PLEASE VOTE: Give Us Real Combat Logs

[Squatdog_nz]

This...this is what will happen.

 

LOL@all this...

 

1- You can't top the damage-meter when you die within the first minute.

 

2- Recount also showed the DPS pulling aggro, failing to interrupt and standing in fire

 

3- Damage-meters were a great bonus to raid damage because it kept the DPS monkeys alert and focused as they tried to maximise their rotation, instead of pressing auto-attack while they ate a pie and watched TV.

[Maltra]

Yes.

 

People already behave in "bad ways some are describing in this thread" and it's certainly not the combat logs fault, since they aren't there.

 

At least with combat logs and meters you can actually identify and separate people who can actually back up their attitude with facts from those who can't.

 

Dealing with certain individuals who are convinced that they do amazing dps or heals by just spamming 1 skill+basic attack and ignore 90% of their character is pretty annoying, because when it comes down to it you can't SHOW them they're WRONG.

 

I really don't see any reason to not have logs in game, i can understand there may be people who don't care about it, but.. being against it? Why?

[MadJerry]

 

The current planned implementation of a personal combat log will give those who require a comprehensive log the option, albeit with some difficulty, to combine those into a comprehensive log. This gives those people everything they need and want. At the same time they also provide those who do not want them and who value their privacy the very same thing, they give them the option to not have their personal data analyzed.

 

 

If I understand this correctly then a player can choose to share their info with the group or not? If that is the case then it wont be long at all until sharing the info will be mandatory in order to get into a group...

[Taroen]

Let me start with saying that my only complaint against meters is that they tend to make otherwise decent players bad.

 

How? you ask? Simple, with a meter on the screen players tunnel vision on "winning" the meter race and being top DPS. Managing threat, moving out of the fire, CCing, not AOEing and breaking CC, etc. all get ignored for higher DPS.

 

So back to your point. Yes, I absolutely agree that some people will pull agro in an attempt to "prove" how great they are at DPS.

 

Where I disagree is that meters will do anything to "fix" those types of players. With a meter they will still pull agro because clicking a threat reduction skill means less DPS. Frankly, a meter will likely make those players even worse.

 

No. Meters do not make otherwise decent players bad. Those players were already bad in the first place.

 

Players that would focus on their own dps to the point of ignoring fight mechanics are fundamentally bad players to begin with, and just as bad, or worse, than players who can not manage to bring half the dps of other players in their class/role.

 

Metrics do not make bad players, they just EXPOSE them.

[Starglide]

I don't think there is any question that he agrees with you. It is the ongoing assertion that people are afraid of having their numbers shown and thus don't want combat logs that is fundamentally flawed and yet you (and he) both keep stating it like fact.

 

I don't give a rats arse if someone sees my numbers - I have already stated time and time again that I'm in a raiding guild that runs parses during the fight real-time. However, if they had asked us in THAT game if we wanted/needed them I would have said No then to.

 

Fair enough.

[Starglide]

While I find it personally entertaining that the numbers of the poll are vastly in favor of the method the developers have decided to go, my guess is a vast majority of players don't actually spend a significant amount of time on the forums. It's not speculating to say that ~75% of the people who voted were opposed to the OP's ideas. How much value it actually has is debatable. I never professed those numbers to be an accurate assessment of the entire player-base.

 

For the rest I'm not going to quote each piece.

 

My stance is not that it's a bad thing to have guilds function the way you describe, but not all guilds actually have that playstyle. Everyone I raid with has raided for years in other games, and by years I mean upwards of 15+ years. We made a point not to look up the boss strats the first go around. We try to have fun. We enjoy playing the classes we like. We enjoy the ambiguity and the challenge that comes with it. It results in, what is to us, a more fun raid setting. We clear all hard mode content now in ~3 hours. Some of us are min/maxers and enjoy the mathy side of things, myself included. We make spreadsheets and do right now what we're going to do in 1.2 with more accuracy. And the ones that aren't into that sort of thing, if they ask us we drone on endlessly about it, but we respect their particular philosophies and what makes the game fun for them. And it wasn't like we started raiding right out of the gate in swtor. We enjoyed the content to level cap. I was in a couple pugs weeks before I actually started raiding with my guild.

