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  1. #61
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    DBM is the worst ... using sth. like it should be punished with bans ... designing encounters where most of the players (but not all) use an addon that says what exactly when happens and what you have to do is the horror ... a game should be able to be run without addons ... these should be only quality of life features like movable bars, a hud and other things ... but nothing that takes away gaming from you.

  2. #62
    Quote Originally Posted by Trollsbane View Post
    Hi everybody. Recently we've been on a little timeout from talking about addons because it just seems to be a topic where everyone goes nuts and tries to burn eachother alive, instead of talking in constructive ways. It's time to give it another whirl. Fresh, and revamped, this topic will be kept clean and without insult.

    As it stands, we have this quote to go on:


    TOR will not feature addons at launch, but the possibility (and probablity) of bringing them in post launch is still there.

    There are a few features included for your UI, such as moving your chat boxes where ever you'd like them, as well as creating custom chat boxes. You can also move and size your party/raid frames in a few ways, such as making them bigger for healers. You can also expand your action bar setup so you have 2 at the bottom of your screen, and 1 to the left and right side, for a total of 4.

    What's missing? Things such as moving and changing the number of slots on your action bars; moving of your UI pieces (other than raid frames); macros; addons; and probably a few other things I missed.

    So, what are your thoughts? If TOR's designed their game to not really need these things, is it still a burden on you? Is the lack of personal customization and addons at launch something that really rubs you the wrong way? Is the exclusion of macros enough to make your gaming experience less enjoyable?

    Discuss your thoughts, hopes, and worries. Just stay constructive and be nice to eachother.

    *Name calling and slang to belittle a person such as: casuals, noob, idiot, scrub, carebear, etc, will not be tolerated.
    Tbh, the only thing I will truely be missing from not having addon support from the start is UI customization. The last 1½ year I played WoW I used TukUI and I loved it to the core. The ability to be move things around at will and give them the apperence you like is a very big plus in my book. If they do not put in addon support at all, I hope at least they will make it like they did in Rift when it launched (as in being able to move around everything and such).
    Last edited by Belial; 2011-10-29 at 11:58 AM.

  3. #63
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    I'm too used to my WoW UI, but I would be fine playing a new game without AddOns. I do like to customize my UI, but it's not a must.

  4. #64
    Mechagnome deathtakes's Avatar
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    @raeli

    In an earlier post you stated that 'the idea that mods such as dbm make the game easier is a flawed one'. You also said that before dbm and the like encounters were bland and now they are interesting because developers know what the add on is capable of so now they can add more challenging events to encounters. I'm paraphrasing of course. But here are my thoughs on it.

    I am of the belief that add ons like dbm DO make encounters easier. Much easier. In fact if you dont have it you would at a serious disadvantage raiding if you didn't have it, hence why its necessary for most guilds. Also, vanilla encounters were 'bland' because that was almost a decade ago. Wow has come a LONG way since then. There is nothing stopping the devs from making great, fun, challenging encounters without needing dbm. Simple visual and audio cues could warn players of impending doom and their own visual awareness should be more than enough to warn them that they may be standing in or around something that could potentially be disastrous. Games have been doing this for decades without any text telling you what do or timer letting you know what's coming. Stuff like this ruins the immersion of the game and simply becomes a crutch. Whatever happened to trying the encounter, dying, learning from it, and trying again.

    I would also like to add that I have no issue with simple UI mods and macros. Additionally i would be ok with mods that affect the game as long as they are moderated by Bioware. I'm not an add on hater it just bothers me that people bitch about content difficulty when they've done limited hardmode content if any, yet they have dozens of mods to help with those encounters and still can't do it. I'm not accusing raeli of this, just stating that this has sort of become a trend lately.

  5. #65
    I think you missed my point, I'm not the best at explaining myself, I rant and rant, and things still are no clearer.

    I was trying to say that the argument:
    "I don't want addons because then there will be boss mods, and they make the game easy." is flawed. It is flawed because Boss Mods can be limited by Bioware so that they aren't anywhere near as helpful as they are in WoW. I wasn't so much trying to suggest that Boss Mods do or do not make the game easy, that argument just leads to nonsense, and so I tend to avoid discussing it, I was using examples to say how WoW's encounters have evolved in complexity to the point where they actually are quite helpful to have, where as in Vanilla, a boss mod or not, it didn't matter anywhere near as much, simply because the encounters were simpler. In Hindsight, that's not really relavent to my point and is just a random observation related to encounters and boss mods, but doesn't really serve any purpose in explaining my reasoning on why the statement is flawed.

