On "Infringing upon Others" and "Negatively impacting design"

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Originally Posted by Aravell

The problem here is that people who use logs beneficially are greatly outnumbered by the tools who treat logs as the ultimate truth yet can't read any part of the log except the shiny percentile number.

Can't really downplay the negative effect when so many people fit the bill. See how many people on the forums try and shut down discussions on anything from savage content discussion to MSQ dungeon discussion with "Erm akshually, you're grey on the numbers website, so you dont get an opinion".

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I think we have the entire mind set backwards here. Those people are looking to shut down your opinion and only after establishing that goal do they look for whatever they think supports it. Just check the dude from my signature. He tried to do that. I dont even do savage in pf, it's just entirely made up. When that one weirdo made the spreadsheet out of the healer thread they already had their conclusion when going in. This way they just outed themselves as person who shouldnt be listened to thanks to focusing on logs while not understanding anything about the forum. It wouldnt even have mattered. We both know that the healer thread is always in the superposition of being at the same time accused of being too good at the game and not being good enough.

As someone who was bullied out of a savage group when I first started savage because other members pulled up fflogs of fights we cleared and saw me, the newbie scholar, at the bottom;

No. FFlogs can go. We have mountains of evidence that fights of every difficulty can be cleared with every possible party comp. FFLogs is a redundant tool at best and a source of harassment at worst.

Inevitably like every other time this comes up we will hear 2 contradicting opinions about FFLogs,Tomestone, and XivAnalysis
1 - "No one cares about your logs, these are personal improvement tools, you care more about it than others do."
2 - "These sites are integral to raiding and raiding will collapse without the ability to quickly find and kick baddies and prog liars efficiently, you're going to make a majority of people quit if you even make it opt-in."

There is severe rot in the community based on developer negligence and sweeping issues like parsing under the rug for too long, there needs to be some stance on this instead of the wishy-washy current one from Yoshida.

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Originally Posted by VerdeLuck

Inevitably like every other time this comes up we will hear 2 contradicting opinions about FFLogs,Tomestone, and XivAnalysis
1 - "No one cares about your logs, these are personal improvement tools, you care more about it than others do."
2 - "These sites are integral to raiding and raiding will collapse without the ability to quickly find and kick baddies and prog liars efficiently, you're going to make a majority of people quit if you even make it opt-in."

There is severe rot in the community based on developer negligence and sweeping issues like parsing under the rug for too long, there needs to be some stance on this instead of the wishy-washy current one from Yoshida.

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I think that's a very surface level analysis. When people say nobody cares about your logs it's when you arent actively pushing them to single digits because you refuse to learn your job or the fight or both. When someone is consistently grey that's because of fundamental misunderstandings of jobs/fights. Nobody cares about your logs specifically because they are your logs, people just want to see who they are playing with and if there are clear indications of their time getting wasted. They would know after having played with you anyway but at that point they might be a lot more fed up.
Some people use it to yeet out progliars but a lot of people also dont and get walled. The reality of the game is when you dont gatekeep your party in hard content, then the game will do it for you. The more frequent check for proglying is also a rather recent thing, tomestone isnt even that old. It kinda sounds like you think kicking people for proglying is a bad thing.

Taking fflogs out of the equation would not even stop the gatekeeping, that's a foolish belief. JP has a massive public blacklist of people where you kinda just dont get taken off because nobody cares to do so. With a site like fflogs you can visibly improve.

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Originally Posted by Valence

FFlogs and Tomestone aren't something that stays at the individual level, aren't something that's kept in private as it is literally publicly available websites tracking data and activity for every player in the game. Furthermore, anybody can upload data obtained in the game about another player without them knowing, and without their consent. I am not writing this from a legal point of view, but from a consistency point of view. If you think that third parties can be infringing upon others in a bad way, then I want you to take a cold, hard look at those types of websites and data aggregators, that while they may provide a lot of useful information at a statistical level or for self improvement, they also collect data about other players without their consent and are usually widely used to dismiss or outright harass others.

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I can make a public website where people upload screenshots ("data obtained in the game", "without consent") and use that to justify a S/A/B/.../F rating for their fellow players. I can further make it so that this website aggregates those ratings and assigns a score, which everyone is then free to use to dismiss or harass their fellow players.

