I understand the parsers are improving... beside it'd be nice when they can tell us what type of damage we're doing. It's too simple right now. I'd love to know how my mate's exotic damage did when he tosses out grav wells. The info I'd like would be number of targets hit by grav wells and total damage inflicted by grav wells
Wow, then you really are a bit of a noob. Every parser I am aware of can break damage down by damage type and weapon, and measure damage of specific sci abilities like TBR. The only thing they can't measure are buff effects like APB, Sensor Scan, Disruptor Breach, and the single valid point of the OP, Shield/Engine Power Drain which do contribute slightly to kills...etc.
Wow, then you really are a bit of a noob. Every parser I am aware of can break damage down by damage type and weapon, and measure damage of specific sci abilities like TBR.
try to word that a little bit less ruder and less arrogant?
I don't use parsers because they lag my computer so I ask others and what I got are the information they give me.
To be honest, no I haven't. The numbers i got when I asked for exotic damage didn't give how many targets were hit by them.
Just checking my last CLR parse, I hit 13 targets with grav well during the course of the parse. I can see the damage done to each target, how many grav well ticks each received, DPS per target and overall, etc.
Running your own parses is very useful for improving your game. Just getting the DPS numbers from someone else's parse is less useful.
try to word that a little bit less ruder and less arrogant?
I don't use parsers because they lag my computer so I ask others and what I got are the information they give me.
The only currently accepted parser for the DPS channels does not need to be open during the combat. It simply reads your combat log, and can do so after you close STO. I never denied being arrogant, my observation of the typical human has that effect on me. I am not even sure it is arrogant to point out that you have a very strong opinion on something you know very little about.
try to word that a little bit less ruder and less arrogant?
I don't use parsers because they lag my computer so I ask others and what I got are the information they give me.
False, actually. There is no need to run the parser during a run. All you have to do is enable the game's native logging. You can use the parser to read the resulting log file at your convenience, even without the game running.
False, actually. There is no need to run the parser during a run. All you have to do is enable the game's native logging. You can use the parser to read the resulting log file at your convenience, even without the game running.
I do think its a bit dickish for people to flash their high dps numbers at the end of STFs. Not sure how it is now but DPSers didn't get mad at people for DPS in the Pre DR days. They got mad when someone blew the generators or killed a cube triggering adds. Once they made the optional much less valuable no one even gave a TRIBBLE about blowing the generator.
I do think its a bit dickish for people to flash their high dps numbers at the end of STFs. Not sure how it is now but DPSers didn't get mad at people for DPS in the Pre DR days. They got mad when someone blew the generators or killed a cube triggering adds. Once they made the optional much less valuable no one even gave a TRIBBLE about blowing the generator.
A real DPSer would simply solo the whole STF...
It is, yeah...
DPS shouldn't be a measure of epeen but something to strive to for your build. I'd like to see what a good healer dps would be, a good crowd controller, etc.
DPS shouldn't be a measure of epeen but something to strive to for your build. I'd like to see what a good healer dps would be, a good crowd controller, etc.
the parser is kinda fun but yeah you just have to give it the command to record info and then remember to turn it off. when you logout you can run the little java program and read the log.
its kinda fun to see what did what damage and if you see someone with large numbers you can see what weapons he was using or if it was from particles etc so it gives some fun info. All parses are relative though to the person who is taking the parse so people farther away wont be accurate as those ones beside you.
anyhow i dont take it as gospel for anything but if i am putting together some stuff on a ship its nice to turn it on and see the changes always lets you know if your you know going in the right direction and not .. well getting worse hehe
I do think its a bit dickish for people to flash their high dps numbers at the end of STFs.
Perspective is everything. I usually consider it a courtesy when ppl paste the mini-parse in chat.
And it's probably only experienced as 'dickish' to the person who did really bad. And even *that* is a matter of perspective. In the new 30k channel I was lucky to get in on, I usually rank if not last, then 3rd place or so. Yet I just find it hilarious to see someone did 56k on the same run I was in: keeps me humble, and realizing I really still know sh*t when it comes to playing this game. :P
DPS parsers are useful, but it's important to remember they are only a tool that throws out numbers.
It's up to you to work out how those numbers relate to real performance. It's also up to you to realise that other factors besides having a massive DPS are also key to being successful in STO.
