The issue nobody wants to address

[Ryel]

Fine, let's go with that comparison. I play Basketball on a team. Of course I am supposed to know the rules and to show up for practice once or twice a week. But it's a team that plays "for fun", not one we get paid for to play in, so our level is way below professional teams. Still, there are a few people who take it really serious, come to practice 5 days a week, train even outside of official practice and of course, are heaps and bounds better than others. But the thing is - just because two people are that motivated to put a crazy amount of effort into a hobby, does not mean they can expect it from everyone else too. The standard of the team is not suddenly going to rise to the level of the few elites, so either the elites just enjoy play a more casual game with the others or they leave and join a more competitive team.

MMOs are pretty much the same: you won't be able to force people into getting as "good" as you want them to be. Either you accept that someone who only comes to practice once a week (aka does not use a parser or does not read his skill descriptions, reads no guides or does not care about equipment) just won't be as good as you who enjoys putting more effort in, or you leave the team that does not live up to your standards (meaning you stop playing with random people in DF or PF and join a static of like-minded people to play with).

For the most part this is true, but when the talk of parsers come up more often than not in dungeons it's not like people are asking for professional play, they're just asking for people to actually play at all.

When it comes to 4 man content this comes in many different varieties:

In some cases with players It's like trying to play basketball for fun and you have one guy constantly traveling, or shooting towards their own team's basket so you breakout the rule book to explain how the game is actually played and they respond with "It's my 12 bucks a month" (See: Ice mages). You probably wouldn't want to play basketball with that person after a while, but you might enjoy playing something else with them.

In other cases its as simple as teaching someone how to pass the ball or helping a team mate with their free throw form so they can get better at landing shots, not in a negative way but it's like "Oh hey i can help with that!". Those players may or may not take the game seriously some time down the line but it's no big deal if they don't, if anything you figure them learning something new would spark more interest in the sport or in this case the game.

Point is players aren't expecting professional level play outside of the content that requires it (endgame), but they are expecting others to show some basic form of competency on how the game is played especially at level 60. For a healer or a tank this means healing the party or holding threat and staying alive, In the case of a damage dealing class this means doing damage while avoiding mechanics. If a player is far, far below what the curve for performance is to the point that it's detrimental to the party there should be some accountability for that, we do so with healers and tanks all the time.

If you enter a 4 man dungeon and a tank is wearing full Dex gear 20-40 levels under the dungeon with no enmity stance on and is using their DPS combo on the boss non-stop without drawing aggro or using cool-downs to mitigate, i imagine you might pull them aside and be like "Hey buddy, I'm not trying to ruin your fun here but i think you might be doing it wrong" i assure you their response of "Well i'm just having fun" wouldn't be all that amusing (okay actually it kinda would, but that isn't the point) and I would hope you would take a few seconds to help the poor guy out.

The higher level the content though the more competency is expected from players, even if that content is casual 4 man dungeon runs, things that people let slide in like... Brayflox probably wouldn't in Fractal or Neverreap because after 60 levels of playing a job they expect you to know it to some degree just like after 2 months on a basketball fun league i expect you to know which basket you're supposed to be shooting for.

You say things like this:

Playing "decently" is entirely enough to make the game pretty much enjoyable to everyone. It doesn't have to be "perfect". A parser isn't needed for "decent" - the game already provides all the information needed for that (combos, effects, attack strength, castspeed, etc.) and anyone with half a brain can create a good rotation with that.

But there are a shockingly large number of players that legitimately have no idea that there is such a thing as "better" than what they are doing or that they aren't performing at base level to begin with. There are quite a few things that aren't actually trackable without a significant amount of attention to detail or at all because of how many of the game systems work; things like like damage from DoTs (SMN / SCH says hi) and Enmity (sup quelling strikes, Shadewalker and Smoke Bomb), I mean we have DRGs who don't even apply Heavy thrust and MNKs who don't bother to keep up with GL I doubt those players are even looking at the enmity list at that point (not that it would even be accurate).

I'm not sure why people get up in arms about the word "effort" being thrown around as if it doesn't refer to a large variety of performance levels and not a single end point. You can put effort into something and still not do so to the point that you're striving for "professional" or "serious" play, sometimes it's as simple as finding out that you aren't doing as well as you think you are and realizing it may be fun to try and do more.

Someone taking 20 seconds to see "Oh so that's what other BLMs are doing, i wonder how i can do that much damage!" is not the same as "I wanna be the very best like no one ever was!"

That's what a parser is for.