Combat logs 1.2. Parsable outside of game.

[astrocanis]

I question your experience. Players adhering to minimum gear requirements have existed since MMOs were started. The heavy emphasis on it is relatively new, but the requirements always existed.

 

 

I respect your opinion. I believe the exact opposite. I enjoy number crunching and tweaking my performance based on real numbers.

 

 

That's nice, but unrealistic when they are implementing combat logging. Most guilds that are raiding current content will require people to send their individual combat logs for parsing. Why make it more difficult for them?

 

I think it's good that you like number crunching and tweaking your performance. I think it's bad when number crunching and tweaking everyone else's performance occurs. Because it's not private - it's used for epeenage by the vast majority. Unless I'm wrong and suddenly everyone who wants one is a raid leader.

 

I'm not afraid of them. I'm afraid of little Ricky A$shat getting his hands on one.

[Raeln]

I've been involved in MMOs a long time. I've played in guilds at all levels of competitive raiding. You'd be surprised how many good gamers can't figure out how to send a combat log that doesn't need massive pruning.

 

Been in them myself.

 

I've hardcore raided before MMOs had addons.

 

I've hardcore raided after MMOs had addons (including Recount).

 

We still ground the content under our feet.

 

That was kind of my point. The personal combat log is useless. You would need to have me in a few runs before you could figure out if I knew what I was doing. Now, if you took me on a couple of FPs and were able to parse my DPS, you would have both your personal observations and real numbers to make an informed decision.

 

The personal combat log is not useless. It is all that is needed.

 

Your retort, "You would need to have me in a few runs before you could figure out if I knew what I was doing." is exactly why respectable guilds should have a good recruiting process in place. Yes - you should have a "trial period" when you join a guild. Reducing everyone to a number is bad for any game.

 

Yay, you can turn 20k dps on a tank'n'spank fight with no mechanics, but how can you perform in a multi-phase, multi-mechanic raid encounter where you rarely are able to fall into your DPS rotation for more than 20 or 30 seconds? DPS meters are useless on those fights past diagnosing who is taking avoidable damage and who is not. This is exactly the type of encounter that a trial applicant to a guild should be judged on before being accepted.

 

These days raid leadership just wants an easy metric to judge people by and reducing them to their "DPS number" (and Gearscore in the past) apparently works well enough for WoW, so it must for TOR too, eh?

[Raeln]

I know how to play the game, thank you. You are not getting the point I am trying to make. There is nothing in this external combat log that has any impact on playability of the game. Having a personal combat log will not suddenly make the game play differently.

 

The point of adding downloadable combat logs is to allow number crunching. The largest segment of the gaming population that uses these numbers are raiders. They've implemented a tool but only did it half way. An Ops team will now need to compile 8 or 16 different logs to get the information correctly. It is a poor implementation. If they are going to implement this feature, make is so it records what happens to the entire Ops team rather than just an individual. That way only 1 (or 2 if there is a distance issue) logs are required. I still won't be able to see what you are doing unless we are in a FP or Ops together. I will only be able to see it after the fact since I will need to upload the log to an external parsing program. They are not adding in game DPS meters or the capability for an add-on to parse the combat log in game.

 

Bioware is attempting to respect the privacy of the individual player. It's something that Blizzard didn't give a thought to.

 

If you are truly in a guild that absolutely must have all 8/16 raid members' logs to figure out what is going wrong, then it is not that difficult to upload and compile all those logs into a parser. I'm sure within a month or two, there will be a conversion for ACT or a website plugin to allow it.

[Raeln]

Pure and simple:

 

From an RP standpoint: in the army or any other job market (but since we are talking combat, let's go with army) you get "parsed" with your dmg, aka "accuracy" at firing a weapon you are trained in, if you cant hit the target, they tell you to practice more, but they wont take you on special missions that require a 99% hit rate.

 

Not quite.

 

If your accuracy is weak, you won't be a sniper or sharpshooter for sure. It won't keep you from being front-line infantry fodder though.