I mean look at these 100K+ DPS parses coming up these days. Sure they are impressive and show how high it's possible to go if you push really hard and plan down to the decimal points. They show what a seriously well coordinated team can pull off.
But that is where some people forget what these parses are showing - they are not your average gameplay, they are in a fairly controlled environment with everything planned out like a film script. There's literally no room for errors in aiming for those numbers.
And so for the vast majority they are meaningless statistics. The overwhelming majority will never do so well.
Also getting 100K it ISA is all fine and dandy, but it's not guarantee you'll get the same in ANRA where to same tactics definitely won't work.
Also the thing that gets me is that some people get obsessed with DPS and forget the other ways to be effective in STO.
- Drain build that totally shuts down the boss NPC, dropping it's shields?
- Crowd control build spitting out massive 10KM grav wells hoovering up everything in site?
- Spike damage de-cloak raider that kill a heavy target in seconds then goes to hide ready for a new attack run.
^ All of those are highly effective builds and playstyles if you can pull them off, they don't need massive DPS numbers, they help the team just as much as trying to kill everything to death in seconds.
to add on what lordsteve is saying there is also a diffrence between damage and effective damage spewing out these big numbers is fine and dandy sept part of that is being used on targets that are being healed for that and more anyways so its wasted damage.
and even in lower damage groups you can do say cure with little trouble if you have a great ccer guarding kang with repulsors etc.
so think about what you got and what it can do.think are you having fun with your ship or are you bored because its the same old same old.
the parser is kinda fun but yeah you just have to give it the command to record info and then remember to turn it off. when you logout you can run the little java program and read the log.
its kinda fun to see what did what damage and if you see someone with large numbers you can see what weapons he was using or if it was from particles etc so it gives some fun info. All parses are relative though to the person who is taking the parse so people farther away wont be accurate as those ones beside you.
anyhow i dont take it as gospel for anything but if i am putting together some stuff on a ship its nice to turn it on and see the changes always lets you know if your you know going in the right direction and not .. well getting worse hehe
Of course I would always run the parser after the group broke up and would see someone with crazy dps and be unable to ask them how they did it because I didnt realize how good they were during the STF.
I think folks would be surprised at just how useful some of the information in CLR could be for them. There's so much there, it could actually end up being overwhelming to some at first. Since it is a Combat Log Reader, it can only read what's written to the log. So issues like those are not a CLR issue, they're just the way the log's written.
Not a DPS person? More of a healer? It's got your heals in there. The amounts of your heals, who you healed, how much healing they did themselves or received from others, can check out their damage resistances, how much they're being attacked, stuff to see if others might be in more need of the healing...could help you with that.
Not a DPS person? Not a healer? More of a tank? It's got where your damage resistances are bouncing around, it's got how many of the attacks you're taking...stuff that could help you with that.
It's not just a simple DPS parser. Sure, there are folks out there that just do that quick copy/paste of the Damage/DPS...but that's not even the beginning of all the information available from CLR. It's an awesome reader.
Whether you're doing group stuff or solo stuff...there's all sorts of stuff there for a player - stuff that although Cryptic is writing it to the log, it's just not letting the player know about any of it.
One of those things, download it - hit up an Argala, Crystalline, or whatever...and just look at all the info it has.
Hell, it's not just tables...it's got charts - it's got pie charts! Wheeeeeeee!
I don't really compete in all that DPS stuff...but I really dig it for the various things I do.
The heal parses can be quite useful to see how effective you are from that end, and the resistance recording can help you fine tune a build for a specific enemy or scenario by highlghting any weaknesses in your ship set-up.
Even just seeing how you compare against teammates is interesting if nothing else. Sometimes a teammate look killer in he game but on the parser they could be the opposite.
But it is still just one of many tools and means of improving or being effective in matches.
If you obsess too much over the numbers you forget the real reason for playing STO - for fun.
I think folks would be surprised at just how useful some of the information in CLR could be for them. There's so much there, it could actually end up being overwhelming to some at first. Since it is a Combat Log Reader, it can only read what's written to the log. So issues like those are not a CLR issue, they're just the way the log's written.
