SE's most difinitive statement yet on parsers

[Sebazy]

Ps yay you're back!

It's like experience, knowledge, skill, talent, common sense, experimentation, advice, seeing someone else rotation and judgement calls (mimicking what they are doing because they are obviously out performing you), and so on and so on are things that can't happen because with parsers you magically become #1 in seconds.

Hypothetical situation. Fresh 50 SMN comes along and does some regular 8 man content with an experienced 110 geared SMN. In what way does the game show the new SMN how his damage is stacking up compared to the veteran? The way I see it, the best he can do is scroll through the log and compare ruin and fester hits which is a relatively small portion of a SMNs damage compared to other jobs. Want a weigh up much you got out of your Raging strikes cooldown vs the other guy? Good luck with that!

There's many reason why people choose to and choose not to use a parser. With near a decade of seeing it on MMO's everyone has their own individual reasons. Yet categories and stereotypes form due to a group of player using it and behaving a certain way.

Oooh the experience card again. I can play this game too!

http://brews.guildportal.com/Guild.a...TopicID=675031 - Oh hey, 'hardcore' data going back to 2001 content, also note that if Seredith was there, I was there as well.

http://eq.magelo.com/profile/9093 - And of course nothing says 'Aren't you too old to be playing games now?' like a 4 digit Magelo profile that's still wearing Kunark loot.

16 and a bit years of substantiated experience (And yes, it stings to admit that, but I've also made a fair career from games so I can't complain too much) and I still stand by my opinion that you played with the wrong crowd. My WoW guild was incredibly tight knit, highly competitive and yet never once did we ever bash or abuse each other over parser results. And I can promise, that if they did, I'd have been the first to get it in the neck as I'm a horrid DPSer Yes whilst there's no shortage of abusive people out there, plenty of people simply strive to do the very best they can, not to mention plenty of people are more than capable of having friendly rivalries with each other (It's this facet of human nature that makes Strava the phenomenon that it is).

A big chunk of your case seems to rest on the assumption that every single last parser user is a raving abusive d-bag. Whilst I'll agree that PF can feel like that more often than not, your fears are thankfully partially unfounded.

Technically anyone can parse without a third party parser but you have to do it old school either read the battle log as you go or watch replays of your gameplay.

I really don't know how I can state it more clearly without putting it in 72pt bold.

It is impossible to self parse a proper dot 'rotation' with any degree of accuracy.

A) No time stamps
B) No log entry
B) All of your directly afflicted dots get compressed into a single small flying text element that is visible for a couple of seconds
C) No crit indication beyond 'the number was a bit higher'
D) Ground AEs also throw up additional flying text elements separate from the dot stack
E) There is no way of knowing what each flying text element represents, was that 300 damage hit my pet? My ruin? My dots?