 

From a min/maxer standpoint: Combat logs help you to tell whether or not the mod that has +5 to your main stats is performing better than a mod with a +5 to power when you are a) above 2k main stat, or b) above 1500 power to answer the question "is there a mark to which diminishing returns kicks in?"

 

The game should relay information good enough so that the player should know whether a +5 stat or +5 power mod is better for them. It should not take a thinktank with hundreds of spreadsheets to figure that out. This is something that WoW failed dreadfully at and something they have attempted (marginally) to address.

 

From a casual gamer standpoint: I wanna go get a dessler turbo mount, but I dont know if anyone will take me. (With combat logs)= I can do a sustained a 2300 dps on a stationary target. (without combat logs)= uhhh, I do good

 

You claim 2300dps but I claim to do 2400dps. We are the same class - who do you think gets invited?

 

Note: neither of us are ever asked to prove those numbers before the invitation and for the sake of the argument, 1800 dps is all that is required for the content. Both of us would do fine.

 

(I think I prefer the "I do good".)

 

Dueling for skill is the worst idea and funniest idea I have ever heard, there are too many variables to factor in for that to be accurate, and god help your people if that's something you actually do, lol

 

I agree, dueling is a pretty ludicrous idea.

 

Privacy of your performance only tells me that you have something to hide. If you suck, that's "OK", you just have to wait your turn unless you can improve. If you cant do either, then dont join a guild, for the love of god. Save your credits an "BUY" a slot when guilds start offering that.

 

I remember a game where others could not inspect you unless you gave them your express consent with a /consent command. It was actually considered rude to inspect someone without asking and inspecting someone generated an area-based emote telling everyone that, "You are looking at <x>".

 

I have never performed a crime worse than speeding or perhaps running a stop sign but I don't want every minute detail from my daily activities spread out on a web-based log for anyone to see.

 

I feel the same about my in-game data. What business is it of yours that I just buffed myself or landed 4 crits in a row? If I want you to see my personal details, then I should have the ability to give you consent to see them - not until.

 

All in all, I do have to commend bioware for listening to the masses crying about no combat logs. Now, they have given the crybabies their time, and I think this is a good step towards a happy medium. We get our logs, the tinfoil hats get their privacy, but now the tinfoil hats arent invisable, so we can see them an avoid them

 

Tsk, tsk. Name calling does not make you look intelligent.

Edited March 6, 2012 by Raeln

[Seregul]

Will the personal log show buffs and debuffs on yourself or your target that come from other players?

[genesiser]

People may not use a damage meter to improve one person, but they will use it to improve the group as a whole.

 

I'll give you an example. (sorry beforehand, but I'm going to use wow)

 

I was in a raid group during the first few months of cata and we had made some progress in Bastion of Twilight. One of the members of our group had to quit the game for personal reasons so we found someone in the guild to replace him, a shadow priest for dps. All the dps in the group were pulling ~12-15k dps during a boss fight but the new shadow priest just could not break 7k dps. She had all epic gear (reputation and crafted 359 gear)but she just... sucked.

 

Anyway, during the week we had people try to improve her play by teaching her rotations, when to use different moves, etc because she was a new member of the raid group. The next week came along and she saw zero improvement. She was still doing 7k dps. At the end of the raid we told her sorry, but she had to go. We later found another shadow priest that with less gear was pulling 14k dps. Needless to say, the raid group as a whole got better and we cleared the place shortly after.

[Glock_]

I think they should have meters and give medals worth gold and special points for players that focus on dps over everything else.

 

Also you should get a server wide announcement when you top dps in a group and an announcement plus a piece of unique epic gear when you top dps in raids.

 

Also they should have a crafting tree make baked goods so players have to give the top dps a cookie which will then be exchanged for elite gifts. If you don't have a cookie you can't join a group.

 

Yes

[Nytak]

So if a raid leader asks the newb in questing blues what his dps is and he says his is higher than everyone else, were supposed to just believe him right? Fail.

