Thank you for no damage meter's

[Nikolu]

I've played a lot of MMORPGS and there have been a very few handful of instances where a class was truly marginalized by code (they just weren't programmed correctly). In most cases, they become marginal only when stats are crunched and another class is determined to be more valuable based on a few data points, leaving out many other useful attributes to the class.

 

The reasons are almost uniformly in the categories of Damage Dealing, Healing, and Damage Mitigation. All other utility is ignored because it can't be easily measured. That creates a pretty simplistic game. A game that should really only have three classes and no customization. What is the point of the depth of the game if everything comes down to three actual roles?

 

So yes, I would say that balancing is not improvement if it is only addressing marginal differences between classes based on an insufficient metric of three roles that do not represent the entire utility of those classes.

 

The point is simple. Exposing the game mechanics to the users can be helpful (not necessary), but it completely changes the focus of the game.

 

Now you are splitting hairs over my example, and I could give you a list of classes/spec's in a couple of games I've played (Rift / WoW) whom were not balanced in a timely manner and their players were left out of activities or forced to change role. But that isn't the point of this thread.

 

Utility isn't ignored at all if balance is close, infact it then becomes the complaint that utility isn't balanced. People will always complain, again that isn't what this thread is about.

 

You are going to have to enlighten me then on the focus of the game, if a combat log or damage meter changes its focus. You understand that this is all about the math. It doesn't matter how you slice the story, the game is about the math. The focus of this game is slaying internet dragons, in a group. You can say jedi/sith/galactic evils instead of dragons if you want, but that is the point of the game.

 

And this game is based on numbers. The story, the lore, the cool graphics, are all tacked onto a social networking engine that provides math problems for groups of people to solve in a tactile manner.

[Kiragrim]

Its kind of like chess club. Anyone can learn to play chess, but not everyone can PLAY it. Those that know how each piece moves but cannot grasp the strategy are usually not invited to compete on certain levels. But they can still play for fun.

 

Ah... You used Chess as an example! Good for you! Except in Chess it is a PVP game. One player wins, one player loses. This is an MMO. Players cooperate to accomplish some goal. It isn't PVP and an awful lot of people do *NOT* want PVP.

 

So you admit it... Meters are a tool for PVP.

 

Do not force PVP on me!

 

Stop the meters! Stop the meters! Stop the meters!

[Darkvayder]

< Old Raid leader >

 

I never see the point of people being against DPS meters anything that helps players be at their best is a good thing in my opinion. If players are pulling subpar dps for a boss encounter that needs good dps to beat an enrage timer, ofcourse i will replace him, will i kick him from the guild, no, will i get one of my class leaders to talk to him after the raid and give him some advice, yes.

 

The sad thing is the kid linking the dps meter ruins it for us all.

 

It never takes very long to figure out people that focus mainly on dps and leave others to do the objectives such as add killing, interrupting etc. Those people will be asked to fix that problem or find another guild.

[Nategray]

Yeah... another "my game was harder then your game" argument... Yay!

 

By the way... My dad can beat up your dad... with his arm tied behind his back, blind folded, two left shoes on, in the snow, up hill both ways, with three huge German shepherds with spiked collars and foaming at the mouth, chasing him through a china shop... and manage not to break a single piece!

 

I WIN! Muahahaha.... Seriously.

 

 

The only point I was making is dps meters do not let you beat high end content, but yes I did revel in my old EQ time flagged glory days was a pita and nothing in WOW was that difficult.

Because rightfully so they didn't want it to be because they wanted to and did make it easier to keep a much higher player base than EQ ever had and good for them.

[Skeelol]

Never said was in a top guild in WOW said I did the hardmode heroics not before the next ones came out but only because I was burnt on top end raiding.

Not really big on reading comprehension are you.

I was however in a top raiding guild in EQ, you know the have to play at least 40 hours a week kind.

 

Exactly my point.

 

WoW raids are hard, if you do them at launch not with tons of already farmed gear and after countless nerfs AND with tactics already layed out for you by other guilds. And they're harder than EQ raids by miles.

 

EQ raids were only hard due to time / people needed. Nothing else.

