PLEASE VOTE: Give Us Real Combat Logs

BioWare, the changes to 1.2 have me very excited, but your stance on combat logs, threat meters and DPS meters are incredible skewed. A lot of people at the event seem to be in awe about the presence of developers and are not shooting it straight with you.

Meters and logs are INCREDIBLE important for leading. You state you do not want people to be judged by this statement, but it directly contradicts your whole philosophy on having separate difficulty levels. You created story mode for those who should not be judged by skills or numbers, but the other difficulties as you stated ARE FOR PROGRESSION. These tools are absolutely DETRIMENTAL to progressing at an incredibly competitive level. Not to mention, not only does logs help others judge another player, but it also allows us to deduce what went wrong. How do you expect a raid leader to try to advance his guild synergy and execution without being able to see what everyone is doing.

It is like asking a baseball captain to direct a team to the championship but only allowing him to see himself play ball. Other MMOs have been incredible successful and have these tools. There is absolutely not reason for you to exclude this. Unless you are aiming for casuals to be competing at end game (which is ridiculous), this game will be laughable at any serious competitive level. Any person I have spoken to (verbally) who is again traditional combat logs and meters is extremely arrogant, inexperienced and exaggerates his performance displaying lack of assumption about the genre and classes as a whole (ie thinking his class does most damage).

Please reevaluate your stance on combat logs, meters and addons for that matter.

: Threat meters, dps meters – are they coming? what is bioware’s stance? A: we want reliance on in-game visual cues but that is not we say we won’t give you dps and threat meters. We will have them in but just not in 1.2. We you to have control over what other see about your character – we went for the middle ground – in 1.2 you will be able to use a simple input in the chat system to see what defeated you. we also have a very detailed combat log you can write to your disk – someone enterprising can use it for their guild to see their performance but it will be out of game (3rd party).

This is so obvious, it's painful at this point. I'm just going to have to lay it down for that vocal majority who are against combat logs because you guys are too much.

First off, it's very disappointing to see that in this age of information and analysis, a majority of people are against combat logs which scientifically quantify every action you perform in the game. This is invaluable on so many levels, I shouldn't even have to explain the benefits gained from such knowledge.

But that resistance to change, that negativity, that fear of numbers has to come from somewhere. The vocal majority who are advocating against the implementation of a public combat log are keeping this stance because of the likelihood of a negative personal (or anecdotal) experience directly related to the combat log. Whether it'd be being called out for performing poorly during an encounter or being called out due to dishing out low DPS or crappy heals across the board, that seems to be the only logical conclusion. For that vocal majority, the combat log is an impediment to their progress within the game; since they see a game as a medium simply to be used for entertainment, more complex analyses simply have no place in this game. Okay, valid argument: you want to keep the game simple and do not care about the historical, quantifiable data behind every single one of your encounters. But that, my friends, is called ignorance.

Now, let's investigate the opposite end of the spectrum.

Currently, http://www.sithwarrior.com -- all you combat log haters should head there, you might learn a thing or two about your class -- is the only website with any kind of theorycrafting and given the abysmal amount of data available to players, the folks over at SithWarrior have done an incredible job in figuring out all of the mathematical formulas behind each ability; how threat is generated beyond the vague words of Stephen Reid that "taunting automatically puts you on top of the threat table;" and created a complex and complete Excel sheet which lets you theorycraft potential builds given different sets of gear. This is amazing. You see, some people like to discover thing; they like to analyze and understand the consequences behind their actions whether it'd be in a virtual world or the real world. By vocally rallying against the implementation of a standard, public combat log, you are essentially giving the middle finger to statistical and mathematical concepts which developers use every-fricking-day to keep this game running. The irony doesn't get better than that.

A good example of what the community over at SithWarrior has done was to debunk the general understanding behind the Taunt mechanic. The process was excruciatingly manual and simply laughable given all of the automation available to us: a few good members of this community actively spent hours hitting Champion mobs in Tatooine and manually recorded every single ability and its related damage; every single parry/dodge/resist; and every attack and damage done by the mob. This was not done in an hour. It took days. And they still discovered the mathematical equation behind Taunting. Now imagine if those folks had a combat log, they could provide us with 100% accurate data that is not reliant on manual human entry that is prone to error. So even though they were able to come up with an equation regarding threat, it is still hypothetical, or in essence theoretical, and cannot be proven with 100% certainty. It's speculation but solid speculation.

Anyways, the folks advocating against a combat log fall in the same category of folks who wanted Galileo to be burned alive at the stake for claiming that the earth was round and that it revolved around the sun and not the other way around.

I read it and my point stands.

They don't have logs and they have found other ways to analyze the data and by their own admission 'figure stuff out'. That's how all of these games used to be before people started requiring the Devs to tell them exactly what is happening in painful detail.

Back in the early days of these games (I remember EQ1 specifically) they didn't give you jack for numbers AND the Devs stood firm telling the player community that supplying that information would just turn it into a math game. They eventually broke down and provided that information.. and guess what? They were 100 percent correct on what would happen.

You don't NEED to know everything that is happening to effectively play the game. You aren't a better player because you know it than anyone else that doesn't know it - you are better informed but you aren't really 'playing' the game anymore anyway... you are playing the numbers.

Once again NO!

People interested in masking their performance or not interested in bettering their own play can choose to play with like-minded individuals.

Thanks!

Interestingly enough I'm going to use the combat log that they are providing to improve my performance and also play with like-minded individuals.

You can do it too!