Not a DPS person? More of a healer? It's got your heals in there. The amounts of your heals, who you healed, how much healing they did themselves or received from others, can check out their damage resistances, how much they're being attacked, stuff to see if others might be in more need of the healing...could help you with that.
Not a DPS person? Not a healer? More of a tank? It's got where your damage resistances are bouncing around, it's got how many of the attacks you're taking...stuff that could help you with that.
It's not just a simple DPS parser. Sure, there are folks out there that just do that quick copy/paste of the Damage/DPS...but that's not even the beginning of all the information available from CLR. It's an awesome reader.
Whether you're doing group stuff or solo stuff...there's all sorts of stuff there for a player - stuff that although Cryptic is writing it to the log, it's just not letting the player know about any of it.
One of those things, download it - hit up an Argala, Crystalline, or whatever...and just look at all the info it has.
Hell, it's not just tables...it's got charts - it's got pie charts! Wheeeeeeee!
I don't really compete in all that DPS stuff...but I really dig it for the various things I do.
ohh, this sounds pretty good. I love reading stats!
You get all sorts of fantastic data from parsing. I learned, from a Bug Hunt Elite, that a certain trait actually gave me a significant amount of healing, while another trait didn't. So I can keep the former and replace the latter.
The time limits in place on STFs and PVE content promote higher DPS to succeed.
The problem isn't us, or people wanting higher DPS, the problem is the game matches are setup to exploit and promote higher DPS to win. This game is DPS based, and that is by design.
The only way it can change, is to change the goals of STFs. Removing time limits for optionals. for one. Time limits mean you need a lot of DPS to beat the clock. It's simple logic.
I can't believe someone seriously made a thread complaining about DPS parsers.
It's like blaming high speed crashes on car speedometers.
Not the parsers, but the parsing.
Parser - piece of software
Parsing - whole culture of idiocy surrounding a parser
This program, though reasonably normal at times, seems to have a strong affinity to classes belonging to the Cat 2.0 program. Questerius 2.7 will break down on occasion, resulting in garbage and nonsense messages whenever it occurs. Usually a hard reboot or pulling the plug solves the problem when that happens.
I know it would drive people nuts and people would scream about it being a dumbing down/casual influence but I think it was a good thing in WoW when they baked in threat meters and generally think the all-consuming focus on RPG (including the urge to throw numbers at players) can actually interefere with gameplay.
I always wished power level micro-management had been simpler and a bit less customized (at least as a default) and really think some games would benefit from concealing the actual numbers from players or at least capping off how much they actually tell players.
Ie. if the parser has a cap on what it will report to players, it disincentivizes doing real damage beyond that. A real damage cap may also be necessary if frustrating to some but a reporting cap can obscure some of the data that drives exploiting and can redouble focus on gameplay.
So... If an attack deals more than X damage, it only REPORTS X damage despite doing more. This forces the player to take a step back and actually look at how effective their gameplay is rather than a pure numeric focus. You could engineer this so that parsers inaccurately report all damage as capping at 20k and then instead of focusing on higher damage thresholds, players will instead dial back to focus at speed of completion and efficiency of completion. They may know that they're actually doing more DPS but they won't be able to measure their DPS, which will force them to measure the effectiveness of their DPS on concrete play objectives.
Hiding the information isn't the way forward. There are those who want to do the most damage in the shortest amount of time. The only counter to that are mechanics that aren't DPS related. Say an enemy ship becomes invulnerable after X amount of damage has been applied due to a trait it has. Then DPS only reduces the time to invulnerability.
Another would be enemy's gaining passive damage resistance the faster the damage is dealt so it gives a diminishing returns without hamstringing the player. If you aim for 100K DPS you would certainly do more damage faster, but the TTK wouldn't be blown out of proportion.
Other methods are having potential DPS levels of ships and then having dynamically reacting mobs that have HP/SP and active abilities that give them a chance to counter or at least survive a bit longer.
However all of that requires someone without a CCG mentality to implement it.
The Parsers (especially seeing as the Dev's use it) and the people trying to better their DPS are not to blame. The huge HP/SP sinks added were on a purely mathematical basis (broken admittedly) from Geko's love of spreadsheets. It's not only a bad thing it's a lazy thing to do.
Chris Robert's on SC:
"You don't have to do something again and again and again repetitive that doesn't have much challange, that's just a general good gameplay thing."