 

The only point I was making is dps meters do not let you beat high end content, but yes I did revel in my old EQ time flagged glory days was a pita and nothing in WOW was that difficult.

Because rightfully so they didn't want it to be because they wanted to and did make it easier to keep a much higher player base than EQ ever had and good for them.

 

Actually they do for DPS fights with very tight enrage timers. EQ didn't have that because it had a joke of a raid content. But that's another story.

 

Please continue to tell me how the best guild in the world that wiped hundreds of times due to DPS issues had players who needed to l2p. Players who squeeze every single bit of dps they can.

 

Go ahead. Also tell me some more how easy it is. It provides me with free laughs.

Edited December 23, 2011 by Skeelol

[Cutiecat]

This boils down to people not wanting accountability for their failures, and meters assist in accountability as well as theorycrafting.

[Zarathrus]

Damage Meters do little to properly evaluate the performance of healers, which I play exclusively.

 

I'm in the no Damage Meter Camp. They aren't all that useful. You want to know how much damage you did, look at the combat log after the fight is over.

[Nikolu]

Interrupts

Pulling adds off of casters and healers

Crowd control

Situational awareness

Developing tactics

 

The meters focus on just a few things that can help in an encounter. They can (not necessarily) lead to idiotic things in past MMOs like specific damage mitigation (cold, fire, etc.. resist), alternate buff hell (potions, food, farming constantly), single class builds, gimmick fights (this particular class skill is necessary), and many other things that do not improve game play nor do they play to any sort of skill.

 

It does not take skill to farm mats, farm gear, or look on the internet to see what single specification is necessary to play and what rotation you must use.

 

All of the things on your list of things that can't be measured, can be measured by a proper combat log or meter.

 

How else do you think mods can be made that tell you who broke CC when? Who interrupted what when, who is standing in what.

 

The only item on your list "developing tactics" can't be measured by a meter, because its a social activity, DRIVEN off data provided by a combat log, or trial and error.

 

Meters don't lead to anything you've outlined in your second paragraph, developers trying to make unique and challenging encounters lead to raiders min/maxing. Meters are just a tool.

[Caelrie]

Interrupts

Pulling adds off of casters and healers

Crowd control

Recount tracks all of those things. What else ya got?

[Kiragrim]

< Old Raid leader >

 

I never see the point of people being against DPS meters anything that helps players be at their best is a good thing in my opinion. If players are pulling subpar dps for a boss encounter that needs good dps to beat an enrage timer, ofcourse i will replace him, will i kick him from the guild, no, will i get one of my class leaders to talk to him after the raid and give him some advice, yes.

 

The sad thing is the kid linking the dps meter ruins it for us all.

 

It never takes very long to figure out people that focus mainly on dps and leave others to do the objectives such as add killing, interrupting etc. Those people will be asked to fix that problem or find another guild.

 

Organized guilds for the good of all involved are not the norm. If there is any organization it is usually the GLs friends who all seem to have type-A personalities who won't accept any failure.. "WIN! WIN! WIN!"... "Oh, and the best loot goes to the top contributors first" (read, best DPSrs, cause healers, off tanks, and CCrs don't *really* count when it comes to downing the boss that drops the best gear in the game).

 

That is how meters work.

 

Stop the meters! Stop the meters! Stop the meters!

[Caelrie]

Organized guilds for the good of all involved are not the norm. If there is any organization it is usually the GLs friends who all seem to have type-A personalities who won't accept any failure.. "WIN! WIN! WIN!"... "Oh, and the best loot goes to the top contributors first" (read, best DPSrs, cause healers, off tanks, and CCrs don't *really* count when it comes to downing the boss that drops the best gear in the game).

 

That is how meters work.

 

Stop the meters! Stop the meters! Stop the meters!

 

So don't join those guilds. What's the big deal?

[Skeelol]

So don't join those guilds. What's the big deal?

 

But no shiniez for him then? Whatever is he going to do!

[Nikolu]

Organized guilds for the good of all involved are not the norm. If there is any organization it is usually the GLs friends who all seem to have type-A personalities who won't accept any failure.. "WIN! WIN! WIN!"... "Oh, and the best loot goes to the top contributors first" (read, best DPSrs, cause healers, off tanks, and CCrs don't *really* count when it comes to downing the boss that drops the best gear in the game).

