Damage meters

At the moment there's a poll going on in the SW:TOR forums about damage meters, should they be implemented or not?

I voted no, and I really do hope that they will not be implemented, because in my opinion these things turn some players into elitists jerks to put it lightly.

I have seen a good hunter going from playing his class to it's full potential to someone who just played to top the charts.
I've seen alot of players posting damage results to show off they topped damage and be proud of that while they wiped an entire group because they couldn't deal with aggro in the same time.
I've been in a raid as a holy priest with another holy priest and 2 paladins, both the paladins were spamming flash heal so for us priests there wasn't much to do, overhealing is fine, but healing someone who has 100% hp seems overkill, i still started doing it because I received a whisper from the raidleader.
To cut a long story short, the other priest didn't, when they asked him why? he replied:"mana management", i agreed to be honest, he was an awesome priest, but they kicked him because he didn't score to high on the meter.
as a DPS I had times I didn't top the meter as an affliction warlock, but there was often more to it than just slacking (I have to admitt I did that to every now and then when I was tired)

I've played Aion for the last 2 years, and I have to say, laying without add-ons, it felt strange at first, i remember the first weeks, I checked almost daily if they hadn't changed their minds about it, and then I realised, I don't need a meter to up my performance, I know my class, I know what it does, I just started paying attention when I killed, asked about other peoples rotations (and tried the ones that seemed to make sense), made some changes and killed a little faster.

And since...I dread going back to the meters and all the negativity you see them bring, the elitists, the guys who think they're awesome because they topped dps but couldn't handle the aggro etc
Well just my opinion, what do you guys think about them?


*typo edit*

The "real poll" is here and it's not so so nice to see how much players are retardly blinded with old WOW behaviour seriously. Vote NO guys!

the result is as thin as a hair by now
Yes 409 48.63%
No 432 51.37%

Already did Elloa

Well I guess my first post on the real forum just had to be controversial

Warning! OMG WALL OF TEXT! Warning!

Unless there is a dmg meter included in the game I for one will download one, if you even managed a raid you will know that there are time you will sit there scratch your head and wonder what went wrong, and not the be a jerk or elitist or anything like that at all but certian fights requier certian DPS / Healing / Tank gear, there's nothing more to it, the secounds or if it was thrid boss, Brutalis I belive, in SW, raiding instance in WoW, requierd a raid DPS of about 200k I belive, with 1-2 tanks and 3-4 healers this means the avg DPS will have to have a DPS output of 10k as long as everyone survives the entier fight, this is due to enrage timer and the ammount healing needed etc. These are simpel numbers and there was no way around this, that was simply enough needed. With a damage meter you could simply enough check after 3-4 attempts, alright what is our avg DPS, do we have someone dishing out 15k and someone 5k then that is alright 15+5=2/2=10 but if you have your highest at 12 and then coupel of guys at 7 you may just as well go do something else unless you really really love wiping for 3 hours, time I belive is better spent gearing up those "low-DPSers" and then come back and down the boss.

As mentioned in that link

"With Recount
Jerk: Dude please leave the group your DPS sucks.

Without Recount
Jerk: Dude please leave the group you are wearing a green helm and your gear isn't good enough for this encounter. (You get kicked, even if you were top DPS)"

In my eyes this is just a sign of a bad community and an ass-attitude, how ever he do have one point and that is if you go into and instance, even with a PUG, and you start wiping over and over again at the same boss the easiset thing is always to kick the healer (if you play tank) or kick the tank (if you play healer) and this may at times be the only way to progress, if the healer can't keep your group alive you will never progress in that instance, if the tank can't hold aggro you will wipe. However there is a third option, if one or bouth DPS don't dish out enough damage it may not be the tank or the healers fault, a good balanced boss fight shouldn't be abel to go on for 6hours becous the tank survives due to healing and can keep aggro but you got zero DPS, or the DPS can't avoid AoE on the 5th attempt and keeps dying, don't need a damage meter for that how ever.

