qw12po09's Post History

qw12po09
0
Neutral
Demise Lvl.60
Mount Tyrannas (PVP)
High Elf Mystic
Amongades on 03/03/2013, 01:06 PM - view
Qw12po09,

I see you're making a case for DPS meters, and I'm one of those people that would love ot have a DPS meter as well. In fact, I made a point to go and find one, since I'd heard of one, and tried to use it. It was a basic screen scraping tool that would've probably worked great, if I hadn't been on my warrior. Since the dmg log is spammed with one line per hit/enemy, when I would traverse cut a bunch of grouped up mobs (I look at you, first room in traverse), it simply was not possible for this screen scraping tool to keep up, and would instantly crash itself and my game.

Anyway, it was a cool tool, but we need something more sophisticated than screen scraping to actually work and be useful.

With that said, I hope this game never officially gets a DPS meter. Yes, I would love a DPS meter, for personal gain, like you've described. I would like to know exactly with solid proof which situations will yield me the maximum dps for my very own gain, no one elses.

Why should Tera never get a DPS meter? For exactly the reaosn everyone is saying they shouldn't. Elitism would sprout everywhere. People would only want to invite ppl who have xyz on their DPS readings, everyone else gets kicked and overlooked. This would be terrible.

The fact is, while there are people like you and me who would make great use of such a DPS meter, the majority would ruin it for the few of us, just like with so many other things. There are ALREADY stories of people getting kicked from IMS because they have a wrong setup or a wrong color glow on their weapon, as if everyone started off with perfect setups and +12 gear? I don't know, I've never done this and never seen it, so I can't comment on why it happens.

But acting like with a supported DPS meter that elitism wouldn't happen everywhere and eventually make everyone's life worse is just naive. We have elitism already now, with no DPS meter. There will be people like you and me who will wnat to use the DPS meter for the RIGHT reasons, but for every one of you and me, there will be hundreds of others who will use the DPS meter for the WRONG reasons.

That's why Tera should never get a DPS meter.

With that said, if anyone finds a better DPS meter than the screen-scraping one I mentioned earlier, please let me know in a PM or something :D


I personally think elitism can't get much worse. Maybe some of it is veiled right now, but it's there. I think this kind of mindset is a bit destructive. We dislike elitism, so we react by trying to artificially prevent it by not letting the general community have tools that tend to promote it like DPS parsers and what have you. But that's not fixing the problem, just a bit of a band aid. We end up in situations where we run instances with people, not knowing if they are there to have a fun dungeon run or of they are huge elitists just itching to kick us at the first sign of not conforming. This leads to a lot of people being bitter and you can have a full party of decent, open minded people playing in a tense atmosphere because they all suspect the others might be out to blame them for any failure and kick them out of the group.

It's up to us as a community to not just tiptoe around this issue. If more guilds actively advertised themselves as anti/non-elitist, if more people would start groups with the premise of inviting anyone regardless of gear and experience, if more people were willing to go on doomed to wipe adventures with new people for just the fun of it, we wouldn't have to sit here and pray a DPS parser is never implemented because it'd ruin the game. I think everyone on both sides of the parser argument knows there's a snowball's chance in hell that one is ever implemented. But the fact that there's so many people against elitism, against turning the game into a number crunching chore should make us ask: "why aren't we doing something about it already?"

I think a DPS parser would be a push in the right direction. It would make all the elitists pop out of the woodwork, but at the same time would make it obvious when you find people that play the game to have fun and don't care about your DPS. When people react positively to you despite you not having optimal, amazing DPS at the end of an instance you'd know then and there that they're allright people. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe elitism would be so widespread that every decent player would be pressured to either conform or quit the game in disgust. But if that really happened, I'd know for sure this isn't a game I want to keep playing and save myself a lot of valuable time.
synaesthetic on 03/03/2013, 12:03 PM - view
One of the things I love about TERA is it has no such mods--no mods to think for you, no mods to tell you how much damage you're doing, no mods to hold your hand and lead you by your nose.

Practice. Learn boss tells. Learn the limits and ranges of your abilities and dodges. None of the bosses in TERA are so complex you need something like DBM to keep track of their mechanics--not even hardmode queen.

