A post on combat meters is overdue, I think. A combat meter is a tool that processes the combat log in real time. The most popular use of combat meters are dps rankings. But they can also be used to find out who healed whom, who did take damage or even who was 'active' for how much during an encounter.
Many players will claim that combat meters allow them to play better. And this is true. I have used combat meters myself during my raid-leader days (TBC) and they are very useful.
Combat meters help an organizer to organize. They help to distinguish the good from the bad players and enable you to tell the bad players what they do wrong. You don't even need to talk with them to find out. Just one glance at the combat meter: "You mangled and never used shred ???"
Combat meters allow the segregation of the player base. And while some players say this is exactly what they want, I say this is exactly what I do not want. Matter of opinion, it seems. I want different players to work together and work for each other in a game. And, yes, I said 'work'.
What I would like to talk about right now is the connection of combat meters and the inefficiency phoebia. A lot of players say that disallowing statistical tools doesn't help with crowd sourcing. I disagree. It helps, it just doesn't solve the problem completely. My proof is the successive introduction of combat meters, export of combat logs and finally the armory with its interface in World of Warcraft. There was always theory-crafting and min-maxing, but it was never as dominant as in Wrath of the Lich King.
Besides the pressure to optimize, combat meters also have a very sinister effect on players: instant feedback.
How often do you think about your bill at the gas station? A lot? And how often do you think about your bill of your supplier of electric energy? Not so much?
If you are the kind of person that tries to refuel at the gas station with slightly lower prices, you are not alone. Nor are you if you still haven't changed to a cheaper supplier of electric energy. And that is although the latter would most probably save you a lot more money. But the bill only comes once a year.
Sure, we all know that we should interrupt and play smart and not die and so on. But we mostly get instant feedback on our dps. I know from time to time I have ignored the "smart play" and went for all out dps. Of course only during unimportant encounters ;)
Instant feedback is powerful. And although theoretically all feedback is useful, and especially instant feedback, it corrupts. This is not really news. Instant gratification is so popular, especially because it is instant and powerful.
Some days ago I went into a leveling Rift dungeon. We went through pretty well and Rift being new nobody had a combat meter. When we finished the party talked about how well we had done and how fast the boss had just died. I was pretty certain that this was due to me. But maybe so was the rest. Without knowing who was the champion, everybody was - or thought he is.
I disagree with Mr. Zuckerberg: Perfect transparency is not always good. In games, perfect information can lessen fun. It can even make players play worse! As long as there are challenges in a game, developers cannot prevent players from optimizing. But they can choose the battlefield! Shall it be statistics? Maybe even Excel and C++? Or shall it be personal communication and estimated guesses?
The process of optimization is fun for most players. What is not fun for most players is exporting combat logs to Excel and discussing differential evolution techniques. By not allowing combat meters and statistics, developers can make the players communicate to find the best way to overcome a challenge. This doesn't solve the whole problem. If the challenges are static, they will still be broadcasted on the internet. But at least you have to talk to a player to tell him what he does wrong.
While I do like number-heavy theory crafting from time to time, that is really not why I play MMORPGs. Combat meters give the players an advantage to overcome challenging content. An advantage they wouldn't need in the first place, if the content were tuned for players without combat meters.
So, while I do see that it is desireable for a developer that most players are at one skill-level, I don't think it is worth it.
Some days ago I went into a leveling Rift dungeon. We went through pretty well and Rift being new nobody had a combat meter. When we finished the party talked about how well we had done and how fast the boss had just died. I was pretty certain that this was due to me. But maybe so was the rest. Without knowing who was the champion, everybody was - or thought he is.
ReplyDeleteThe key thing here is that you were successful. That the "challenge" you faced was easy enough that you could beat it without feedback.
Now imagine your group had hit an enrage timer and wiped. And did that again and again. Without a DPS meter, you can't see where the problem is, you can't improve.
DPS meters allow the developers to put some of the responsibility back onto the shoulders of the DPS. Otherwise, only the tanks and healers have responsibilities, because only their actions can be evaluated.
I've raided with guilds that didn't use meters, that didn't attempt to or enforce optimization. Eventually we just hit a wall, a fight we simply could not beat. We couldn't go farther, and the guild ended up dying.
People who insist on optimization for easy content, for content where you will be successful with a minimum of effort, are being excessive. But optimization is for difficult content, where failure is a real possibility.