 

A lot of the information people want is superfluous to content outside of nightmare modes. It's not needed right now, many guilds are clearing that content. And it's not necessary in the future. It can, however, be a good tool. In the right hands that information can be useful. In the wrong hands you end up with a community like WoW has. Making it take more to micromanage means that most people will only put the time in to parse logs when it matters, matters being when content isn't being downed and they can't find any other reason why they're not succeeding. This was a point already made by someone else so I won't ramble on about it.

 

Keeping it this way keeps that right in the hands of the player. If the player is presented an option where they share logs or leave, then they have a decision to make. I fully respect the other side of the fence here, if that's how you want to run your guild, good for you. But that choice isn't taken from the player. And all guilds won't run like this (nor do they need to like you seem to think).

 

The rest of what you talk about is capable with the upcoming system. Anything from judging performance (with the permission of the player in question) to helping people out with dps who are seeking it. It's not as easy as other games, but it's not supposed to be. It's also not going to inundate the rest of the game world due to being implemented in this manner.

 

Excellend points and I respect this.

[Daellia]

If I understand this correctly then a player can choose to share their info with the group or not? If that is the case then it wont be long at all until sharing the info will be mandatory in order to get into a group...

 

More that the player can choose to export and upload their log separately. Developers of parsing tools will then need to figure out some way to allow merging of logs from all 8 or 16 members of the operation, and ways of handling it when not all of the members upload, which can be tricky. I doubt the logs will notate difficulty mode directly, so parsing applications will need to use the WWS and WoL method of tallying total damage done and comparing that to the known health totals of the boss on all 3 difficulty settings. Unfortunately, some of these health totals are relatively close to each other, so not having a complete log from all members of the raid can be nasty.

 

For example, G4-B3 in 8-man Karagga's Palace has around 1.5 million HP in hardmode, 1.7 million in Nightmare, and 1.8 million in normal mode (no, you read that right, he has more HP on normal than either hard or nightmare. The difference in mechanics between normal mode versus hard or nightmare make this make sense). If we assume all 4 dps are doing roughly the same dps, and the tanks are each doing half that, this means we need 360000 damage per dpser on normal, 300000 per person on hard, and 340000 per person on nightmare, on average.

 

Now, let's assume we got 7 out of the 8 logs for a raid on that fight. Damage totals from the logs are 408562, 352271, 316481 for three dpsers that submitted logs, 211015 and 122775 for the two tanks (well, tank and offtank in dps gear), and 9425 and 8335 for the healers. Now, that totals to 1428864 damage, which means this was likely either normal mode or nightmare mode (as only 80k more damage would be needed for hard mode). To determine which, we'll need to guess how much the last dpser did. Unfortunately, this gets tricky. If we assume normal mode, the final dpser would have needed to do around 380000 damage, while if we assume Nightmare, 320000. Both of these totals are within the range of dps values already present in the log, so there's no way to determine which mode this log was performed on.

 

In this particular case, we can probably determine it from the buffs the boss gained over the fight, as he gains an addition buff (which amplifies his damage done) in hard and nightmare that isn't present in normal mode, but the illustration stands. Without a full log, many of the most common features of log parsers from WoW will be absent, as we can't determine boss difficulty level.

 

Also, parser devs will need to find some way for uploads to be matched with each other, preferably automatically. No idea how to do this one easily.

 

My group now basically has hard mode on farm and that's all we run because they have no desire to run nightmare modes.