Personally I can't stand mods like DBM, since they take most of the game out of the game. You just mindlessly listen to what the mod says and mash buttons and watch timers. That isn't playing a game. It's more akin to a child's color-by-numbers coloring book.

Damage meters reduce a game down to Excel: The Calculating. Numbers, numbers, numbers. My kingdom for an MMO that doesn't only disallow damage meters, but doesn't ever show you how much damage you're doing, either. This is a game, not your Statistics 1A homework.


Why would a damage meter reduce the game to Excel for you? If your score isn't something that interests you, how does it prevent you from doing what you've been doing so far. There's people on the roleplay server that have fun by building stories, characters and interactions. Would a DPS parser stop them from playing the game the way they enjoy? Probably not. There's people, me included, that play the game for fun little challenges like soloing BAMs and instances, without caring much about efficiency and DPS, just getting through the fights in one piece. Would the introduction of a DPS parser make all those people go "gasp, all the fun I had in this game was WRONG. I'll stop having fun and write down DPS numbers instead!"? I'd like to believe not.

I don't like the idea of add-ons that radicaly change the way you play either. But DPS parsers offer metadata, something to mull over at the end of a fight, if crunching numbers is your kind of thing. They are not something that add or detract from the gaming experience itself. Yes, the way to get better at Tera is to practice recognizing tells and avoiding attacks, as you said. But once you get sufficiently good at that and death is not much of an issue, you'll be bored. I know I am. So at that point I'd love to have a tool that lets me go further, and fine tune my gameplay to the utter extent. It would make dungeon runs a lot more involving than "clear this for the 1000th time and AH the loot", and as a consequence extend the game's viability for me.

I feel like the problem is on your end. You don't seem to have enough confidence in the way you enjoy the game, and feel that a DPS meter would change that. I think if you are having fun playing the game in whichever way you are playing now, damage parsers shouldn't change that in any way. And maybe after a hundred dull runs of the same dungeon you mastered, you'd look at that DPS parser and think "wouldn't trying to get better be somewhat fun?".

There are many people, and many reasons to play games. Some people obsessively play sidescrollers to get the best speedrun time possible. Does that mean a sidescroller with a timer ruins your ability to play it just for the fun of it, because some people made a hobby out of decreasing it?
AzBigD on 03/03/2013, 12:04 PM - view
If a dps meter showed ONLY your dps, I don`t and never had an issue with them. They can be a great tool. Where I DO have an issue is when lil Tommy gives Johnny crap and says "L2P n00b" when Johnny does 10 less dps than Tommy.

And you KNOW that`s what would happen here, right? Like GearScore in WoW..that ruined WoW in WotLK because you had scrubs in 4500 GS gear wanting nothing but 6200 GS players for this or that dungeon because they wanted someone to carry them lol.


What you're saying has merit, but you know, jerkbags are jerkbags because they are jerkbags. Having or not having a tool isn't going to make them less or more of a jerkbag. If they're the kind of people that take pleasure out of insulting people who don't meet their arbitrary requirements, they're going to do that DPS parser or otherwise.

Case in point, look at all the people kicking on grounds of gear score and enchantment level. Those are your jerkbags right there. If we had DPS parsers, they'd kick people based on DPS instead. Would things change? Not much in my opinion.

Besides, if a DPS parser acheives the feat of getting all the jerkbags to show the true colors, that couldn't be better. Then all the decent people who play the game with a healthy mindset can get together and have fun, and the jerkbags can tear eachother's hair out for that 1 extra DPS. I see this as a net gain, and would welcome it any day. Do you want to play with jerkbags just because they don't have the tools to justify kicking you out of parties, yet? They're going to do it sooner or later, and the sooner you sift through the awful people and find decent guys to play with, the better your experience will be in the end.
Lieva on 03/03/2013, 11:19 AM - view
You don't play Tera do you. I gave you the benefit of the doubt when I said "I'll play". I should have known better. When your dps can vary from 30k dps to 300k dps on the same boss, in the same gear, and through absolutely zero fault of your own, you'll understand what the meter haters are talking about.


Can you link me to the DPS parser that provided you with the data that DPS can vary from 30k to 300k? It sounds like the kind of tool I'd love to use!

