suggestion: consolidate damage spam

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Jumbur, Jun 20, 2021.

  1. Jumbur Improved Familiar

    Currently, when I cast a spell, I get something like this in my combat window:
    I was just thinking, what if we toned down the "verbosity", by omitting the name of the procs/effects, adding the numbers together and presented the number in "kilo damage" or "mega damage", resulting in:

    Or something like that.

    It would make it much more readable by "human eyes". Im not interested in the level of detail we currently have in my "daily fights".
    The current detail is still nice for experimenting or parsing though, so make it optional.


    Would that be possible? :)
    Fenthen likes this.
  2. kizant Augur

    That would slow things down even more and make the log useless.
  3. Jumbur Improved Familiar

    Im not sure it would slow things down? Adding numbers together is faster than drawing text, I think.
    I don't log when I play. I just want a confirmation that my spells hit and a "loose" impression of my damage, that I can actually read "on the fly".

    I understand others have different preferences, which is why I suggested it to be optional. :)

    This suggestion is all happening client-side btw. It might even be possible to make it only affect the chat-windows, while the log-file gets the original verbosity level. There is already a difference between log-content and chat-window-content(ie timestamps)
    Fenthen likes this.
  4. kizant Augur

    Just filter everything but your own spells and use a damage overlay. That's as good as it's going to get. Write your log to ramdisk or something if you have slow drives.
  5. Jumbur Improved Familiar

    That sounds inefficient tbh, and why should thirdparty programs be required to get an easily readable damage-output?
    My everquest is already laggy without having logging on. So I want to avoid logging.

    Im not saying it can't be done with your suggestion, and I would love to be able to filter everything but my own spells, but the "hide/show" option under filtering is missing for most of the spam-text. :(
  6. kizant Augur

    If you use an outside process to parse the log then you're able to offload some of the CPU resources. The EQ client only has 1 main thread to work with besides some graphics contexts that are handled your video drivers which is why drawing isn't really a bottleneck. But if you want to parse the data in the EQ client and create new log lines, etc then you're just increasing work the EQ client has to do.
  7. Jumbur Improved Familiar

    I thought my Idea would result in less log-lines for the client? :confused:
    So it is not possible for the eqclient to read the damage values directly and adding them together, before they are converted to log-lines and written in the the chat window?

    I always assumed that the log-lines was generated by the client based on raw data from the server, and not that the client received the formatted log-lines from the server.
  8. kizant Augur

    Why is that an improvement? As long as the data is simple and requires little processing by the client then it doesn't matter. It'll write almost instantly and get buffered by the hard drive. Complicated filtering or having to buffer/add up total damage per player per time period in memory would create lag in the client.
  9. Cloud the Third Augur

    What you want would require more processing by server because it would have to wait and calculate all the damage from different things together and than send it (or delays if it is done by the client). That would be bad. It is better to send simple things that require no calculation even if it is more calls back to the client it requires to processing and is easy to do. You can just filter these "spam" damage things to a different chat window and if you want an app to then process the logs so you can see what each ability is doing it can do it. If you sum all these things together it requires more work by the app and makes it impossible for an app to use logs to figure out what the most powerful ability is.
  10. Jumbur Improved Familiar

    True, it wasn't a suggestion aimed to optimize the client load. It was a suggestion to make combat less spammy, and more readable for the end-user.
    I think it is annoying that I get 10+ lines of text for each spell I cast. It makes it hard to evaluate, how much damage I actually do to a mob, during combat.
    In the old days when I casted a nuke. I would only get a single damage value in my combat-window, that I could read with a quick glance. I miss that. :)

    I actually imagined it would be done client side, before the log-lines were displayed. All damage-values received with the same timestamp would be added together, and then displayed. I thought it would be computationally inexpensive.

    That way, I would only get 1 line per spell-cast.

