The Real Problem with Parsers

[RiceisNice]

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If this is considered harassment, then player interaction in general is harassment (and goes on to show just how south this community has gotten if they can't even take personal responsibility for this sort of thing and the developers have to hold our hands through everything. Anything that gets added to the game can be ammunition for harassment.

[Aiselia]

If this is considered harassment, then player interaction in general is harassment (and goes on to show just how south this community has gotten if they can't even take personal responsibility for this sort of thing and the developers have to hold our hands through everything. Anything that gets added to the game can be ammunition for harassment.

And you stopped before the important part: Whether or not it's considered harassment makes no difference if people report it and waste SE's time responding to an increase in tickets. Even if 10,000 people report someone for harassment and none of those reports are actionable, SE still had to devote time and resources to those 10,000 tickets.

Nobody won victories for being able to carry a gun by saying "Well, I could just stab someone with my pen, so what are you going to do, ban pens?" Nobody won victories for drug legalization by saying "Well, I could just overdose on Tylenol, what are you going to do, ban Tylenol?" So why do people think that they'll win victories for parsers by saying "Well, I could just harass someone for wearing purple clothes, are you going to ban purple dyes?"

[OPneedNerfs]

It's simple. Do it like many other games have come before it. Impose a punishment for making too many false reports.

If it doesn't discourage people from reporting just because their fee fees were hurt, at least they'd get punished and would open their eyes to how it's not just all about "me".

[Aiselia]

It's simple. Do it like many other games have come before it. Impose a punishment for making too many false reports.

Brilliant, and then they can lose paying customers because not only do they feel the players are attacking them, they can feel like SE wants the players to keep attacking them because THEY are the ones getting punished for feeling attacked enough to report!

Do I need to add a sarcasm tag, or we good there?

[OPneedNerfs]

Brilliant, and then they can lose paying customers because not only do they feel the players are attacking them, they can feel like SE wants the players to keep attacking them because THEY are the ones getting punished for feeling attacked enough to report!

Do I need to add a sarcasm tag, or we good there?

You're assuming them being able to report but nothing getting done will make them stay longer.

If nothing changes on their end, the "harassment" won't magically stop or disappear.

Worse yet, the people who actually know how to play will burn out from running into too many of these special snowflakes that they would eventually quit as well.

Do I need to add a sarcasm tag, or we good there?

[Aiselia]

You're assuming them being able to report but nothing getting done will make them stay longer.

If they don't know if nothing's getting done because they're not told either way, turning the punishment around back to them is a surefire way to get them to quit. Good luck trying to convince SE with your argument. "Hey, go institute a policy that will make you lose money because I don't want to deal with bads any more, kthx."

Worse yet, the people who actually know how to play will burn out from running into too many of these special snowflakes that they would eventually quit as well.

Or they'll learn how to premake parties and group with people they know are good. Either way, someone's got to learn something.

[OPneedNerfs]

If they don't know if nothing's getting done because they're not told either way, turning the punishment around back to them is a surefire way to get them to quit. Good luck trying to convince SE with your argument. "Hey, go institute a policy that will make you lose money because I don't want to deal with bads any more, kthx."

So your argument is that:

People who know how to play a game and are willing to invest their time and effort into it suck it up or quit

in defense of people who don't know how to play and can't be bothered to do better?

Or they'll learn how to premake parties and group with people they know are good. Either way, someone's got to learn something.

I'm not even gonna start with how you think the DF is only for bads due to JP/NA server differences we've obviously experienced.

If, hypothetically speaking, everyone follows your advice and "learn how to premake parties and group with people they know are good", wouldn't the bunch you're defending quit because nothing would get done? No tanks or healers who want to deal with low dps and let's be real here, anyone who doesn't bother to learn basic dps rotations won't be bothered to tank/heal. Better yet, they DO go into a tank/heal class yet can't hold threat/keep people alive.