In other words, if used correctly a damage meter can acctualy alow you to pin-point the problem and not have to hear or tell someone "Sorry dude you suck fuck off /kick" but insted say "Hey man I'm sorry but you will need a higher HPS / TPS / DPS for this fight, otherwise we will keep wiping."

I also Voted no.

I understand that with the healing in WoW Gemma, we had similiar problems in the guild. However everyone was overhealing becuase they had endless mana pools anyway. In this game healing is way harder and I don't think a healing meter would serve any good here. Bounty hunters and operatives have an endless resource of healing if they are good at managing it while sorcerors will run out of their force and can't do much. Thus a healing meter would be showing really wrong numbers, ofc, people that knew how the mechanic works wouldn't complain but the majority would. There is no way to overheal in this game since you cannot increase your mana pool or resorces. You won't ever be the one with endless mana pools and endles MP5/spirit regen.

Bioware has said there won't be any addons for quite sometime, mostlikely there won't. That's also a reason why we don't have a combat log otherwise parsers would alredy been out.

I belive a lot of people compare Swtor end game with WoW or expect it to be similiar, but It's not. Swtor is a casual and social game. Bioware never really wanted addons and parsers into the game becuase it does ruin communities.

You make some very valid points here, Aurrius. Damagemeters are, in themselves, harmless - simply a tool to pinpoint exactly where a problem lies, and how to deal with it.
That being said, addons like Recount, Gearscore and the likes has often been "misused" by communities in an elitist way; I mean, who hasn't seen "LFM dragon's lair, /pst with gearscore and achiev"? And what's more useful; a player mechanically doing 10k dps, or one doing 7k whilst being friendly, helpful and assisting on ventrilo/teamspeak?

In short, damagemeters are great in a perfect world.

Sidori wrote:You make some very valid points here, Aurrius. Damagemeters are, in themselves, harmless - simply a tool to pinpoint exactly where a problem lies, and how to deal with it.
That being said, addons like Recount, Gearscore and the likes has often been "misused" by communities in an elitist way; I mean, who hasn't seen "LFM dragon's lair, /pst with gearscore and achiev"? And what's more useful; a player mechanically doing 10k dps, or one doing 7k whilst being friendly, helpful and assisting on ventrilo/teamspeak?

In short, damagemeters are great in a perfect world.

Exactly. Damage meters in themselves are harmless but they are way missused by the overall community that I would rather not see them than having everyone using a damage meter as a measure of competence wich is wrong. Not to mention gearscore.

Well to be honest people could just as well say "You need atleast 5 blue and 3 purpel items to join" I don't belive removing addons will change anything besides from bore and piss off the people who love theory crafting and custamizing UI's.

Besides from that they are called Addons for a resson, this is something you may add if you feel like it, I played with about 130 diffrent addons and a fully custimized UI, cast bars, timers, meters, chats etc etc etc in WoW, not being abel to custimizing your UI is a thing that could turn me off in the long run.

I am however pretty sure there will be addons, even if it will take a year or so.

Problem with Addons is the game engine the game is using. Hero Engine seems very limited in its API for allowing UI custimizations. We might get them later on though.

Besides from that they are called Addons for a resson, this is something you may add if you feel like it, I played with about 130 diffrent addons and a fully custimized UI, cast bars, timers, meters, chats etc etc etc in WoW, not being abel to custimizing your UI is a thing that could turn me off in the long run.

Though I really support custimazation addons I really don't support Deadly Boss Modes. That's one of the addons I would never ever want to see in another MMORPG. DBM is not even optional in WOW anymore. Everyone is required to have it if you ever want to raid. Addons that plays the game for you is stupid. I consider DBM one of those simply becuase you never have to pay attention to the boss, you just look on your screan and move when it tells you to.

This is something that puts me off Addons. In time they are not optional anymore but rather mandatory. WoW deisgn their bosses after addons used in raids. By players using damage meters to min/max they have designed the game after addons and that's a bad thing.

When implementing this Bioware needs to be very carefull to not ruin the overall fun of the game. If they do this perfectly; addons won't be a problem at all.

