The issue nobody wants to address

[Welsper59]

Not really, though. Devs have asked people not to use them for harassment, but they've never really said that they would cause more - that's just something the community decided. This source is a bit old (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-WX...outu.be&t=6m5s) but he never even mentions harassment as one of the reasons, let alone the foremost. Here's another interview (http://gamerescape.com/2014/02/12/ps...naoki-yoshida/) where yoshi's asked about it and never mentions harassment in a 3 paragraph answer. If your argument is that it's a dev position, then you should really have a source. In this case, that's not the dev position, it's a community position.

I know everyone says it's a dev position, but it's really bugging me because it's really not true at all. After the first ZAM interview where he laid down fight club rules, everyone started saying stuff like "so basically as long as you don't use it to harass people, no one will know." Which is true. But that was just because harassment would break the fight club rules; harassment itself was never the focus until the community made it that way. Harassment being in any way relevant to parsers was a conclusion drawn by the community via a series of implications, none of which are really tied to any dev statement.

At this point everyone just assumes it's true because so many people say it, and people say it because they assume it's true, and they assume it's true... ad infinitum. That argument might trump all others if it were true, but it's not.

As for your personal opinions about it... where are you gathering this evidence? Everything I've seen and experienced personally (stuff like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFWh9aY4pas) suggests the opposite. If you're going to appeal to history, can you find any examples? I agree that there's no reason to think history wouldn't repeat itself, but we apparently have very different ideas as to what that means.

Apathy doesn't exactly exist to the same degree here when it comes to reliance on DPS. I've commented about this before in how DPS in WoW is not the same as DPS here. Combat mechanics in FFXIV rely far more upon DPS (or players in general) working together to be capable of proper output, even in normal dungeons. This has not existed in WoW, outside of very specifically intended difficult content (like challenge dungeons), but it does here. A single well geared player, playing decently or to the best of their ability, can output three or more times the output of a fresh player trying their rotation to the best possible way. You can't do that here. You'd be lucky to even reach double the numbers. Meaning, your presence is far more noticeable than it is in WoW. The point of that video was how content, and the ease of being a single player in a far larger group of the same role in a raid, removes the need to learn to progress. You get what you want for absolutely no effort. It's like how people would just AFK in vanilla raids like MC. 40 people = more opportunity to do absolutely nothing because the fights are hard to balance out against so many variables.

Regarding the evidence, uhmm... have you ever played games with parsers and paid attention to group chats or shouts? Have you ever played WoW back in the day? Have you ever paid attention to the constant bickering that happens even here in-game about performance? It doesn't happen all the time, but it certainly does happen. That alone could possibly be reason enough for the devs here to not want it beyond what we currently have.

As for the parsers thing, you have to sort of think outside of what's laid out in front of you when it's something vague. When they're saying to not use the tools improperly, what else do you think they're referring to among the player base? "We're all adults here" kinda stems from immaturity being a concern. He may not have literally said the harassment bit, but it's obviously implied. You can't just take something vague and leave it be. There's meaning behind words, including vague ones. Suggestive evidence often supports opinions and perspectives. It's pretty obvious what he meant by that. Take for example someone saying something is "bad". Okay... it's bad. Do you just end it there? Should a dev just think "Oh, it's bad. Time to start over"? No! Why does someone think it's bad, what can be changed if found to be the common reaction, etc.

Harassment is not a concept derived simply because the community thought it's a problem. It's a problem that inevitably exists, whether or not you see it firsthand. If you've ever been in charge of a project that goes live to people other than yourself, you have to contemplate many things. You have to find ways to combat wrongdoings, for example. You have to think how something may be manipulable, if that's a problem. This is why things like the ToS exists. It's the preemptively lay out the rules that one cannot do certain things. It doesn't matter if these things happened already, it's to help prevent them from happening at all and to protect the company from lawsuit.

I mean, again, think about it. What else could possibly be meant by that statement when you put all the pieces together? His final words of "minna wa otona nandakara" or "we're all adults" kinda leads one to think something very specific about it.