Sarcasm aside, if you had read my post you'd understand this is exactly what I'm talking about. Yes, DPS will vary. But for some people the interval it varies on will be different. There will be people whose DPS tends to be in the 30-300k range and people whose DPS is in the 50-500k range. That's the whole point of DPS parsers to begin with. You are supposed to collect data each fight and see how your variance compares with other people's variances. That's how statistics work and all that. That's how you improve, that's how you tell what you are doing.

But you don't want that. You want the convenient excuse that "I did bad this fight because of circumstances out of my control". You don't want to find out that other people, through better or worse circumstances tend to average out to a higher number than yours. That would hurt your ego.

Oh, but don't bother reading this post more than you did my previous one. Tera is a super special game and you are a super special person. Your ability to play Tera cannot be gauged with numbers because it's so super special that statistics theory cannot hope to comprehend it. Don't let me break you out of your happy fun personal space where you are good at a game because you feel that way, so it has to be true.
Lieva on 03/03/2013, 07:45 AM - view
I'll play.

You want to compare your damage from one attempt to the next. Here's a real scenario in the game.

Shandra Manaya Attempt #1:
You are targetted when she burrows 80% of the time, your dps goes down

Shandra Manaya Attempt #2:
You are never targetted when she burrows, dps goes up

Shandra Manaya Attempt #3:
She rarely does her fly up AoE move, your dps goes up

Your damage performance is HEAVILY reliant on what abilities the boss does. They are not scripted events that you will see the same combination of. There are too many variables in Tera that the player has no power over for a damage parser/meter to be useful.


There are a lot of things players don't have control over, and this is not something that came about with Tera. You have no control over how often and which abilities crit. You could be an outlier that crits on every other hit, and someone with the same exact crit rate can see one or two crits that fight. Does that mean damage parser numbers are wrong? No.

I haven't, and I don't believe anyone in support of damage parsers has, ever implied that they provide insight from an omniscient greater power that measures your ability without fail. For any given fight, damage parser numbers might be way off. But what about 2 fights, or 3 fights, or 10 fights?

It starts to even out. Some people will produce bigger numbers than other people, more often. There will be exceptions, but slowly those exceptions would start phasing out, especially with calculating average DPS over multiple encounters.

All damage parser threads we've had since launch had massive strawmen constructed by the people in opposition of them. You seem to believe the DPS meter crowd is blind, and only relies on raw numbers to gauge performance; worse even on a fight by fight basis. And that's very wrong I'm afraid. Damage parsers are an useful tool. Anyone understands there are exceptions and statistical data is never fully accurate. But also, everyone understands that the more data samples you accumulate, the more accurate statistics become. And always, some data is better than no data.

Statistical data is used in many fields, from professional sports to stock trading. Fields with many, many more uncontrolable factors than an MMO. And you'll see that successful people in those fields always make more and better use of statistics than their less successful peers.

All the DPS parser crowd wants is a tool that's more relevant, accurate and insightful than "well, uhm, this guy has a glowy +12 sword and looks like he knows what he's doing so we should take him over this guy with a blue +9 sword that is using an odd rotation and ability set because our gut feeling tells us he's better". Numbers might not be accurate fight by fight, but if the blue weapon guy has much more advanced insight than the red weapon guy, they will sooner or later prove that, instead of forcing him to conform to the red weapon guy's gear level and rotation because the community doesn't have the time and tools to figure out just how good he is at his job.

And more than anything else, a lot of DPS parser supporters want them for bettering themselves, and not as a reason to vote kick other people from groups. Please don't assume I lack the ability to process the meaning of statistical data and use them in a constructive way. Please don't assume I will fail to understand what statistical data represents and use it to misjudge other people. Please don't assume I lack the thinking ability to look past outliers and individual events and use statistical data to better myself.

And, if Tera's gameplay mechanics are so incredibly innovative that mathematics fail to apply like they do to everything else in the universe, come up with a better scoring system, awarding you for avoiding attacks with proper timing, penalizing you for wasting evasion skills on misread tells, and what have you. The DPS parser supporters want one because it's the simplest to implement tool that provides meaningful insight into performance. That's not to say it's the best. Tera is welcome to stun us with something as innovative as its combat system.

