I'm confused about Yoshi-P's thoughts on dps-check programs.

It's very interesting to see the discussion about those who are against any form of parsers that track performance of players. Sure it is a game and all but whenever there are numbers involved in a game people are going to want the most out of themselves and their team members. It's clear when you go through these threads who has and who hasn't bothered to progress through the high end endgame content in MMOs in a timely manor.
Parsers/DPS Meters are amazing tools for improvement and knowing who is doing what to quickly assess the situation and what improvements are being made, you can also clearly see so much with such a wonderful tool.

But the fact that a vocal minority of people react negatively when they're told to improve their DPS/HPS/use a defensive CD because of their own self entitlement over paying $XX.XX per month to play a game based around numbers with others who want people to do the best numbers they can.

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Originally Posted by Chokee

yeah its still there its called proving grounds. and to enter heroic dungeons (current dungeons) you need at least silver medal for the role you're queuing for.

it won't happen here. wish it would, but look around you.

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The proving grounds in WoW haven't really set any kind of standard. Players running heroics still fail a good chunk of the time and the proving grounds don't prepare players for anything beyond heroic dungeons. (which they only roughly do at that.)

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Originally Posted by Pavise

But the fact that a vocal minority of people react negatively when they're told to improve their DPS/HPS/use a defensive CD because of their own self entitlement over paying $XX.XX per month to play a game based around numbers with others who want people to do the best numbers they can.

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The minority of the player base (in which those vocal in support of parsers belong to as well) that are involved in arguments over parsers don't really speak for the non-vocal majority of players that simply play the game.

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Originally Posted by SDaemon

The proving grounds in WoW haven't really set any kind of standard. Players running heroics still fail a good chunk of the time and the proving grounds don't prepare players for anything beyond heroic dungeons. (which they only roughly do at that.)

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try queuing for normal dungeons now, where the ones who fail the proving grounds are playing. they're like the fire 3 spam blm players of wow. imagine if they play heroics.

the proving grounds are just there to gate the people who cant tell which is their head and which is their ass. they did set a standard. a very low one. but i think its enough.

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Originally Posted by Chokee

try queuing for normal dungeons now, where the ones who fail the proving grounds are playing. they're like the fire 3 blm players of wow.

the proving grounds are just there to gate the people who cant tell which is their head and which is their ass.

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Try queuing for heroic dungeons now, you will barely notice a difference. Proving grounds has pretty much failed at weeding out people who cause massive headaches in Dungeon Finder.

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Originally Posted by maTyaR

At that point, SE would be siding with the hardcore players and suppressing the casual playersl

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it has nothing to do with "hardcore" or "casual" players at all, imo. It has to do with people going into the mob mentality if someone hits for 10 dps less than the "average" that's decided upon by the playerbase. There's nothing "hardcore" about a shitty attitude.

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Originally Posted by SDaemon

Try queuing for heroic dungeons now, you will barely notice a difference. Proving grounds has pretty much failed at weeding out people who cause massive headaches in Dungeon Finder.

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i am currently playing wow (like literally). i keep bouncing between heroics and normals and i'm seeing a difference. sadly proving grounds cant weed out people for negative attitudes, which i'm guessing a big part of massive headaches in dungeon finder as you said (like they know how to dodge, but refuse to because they know healers can just heal them). but as we are talking about performance in this thread, i just felt like the proving grounds can at least help in this matter.

anyway we're getting offtopic (towards wow) so im stopping here.

I am not against parsers and would like to make a comment about them being needed. Some of you may be able to relate to this. Most of us can say we have spent a fair amount of time playing MMO's and for whatever reason we enjoy them. I have used parsing tools in other games and still in others I never had one. When I first started playing MMO's in 1999 there were no such things as add ons. There wasn't macros to maximize your dps and such. Most of the raids I did involved at least 4-6 hours of keyboard forehead smashing wipe fest until we got it right.