 

No, not fail. Any decent guild has a website and people stay in contact outside of the game quite a bit. Our guild coordinates through Facebook as well as our guild website.

 

Once 1.2 hits, I will be writing a parser for the combat logs. We can then have members download the parser and upload the results file. We get combat metadata (dps, and activity level being the most important), the player has the detailed logs and we can go from there.

[Knewt]

They pretty directly do not want that.

 

The devs spoke in the summit about wanting to give players a parsing tool for personal use and not a tool to be judged by. The arguments for and against are well-established but, SWTOR took a pretty definite stance and it even seemed to meet with a mostly positive reception in the room.

Just more developer double-speak. On one hand they don't want people to be judged or compared to each other. On the other hand, they want to create competitive ladders for pvp.

 

Further, that's an unrealistic ideal from the Devs. As soon as the logs are available, a log aggregating website will pop up and allow people to compare their logs. People will be judged. There is nothing the devs can do to stop it.

[Knewt]

Bioware is attempting to respect the privacy of the individual player. It's something that Blizzard didn't give a thought to.

 

If you are truly in a guild that absolutely must have all 8/16 raid members' logs to figure out what is going wrong, then it is not that difficult to upload and compile all those logs into a parser. I'm sure within a month or two, there will be a conversion for ACT or a website plugin to allow it.

You give up some of your privacy when you do things in a group. They could implement this so it only records the group/ops team. If you don't want to share your combat log, then don't join the group. You get your privacy and I get a combat log that tells me what everyone in the team did.

[Matte_Black]

Just more developer double-speak. On one hand they don't want people to be judged or compared to each other. On the other hand, they want to create competitive ladders for pvp.

 

Further, that's an unrealistic ideal from the Devs. As soon as the logs are available, a log aggregating website will pop up and allow people to compare their logs. People will be judged. There is nothing the devs can do to stop it.

 

There really was no doublespeak going on, they were pretty clear about what they thought was right for this game. The major difference being whether the player chooses to be judged and whether that judgement will become a barrier to play. Competitve ladders may judge you but, they won't stop you from entering instanced PvP because another player thinks your score is too low.

[Icebaron]

Although acceptable, this is still somewhat bothersome. Alot of extra work.

 

A better solution would of been to have an ingame damage meter with an option to hide your stats so nobody could see them.

[Dezzi]

This was a brilliant move by the team. The information is there for those who want to share it, but can be withheld by those who don't want to be judged by epeen-waving junkies.

 

Seriously, this is one of the best ways they could have implemented this.

[NasherUK]

They have probably done it this way as it's more bandwidth efficient. You are getting it directly from the server as a log, rather than the server communicating with all the clients in real-time, which only adds to lag. Edited March 6, 2012 by NasherUK

[Locustone]

Reasonable people can disagree about using or not using real-time combat logs/addons/dps measurment tools, but at the end of the day BW should give individuals the ability and choice on whether or not to use it in game.

 

I personally have seen both sides, where I have been discriminated/flamed because my dps wasn't good enough or at par with the rest of the group based on dps meters. This only pushed me to gear better and realize that the rest of the group was carrying me through something. If your guild/group is OK with that then fine, but again it should be an informed choice. I've also been on the other side of the fence, where someone who was exteremly undergeared wanted to run with a well geared group. My sentiment was that if that person was not competing with me for gear and we all liked the individual then I had no problems pulling some extra weight. However, none of the above are true then I would have serious issues about carrying someone through an Operation and watching that person get end game gear pieces (that I need) before I do.

 

Just because global combat logs/parsers/addons are avaialble it doesn't mean you have to use them. Granted some groups will measure you, but nobody will force you to run with those people.

 

If I was a betting man, I would bet that the real reason BW has not implemented full transparency on damage/healing/combat stats is because they will get too much negative feedback from an imbalanced game. It is an easy way to hide the side effects of an unfinished product.

