Personally, theorycrafting and optimizing your character have been core parts of WOW since the beginning. It would fundamentally change the whole game and community to remove them.
Besides, can you imagine what group chats would look like after 2 or 3 wipes? Everyone would be blaming everyone for not pulling their weight. And PVP? Everyone would be claiming that their underpowered and everyone else is OP. And no one would be able to prove or know anything for certain.
I’ve never used one, and I play the game just fine.
A lot more chill. I’ve played games that had no damage meters. People didn’t stress as much or act as nasty to each other.
I think you misunderstand my point. The game didn’t change just because meters were introduced. Builds that could complete content before meters could still complete content after meters. Builds that were suboptimal before meters were still suboptimal after meters. The only thing meters change is how much information is available to the players.
Regardless of how much other players whine and moan about you for taking a suboptimal build there are two things that are absolutely true:
And here’s the other thing. The people who play games are very very smart and very very determined. It comes from having such a large sample size of competitive nerds. Even without meters the sheer communication power of the internet ensures that those 12 builds would be settled on eventually. People would just find other ways to measure them. The only thing meters did it expedite the process. Bad builds were always bad. If your defense is that people should be allowed to live in the ignorance that their build is bad, or not even that, that the entire community should be forced to live in that ignorance so a player never has to know that their build is suboptimal, that’s an argument I can’t get behind.
But what I don’t understand is why it has to matter. If you can still complete content why do you care if you have the best build or not? If other people “helpfully” (huge air quotes there because I hate such people as much as you) inform you that you’re not playing optimally why can’t you just mute them and move on? They don’t pay your sub don’t let them dictate to you how to have fun. Just like we shouldn’t dictate to people who like to measure and perfect their performance how they can have fun.
Yea games are supposed to be fun. And for me carrying some one is not fun.
What would the state of the game be if there were no numbers?
we had that at the beginning actually… lots of bads made it hard to kill many mobs including Vael.then meters came out and we found the bads…bads have been crying about the meters since then.
I do think people who brag about damage in BGs are ridiculous and generally unintelligent. But if meters were taken away they’d find something else to brag about like HKs.
Do not conflate a lack of addons with an absence of data. Players, typically, are expected to know what their rotation should be. Now, you might say, “but Atalanta how do I know I’m doing my rotation correctly if I don’t have an addon to tell me what my DPS is!?” but I’d counter that with “success or failure”.
See Final Fantasy handles things differently, but I wouldn’t say it’s worse (or necessarily better per se) just because. Someone has to improve for that boss to go down. Honestly a lot of the time just shoring up your foot work and doing mechanics is a completely valid way to do that.
I’d even argue, to be completely fair, that Final Fantasy encourages you to actually learn to play the encounter more than WoW does. Final Fantasy doesn’t allow you to blame DPS; it requires you to learn the encounters mechanics. When you learn them, and you’re still failing, then everyone needs to buckle down. That means studying how you’re supposed to play, figuring out what you’re doing wrong, and then trying new things.
It might seem completely arcane and impossible because you can’t see your actual DPS, but… is that really the only way to learn? Is the only way to adjust things, to improve them, by knowing precisely what the end result is at all times? I don’t think so.
You don’t know that you’re making a better cake than last time until you’ve cooked the cake. You can read every guide on the planet but without that experience you… well you don’t know. There’s no DPS meter telling you how well you’re doing each part. You’re just going in half blind and trusting that you can figure it out as you go.
Learning can occur without knowing how well you’re doing each step. In fact that’s how most of us learn most things. I wasn’t certain that I was whipping the eggs correctly when I learned to make [recipe]. I could look at pictures, and view videos, but until I’d done it a few times I couldn’t really be sure that my method was correct. Even once I got that part down there were other parts of the baking that I could improve; and improve I did over time. Now I can whip up a cake without a recipe based on how it looks and what ingredients I used.
You’re placing too much emphasis on this. Final Fantasies system relies on the group as a whole progressing.