    So to reiterate. That argument is flawed because Boss Mods don't have to be something that you see as a detriment to the game - if Boss Mods are something you don't want, then that's fine, but you should treat them seperately to other addons because they are different, and all addon functionality can be limited by Bioware, so if everyone is saying "I want addons, I don't want Boss Mods though", then they can do something about it, but if everyone's just going "No, I don't want addons because Boss Mods make it easy mode" then it's probably not going to end up so great, and often it just ends up in silly arguments. I hope you follow, cause I'm not sure I can explain it any better, my ultimate goal is this:

    I want addons. I want to customise my UI. I don't care much for Damage Meters - I use it for sure, occasionally to double check things (not just DPS), and I'm not really bothered either way about Boss Mods, have them or don't, I couldn't care, but what I do care for is customising the look and feel of the interface. Removing the portraits from the unit frames, hiding the action bars entirely, changing the cyan to something else etc. These are what I care about, and all I care about is pointing out to the people that only dislike addons because of Boss Mods, that, hey, Boss Mods can be limited, so no need to hate on all addons, just hate on the actual problem you have, if you get me.

  6. #66
    Quote Originally Posted by Odysseus83 View Post
    DBM is the worst ... using sth. like it should be punished with bans ... designing encounters where most of the players (but not all) use an addon that says what exactly when happens and what you have to do is the horror ... a game should be able to be run without addons ... these should be only quality of life features like movable bars, a hud and other things ... but nothing that takes away gaming from you.
    The DBM whining makes no sense to me. All it does is give visible timer for when something is about to happen, if an addon like that didn't exist the raid leaders of any half decent raiding guild would be playing with stopwatch in their hand calling out different boss abilities manually, the exact same thing DBM is doing now automatically. It is nothing but a quality of life addon.

    If Blizzard wanted to stop addons like it all they need to is randomize the boss ability CD timers, the thing is though they won't do that because majority of the player base would hate it if all boss abilities were subject to RNG. Just look at the most RNG boss current tier Rhyolith, funnily enough its almost the most hated one.

  7. #67
    Quote Originally Posted by Cakka View Post
    If Blizzard wanted to stop addons like it all they need to is randomize the boss ability CD timers, the thing is though they won't do that because majority of the player base would hate it if all boss abilities were subject to RNG. Just look at the most RNG boss current tier Rhyolith, funnily enough its almost the most hated one.
    Even simpler. As I keep saying.

    Boss Mods read events. You don't send the relavent data. The Boss Mod is rendered useless. Of course, to entirely render Boss Mods useless you would have to obscure perhaps too much data, but you can for sure make them far less useful than they are in WoW. Certain things that would likely still probably get announced would be things like the Countdown on Baleroc, since you get a debuff and are linked with someone else, you can't really not send any parsable data there, but other things, cooldown based things or things that occur on a certain time after another event, those for sure you could.


    It's not like addons can just do whatever they want and pull data from thin air - it has to be provided in some form or another, and thus, it can be limited.

  8. #68
    In regards to addons in general:

    I feel the same way about addons as I do about macros--they should exist for non-combat convenience purposes (and very few combat-convenience purposes). I see no reason to exclude Galactic Trade Network addons or artwork addons or full custom minimalist UIs as long as they afford you no direct combat advantage (a minimalist UI affords you more visibility which may count as an advantage, but I'm speaking of automation).

    As for things like Recount, I fully support it. A lot of people think Recount is terrible but in all honesty MMOs are games in which end-game PvE expects you to know and understand how to play your character effectively before you can understand the encounter. End-game PvE is (for the most part) group oriented. One must be an effective player or their group suffers and we need things like Recount in order to monitor performance for the good of the group. I'm sorry but the group's enjoyment takes precedent over your desire to not be told your DPS or HPS or TPS is bad.

    As for things like boss mods, it's a little more difficult. In my honest opinion they were necessary in WoW. The first most basic boss mods came out during MC and Blizzard had no internal system to offer that same basic service. As the boss mods got more complex and functional Blizzard decided that rather than ban boss mods they would simply design encounters with such mods in mind (mechanics that simple alerts don't quite matter). This is a major point of contention--should encounters be made complex and extremely challenging based around alert systems or should encounters be simple and basic enough to not need alert systems to do feasibly? Make no mistake--Heroic Ragnaros cannot be completed without alert addons. That encounter would not be possible to complete without some kind of boss mod. If we get rid of boss mods we also lose the ability to make encounters of that level of complexity. Is that a worthy trade-off?
    Last edited by Tore; 2011-10-29 at 06:36 PM.