Or you could keep vote kicking people because their weapons don't glow the right shade of pink. I guess that works too.
Once upon a time, when getting a computer to render output on a screen and not a punchcard was considered incredible, people thought up computer games. They invented Pong, Space Invaders and Tetris. Then someone thought "Gee, this is fun, but wouldn't it be really cool if we had some way of measuring just how good you did, so you can compete with friends or make a hobby out of improving your gaming ability?"

And thus came scores. A simple numeric value that quantifies just how "good" you were on a particular playthrough. Scores made games fun for a lot of people, because now you could gauge how good you did against other people's attempts. And since playing games is fun, and competing with other people is also fun, scores made everything double the fun.

But then the enemy came. The "everyone is a winner mentality". Drilled into children from a young age, we are now facing a generation that would resort to suicide if you so much as imply that maybe, just maybe, other people can do something better than them. Everyone is equal, offenders will be prosecuted.

And this is what we are seeing in Tera. A community that cries "muh skeelz!" if you suggest that a DPS parser or something along the lines would be a nice add-on. "but fights in Tera are so complex! you can't just gauge muh skeelz with a number!" That's the argument you're going to see throw at you without trying to reason. Because it's not like you have to stay alive to do maximum DPS or anything like that, so it's not like having top DPS would also mean you were alive and avoiding damage for the entirety of the fight. People that DPS more aren't better! You just don't understand how subtle this is! Don't try to measure muh skeelz!

A lot of these people played other games, WoW too judging by how much mud they sling at it. They likely did bad to average, never did anything competitive and used the "it's just a game, people that do better than me don't have lives" excuse. So they came here where individual ability is conveniently obfuscated so they can use the much more pleasant excuse of "you can't measure muh skeelz, nuh uh!".

A DPS parser would put class imbalances in the spotlight giving us hard data on what class does better in which encounter? But muh skeelz!
A DPS parser would motivate people to get better by showing them where they are, how they are improving and what other people are doing? But muh skeelz!
A DPS/damage taken parser would let more people complete endgame content such as MCHM because they'd have a way to track how they are doing and which approaches are more effective? But muh skeelz!
A DPS parser would let people with inferior gear but good knowledge of fight mechanics and better reflexes have the recognition they deserve over the people who abuse the economy to create obscenely overpowered gear? Muh skeeeeelz!

Don't try to find a competitive niche in Tera because there isn't one. Buy some cash shop items, sell them for ingame gold, buy the best gear money can obtain, steamroll encounters and high five yourself for your skills. If that sounds appealing to you, proceed. If not, well, you should know the answer to your thread's question already.
If I roll up on someone killing a bam solo or duo, or doing escort quests, I always wait for them to be done before I gank them.

Of course, this doesn't stop them from whispering me with threats and calling me names because I dared to engage pvp against someone my own level.

Makes me not want to give a crap and kill them whenever instead of waiting.
Enmasse has constantly spewed the same rhetoric every time a change happens in korea that everyone knows is towards pay to win.

When mounts and costumes were introduced as cash shop in korea, Enmasse declared that 'nothing is certain here guys! We are our own company! We don't HAVE to do what korea does!' But within a month they had released it.

When Korea went F2P, Enmasse declared DON'T WORRY GUYS. Just because Korea does something we don't have to! Within a couple of months, the email went out that NA Tera was going to F2p. I laughed a little to myself.

And then, when everyone looked at Ktera's cash shop, and said 'Masterwork Alkhests and spellbinds in cash shop is really pay to win, please don't do this!' Enmasse said DON'T WORRY GUYS. We will protect the game, just because it releases in Ktera, does not mean it will happen here!

And within a week, it had been added to cash shop.

If masterwork armor and weapons were released in Korea, then they'll come here. If Korea decides to go pay to win, then it will be pay to win. It's as simple as that. Enmasse claims they can do things differently than ktera, but they don't, not a single thing. (Except that patches are slower.)

Fool me once, shame on me...etc.
I failed about 20ish times going to +9 on my weapon.

And then when I succeeded +9, I went ahead to +12 with only 4 enchants. (1 Fail on +12.)

Sucks to be unlucky :D
Edited by: qw12po09 3 months ago
Nope.