    It could also work for incoming damage: if it looks like a mob hits me 4 times for x, y, z and w damage(quadding) or if looks like it hits me a single time for x+y+z+w damage, doesn't change anything for my survival. But I would prefer if, it was displayed as a single line in my combat spam.
  11. Cloud the Third Augur

    I agree maybe this should be fixed. As a melee toon you pretty much are required to have a different window with all your melee damage in because you can't take it in the main window. Even with only the melee stuff in another window it still makes it impossible to read while it is happening. Maybe they should have just increased damage instead of increasing how often you hit something. I think it is probably to late to fix this problem and you may just have to deal with it.
    Jumbur likes this.
  12. Chaosflux Augur

    DPS overlay draws a much clearer more realistic picture for you then the combat spam window ever will. You aren't going to get a good objective feel for how you are performing even if they did change the log like you are asking.
  13. Jumbur Improved Familiar

    I think if there was a way to display the damage output in an easily readable style in-game without the need for thirdparty apps, then there would be a lot more skilled dps-players. You practically need a thirdparty app to know if you are doing good dps on live servers.
    My suspicion is that a lot of casual players aren't using thirdparty apps(me, for example) and thus have no clue if they are good dps or not, until someone comments on it.

    The information(and presentation) needed for improving your playstyle should be available in-game, and not be reliant on thirdparty apps imo(at least we have in-game spell-descriptions now :) ).

    Im not saying my suggestion is the optimal one, but it would be a step in the right direction.
    Relying on mods to make up for poor design, is not how to maintain a game in the longterm imho.
  14. kizant Augur

    It's more cost effective for the development team if they're getting free work from the community is it not?
  15. Windance Augur

    Jumbur,

    You have the power to change how the damage is displayed and filter out the fluff. Have you tried using them ?

    For example you can turn off the these: ( I don't remember what the filter is called )

    Combat Dummy Caza's body is consumed in ethereal flames.
    Combat Dummy Caza is struck by ice.
    Combat Dummy Caza is struck by ice.
    Combat Dummy Caza is struck by magic.

    You can also tell the client to just report the damage as numbers:
    Then set up a window just for your damage and you get scrolling damage as raw numbers.

    1117766
    64684
    62123
    90581
  16. Chaosflux Augur

    The in game readable text has never been a good metric of measurement for how good a person is or is not, we were using parsers (granted not as good as the one Kizant has made for the community) as early as the planes launching just before Kunark came out (so 2000).

    The in game text far to easily can fool you because you will naturally mentally cherry pick the good and make excuses for the bad. Combat happens way to fast to accurately calculate DPS unless you are some kind of Savant by like level 45, let alone if you wanted to keep track of total damage done, the metric that actually matters on anything of any kind of real duration.

    Pretty much every MMO I've played in order to really know what you are getting out of your character you have needed some 3rd party programs to get hard numbers.

    The change you are asking for wouldn't do much unless you are one of the very very few people gifted with perfect recall IRL and wouldn't accomplish your stated goal. There is just too much going on bud.
  17. Jumbur Improved Familiar

    I would LOVE! to do that, please tell me how!!!

    I tried fiddling around with filters but i get this:
    https://imgur.com/a/1LKzg4z
    where I can't select hide. The drop-down menu is just empty...

    and I have never figured out how to change hit-mode for spells, only for melee.

    Im using the standard UI btw.
  18. Windance Augur


    Looks like you are correct. The hits mode is only for melee.

    You can not turn off spell emotes but you can send them to a window you minimize and never look at.

    Since they have several other chat filters it seems like a reasonable request to extend the hits mode to spells, and add additional filters.
    Jumbur likes this.
  19. niente Developer

    Making a simple damage output (total dmg, time, DPS) for everyone after each fight in-game would be cool (if it were also accurate, which, who knows). But not as important as things like fixing raid lag, debuff slot limit, real estate / server crash issues. Maybe someday.

    It would also be cool if spells didn't cast 5 other spells and we didn't have 18+ melee hits per round. These were decisions made a long time ago that got out of hand at this stage of the game and it becomes harder to scale them back. Raid lag is a symptom, the actual problem is there are too many things happening, and as stated in this thread you can't read them or garner anything useful from reading them without using a 3rd party log parser.
    Fenthen, Sissruukk, Riou and 13 others like this.
  20. Jumbur Improved Familiar

    Any chance of that ever being addressed? It sounds like it would solve a LOT of other fundamental problems, if that was fixed.
    Removing recursive proccing didn't change much. But I guess it is a start.
    Fenthen likes this.