  9. #69
    Deleted
    Boss mods stopped being simple stop watches with timerbars years ago. Today you have range finders telling you're too close, you have warning sounds tellung you're in something bad -> move out, you have arrows showing the direction ... todays boss mods slap you in the face telling you what the boss is doing. This is necessary because the bosses became really complex espeacially in heroic mode. Blizzard made them that hard because bossfights were being triviallised years ago by the first boss mods ... thus staring a spiral of bossfights getting more confusing and boss mods becoming better to keep up with the new bossdesign of Blizzard. If boss mods werent implementet by the community in the first place it would have allowed Blizzard an easyer way to design bosses. I'm sure everyone here will be saying "yeah, bosses are easy als hell you noob" ... but try playing them without bossmods in heroic mode ... you will be suprised.

    €: I apologize for using the word boss fifteen times ... i'm really sorry

    €2: Torethyr was faster and said the same thing a lot more eloquently than me ... forgive me ... am no native speaker
    Last edited by mmoc250e078684; 2011-10-29 at 06:39 PM.

  10. #70
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    My biggest gripe with SWToR atm is the default UI it's not very user friendly. So I would be looking for a button bar replacement and an updated UI along the lines of xperl or Pit Bull but with a more Star Warsy feel.

  11. #71
    No Addons that assist you in combat. (like healbot type addons) interface yes,a peen meter yes (even though I hate it)

    Yes to macros so long as you don't have the option to bind everything onto 1 key like Rift, a WoWish type macro system would be great.

  12. #72
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    I think the general consensus is that DBM and boss mods like it are bad, and Recount and aesthetic UI customization options are good. I agree completely.

    Boss mods went from "hey cool, a timer for this ability" in vanilla, to "YOU DON'T HAVE DBM? WTF!?!?" in Cataclysm. It's just a necessity with how complicated some bosses are now... which is odd, since bosses have become this complicated mostly BECAUSE of DBM. It's hard to challenge people with simple mechanics when they know exactly when it's going to happen.

    As for Recount... it's a great tool. If you don't view it as that, then you either haven't raided at the cutting edge or you've been burned by someone misusing it in lower-end content. Yes, idiots are going to use it incorrectly just as often as hardcore players are going to use it correctly. That's just how things work.

  13. #73
    Quote Originally Posted by Raeli View Post
    Even simpler. As I keep saying.

    Boss Mods read events. You don't send the relavent data. The Boss Mod is rendered useless. Of course, to entirely render Boss Mods useless you would have to obscure perhaps too much data, but you can for sure make them far less useful than they are in WoW. Certain things that would likely still probably get announced would be things like the Countdown on Baleroc, since you get a debuff and are linked with someone else, you can't really not send any parsable data there, but other things, cooldown based things or things that occur on a certain time after another event, those for sure you could.


    It's not like addons can just do whatever they want and pull data from thin air - it has to be provided in some form or another, and thus, it can be limited.
    As I just said as long as events are not randomized you can time them, and as I also said I kinda doubt people want boss with randomized ability timers. I'd rather have an addon do that than having to have something silly like stopwatch to time boss abilities with. What removing addon like DBM would do is basically nothing to the hardcore guilds, they would just do what DBM does now manually, but it would make it harder for more casual guilds.
    Last edited by Cakka; 2011-10-29 at 07:43 PM.

  14. #74
    Mechagnome deathtakes's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Raeli View Post
    I think you missed my point, I'm not the best at explaining myself, I rant and rant, and things still are no clearer.

    I was trying to say that the argument:
    "I don't want addons because then there will be boss mods, and they make the game easy." is flawed. It is flawed because Boss Mods can be limited by Bioware so that they aren't anywhere near as helpful as they are in WoW. I wasn't so much trying to suggest that Boss Mods do or do not make the game easy, that argument just leads to nonsense, and so I tend to avoid discussing it, I was using examples to say how WoW's encounters have evolved in complexity to the point where they actually are quite helpful to have, where as in Vanilla, a boss mod or not, it didn't matter anywhere near as much, simply because the encounters were simpler. In Hindsight, that's not really relavent to my point and is just a random observation related to encounters and boss mods, but doesn't really serve any purpose in explaining my reasoning on why the statement is flawed.