Don't even know what AIP is but it sounds good

I absolutly agree with that, about DBM, if they are able to create dynamic boss fights with some kind of emotion for a heavy hit / AoE I don't mind.

Well I've done the instances up to the Mandalorian flashpoint, and I find the tactics clear enough to not requiere any kind of "Runnnn, little girl ruuuuun" voice over.

I myself have played with and without addon. I was pissed to have to reinstall everything after each patch, so I just ended in Cata with clique for dispelling, DBM (though at the end I even didn't bothered with that one either), and recount to annalyse my healing.

But, if all of this was kinda part of the game in WOW, I really do not wish to see it in Star Wars, cause I believe Start Wars could be a more fresh game, far from elitism and the "I take my hobbie as a second job" spirit. It doesn't mean I'm planing to handle raiding and everything with a slacking attitude, but I do hope to preserve the "fun" and maybe the amateur side that give more exitement to a game.

Got to agree with the fights so far, even if black talon / essel (what ever its called) is a joke when it comes to tactics, hammerstation / athiss was pretty nice without over doing the emots.
The question is later on when those attacks that you need to keep everyone topped of for comes in, if they do, will you have 1 secound to top off 16 people, or what ever an operation is, or will you get an emote 5 secounds before or how will they do it?

Aurrius wrote:Got to agree with the fights so far, even if black talon / essel (what ever its called) is a joke when it comes to tactics, hammerstation / athiss was pretty nice without over doing the emots.
The question is later on when those attacks that you need to keep everyone topped of for comes in, if they do, will you have 1 secound to top off 16 people, or what ever an operation is, or will you get an emote 5 secounds before or how will they do it?

They probably will have an emote and maybe a 3sec casting time or so. I can't see how those phases can be implemented though since the healing is considerably different from other games.

Yeah well it was just an example
Starting to realise I may come off sounding abit negative or "they didn't do it like this in wow do It's wrong" that is not at all the case. I'm just really curious about what the game will be like

Aurrius wrote:Yeah well it was just an example
Starting to realise I may come off sounding abit negative or "they didn't do it like this in wow do It's wrong" that is not at all the case. I'm just really curious about what the game will be like

Just keep in mind that the game is pretty casual and you will understand things better I guess. Though, after a time with the swtor.com/forum is flooded with QQ I belive this will be more like WoW than it alredy is. I've spoken to some general beta testers that cleared the raids alredy and they say It's very different from WoW raiding. So we can atleast expect it to be different so thinking WoW way is not the best. ^^

I'm as curious as you to find out how the raiding will work out!

Well you got to take what you can from the experiance you got but keep an open mind... Fuck me I should play a jedi....

Anyway, the raiding part sounds good, after all there is a reason most people that will play SWTOR probleby played wow but dose not anymore, me included. I don't wana see an other wow even if I will use a lot of the experiance that I got from there coming into swtor.

Aurrius wrote:Well you got to take what you can from the experiance you got but keep an open mind... Fuck me I should play a jedi....

Hehe, yea you should. We dont got any goodie goodies on the mpire side though, but a lightside sith maybe

And I am really frustrated over that thread about these dmg meters thingy.
i dont know how people think really, for me social skills goes waay before topping the dps.
So I really hope this game wont be allowing any mods or something like that. I rather see that they will make their own UI more customizable rather then allowing mods for it. But heey, thats just me.
And yes I have played wow, and yes I did enyoj it. But thats not what i wanna do anymore, if I would like that I would go back to it.
So I have hopes.. thats all a man can have in the end....

Aurrius got a good point though : a jerk will find something to say no matter DPS meter or not. I however thing that WOW created more jerk with several of the feature implemented by the game or the gamers, spoiling the MMO community and mentality as a whole.

What I really want to say to all those people is that we need to give SWTOR its chance to be different. I've much hope that SWTOR will bring back the old shool friendship and freshness of MMO. I want to be exited by the game and share it with other players, including non Whitestar!!!

I believe someone said already in this topic that jerks and elitists will find something to complain about, doesn't matter if there is dps meter or no dps meter. Be it your gear or tactics. Just have to find nice people ingame (when there is no guildies around)