 

Wanted to address this briefly. My raid group started normal modes a bit over a month ago, as we finally got our 8th member to 50 (ya, I know, they're slow-pokes). 2 weeks ago (not including this week), we started hard modes, and cleared all 4/5 EV that week. The next week (last week), we cleared 4/5 EV again, all 5 in KP, then finally got Soa (buuuuuuggy fight). This week, we decided to give Nightmare a try, expecting it to be somewhat more difficult. Imagine our surprise when we discovered that the first 4 in EV are still] just loot pinatas. Bonecrusher in KP is a a hurdle, but once we got past him, we cleared the other 4 without issue, one-shotting Karagga on our first attempt with no deaths. We'll be working on Soa tomorrow, and I expect to have him down by the end of it. We've been raiding progression raids for 3 weeks now (and honestly, the first week was just our extra raid day where we decided "why not", hence only 4/5 EV, only were at it for about 3 hours), and we're 9/10 NiM (and my raid group isn't exactly Paragon level. We're good, but we're not good enough for this to be abnormal).

 

Basically, don't let the "Nightmare" mode tag give you pause. It really isn't that much more difficult than hardmode. Certain mechanics are a bit more binary (for example, Bonethrasher's cleave hits for about 16k in nightmare, so eating extra cleaves when you shouldn't be is BAAAD), but honestly the majority of them are just free loot. Pylons and Council aren't even really appreciably more difficult than hardmode. To illustrate, one of our guildies (a merc) hit 50 midway through last week. He ran a few flashpoints and PvPed until he at least got rid of all of his green mods on items, and more than half of his blues. He was still rather undergeared for hardmode, though, and we through him into nightmare mode instead. No issues. He even handled Council without issue.

[JadenKayne]

No combat logs.

 

No parsing of any kind.

 

Thanks.

[Daellia]

No combat logs.

 

No parsing of any kind.

 

Thanks.

 

Considering that BW has already confirmed the addition of exportable parse-able combat logs (self-only, though) in 1.2, this doesn't really add much to the discussion.

Edited March 11, 2012 by Daellia

[krinaman]

You're absolutely right. The same people that zerg the boss, mindless of all mechanics and threat, will do so meters or not. The meters might reinforce it slightly, but overall nothing really changes. If anything, a meter would at least let them epeen-stroke without actually destructive behavior like intentionally pulling threat.

 

.....

 

 

Except, as I just said, they still do the destructive behavior. I seen it so many times it isn't funny. After wiping the group a half a dozen times they then post their meters claiming their "awesome dps" is proof it wasn't their fault.

 

Furthermore, I've seen people who didn't do destructive stuff start doing it as soon as they got meters.

[Taroen]

Except, as I just said, they still do the destructive behavior. I seen it so many times it isn't funny. After wiping the group a half a dozen times they then post their meters claiming their "awesome dps" is proof it wasn't their fault.

 

Furthermore, I've seen people who didn't do destructive stuff start doing it as soon as they got meters.

 

And, again... The metrics did not make those players bad. They just exposed them as being bad players to those of us who understand that DPS is not the be-all end-all in fights. I would work with people who have slow DPS to help them get better, but the people who are so bad that they think their "leet deeps" is the most important thing in the world would get a /gkick from me before they even finished pasting the meter results to chat.

[krinaman]

And, again... The metrics did not make those players bad. They just exposed them as being bad players to those of us who understand that DPS is not the be-all end-all in fights. I would work with people who have slow DPS to help them get better, but the people who are so bad that they think their "leet deeps" is the most important thing in the world would get a /gkick from me before they even finished pasting the meter results to chat.

 

Whether we blame the meter or the player it really doesn't change the problem. The reality is there is a percentage of the population that plays worse when they got a meter in front of them.

[Daellia]

Whether we blame the meter or the player it really doesn't change the problem. The reality is there is a percentage of the population that plays worse when they got a meter in front of them.

 

There's also a percentage that plays better when they have meters (competition breeds excellence), and yet another percentage that that helps others play better when they have meters.

Edited March 11, 2012 by Daellia

[Stupiddrummer]

a long time ago, i got kicked from a guild for sub-par dps.

 

It wasn't because i didn't take the time to learn my class

It wasn't because i refused to improve my play

It wasn't because i refused to take advice from fellow guildies

It wasn't because i was guilded with jerks

 

it was because of dps meters. And i hate them.

[bhouse]

a long time ago, i got kicked from a guild for sub-par dps.