OP, of course you are right. I am telling for some time now that parsers should be baned and Cryptic shouldnt even let players use them in the first place. The whole DPS concept its ridiculous and so inaccurate, depending on a multitudine of factors: team you are in, mission and even the parser program settings.
Now of course you will get jumped at for threads like these by every gang or league or what ever those ppl are organized in.
Now I am thinking about parsers been the most wretched curse that came upon STO, but some ppl may see it as next best thing since sliced bread. Each has the right to his/hers own opinion.
So how about a better solution: Cryptic to add an option in the privacy tab menu to "Allow other to see my damage/healling" and same thing with ignored players. This way the DPSers will get their big ego stroke from seeing their own DPS :"Yay, everybody look at mee, did this xxk DPS":eek:, while other ppl will mind their own business.
And I think this option is much needed, since I heard some disturbing things (and outrageous ones I might add) as some DPSers are pugging to collect data on ppl for "statistics":rolleyes:. Now I dont mind Cryptic doing this, of course. But its another thing when a group of individuals are doing that, since that data can be easily manipulated to use their own agenda and so on. And maybe some ppl just dont want to be asociated with that certain group of individuals...
So an option to allow others to see or not your data would be best, similar as the ignore function is...
you better check yourself pal dps has really nothing to do with pvp you come into pvp with your high dps numbers if you want to all that's gonna do is make you over confident ...and dead.....why is it when anything it seems gets bad press on the forums in the end somehow pvpers get the blame?
Just because you dont find your playstyle represented in parsers and because you have some ego problem that prevents you from just knowing how good you did whether it shows up in the parse or not you still want to stop all parsing in this game and ruin it for everyone?
And btw maybe your argument holds compared to a 10-20k "dps guy" but thats just very low. Using the parsers we got up to 160k dps which shows that your approach caps out fast while "dps guys with parsers" will eventually far surpass your styles effectiveness.
An adult player in your position just knowe what hes doing and is not offended by not showing up on parsers as high as he may like.
you better check yourself pal dps has really nothing to do with pvp you come into pvp with your high dps numbers if you want to all that's gonna do is make you over confident ...and dead.....why is it when anything it seems gets bad press on the forums in the end somehow pvpers get the blame?
Apparently you don't know what "=/=" means (hint: it's the same as "!="), because you are actually agreeing with zathri83's statement that DPS parsing isn't for PvP.
DPSers using parsers is completely fine if that's the way some players want to go. If getting top DPS and consistently improving your build to deal even more damage is your thing, there's no reason to not take the most enjoyment and satisfaction out of it as you can.
I'm not a DPS king because I don't want to focus on that - for me, it's not fun. But that doesn't mean I can't appreciate someone else having fun with DPS and parsing, and it is neat from time to time having someone paste a quick-shot of total DPS to see where I'm at.
DPSers are not ruining this game. Players who are unwilling to co-exist with other players' ideas of in-game enjoyment are ruining this game. Just because someone wants to use a parser doesn't mean that your idea of fun is immediately ruined.
The only time using a parser is a problem is when the user gets angry about it. The player who did 100K has no right to scream at another player just because they only did 5K - again, everyone will play the game their own way.
A top-DPSer can't demand that every player maximize their DPS, just as players who don't focus on DPS can't demand that top-DPSers stop their maximizing.
Comments
Wow, then you really are a bit of a noob. Every parser I am aware of can break damage down by damage type and weapon, and measure damage of specific sci abilities like TBR. The only thing they can't measure are buff effects like APB, Sensor Scan, Disruptor Breach, and the single valid point of the OP, Shield/Engine Power Drain which do contribute slightly to kills...etc.
try to word that a little bit less ruder and less arrogant?
I don't use parsers because they lag my computer so I ask others and what I got are the information they give me.
Just checking my last CLR parse, I hit 13 targets with grav well during the course of the parse. I can see the damage done to each target, how many grav well ticks each received, DPS per target and overall, etc.
Running your own parses is very useful for improving your game. Just getting the DPS numbers from someone else's parse is less useful.