Rohan: dps races in WoW these days are designed with the assumption that people will use damage meters as part of their minmaxing strategy. A game that was designed without damage meters would not have dps races that hard.
ReplyDeleteI agree here, and I see this as an interesting contrast to your last post. I think giving players access to the game's underlying rules and mechanics is usually fine. Real-time software processing seems different though.
ReplyDeleteTo use a chess analogy: It's common to record a chess game and play back through it later to see where you made mistakes. It's also fine to study opening books and play through the games of grandmasters to improve your game. However, it's not okay to bring a book of openings with you to the chess table, or to use a chess program to give you advice. In other words, it's okay to use outside aids to practice, but it's not okay to use them during the game.
If it were up to me, I'd give players access to the general rules and mechanics of the game but prohibit any sort of real-time software assistance. That means no dps-o-meters, heal-o-meters, aggro-meters, stay-out-of-the-fire-o-meters, etc.
I think combat meters also hurt immersion and community quite a bit, but I suppose that a different post. ;)
I suppose I should add that giving players access to the basic rules and mechanics doesn't mean giving them access to every bit of information about the game. For example, I wouldn't give players access to:
ReplyDelete-The item database
-The character database
-Locations of specific objects
-The details of mob AI, including aggro calculations
-Loot tables
In fact, other than the basic rules and mechanics, I'd keep most of the information in the game hidden.
So I think I'd agree with you about things like the armory, but I can't say for certain since I'm not a WoW player. ;)
One of the prime selling points of an MMO is that it makes players feel good about themselves. APIs that allow accurate evaluation of true performance will interfere with that. This includes dps meters, but also armories and progression tracking add-ons/sites.
ReplyDeleteGetting boss X down feels a lot less epic when you're informed you're behind 90% of the other players out there.
"To use a chess analogy: It's common to record a chess game and play back through it later to see where you made mistakes. It's also fine to study opening books and play through the games of grandmasters to improve your game. However, it's not okay to bring a book of openings with you to the chess table, or to use a chess program to give you advice"
ReplyDeleteAt the risk of sounding like Captain Obvious, I'd like to point out that Chess and WoW are two very different games.
Instant feedback is an intended feature and a major factor in WoW's appeal. From the very beginning, the player can see the results of his or her actions immediately. Push a button, and your character will cast a spell or perform a special attack; push a few more buttons, and the enemy will die; press your interrupt button quickly enough, and the spellcasting mob will stop his ominous hand motions and will run towards you; miss it, and you'll get a fireball to the face. Et cetera.
On other hand, Chess is all about strategical and tactical decisions that may not have any visible impact until many, many turns later. In fact, not so long ago, it was quite common for chess players to conduct their matches via mail (electronic or otherwise). Now, how many WoW players do you know who would enjoy exchanging letters with Blizzard ("I'm casting Shadow Bolt" - 2 weeks pass - "It hits for 35000 damage. Your next move?") instead of pushing buttons?
In endgame raid content, however, WoW's model gets inconsistent. When a boss has many millions of hitpoints, when there are multiple people assigned to interrupt/dispel/healing duty, when the fight lasts for several minutes, it is not clear whether your actions are having the desired effect or if you're doing something wrong. And that's where combat meters come to the rescue, providing instant feedback that is already present throughout the rest of the game.
I really did enjoy copying my combat log into a spreadsheet, and writing code to parse the log and tell me how much haste I was wasting thanks to Borrowed Time or how much better the second point of Grace made me. I recognize that this puts me in the minority.
ReplyDeleteThe problem I see with getting rid of combat meters is that first of all, crowds are really, really good at doing things. You can make information hard to get at, but you can't make it impossible to get at. If numbers pop up on my screen when I hit things then I don't want to have to record my play sessions and then use Optical Character Recognition to generate my own logs, nor do I want to be beholden to people who do for information. If we don't even get that then people will still determine some dps benchmark (how quickly can a given spec kill a blue foozle) and do comparative tests.
If you make it really, really hard to get information then at some point players are going to become very frustrated. If you join group A vs. group B it will seem like you are playing a totally different game, and not in a good way. Everything might die twice as fast in one group but you won't know why.
Game designers are usually terrible at first stabs at balance. Without crowd sourced information, one class will just end up doing twice as much damage as another. Even though no one will be able to prove it directly, it will become common knowledge sooner or later.
Success means people will care about how things work. Trying to cut them off from that information won't work in the long run. Then again, in the long run we're all dead, so maybe the short or medium term is what to aim for.