WoW isn’t really one or the other; it could be either or but they allow us to use Addons and we, as a community, have forced it to be an every-man-for-himself situation.
If WoW didn’t allow us to use DPS addons, do you know what would happen? We’d still be downing bosses. We’d still be beating up new difficulties, and we’d still be progressing. We’d still be getting better at what we do.
How is that possible in the absence of data? Well… it’s not, but you’re forgetting the most important piece of data of all: progress. If we failed a lot, we’d have to go read up on our class/spec. Maybe we don’t have DPS addons, but perhaps we have loggers that show us the spread of our ability usage and we can discern that we’re not using certain abilities often enough or we’re missing windows too often.
There’s so much data to be had that doesn’t boil down to “what’s my DPS”. WoW, in a lot of ways, has become very isolationist and elitist precisely because of how it’s end game plays. It’s not about the group progressing, it’s about whether or not the individuals are doing their job; a similar idea in theory but it overly focuses on the one guy who’s doing 10% less DPS than he should and fails to account for the 4 people who are also not doing things they should be have good DPS.
I doubt this, to be honest. It would seem so at first, because we’d all be a little more blind, but I don’t think long-term it would matter much in the end.
Final Fantasy has damage checks; if you’re not doing enough damage you simply can’t beat the boss by sheer math. They manage it without that data being shareable.
What happens when you’ve learned the mechanics, and you know that you have learned them, but you’re still not winning? Well… you now have data. Cumulatively the group is not playing effectively enough. This encourages, no, demands, that you have to go read your guides and explore your options.
The developers have talked at length about the impact of addons on raids. In fact they’ve neutered things like DBM in the past. While that’s not a damage meter it is, however, a “tool” to do better. They’ve actively said that sometimes they end up designing raids with addons in mind, and they don’t love that.
In WoW you have addons that can tell you when to move, what to do, and what to avoid. You have addons that tell you if you’re not doing the DPS you should. You have addons for everything.
Let’s not pretend like we’ve not been coddled to the point that we barely want to work together. We’re entitled. If I’m doing everything right and we’re failing then you’re all expendable. I’ll just go find a new group, improving as a group be danged.
Except that leads us to the elitist social setting we have now; the group is irrelevant the moment something goes wrong.
I kill Onyxia by myself every week. These priests are not hitting hard enough.
There was a time when I left WoW to try another MMO.
I tried SWTOR when it was released. I didnt see a Damage Meter there. I kept asking people in there, how would I know if I am doing good or bad on the fights? My hint was if I stole aggro as DPS, it means I am doing good damage.
Anyway, I didnt like SWTOR. Though I saw SWTOR really tried to compete against WoW. It’s not good enough. I went back to WoW… and never left again for other MMOs.
This is very true, many more mechanics rely upon having strong DPS or else you pay for it later
It doesn’t matter whether it is business, politics, engineering, relationships, sport or playing an MMO, less information leads to less correct thinking. People are jackasses regardless but better they be well informed jackasses than jackasses fumbling in the dark.
Removal of clarity doesn’t reduce stress, it increases it due to lack of transparency and trust. Humans deal extremely poorly with uncertainty.
The beginning days of the game a few dozen damage was the difference between first and last. Overhealing was the only thing of concern. Now it’s just too unbalanced to be saved even if meters arent used.
It’d be like getting rid of grades in school, PRs, taste buds, or taught nipples. Feedback is important.
Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only sky
Imagine all the people living for today
Ah
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace
You
Imagine there’s no religion. It isn’t hard to do.
But they are right, if…
We need damage meters because of damage meters.
The more addons that are introduced the more we rely on addons since Blizzard are designing fights so complex now that if we did not have addons no one would beat the boss unless you brute forced it, and to even get to that point it would take you forever since you would be taking longer in keys and normal raids to gear up to the hard fights.
If we were to remove damage meters we would need to ban every addon in the game and go back to basic boss mechanics.
The glory days of afking every raid and still getting gear so the people back in ironforge had no clue how bad I actually sucked.
RIP