The only currently accepted parser for the DPS channels does not need to be open during the combat. It simply reads your combat log, and can do so after you close STO. I never denied being arrogant, my observation of the typical human has that effect on me. I am not even sure it is arrogant to point out that you have a very strong opinion on something you know very little about.
False, actually. There is no need to run the parser during a run. All you have to do is enable the game's native logging. You can use the parser to read the resulting log file at your convenience, even without the game running.
Hmm, this is interesting, I've been lied to!
A real DPSer would simply solo the whole STF...
It is, yeah...
DPS shouldn't be a measure of epeen but something to strive to for your build. I'd like to see what a good healer dps would be, a good crowd controller, etc.
the parser is kinda fun but yeah you just have to give it the command to record info and then remember to turn it off. when you logout you can run the little java program and read the log.
its kinda fun to see what did what damage and if you see someone with large numbers you can see what weapons he was using or if it was from particles etc so it gives some fun info. All parses are relative though to the person who is taking the parse so people farther away wont be accurate as those ones beside you.
anyhow i dont take it as gospel for anything but if i am putting together some stuff on a ship its nice to turn it on and see the changes always lets you know if your you know going in the right direction and not .. well getting worse hehe
Perspective is everything.
And it's probably only experienced as 'dickish' to the person who did really bad. And even *that* is a matter of perspective. In the new 30k channel I was lucky to get in on, I usually rank if not last, then 3rd place or so. Yet I just find it hilarious to see someone did 56k on the same run I was in: keeps me humble, and realizing I really still know sh*t when it comes to playing this game. :P
It's up to you to work out how those numbers relate to real performance. It's also up to you to realise that other factors besides having a massive DPS are also key to being successful in STO.
I mean look at these 100K+ DPS parses coming up these days. Sure they are impressive and show how high it's possible to go if you push really hard and plan down to the decimal points. They show what a seriously well coordinated team can pull off.
But that is where some people forget what these parses are showing - they are not your average gameplay, they are in a fairly controlled environment with everything planned out like a film script. There's literally no room for errors in aiming for those numbers.
And so for the vast majority they are meaningless statistics. The overwhelming majority will never do so well.
Also getting 100K it ISA is all fine and dandy, but it's not guarantee you'll get the same in ANRA where to same tactics definitely won't work.
Also the thing that gets me is that some people get obsessed with DPS and forget the other ways to be effective in STO.
- Drain build that totally shuts down the boss NPC, dropping it's shields?
- Crowd control build spitting out massive 10KM grav wells hoovering up everything in site?
- Spike damage de-cloak raider that kill a heavy target in seconds then goes to hide ready for a new attack run.
^ All of those are highly effective builds and playstyles if you can pull them off, they don't need massive DPS numbers, they help the team just as much as trying to kill everything to death in seconds.
and even in lower damage groups you can do say cure with little trouble if you have a great ccer guarding kang with repulsors etc.
so think about what you got and what it can do.think are you having fun with your ship or are you bored because its the same old same old.
do what makes the game fun for you.
Of course I would always run the parser after the group broke up and would see someone with crazy dps and be unable to ask them how they did it because I didnt realize how good they were during the STF.
Not a DPS person? More of a healer? It's got your heals in there. The amounts of your heals, who you healed, how much healing they did themselves or received from others, can check out their damage resistances, how much they're being attacked, stuff to see if others might be in more need of the healing...could help you with that.
Not a DPS person? Not a healer? More of a tank? It's got where your damage resistances are bouncing around, it's got how many of the attacks you're taking...stuff that could help you with that.
It's not just a simple DPS parser. Sure, there are folks out there that just do that quick copy/paste of the Damage/DPS...but that's not even the beginning of all the information available from CLR. It's an awesome reader.
Whether you're doing group stuff or solo stuff...there's all sorts of stuff there for a player - stuff that although Cryptic is writing it to the log, it's just not letting the player know about any of it.
One of those things, download it - hit up an Argala, Crystalline, or whatever...and just look at all the info it has.
Hell, it's not just tables...it's got charts - it's got pie charts! Wheeeeeeee!
I don't really compete in all that DPS stuff...but I really dig it for the various things I do.
The heal parses can be quite useful to see how effective you are from that end, and the resistance recording can help you fine tune a build for a specific enemy or scenario by highlghting any weaknesses in your ship set-up.