 

That is how meters work.

 

Stop the meters! Stop the meters! Stop the meters!

 

Your personal bias is all that is driving this argument then. I've never been in a guild which behaves as you've described, and these social problems have nothing to do with combat logs or meters.

[Cutiecat]

So don't join those guilds. What's the big deal?

 

They want to be carried to success but they don't want to have to be remotely competent.

[Darkvayder]

Organized guilds for the good of all involved are not the norm. If there is any organization it is usually the GLs friends who all seem to have type-A personalities who won't accept any failure.. "WIN! WIN! WIN!"... "Oh, and the best loot goes to the top contributors first" (read, best DPSrs, cause healers, off tanks, and CCrs don't *really* count when it comes to downing the boss that drops the best gear in the game).

 

That is how meters work.

 

Stop the meters! Stop the meters! Stop the meters!

 

Most good guilds will gear tanks, healers then dps. But if you are saying that best dps should get the best gear is correct, CCers dont need better gear to do better CC.

[Seismax]

Exactly my point.

 

Please continue to tell me how the best guild in the world that wiped hundreds of times due to DPS issues had players who needed to l2p. Players who squeeze every single bit of dps they can.

 

Well... I do remember reading about that world first deathwing a few days ago, they benched a player for 3 hours so he could go l2p on a target dummy:D

[andrelle]

Ah... You used Chess as an example! Good for you! Except in Chess it is a PVP game. One player wins, one player loses. This is an MMO. Players cooperate to accomplish some goal. It isn't PVP and an awful lot of people do *NOT* want PVP.

 

So you admit it... Meters are a tool for PVP.

 

Do not force PVP on me!

 

Stop the meters! Stop the meters! Stop the meters!

 

I admit it. Absolutely. And everybody needs a good dose of pvp!

 

But its more than a tool for pvp. Its all about zero-sum. Your gain or loss of utility is balanced by someone else's gain or loss. Thus, like Gordon Gekko once said, somebody wins, somebody loses.

 

I don't see what's wrong with this application where not only pvp but raiding is concerned. It is as simple as saying: "if you don't want to play min/max, don't play min/max." But those who do should have the tools.

 

Besides, isn't Zoeller going to provide the logs at some point? We can argue good and bad all we want, but eventually its going to be in the game.

 

My point is just avoid it if you fear it. If it makes a person feel inadequate by seeing the leaderboard, well, there's other things to do in the game, and there are other raid/guild leaders with different philosophies.

 

But will it change the game dynamic to include it? I mean, how so? Because you won't be picked first in the ball field? So? How some people survive in life is beyond me.

[Bhigtimm]

If you are that good, you shouldn't need a meter to tell you that you are good. Trial and error is how you should learn the fights, not solving some math and making the fight trivial.

[SlyJeff]

This is why I don't like the Meters=Harder content argument. If you can't beat it I'd say that's pretty hard, you don't need meters to design content that's nearly impossible to beat.

 

I'll stand by saying that it helps people organize better and make more informed choices though. I'm up for having hard content, but when my success depends on 10-20 other people, I'd like to be able to efficiently do something about it.

 

My meter=hardness argument is based on the idea of the developer wanting to make content that can be beaten with a certain amount if effort. The tools allow them to make it harder while still being doable, because the tools allow players to gain the knowledge to play better.

 

Or more simply

Meters and logs->players who want to improve can improve more->overall better players and stronger groups->the content can be made more difficult while still being reasonable achievable.

[Nategray]

Exactly my point.

 

WoW raids are hard, if you do them at launch not with tons of already farmed gear and after countless nerfs AND with tactics already layed out for you by other guilds. And they're harder than EQ raids by miles.

 

EQ raids were only hard due to time / people needed. Nothing else.

 

Never had the farmed gear and or read any tactics, we were a pretty casual guild and just slower at getting to them, we learned from wiping and picking ourselves up and doing them again.

EQ raids were harder because they were designed harder, WOW intentionally made everything easier.