[Tsilyi]

Definitely mainly a paranoia thing. The majority of people are terrified by the idea of a parser and come up with all these weird reasons why parsers are the devil (not saying you are one of those @Tsilyi) because it will expose them and they'd finally have to learn to play the game.

Not gonna say I disagree with your assessment for the most part but unfortunately I think the reason a fair amount of people are like that is because of mistreatment. If there weren't jerks around who handled lack of skill on the part of their teammates (yes, team! we're all on a team... except for pvp, I guess) poorly or in a mean spirited manner, I feel like a fair amount of the paranoid people would be a bit more open to helpful critiques. Then again, there are also some people who simply are defensive by nature and there is not much we can to do help them. It's going to be rough either way. I've played a multitude of mmos that had parsers and I can't say I've personally been bothered by their inclusion, but wherever they go, people DO have some pretty awful experiences (however exaggerated the regularity of them might be).

Anything that gets added to the game can be ammunition for harassment.

part of me gets a kick out of how people with parsers or who consider themselves super skilled point to others not meeting their requirements for skill as harassment and on the opposite end people who are not so skilled sometimes consider the mere existence of parsers as harassment. Everything already IS harassment! D: Will we ever recover?

[Aiselia]

So your argument is that:

No, my argument is that you should think up a better argument if you want to convince SE of something. Telling them they should do something that will lose them money is not going to convince them.

I'm not even gonna start with how you think the DF is only for bads

Good, because I've never said that. What I have said is that if you don't want to deal with random bads, don't queue in a thing that can give you random bads.

wouldn't the bunch you're defending quit because nothing would get done?

I don't know, would they? You realize that taking things to an extreme is not an effective way to disprove an argument, right? Not everybody who's competent cares about whether or not a bad DPS is going to add 10 minutes to their DF run. So taking it to the extreme point of everybody is largely irrelevant unless you think that it's a logically likely scenario.

Not everybody that's competent is impatient.

unfortunately I think the reason a fair amount of people are like that is because of mistreatment. If there weren't jerks around who handled lack of skill on the part of their teammates ... poorly or in a mean spirited manner, I feel like a fair amount of the paranoid people would be a bit more open to helpful critiques.

(Preface: I'm agreeing) Brings to mind the phrase, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you." One can call people paranoid that people will misuse the information and abuse others over it, but that doesn't mean that there aren't already historical grounds on which that paranoia is based. If people played another game with parsers in it and were subject to elitism and jerks (or even if not subject, witnesses to) in that, they have no real reason to expect that it'd be any different here. Like I think I said earlier in this thread (or maybe another one), I got kicked from a group in WoW because I was on a freshly-max level character and was running literally the easiest heroic dungeon at the time in order to start gearing up. The rest of the group was in raid gear and expected me to match their DPS, which was logically stupid and literally impossible. Do I have any reason to expect that it would be any different here? Especially considering it would be worse here because my queue for that dungeon was only like 5 minutes at the time. Here, it could be half an hour.

No one is entitled to the time of 3-7-23 other people.

No more than anyone is entitled to outright waste the time of even a single other person. If you kick someone from a group because of low DPS, you have outright wasted their queue time. If they then queue again, all you've done is displaced whose time is being wasted. If they get kicked again, more of their time is being wasted. Because you think your time is inherently more valuable than theirs.

There's an epidemic in society today that people think that it's okay to inconvenience others harsher than they would have been inconvenienced just because it's someone else.

[Souljacker]

I believe the mistreatment is exaggerated. Being removed from a party because you weren't carrying your weight does not equate abuse. No one is entitled to the time of 3-7-23 other people. There's an epidemic in society today where anyone who gets in trouble looks outside themselves for the reason it happened. This is no different. Someone was removed from a group not because they were underperforming, but because "parsers", which is an effective bogeyman and lets them ignore the real issue of the underperformance. If we vilify parsers, we don't have to look at ourselves and the things we are doing wrong.

With this game's challenging rotations a parser is needed. It would be nice if it was an official one.