[ferroz]

Just FYI for all you 'hard cores' out there. Folks are not 'afraid' of having their performance scrutinized by DPS meters, it's not fear at all.

 

What a majority of the detractors are against is the little dictators of a pug yelling about .02 less deeps, the screaming vent raid leader, and the toxic swill of community poison that usually forms, when overly competitive types, bully other players who have a different style of play.

That second paragraph looks like a bunch of things that you're afraid of. So I'd say that it is fear, you're just not being honest with yourself

 

No one is going to use DPS meters to 'help' anyone improve. That's just not how it works now. Don't fool yourselves, you all know it's no longer any kind of teaching, or improvement tool.

That's what I use it for; same goes for pretty much everyone in my guild (I'd say everyone, but there are a couple that I don't know very well)

[terminova]

People who think these logs have to be done outside of raids and not real time are incorrect..unless read on.

 

It should be similar to Rift where as you can have ACT and the like running outside the game with an overlay of the group/raids dps.. unless of course BW blocks other logs from being accessed.. then of course all logs will have to be compiled off line. But I'm sure someone will make a parser where it is a data dump for a guild so everyone is parsing to it at the same time.. and then it spits out the data real time in an overlay.

 

Either way with logs coming it's a matter of time until we have real time meters.

 

With how well my computer isn't handling SWTOR, I'm not likely to ever use RTM, ever.

[MasterKayote]

If I was a betting man, I would bet that the real reason BW has not implemented full transparency on damage/healing/combat stats is because they will get too much negative feedback from an imbalanced game. It is an easy way to hide the side effects of an unfinished product.

 

If that were the case they wouldnt have had combat logs at all. Or at least make it impossible to parse. When the logs make it to the game if they dont have the game well balanced, theyre going to get flak anyway. The fact they plan to release it and make it only personal means they simply do not want all the bs that comes with parsers poisoning the game and its community, which I couldnt agree more.

 

I personally wouldve preferred an in game personal log with the capability of a 3rd party addon to get the info and send it to a custom channel created by a guild to share the info. The main problem with parsers is the *****s using them in pugs causing all the drama. And lol at the moron who expects a pug to have any addon.

 

Guilds however are more of an exception. While I firmly stand by the fact that meters are NOT NEEDED in the game to get through the content (we're doing perfectly fine without them now!), and that the game is both more fun, immersive, and challenging when you are actually playing rather than worrying about your rotation and what the meter says ... I fully understand its usefulness to guilds. So long as they are only publicly usable by them.

[Kelsion]

I am probably the first to come out and say this, but I WANT to be criticized. Critisizm is not a bad thing as long as it is constructive. I know that there are people out there that would used an all-inclusive log to troll people, but most of the people that I have come into contact with use this type of information to improve themselves and their team mates.

 

It is not even to see who is doing bad. In WOW, sometime I would see a person of the same class as me doing better than me. I would ask them what they were doing different so that I could improve. I like combat logs, damage meters, and threat meters. I would even be ok with damage meters being availible only to Ops leaders to monitor who might need a little help. Maybe you got a mechanic that needs one DPS to split off and burn down a mob by themselves. You would need your highest DPS to do this. You would need a meter to know who to send. Just like in WOW on the FLame Leviathon fight. You had to throw one person up to kill the turret. Naturally, you wanted your best so that the turret died fast.

 

There are many, MANY reason that I can think of to have damage meters and all-inclusive logs. There is only one reason that I can think of to not have it - to keep people from improving.

 

 

Edit - thought of one more reason not to do it, and that reason has already been stated before. BW won't have to put any effort into balancing the classes and specs.

[Crutchess]

This is where learning to play comes in. People played for years without meters and play tor without them now. If you need a meter for you and your group to troubleshoot what is going wrong you should just disband.