Even just seeing how you compare against teammates is interesting if nothing else. Sometimes a teammate look killer in he game but on the parser they could be the opposite.
But it is still just one of many tools and means of improving or being effective in matches.
If you obsess too much over the numbers you forget the real reason for playing STO - for fun.
ohh, this sounds pretty good. I love reading stats!
If you want to blame anything for the DPS race, blame the design philosophy.
It's like blaming high speed crashes on car speedometers.
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The problem isn't us, or people wanting higher DPS, the problem is the game matches are setup to exploit and promote higher DPS to win. This game is DPS based, and that is by design.
The only way it can change, is to change the goals of STFs. Removing time limits for optionals. for one. Time limits mean you need a lot of DPS to beat the clock. It's simple logic.
So the only fix, is to change it.
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Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/brentjustice
Not the parsers, but the parsing.
Parser - piece of software
Parsing - whole culture of idiocy surrounding a parser
I always wished power level micro-management had been simpler and a bit less customized (at least as a default) and really think some games would benefit from concealing the actual numbers from players or at least capping off how much they actually tell players.
Ie. if the parser has a cap on what it will report to players, it disincentivizes doing real damage beyond that. A real damage cap may also be necessary if frustrating to some but a reporting cap can obscure some of the data that drives exploiting and can redouble focus on gameplay.
So... If an attack deals more than X damage, it only REPORTS X damage despite doing more. This forces the player to take a step back and actually look at how effective their gameplay is rather than a pure numeric focus. You could engineer this so that parsers inaccurately report all damage as capping at 20k and then instead of focusing on higher damage thresholds, players will instead dial back to focus at speed of completion and efficiency of completion. They may know that they're actually doing more DPS but they won't be able to measure their DPS, which will force them to measure the effectiveness of their DPS on concrete play objectives.
Another would be enemy's gaining passive damage resistance the faster the damage is dealt so it gives a diminishing returns without hamstringing the player. If you aim for 100K DPS you would certainly do more damage faster, but the TTK wouldn't be blown out of proportion.
Other methods are having potential DPS levels of ships and then having dynamically reacting mobs that have HP/SP and active abilities that give them a chance to counter or at least survive a bit longer.
However all of that requires someone without a CCG mentality to implement it.
The Parsers (especially seeing as the Dev's use it) and the people trying to better their DPS are not to blame. The huge HP/SP sinks added were on a purely mathematical basis (broken admittedly) from Geko's love of spreadsheets. It's not only a bad thing it's a lazy thing to do.
"You don't have to do something again and again and again repetitive that doesn't have much challange, that's just a general good gameplay thing."
i agree make it so
you better check yourself pal dps has really nothing to do with pvp you come into pvp with your high dps numbers if you want to all that's gonna do is make you over confident ...and dead.....why is it when anything it seems gets bad press on the forums in the end somehow pvpers get the blame?
And btw maybe your argument holds compared to a 10-20k "dps guy" but thats just very low. Using the parsers we got up to 160k dps which shows that your approach caps out fast while "dps guys with parsers" will eventually far surpass your styles effectiveness.
An adult player in your position just knowe what hes doing and is not offended by not showing up on parsers as high as he may like.
Apparently you don't know what "=/=" means (hint: it's the same as "!="), because you are actually agreeing with zathri83's statement that DPS parsing isn't for PvP.
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DPSers using parsers is completely fine if that's the way some players want to go. If getting top DPS and consistently improving your build to deal even more damage is your thing, there's no reason to not take the most enjoyment and satisfaction out of it as you can.
I'm not a DPS king because I don't want to focus on that - for me, it's not fun. But that doesn't mean I can't appreciate someone else having fun with DPS and parsing, and it is neat from time to time having someone paste a quick-shot of total DPS to see where I'm at.
DPSers are not ruining this game. Players who are unwilling to co-exist with other players' ideas of in-game enjoyment are ruining this game. Just because someone wants to use a parser doesn't mean that your idea of fun is immediately ruined.
The only time using a parser is a problem is when the user gets angry about it. The player who did 100K has no right to scream at another player just because they only did 5K - again, everyone will play the game their own way.
A top-DPSer can't demand that every player maximize their DPS, just as players who don't focus on DPS can't demand that top-DPSers stop their maximizing.