The Real Problem with Parsers

[Samsta]

Oh yeah, well, there was this one group who I was with and they were like "Oh man noob, you totally should have been eating HQ Tailor-Made Eel Pie instead of your noobish HQ Lalafell Pot Pie" and then kicked me.

So there. >.>

um, can you even see what food someone has eaten? Doesn't it just show you the "well fed" effect?

[Almalexia]

Class and job quests could stand to be more rigorous in teaching game mechanics to players.

eg. PGL quests teach you how to GL, but it doesn't teach you how to use positionals. The difference between a properly and improperly positioned Boot/True/Snap, the very first combo, is around 35% damage--that's more than a "difference in playstyles," as the GMs would say.

You also face either waves of enemies--again, silly for PGL, whose real power comes from flanking--or a gimmicky encounter that is divorced from the class' expertise.

eg. You learn Touch of Death at lv.15, but only after completing the quest. Why not receive ToD at the beginning of the quest, and let the quest present a scenario for you to use it effectively? Or more recently: why not introduce Form Shift at the beginning of the lv.52 quest, and present you with an instanced encounter where you must preserve GL through a period of non-combat?

The game needs to confront the player about their performance before the community does. As it is now, the game dumps the tools at the feet of the player and leaves them to their own devices. It's strange, because this philosophy is at odds with Yoshida's commitment to accessibility for new players, and these early levels are when new players are most receptive to the game's concepts and mechanics.

A parser only tells us that something is broken. The fix isn't the parser, and the burden is on the devs - not the community - to repair what's broken.