 

It wasn't because i didn't take the time to learn my class

It wasn't because i refused to improve my play

It wasn't because i refused to take advice from fellow guildies

It wasn't because i was guilded with jerks

 

it was because of dps meters. And i hate them.

 

I dont buy it...lets go over the facts.

 

If you did take the time to learn your class, your damage wouldn't be bad enough to be kicked.

If you were actually taking their advice and applying it, there is no reason to kick you. Why even bother giving advice if you are just going to kick that person?

If they werent jerks, how do you explain being kicked for having low damage?

 

It is not a damage meter/combat logs fault you were kicked.

[Loendar]

a long time ago, i got kicked from a guild for sub-par dps.

 

It wasn't because i didn't take the time to learn my class

It wasn't because i refused to improve my play

It wasn't because i refused to take advice from fellow guildies

It wasn't because i was guilded with jerks

 

it was because of dps meters. And i hate them.

 

Stupiddrummer is a pro-combat logs person. He is making the above comment as some kind of sarcastic troll to get people to dispute him and cast the anti-log people in a bad light.

 

Ignore him and he will go away again for a period of time.

Edited March 11, 2012 by Loendar

[Stupiddrummer]

Stupiddrummer is a pro-combat logs person. He is making the above comment as some kind of sarcastic troll to get people to dispute him and cast the anti-log people in a bad light.

 

Ignore him and he will go away again for a period of time.

 

hah. if i used a signature, this would be the new it.

Edited March 11, 2012 by Stupiddrummer

[fungihoujo]

Self logs are there- if you need them shared/you're a serious hardcore guild- make it mandatory.

 

But, for pugs and casuals, it gives you all the ability to improve your own skills without any of the hassle of having randoms turn what should be cooperative play into a pissing contest.

[ScarletBlaze]

fungihoujo;3368568]Self logs are there- if you need them shared/you're a serious hardcore guild- make it mandatory.

 

 

To correctly do this make sure it is part of the guild rules that everyone agrees to when they join the guild or it can cause a problem down the line.

Edited March 11, 2012 by ScarletBlaze

[krinaman]

There's also a percentage that plays better when they have meters (competition breeds excellence), and yet another percentage that that helps others play better when they have meters.

 

And there is also a percentage that help others without meters

And there is a percentage that tick other players off trying to "help" with or without meters.

And there is a percentage that are just *****s with meters "ZMOG I'm doing 10 dps more than you, L2Play noob"

 

So yeah tl;dr there are all kinds of people in the world. At the end of the day it's a question of do you believe meters do more good than harm. In my experience meters add little for the damage they do.

 

Obviously opinions vary.

[Darth_Grissom]

Meters do too much damage.

 

My guild is running fine without them and we dread the day they are added

 

I voted No to meters on the poll and it looks like I am not alone.

[Eborix]

No, I do not want combat logs. I would also prefer that they not add DPS or Threat meters, but it seems its too late to change that.

[Darth_Grissom]

No, I do not want combat logs. I would also prefer that they not add DPS or Threat meters, but it seems its too late to change that.

 

The good thing though is that No One else can see the meter except you. No one else will be able to view the outgoing and incoming damage except you .

[Chinaexpress]

Please don't give Dmg Meter!

 

I need to continue playing with one hand, while I'm smoking, eating, playing some random app game on my ipad. But of course be on full alert when it's LOOT TIME!

 

Thanks Bioware on this stance to not have meters accessible to everyone =). I can now continue to have the most awesome gear. And thank you for my guildies who continue to kill stuff for me while I take their loot. HAHA it's not like they know I have been ******* the whole time they are raging over enrage timer defeats. 0=)

Edited March 11, 2012 by Chinaexpress

[Menisong]

Meters do too much damage.

 

My guild is running fine without them and we dread the day they are added

 

I voted No to meters on the poll and it looks like I am not alone.

 

Why on earth does your guild dread meters? Your guild doesn't have enough self control? Once they add meters your happy little guild turns on each other and starts to eat one another?

 

Sounds like your guild has problems and is not doing as fine as you claim.

 

Meters affect PUGs, thats about it. Guilds should be unaffected by them.

Edited March 11, 2012 by Menisong