Discuss: Are DPS meters bad for MMOs?

[Pells]

not having dps meters is like being on a track team without stop watches

And yet anyone involved in the pole vault, long jump, high jump or shot put would still argue that stop watches are not necessary.

[Shneibel]

it is not bad nor it is good. The system is good for ppl who want to know their own progress, until ppl abuse it. An mmorpg can do perfectly well w/o dps race/check mechanic.

[StrejdaTom]

Everything has a bright and a dark side. DPS meters will always be here and when Addons are implemented, then they finally wont be against the ToS I believe.
And I would like the posibility to know my and my team's DPS so I can improve myself or politely ask people to pay more attention to fight and their job.

[Elusana_Celah]

Well the other poster made a good point. If everyone would evaluate themselves and shoot to improve, content would be cleared without this stuff. The only thing this stuff lets you do is identify who the weakest link is and be able to point the finger and call them out on it. Which, in-turn, will get you banned. So this serves no valid purpose except for self-evaluation. Even if you were in a raid guild and the raid leader was calling people out for their low DPS, if someone got angry enough they could report the raid leader for using the software > BANNED.

I don't see Square making this stuff completely legal to use for anything other than personal evaluation.

[SpookyGhost]

Might've been brought up already, but since most people seem to be for personal improvement but against people using their DPS to harass/yell at them, why not just show people their own DPS? Maybe have a recommended DPS # displayed for each encounter, that way the player can personally gauge how close or how far they are from it and make adjustments from there. Not as great as seeing everyone's DPS and actually providing helpful tips to those falling behind, but since there's a lot of fear that legal parsers would lead to harassment, maybe this would be a good middle ground?

[Bishop81]

Might've been brought up already, but since most people seem to be for personal improvement but against people using their DPS to harass/yell at them, why not just show people their own DPS? Maybe have a recommended DPS # displayed for each encounter, that way the player can personally gauge how close or how far they are from it and make adjustments from there. Not as great as seeing everyone's DPS and actually providing helpful tips to those falling behind, but since there's a lot of fear that legal parsers would lead to harassment, maybe this would be a good middle ground?

On a similar note, they can displayed a "rank" after a boss kill like in many Japanese games - e.g. Rank S, Rank A+, Rank C ...

It would be decent feedback to players without smacking them in the face with numbers - I'm sure players can work out what is causing them not to get Rank S like they do in other games.

[Ryel]

And yet anyone involved in the pole vault, long jump, high jump or shot put would still argue that stop watches are not necessary.

That's a poor argument, all of those other events still have a metric by which they are able to measure performance.

You don't pole vault or long jump and just walk away without knowing of or measuring your results, at least not at any team oriented event where performance actually matters, so yeah I'm not exactly sure where you're trying to go with that one.

[Gilraen]

How about this. Noone likes it when developers have to complete a game by X date. Deadlines are nice, they motivate, but noone likes unrealistic deadlines. Look at the bugs in the latest Assassin's Creed, for example. A little extra time could have avoided those and maybe even given them time to add in female assassins. But no, EA had their ideal release date and nothing was going to change that. Another bad example, but every bit as fitting.

The only people that like parsers are those that push themselves and those that push others. For everyone else, life isn't changed either way with or without them. That's the point, for everyone else they just want to play a game and have fun. They don't need a 'parser monkey' on their back throwing poo at them when they aren't 'at their best'.

[Xatsh]

DPS meter in my opinion are a bad thing it lead to horrific tunnel visioning in fights and people who are OMFG my dps is better then your dps /kick /kick /kick. but the true issue is the game is built around dps checks.

Almost everything at endgame requires X group dps or the boss does some move that 1 shots everyone. In my opinion it is horrible design, it is SE's way or locking content out for certain gear scores, but it is just bad in my opinion.

Which I think it is nuts that SE will not give us a dps meter or technically allow one to be used when the game is based around high dps. They are sorta a requirement for endgame raiding.

[Craiger]

Parser's are vital for progressing in some content... If you don't do that content, then it doesn't matter, but if you ever try to do it, you have to be able to produce the right numbers. If you're group doesn't get the right numbers, then it could be impossible to beat the boss, so there would be no point in even trying...

Like have been pointed out here, I would like to have an in-game DPS meter for yourself only, and maybe some kind of ranking after the fight without numbers. (or even with numbers) You have already beaten it by then, so you can't really be yelled at for messing it up...

One important point though, is that you somehow have to know if the number you see is good or bad. You can't just put out a number and expect that to be enough for some to improve their DPS...

The game should give you some guidelines to how much you are expected to do or something, and give you feedback with like showing different colors to easily see if you're doing good or not (could be options to show either numbers or colors etc), with green of good, and red when you're doing less then you should. It should be pretty obvious when you do less, so that the players actually care about increasing their DPS