talking about, but there's no confirmation that 'your' in italics means you can't see anyone else's. Plus they're always changing this stuff, so a quote from early January could very well have changed since then. So that's half an answer to a quarter of the questions :-)

Edited March 4, 2012 by Perringaiden

[Akirator]

Link?

 

EDIT: I found the post you're talking about, but there's no confirmation that 'your' in italics means you can't see anyone else's. Plus they're always changing this stuff, so a quote from early January could very well have changed since then. So that's half an answer to a quarter of the questions :-)

 

You're right stuff changes all the time, but that was their thoughts at the time he wrote that. And since they haven't said anything since then that contradicts that statement, we go with what we have.

 

As for not saying it's only your data, I don't see any possible reason for him emphasizing that particular word if it wasn't only your data.

[Azkit]

BioWare Devs, now that Gabe A. has let the cat out of the bag on Combat Logs in 1.2, is there any more details you can give us?

 

Questions I have:

1. Will it be viewable in game in real time?
   
2. Will we be able to save it out to disk for later review?
   
3. Will it just be "my" details, or will it be everyone in X radius or within party etc?
   
4. What will be the format? (i.e. will it have enough to be parsed , or will it simply be text?)
   

 

1. Yes - 3rd party software is able to be overlayed on top of other applications. Vent and Mumble, for instance, can put screens on top of the SWTOR display, thus it's proven that 3rd party software would be able to do this. (This assumes the combat logs are updated in real time, which is a fair assumption as it'd be kinda silly otherwise).

 

2. Yes - 3rd party software can do whatever the hell it wants to do, including saving information to your disk.

 

3. See thread, no one knows for sure, it's only been vaguely hinted at that the logs will be self-only, no confirmation given one way or another. However, given the nature of 3rd party software, we can guarantee that parsers will support logs for guilds, even if the actual combat log is self-only.

 

4. Please clarify this question as this question doesn't make sense to me. "Enough to be parsed or text only?" Text is usually what is being parsed to create the 3rd party software, thus the question is contradictory.

Edited March 4, 2012 by Azkit

[reaperkeepet]

Gabe FTW.

[Dystopic]

I fully expect to be able to see other peoples DPS. As long as every boss fight in the game uses a hard enrage I expect to be able to see other classes DPS/spec.

 

It's obvious when you wipe because of heals. It's obvious when you wipe because of tanks. You also know what went wrong and how to fix it. With DPS? All you know is that you don't have enough to beat the enrage timer. No idea how to fix it.

Edited March 4, 2012 by Dystopic

[Perringaiden]

1. Yes - 3rd party software is able to be overlayed on top of other applications. Vent and Mumble, for instance, can put screens on top of the SWTOR display, thus it's proven that 3rd party software would be able to do this. (This assumes the combat logs are updated in real time, which is a fair assumption as it'd be kinda silly otherwise).

 

Vent and Mumble do not affect the game application. They place a window in the correct location on the Windows canvas at a layer above the one that the game is presented on. If the combat log is updated in real time only within game, then 3rd party software that reads it would be considered akin to hacking the client, and probably not something BioWare would encourage. If its reading a text file off disk, see Question 2.

 

I meant visible in the game client without hacks.

 

2. Yes - 3rd party software can do whatever the hell it wants to do, including saving information to your disk.

 

The question isn't whether 3rd party clients save to disk, its whether the client saves to disk such that 3rd party applications can read the file and parse it, to avoid 3rd party software having to hack into the game client.

 

4. Please clarify this question as this question doesn't make sense to me. "Enough to be parsed or text only?" Text is usually what is being parsed to create the 3rd party software, thus the question is contradictory.

 

There's a big difference between:

 

JoeSchmo hit BossMan with DragonPunch for 300 Elemental damage (150 Absorbed)

 

and

 

{987-34-AX-2,"JoeSchmo"}, {B-1532,"BossMan"}, {342-545,"DragonPunch"}, 300, 6, 150

 

The first is a textual representation. Differentiating between two mobs with the same name is impossible, two spells with the same name is the same issue. Text parsing to determine which parts are what is troublesome etc.

 

The second is a CSV representation providing specific detail, which the UI then re-interprets into a textual (and localisable) representation. This second method is much easier to work with when parsing data, and much easier to manage.

 

I'm hoping the combat log we get written to disk (or accessible from addons eventually) will be the second type. WoW had this issue until they re-worked their entire combat log in 3.0 (I think).

[Kourage]

show me a quote saying otherwise.

 

lolololol

 

 

No, you show us a quote to back up your statement.

[Zannis]

pretty sure they said before that only you would be able to see your own damage.

 

Has never been said. The whole personal log rumor started with some Zoeller quote where he said they fully intend on giving players combat logs to 'gauge their performance.' That's it. Some players made posts about him using the word 'their' to mean that players would 'only' be able to view 'their' combat logs.

 

I doubt combat logs will be personal. I don't care how much damage I'm personally doing. I care more about how my group is performing. Not just DPS, but interrupts, cleansing, dying to things that players should be avoiding, etc.

 

Lastly, even if combat logs are personal, OPs leaders can still request players forward them their parsed text files. If I suspect someone's DPS was too low and they refused to email me the text file, then I wouldn't be inviting them back.

Edited March 5, 2012 by Zannis

[Perringaiden]

Has never been said.

 

This is the original quote:

 

“Finally, I’d like to acknowledge, again, that we do understand that there is a desire for players to get more detailed information what happens to their character in combat. We agree with those requests and are working on various ways to, optionally, get more detailed data on your combat performance.”

 

The original Yellow has dropped off tracking, but I got that from a number of Blogs in the identical form. The emphasis on "your" is the original post's, not something that other people changed.

Edited March 5, 2012 by Perringaiden

[Perringaiden]

Got one response of relevance from the Ops panel:

 

Combat log will show everything incoming and outgoing to your character, that can be saved to disk. However, you can’t flag a button to see how everyone else is doing. Also, this will work out of game, not in.