Which is to say, none of that is what makes FFLogs and Tomestone uniquely problematic.

Their unique problem is that the data on which they opperate and depend can be provided only via means that are not ToS-compliant -- namely, ACT and its FFXIV parsing plug-in -- and that said means border on trivial for anyone to employ.

Just because players can always find a way to be an ass to people they've never before met doesn't mean we need to accept that finding such a way should be trivial.

An in-game indicator of the progress you've made on a fight would just be better for the community overall. It would be similar to ILVL gating. People can choose to be more selective in their PF listings at the expense potentially more waiting time to find people at their prog point. It would probably reduce toxicity overall due to less prog lying.

Public logs and damage meters you can't opt out from should never be a thing built into this game. I think anyone who played WoW would agree at how awful that becomes. However, I would like SE to have some kind of output to log functionality just so we can get rid of the need to run ACT. Especially considering ACT is capable of more nefarious things such as Triggers and not just consolidating logs.

I agree that Yoshida should express his opinions on this more clearly like he did for cosmetic mods.

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Originally Posted by Saraide

Some people use it to yeet out progliars but a lot of people also dont and get walled. The reality of the game is when you dont gatekeep your party in hard content, then the game will do it for you. The more frequent check for proglying is also a rather recent thing, tomestone isnt even that old. It kinda sounds like you think kicking people for proglying is a bad thing.

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Personally, my problem with this whole thing is that people are required to use a 3rd party tool for this whole thing to work. If you don't use the tool, there's a chance that your progression will not be recorded if no one is using the tool in that party, which makes the whole thing a gigantic hassle for people who don't want to use the ToS-breaking tool.

I would actually love it if SE implemented a system that records fight progression and only allows PF leaders to put up a PF for as far as they've personally been, so nobody can lie on the leader or members side. Would also be nice if fight progression is shared across the account to eliminate having to show logs to prove you cleared the fight when trying to join cleared parties on an alt.

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Originally Posted by Valence

Also I'd be quite curious to know how you'd proceed? Do I show up on their discords that are probably choke full of diehard fans of the websites, and expose my concerns? Or do I ask to talk with a manager? I'm sorry but this sounds a little masochistic.

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Just a little masochistic. I've tried similar attempts to detoxify raiding culture, and more or less all I end up with is a collection of Discord bans, blocks, and people who go on and on about how "you just spread negativity" sooo ... sadly, something on these lines.

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Originally Posted by Aravell

"people who do savage probably cheat". While there is genuine congratulations when people clear, there are also a lot of people who look down on anyone who clears harder content as cheaters and diminish their effort in getting a clear.

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The trouble is twofold:

* That if you go by a strict interpretation of the TOS, a painfully large amount of the raiding playerbase DOES cheat. (And you need less than 10% of the PUG base to do this in order for it to be odds-on that you will have at least one such person in your PF.)

* This has an insidious effect on content development. I am not sure this is reversible, or if we're watching the raiding ship start to sail over the horizon as we speak as performance has become too pervasively inflated by the use of third party aids (which then require content to be tuned much more tightly to not receive mass ill feedback and/or risk a sudden implosion in player participation due to frustration if the aids are yanked especially in what seems to be the hardest tier the game has had since the horror stories of Heavensward, which actually did cause a mass towel-throwing).

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Originally Posted by Minali

but I didn't get the feeling privacy was in any way a concern of theirs (FFLogs').

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Unlike the other big website-based tools that only indirectly interact with the game (e.g. the hunt trackers, the Teamcraft materials tracking aid, etc.), that fund themselves through donations, the problem here is that WC/FF Logs & Tomestone are an actual business, all the way up to including paywalled data access features.

There is going to be no way to get its operator to cooperate in a way in any way positive to the community as they have a vested interest otherwise (when you post eg an S-rank to Faloop that is merely an organized community notepad you are contributing to; when somebody uploads a run you were in to FF Logs, that is literally a product the site is to some or another degree selling).

SE does need to have it shut down, probably through leveraging the commercial nature of the site, the necessity of third party addon usage as a data source, and the ill-effects it has on the part of the playerbase that would like to just do content and not deal with boxscores or rat races (I should hope this is a majority, still).