Interesting Tank Research

[Izsha]

snip

Yes, it has problems. Its a narrow study looking at a small subset of tanking. It uses a debatable set of assumptions and requirements (like the no unchained among other things). It uses data that is available (fflogs) which has limitations of it's own. It's not a peer reviewed article in a professional journal. But its the best thing we actually have to work with. That's why my title is "interesting research" not "Conclusive proof that X hypothesis is correct".

I'm not here to defend the scientific efficacy of a bit of number crunching about a videogame made by a few people in their spare time. But it is still the only attempt at any tank analysis that goes beyond theory craft and why it should get some visibility, props to the authors, and take a look at what we as the tank community can get out of it. We aren't going to get journal peer reviewed studies. Comparing this to rigorous professional academic standards is really a bit excessive. It was never supposed to be that. Take it for what it is, not for what it isn't.

As for "useful" mitigation on AAs etc, I think this is an excellent example of why we need things like this to remind us to reconsider. We constantly minimize the impact of fluff mitigation in statements like this that which encourage people to ignore fluff damage because regens cover it and only mitigate spikes, yet at the same time bemoan lack of fluff mitigation as a balance point (and point to FF logs damage taken to support the claim). This isn't a peer reviewed study, but it is certainly useful in looking at how we talk about tanking and frankly, we do need to review how were talking about it because there are constant inconsistencies in what we do and don't value. We cant both say that defensive abilities giving healers extra GCDs is a powerful benefit of good tanking, then in the same breath push fluff mitigation to the side, and that is just one example.

[Chrono_Rising]

The study certainly has issues, and I also believe the focus on dark knight/the provocative tone is a weakness of the write up which takes attention away from what was actually found about tanking compositions.

However, I do want to point out a double standard here. If we want to demand peer review quality of work to justify a claim that we don't like, then we also need to require peer review of the statements being made that we do like. This is a process which takes time, as someone who submits work for peer review I would say a short turn around is 6 months to get through the refereeing process, and up to a year to see publication (depending on field). So if we want to hold our judgments of classes for half the life of an expansion before telling the developers and community what we think/critically assess so be it, but realize that applies to all criticism and claims, not just the ones we disagree with. To give an idea of time to produce just that easy statement on total damage taken the time to collect the data, remove party effects, and remove runs using tank stance, having weakness, tank deaths, and other such things which would skew results and then complete an analysis, interpret the results took nearly 60 to 80 hours of people's free time. If you want more nuanced statements about survivability more work and more in-depth work needs to be done, and I expect it will also take a large amount of time.

For a video game hobby, I doubt we are going to find people who will have the time/energy to submit research to a peer review process to justify multiple narrowly defined questions.

On the other hand, if we want to share ideas and improve people's methodology for teasing out these statements with actual justified numbers, then we need to talk and share as a community. Peer review process is going to slow that down and limit the information to a small subset of people for a long time (remember peer review requires the review be carried out by (a) qualified people (in this case requiring some advanced statistics knowledge) and (b) be impartial to the results), and isn't a road we should demand of people. That said, the paper has weaknesses, and one is that it only looks at total damage intake, and not buster/spike damage, which is more important for assessing how well tanks are surviving.

[Canadane]

The constant struggle of players wanting to bring things down to their level vs. SE wanting players themselves to improve.

[Capn_Goggles]

The constant struggle of players wanting to bring things down to their level vs. SE wanting players themselves to improve.

If SE wanted players to improve then they wouldn't design 90% of their meat-and-potatoes content to be so easily accessible or render the rewards for completing savage content utterly irrelevant within a patch.

Furthermore, the response to "DRK has to work harder to get the same results" shouldn't be "git gud", the response should be a call for a better designed job. Machinist, for instance, is much harder to play than Bard, but is largely inferior and far more subject to factors outside of the players' control. Regardless of the fact that it's currently speedkill meta, I think it's safe to say that having to work twice as hard for the same result isn't good design. If DRK was slightly better than the other tanks in exchange for requiring more optimization and skill, then it'd be a fair trade.

[shao32]

The constant struggle of players wanting to bring things down to their level vs. SE wanting players themselves to improve.

You right, lets return WAR to the 4.0 status.

[347SPECTRE]

You right, lets return WAR to the 4.0 status.

Honestly I liked 4.1 just fine.