Discuss: Are DPS meters bad for MMOs?

[Xatsh]

Either DPS check or HP check. Choose your poison. In case of HP check you'll need to add Time check, just so that people won't be kiting boss for an hour. Which results in... DPS check.

I prefer the HP check without a time limit honestly.

So what if a group find a kite strategy that takes 2-3hrs to kill good for them. The penalty for doing so is it is taking 3hrs to kill it instead of 15mins.

[Hiruke]

I prefer the HP check without a time limit honestly.

So what if a group find a kite strategy that takes 2-3hrs to kill good for them. The penalty for doing so is it is taking 3hrs to kill it instead of 15mins.

Actual humans won't put up with this, and we shouldn't design around this. They will leave your instance, so the actual penalty is never clearing it ever. That happens already, actually, so why change the system? It may be sad for people that not every MMO is only about participation trophies, but certainly there are games out there they may enjoy more. I imagine there must be some super casual MMOs where you win without trying. Or they could play non-combat MMOs:

http://www.wanderthegame.com/

I hate this topic. It was intended as a troll topic on Massively, and will inevitably be nothing but a troll topic here. People's arguments against parsers is that "omg they're bad" when really the problem is they are playing a game where you're intended to excel and they think it's ok to push 130 dps as MNK in iLVL110+ gear in Ramuh EX. "Why am I not winning guys!?" I understand a lot of people think "it's just a game, why should I play well? I should just be able to huck it in there and win!" but you need to find a game that's catered to this, not expect games meant to played skillfully to.. not be that. I don't go to the World Series of Poker and cry that I lost because apparently drawing a fresh hand at every opportunity isn't usually a winning strategy. I should win just for participating!

The problem isn't people going "omg this SMN is 30 dps below me, kick him!" it's "omg this SMN is doing 100 dps when a SMN of average skill should be doing 300 dps in this fight - the WAR is outdpsing 2-3 of our dps!!!!!" which is clearly a case of those dps play so horribly bad that you won't win anything ever, so just give up now. That's not a problem with parsers, that's a problem with the underperforming dps. They are afflicted with at least one of the following:

1) Poor gear
2) Poorly optimized gear
3) Poor attitude
4) No motivation
5) Not enough skill
6) Not enough resources to clue them in that they're doing poorly
7) etc. etc.

[Gardes]

I prefer the HP check without a time limit honestly.

So what if a group find a kite strategy that takes 2-3hrs to kill good for them. The penalty for doing so is it is taking 3hrs to kill it instead of 15mins.

So you liked 1.xx's 'almost everything is kited because we can' combat strategy? All the final job story quests are 8 man and damn near everything gets kited. War battle had 1 tank kite all the birds, pld battle had one tank one of the boss, drg battle had one tank kite the dragoon (or was it the dragon, can't remember), mnk battle had one tank kite everything as the group takes the adds one by one. I think only the brd and blm one had people ccing the mobs with sleep. It's not fun and sacrifices one person's enjoyment because all he gets to do is just run away to kite. Makes every new battle we encounter just a matter of 'can we kite this or not?'

Ive never used or seen "Parsers" before but here is my question to the community: From reading these post, it seems that this parser measures dps output. Can it be used to measure other important stats? for ex. having High dps isnt the only thing that helps getting clears, maybe it can measure roles or something like how much dmg players are taking, how fast or efficient are they using their skills, avg. healing per sec, etc. What im essentially asking is is it a way to check not only dps, but other jobs? Cause it seems like people wanna just check to see if dps is being met but there are other factors too, especially in this mechanics-heavy game. would help the whole group to know what needs to be fixed on wipes while making sure that EVERYONE could have accountability, not just dps.

You can check almost anything. Our OT was having trouble taking the adds in phase 3 of t9 and we weren't sure why. He just keeps failing at it and someone else looked around in the parser and turns out he's missing quite a bit. We just assumed that everyone would already know what their accuracy needed to be at but apparently he didn't. Oh hey, guess how we know our acc limits? Some early birds tested them for us! We're now farming t9 with the same method and having no problems with adds.

Another example, turn 9's phase 4 where the boss starts using a multi-hit move that can do a total damage of more than the tank's hp. As the tank I died to it and people start wondering if my mitigation was late or in the wrong order and whether I should switch them around because the attack alternates in damage strength against me. I was sure that I did it perfectly and I didn't get myself killed. Someone else looked around in the parser again and I was right because the damage I'm taking from claws was minimal from all of them and it couldn't have killed me. After an even closer look, it was found out that I got killed by someone's thunder debuff and I didn't need to change my play style.

Another example! Back in turn 8 before echo, we were reforming the group and got a new healer who has never done the turn. I personally recruited him because I used to do the 1st binding coil of bahamut as a static with him and thought he was good. We were having trouble keeping the tank alive (wasn't me at the time) and people started looking at this new whm and he was getting exasperated because he was trying to do his best and our sch started getting sarcastic with him. So again, someone else looked at the numbers and he started noticing that the sch's healing numbers are suspiciously low considering he is much better geared than whm (half when he has i110 book and the whm has i90 zenith). We didn't tell this to any of the healers because we weren't sure if this is normal. Shortly after the sch left due to irl schedules (for real) and we tried another sch and we suddenly don't have anymore problems and we looked at the numbers again. The new sch is also better geared and more experienced at turn 8 and his healing numbers are higher by a little bit than the whm so we now know it was the previous sch slacking and blaming the other healer. But I suppose that's water under the bridge but at least we found out why.