 

I see this argument over and over again. A long time ago, games didn't have meters, and people still played them and downed content. Now, every other game has meters, except this one, so because we used to do it without meters in other games long ago, you should be fine doing it that way in this game. Pumping hot dps is fun and competitive, and some people enjoy that.

 

People got around by horse and buggy, traveled on dirt roads, and made their houses of dirt in the past. And they lived and got by. That does IN NO WAY mean that after they invented freakin jet airplanes we should be fine if we can only use a horse and buggy.

[Vydor_HC]

I am probably the first to come out and say this, but I WANT to be criticized. Critisizm is not a bad thing as long as it is constructive. I know that there are people out there that would used an all-inclusive log to troll people, but most of the people that I have come into contact with use this type of information to improve themselves and their team mates.

 

This was the reason they noted in the summit for actually including what they are going to provide. They know there are some metrics they want to provide within limits.

[kjryx]

There are many, MANY reason that I can think of to have damage meters and all-inclusive logs. There is only one reason that I can think of to not have it - to keep people from improving.

 

The reason not to have it in game is to offer the socially inept players on less thing they can use to try belittle other players with. Over time there will be more gear disparity between players leveling, and people filling group chat with useless numbers as long as it shows how good their doing. It'll breed more players that don't care about interrupts, or standing in fire, as long as they can pull big numbers.

 

Logs outside the game give players every chance to rate their performance. Community sites that will invariably pop-up will let players gauge their performance against their peers, and forums will always give people a chance to find out what they're doing differently. Adding them in-game will almost certainly only lead to epeen contests and ignoring

fight mechanics.

[Quraswren]

Sound like win-win.

 

Gearscore mixed with people who watched TOO much on recount, ruined a lot of wow. It became an elitist community, and everything became "need 5k GS or more" etc, even if the bosses were easy and could be killed with a bunch of people in greens.

 

I think this is the right way to go from a server community perspective. The game gets ruined when you get too much of "need x amount of this, and x amount of that to get invite" mentality among people who doesnt know what they are doing in the first place.

 

In short: when noobs starts acting like elitists who think they know everything, when they actually DON'T, it goes very wrong, and that's what happened in WoW with too much focus on gearscore and recount across the board

 

This lets the people with brains do their job, and it also lets the community have less of the "elitist" wannabes spamming chat with random values needed.

 

Excellent post good sir. Very well done.

[RealAeiouy]

I see this argument over and over again. A long time ago, games didn't have meters, and people still played them and downed content. Now, every other game has meters, except this one, so because we used to do it without meters in other games long ago, you should be fine doing it that way in this game. Pumping hot dps is fun and competitive, and some people enjoy that.

 

People got around by horse and buggy, traveled on dirt roads, and made their houses of dirt in the past. And they lived and got by. That does IN NO WAY mean that after they invented freakin jet airplanes we should be fine if we can only use a horse and buggy.

 

 

 

Meters are easy mode, make the game less challenging and remove the need for players to pay attention to the game.

 

We have a massive number of players who seem clueless on how to play and improve without meters and that is scary and sad. Meters don't make gameplay better. They are a mechanism to short cut paying attention.

 

By your logic every mod ever made improved gameplay and that is not true. A lot of mods negatively hurt game play. Meters get players not to pay attention combined with focusing on one thing. It is not good.

 

People can want meters but they can not do so under the guise of being a more advanced or sophisticated player.

 

I want developers push the boundaries for feedback and not just cop out with easy mode meters.

 

Like I said before I have spent a lot of time playing games with and without meters and there is zero question which is the better experience.

[Xerel]

Meters are easy mode, make the game less challenging and remove the need for players to pay attention to the game.

 

We have a massive number of players who seem clueless on how to play and improve without meters and that is scary and sad. Meters don't make gameplay better. They are a mechanism to short cut paying attention.

 

There's a slight flaw with your logic, how exactly would anyone tell if they've improved?

 

And how exactly do meters "remove the need for players to pay attention to the game" that doesn't make any sense at all. If i have a meter I can somehow ignore everything else? huh?