    So to reiterate. That argument is flawed because Boss Mods don't have to be something that you see as a detriment to the game - if Boss Mods are something you don't want, then that's fine, but you should treat them seperately to other addons because they are different, and all addon functionality can be limited by Bioware, so if everyone is saying "I want addons, I don't want Boss Mods though", then they can do something about it, but if everyone's just going "No, I don't want addons because Boss Mods make it easy mode" then it's probably not going to end up so great, and often it just ends up in silly arguments. I hope you follow, cause I'm not sure I can explain it any better, my ultimate goal is this:

    I want addons. I want to customise my UI. I don't care much for Damage Meters - I use it for sure, occasionally to double check things (not just DPS), and I'm not really bothered either way about Boss Mods, have them or don't, I couldn't care, but what I do care for is customising the look and feel of the interface. Removing the portraits from the unit frames, hiding the action bars entirely, changing the cyan to something else etc. These are what I care about, and all I care about is pointing out to the people that only dislike addons because of Boss Mods, that, hey, Boss Mods can be limited, so no need to hate on all addons, just hate on the actual problem you have, if you get me.
    Why I see what your saying. You don't want a blanket ban on mods just because some people dislike certain ones, like dbm for example. In that case I agree. UI mods that allow you to group bags, move your map and bars, resizing of portraits etc. should always be aloud. They don't offer any advantage over any other player, just simple customization to ones personal preference. 10-4 good buddy.

  15. #75
    Quote Originally Posted by Odysseus83 View Post
    Boss mods stopped being simple stop watches with timerbars years ago. Today you have range finders telling you're too close, you have warning sounds tellung you're in something bad -> move out, you have arrows showing the direction ... todays boss mods slap you in the face telling you what the boss is doing. This is necessary because the bosses became really complex espeacially in heroic mode. Blizzard made them that hard because bossfights were being triviallised years ago by the first boss mods ... thus staring a spiral of bossfights getting more confusing and boss mods becoming better to keep up with the new bossdesign of Blizzard. If boss mods werent implementet by the community in the first place it would have allowed Blizzard an easyer way to design bosses. I'm sure everyone here will be saying "yeah, bosses are easy als hell you noob" ... but try playing them without bossmods in heroic mode ... you will be suprised.
    I agree with you that boss mods have allowed Blizzard to make more complicated bosses, but thats a GOOD thing! I don't want to be fighting my UI, I want to be actually fighting complicated bosses. Just give us as much information as possible, and make the fight difficult because you need to great at tanking, healing or DPSing, not because your UI sucks.

  16. #76
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by Cakka View Post
    I agree with you that boss mods have allowed Blizzard to make more complicated bosses, but thats a GOOD thing! I don't want to be fighting my UI, I want to be actually fighting complicated bosses. Just give us as much information as possible, and make the fight difficult because you need to great at tanking, healing or DPSing, not because your UI sucks.
    But all this lead to a point where you can't beat bosses with WoW alone ... you need help from a 3rd party and thats a huge flaw in boss designs ... at least from my pov.

    € typo
    Last edited by mmoc250e078684; 2011-10-29 at 09:57 PM.

  17. #77
    Quote Originally Posted by Odysseus83 View Post
    But all this lead to a point where you can't beat bosses with WoW alone ... you need help from a 3rd party and thats a huge flaw in boss designs ... at least from my pov.

    € typo
    If the developer can not include a boss alert system as good and useful as a 3rd party is able to, then I'm okay with DBM-type mods becoming "mandatory." I think limiting complexity is worse than being pigeonholed into boring simple encounters.

    Now, the ideal situation would be if the developer could make a great in-game alert system that gave us everything we needed for all ultra-complex encounters. Unfortunately the chances of this happening are very very very very very low.

  18. #78
    Scarab Lord Greevir's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Odysseus83 View Post
    But all this lead to a point where you can't beat bosses with WoW alone ... you need help from a 3rd party and thats a huge flaw in boss designs ... at least from my pov.

    € typo
    People kill bosses all the time without Boss mods. Check out the PTR.

  19. #79
    Scarab Lord Trollsbane's Avatar
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    That's true.

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  20. #80
    Quote Originally Posted by Greevir View Post
    People kill bosses all the time without Boss mods. Check out the PTR.
    Those are usually normal-mode. The kinds of guilds that go, en-masse, to the PTR are generally the type that are able to stomp most normal-mode encounters in a game.

    I think clear in-game cues would be enough, IF the game is designed well for no DBM-type mods. If they want to design encounters that are SO difficult and complex that things like DMB are necessary (but not include in-game cues), then they should allow it. One thing to remember about DMB is this: It might tell you that a boss is about to shoot fire at your face, but it can't make you skilled enough to successfully dodge said fire, while still doing your job.
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