The shear amount of time I wasted in my youth on MMO's is actually insane. We used to have text windows (combat logs) that you would maximize to a certain size so you could see all of the scrolling text. Now to give you an idea the raids I used to do involved 72 other people with people on reserves outside of the raid zone who would sometimes be filtered in throughout the raid. I was a dps, and one of my roles was to have a stop watch that would count us down for any bosses that had an enrage timer. Now we didn't have anything telling us when that enrage timer was when we first did a raid (especially if it was our first time) It was my job to make note of that enrage timer the first time in and any time after that I would have to start the stop watch and prepare people with time call outs during the fight (the so called dps check). I was also responsible for finding the patterns in the raid bosses attacks, and what they were called and what kind of damage they did.

All of this information was then displayed for the entire raid force after we had completed our calculations which I might add may have not come to light for 12-24 hours of raiding any particular fight. Things weren't always clear at first so we had to adapt and overcome. In essence this began to give us bench marks that we could use to measure what our dps was and what we had to do in order to beat enrage timers. You can literally go back to the time stamped combat logs and calculate what your standard dps should be based on previous wins or losses even. This was all then calculated to give what we call a constant. Or as you folks call it a dps check. The point is everybody goes round and round about this topic and the arguments get crazy and people blindly respond with idle threats or slander.

When we didn't have parsing tools back then people still manage to troll, because everybody new what the numbers were. We new based on data how many crits we were looking for, we knew by the damage we were putting out if rotations were optimal or not because the numbers didn't lie when you went back and looked at the logs. The only difference today is there is a tool to do everything for you that I just described. Half the fun in a raid was not even knowing what to expect, and then somehow winning it. We would sit there for hours afterwards pouring over the data and just doing true theory crafting as it were. We didn't think of it as a job, we didn't think it was the end of the world if we couldn't meet those benchmarks that we recorded. instead we went back into those raid zones and beat our faces against the wall until we won.

The difference with gaming today is we are all adults now, and can't afford to put that kind of effort into something like a game, but we want to hold onto that first win we had years ago so we keep playing searching and looking for that feeling we all had the first time we ever beat a raid. If a dps tool can help why not use it. You don't need some tool to be a toxic person and as somebody already said "what are people afraid of" Chances are a dps tool can help your raid force be very efficient and successful, so you don't have to bash your face against the wall for 10 hours at a time. I mean look how crazy people get in dungeons if you are new, or you wipe or something. Everybody expects perfection in a game, and I don't understand it.

TL:DR
DPS tools are useful, and toxic people will be here with or without one. So why not use them.

Sorry for the wall I fixed it a little. Its late I was just in thought.

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Originally Posted by Chokee

i am currently playing wow (like literally). i keep bouncing between heroics and normals and i'm seeing a difference.

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Must be lucky. Haven't noticed any significant difference thanks to Proving Grounds since WoD dropped. Even in MoP Proving Grounds didn't really help the player-base.

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Originally Posted by Donarudo

snip

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Saw bits and peaces that I would like to respond to properly, but honestly the massive wall of text is difficult to read.

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Originally Posted by Donarudo

words

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Paragraphs are important. I can't read anything you wrote.

In regards to parsers, well... I think it should be a personal parse and not something everyone can readily see because from my experience with serious end game raiding, players are more serious about their own performance anyways so if you gotta yell at the DPS for being too crappy they will at least know it was them. I've experienced DPS being bad myself while I am on monk and was it me? I don't know if it was me. I had to have a friend parse me so I could figure out my monk rotation and I'm finally doing acceptable DPS thanks to him.

But if you had a public parse and you know you go join some party finder with randoms and everyone is parsing you and you're below the other DPS due to gear reasons or whatever yet your DPS is still well within the acceptable numbers for that fight, chances of harassment are quite high or at the very least epeen pushing... ugh could you imagine having to constantly deal with epeen based harassment every time you join some pug party?

Parsers are an awesome idea but I'm ONLY in favor of them for personal use and no one can view other people's DPS and SE still leaves it a bannable offense to be harassed by someone public parsing. Because I still feel in a serious raid setting, if someone knows their DPS is low they will try to improve themselves without the need for harassment. (By serious raid I mean raiding with friends/fc/static, NOT public party finder or duty finder groups).

SE condones it because they have an exportable combat log, with no other use

Nuff Said.