Nothing in WOW had you tank mez 6 uber elite mobs it takes a raid of 75 to kill while also having 6 others ones have to be kited around by druids bards and rangers because you cannot kill them until you kill the 6 ones being tank mezzed by a single group, and you could not kill any of the 6 as they all had to be killed within a minute of each other or they all re-spawned.

And that was just to get the main boss to spawn.

 

Do your self a favor and look up time flagging in EQ and what was necessary to get it.

Spare me the WOW is hard crap only people who never played EQ would ever compare WOW raiding to EQ raiding, it was one of the downfalls of EQ and blessings of WOW how they made raiding so much easier.

So in short do not talk about things you have no clue about.

Edited December 23, 2011 by Nategray

[Fallenlight]

And why do you care if there are meters? I have been a raid leader for a long time, and we use meters to look at the skill breakdowns to help improve the raid and players.

 

So you mean you have a problem with the E-Peen kids that spam meters, that you can easily /ignore right?

 

And sorry I have to say it. You are more than likely one of those people that have no idea how to play your class and don't really care, even if you are holding a group back.

 

This is one of the elitist jerks people are talking about. The kind of people who are like...Mmo's are a sport, this is my life...screw kids and a wife and career i gotta beat this damn raid!

[Valadain]

Now you are splitting hairs over my example, and I could give you a list of classes/spec's in a couple of games I've played (Rift / WoW) whom were not balanced in a timely manner and their players were left out of activities or forced to change role. But that isn't the point of this thread.

 

Utility isn't ignored at all if balance is close, infact it then becomes the complaint that utility isn't balanced. People will always complain, again that isn't what this thread is about.

 

You are going to have to enlighten me then on the focus of the game, if a combat log or damage meter changes its focus. You understand that this is all about the math. It doesn't matter how you slice the story, the game is about the math. The focus of this game is slaying internet dragons, in a group. You can say jedi/sith/galactic evils instead of dragons if you want, but that is the point of the game.

 

And this game is based on numbers. The story, the lore, the cool graphics, are all tacked onto a social networking engine that provides math problems for groups of people to solve in a tactile manner.

 

That's the focus change exactly. None of the best games I've played were about the math. They were about the challenge, not pulling apart the numbers and ignoring the rest of the game.

 

By taking a game like this and reducing it to the math, all you do is create a very, very complicated game of simon says. Boss says this, push this button, boss does that, push this other button.

 

The challenge of a game, something I think they are doing very well at thus far, is to create situations that can be solved in multiple ways by different classes. Encounters you just barely get through by timing a stun right or using the terrain correctly.

 

Honestly, the most fun I had in other games wasn't getting everyone together and min/maxing our way through an encounter. It was going into a difficult instance with less players than required and finding a way through it anyway.

[Seismax]

My meter=hardness argument is based on the idea of the developer wanting to make content that can be beaten with a certain amount if effort. The tools allow them to make it harder while still being doable, because the tools allow players to gain the knowledge to play better.

 

Or more simply

Meters and logs->players who want to improve can improve more->overall better players and stronger groups->the content can be made more difficult while still being reasonable achievable.

 

See that's different. That is "Meters = hard but not too hard" or "Meters=Just right". That's very different from "Meters = Hard".

[Bhigtimm]

Never had the farmed gear and or read any tactics, we were a pretty casual guild and just slower at getting to them, we learned from wiping and picking ourselves up and doing them again.

EQ raids were harder because they were designed harder, WOW intentionally made everything easier.

Nothing in WOW had you tank mez 6 uber elite mobs it takes a raid of 75 to kill while also having 6 others ones have to be kited around by druids bards and rangers because you cannot kill them until you kill the 6 ones being tank mezzed by a single group, and you could not kill any of the 6 as they all had to be killed within a minute of each other or they all re-spawned,.

Do your self a favor and look up time flagging in EQ and what was necessary to get it.

Spare me the WOW is hard crap only people who never played EQ would ever compare WOW raiding to EQ raiding, it was one of the downfalls of EQ and blessings of WOW how they made raiding so much easier.

So is short do not talk about things you have no clue about.

 

Nothing in Wow? Major Domo, what else you got?

[Skeelol]

So is short do not talk about things you have no clue about.

 

You should really practice what you preach.