Forces and ability

[Valymer]

I hear that question often. Why didn't they give us a combat log? It must be an oversight. Wrong. They did it for a reason, and that reason is easy enough to understand.

The first part of it is simply aesthetics. Modern ARPG's often try to avoid screen clutter. They want more to be happening on screen. The less of your screen that is HUD, the more lively the action looks, and the more you see of the scenery. But they could have given us an option to have a combat log, you might think. This gets to what is probably an equally important reason to them.

They didn't give us a combat log _precisely so people like us wouldn't have a combat log_.

Say it with me now, "Casual ARPG." The people who toy and tinker with this garbage are the first actors in an unavoidable chain of events which runs counter to their design philosophy. First we poke and prod. We try to look for something simple: numeric optimization. How does a person, we ask, fiddle with the numbers such that they are the "best" for a specific, objective goal? DPS is often the biggest one. We do it mostly out of curiosity, not because we have some great determination to be uber.

But then everybody else picks it up. And this includes the endgame grinders. These people are after tokens or gold or whatever carrot-and-stick nonsense is dangled in front of them by the developers to keep them playing after they've done all the y'know, actual content. And first they get bored because they're repeating the same garbage, and then that boredom makes them want speed, so they can get more carrots with less tedium. And when they've optimized themselves, they look for the next source of speed: everybody playing with them. They do what they do in the name of the greater good, they say. But really, they just want more carrots. And in the name of more carrots, they will mock, exclude, and trivialize any player who does not fit precisely into what the theorycrafters say is the "best".

They don't want that. They want you to log on, jump into a map, and have people to play with who simply want to _play_ with you. Our glorious, optimized "utopia" is not a part of that.

Well, I didn't mean an on-screen combat log, like you said that wouldn't fit with the feel of the game. Rather I meant a combat log saved to a simple text file in the PSO2 directory, that could be analyzed/parsed after the fact.

I see what you are saying about the snowball effect theorycrafting can have. But what else do they expect people to do at level 40, which is easily attainable in less than a week? Farm meseta to sink into DooDoo's bottomless pockets?

And that's another thing: given the inordinate amount of difficulty required to affix abilities onto items, it makes theorycrafting that much more important. If they wanted it to be a casual game, why make that whole system so insanely frustrating and time-consuming? Considering that grinding+weapon affixing is essentially the "end-game" that we have at for the moment, it only makes sense to really try to understand exactly what these abilities are doing for our characters before we waste days, weeks or months going through the pains of affixing them to our weapons, don't you think?

For a "casual ARPG" the amount of grinding/farming meseta and items required to attempt even the most basic of upgrades (like getting your rares to surpass 5* items in quality) requires quite the sizeable timesink. I can't imagine that too many true casual players would ever make the effort, honestly. The ridiculous difficulty inherent in that system, combined with the very low drop rate of rares, implies to me that the developers fully expect there to be plenty of hardcore players in the mix.

Anyways, I'll just chalk up not having a combat log to an additional "challenge" bestowed upon us by SEGA, right there alongside DooDoo's House of Horrors. Doesn't make it impossible, just makes you want to punch a hole in your monitor sometimes.

[Valymer]

There's just no challenge in such a system, other than the challenge to not quit from boredom. With raiding, even 12-mans, there is a great deal of skill involved if you are actually trying to beat progressions fights (not just farming stuff you've already beaten). With a 12-man MPA in PSO2, there is practically zero chance for me to die. I just feel like I'm playing Dynasty Warriors in space without all the cool lore.

Well, I will find stuff to do, or take long breaks, I'm not worried about it. I just think that this game has much more potential than it currently makes use of. Everyone plays video games for different reasons, of course. My reason is to have fun, but part of that fun is being challenged at least every once in a while. Every game has boring grinding segments, some more than others, but that's ALL PSO2 is right now. Aside from a boss fight here or there (really there's only two that are even the slightest bit challenging to me), there isn't much to even force me to pay attention.

It's not even so much about the level cap, I was max level a month and a half after WoW came out, too. But WoW had PvP, it had tradeskills, it had side quests, epic mounts, a whole bunch of other shit to do once you maxed out. PSO2 has...DooDoo's shop and costumes. You see what I'm saying?