To people who complain about "elites".

[CookieMonsta]

parsing leaves a trace on their servers and SE has basically stated "they wont go in and look for it if they don't have to, but if they have to, they have to do something about it".

Thats a load of crap, do you even know how parsing works? Hint you can parse without ACT using just a pen, paper and pocket calculator. Trust me, the only way SE can know that kind of information is if ACT literally tells them "I am here!!!" which it doesnt, or if SE installed spywear on my PC (which will be swiftly dealt with by BitDefender)

A few question to help me understand:

What do you consider a below average dps? If we consider 100% being the best DPS, did you really mean it mathematically as a dps doing less than 50% ?

And can an average skilled party complete Zorvan Ex regardless of the time and phases it may take?

The rotations in FFXIV are usually designed that if a person utilizes most of their offensive cooldowns, stack their DoTs and applies their appropriate debuffs on the boss, they should achieve roughly 60-75% of their job's potential at a particular gear level. Typically, the damage improvement from gear is only 20-30% every raid tier. Like going from ilevel 240-270 is iirc 30%.

To go below 50% means you typically are either using gear that is two progression patches old and/or don't perform your rotation properly.

Like is said earlier, the issue with zurvan is people are trying to burst him to 75% in the opening phase of the fight to skip soar. They "guarantee" this by bringing 6 DPS jobs. However, if all the DPS are performing at 50% or lower, the skip will still not happen thus negating the effectiveness of the strat.

[Eloah]

Thats a load of crap, do you even know how parsing works? Hint I can parse without ACT using just a pen, paper and pocket calculator.

Yes I am aware of how it works. Anyone is able to read about it. But what you do with your pen, paper, and calculator, is only on the surface, the parser is reading data from your memory you aren't supposed to see. It's essentially data mining on the smallest scale. And anything like that leaves a digital trace, no matter how small or how unnoticeable it might seem. Think of it like deleting files from your computer, they aren't truly gone, not for some time anyway. And most developers today are placing anti-piracy measures in their games; being an MMORPG I doubt SE isn't doing the same. And I know it's not piracy, just using the example.

Oh, and before you or anyone else says anything about this information, both my father and a friend of mine have studied computers and work on them for a living, so yay free IT support for me, but I do worry sometimes if anything "private" I have on my laptop is discovered, if they ever take a look to fix an issue I am having. Remember, we live in a digital age, unless you are completely off the grid, anyone who wants it can get any information they want.

Also I am done with this, it seems to have escalated well beyond what it should have. Use a parser, don't use a parser, people can do whatever they want, just don't harass people because of the knowledge you gain.

[CookieMonsta]

Also I am done with this, it seems to have escalated well beyond what it should have. Use a parser, don't use a parser, people can do whatever they want, just don't harass people because of the knowledge you gain.

Again, please humour me. When you do a read + copy operation on RAM, there is absolutely no way the other party can know unless the information is quantum encrypted (or conventionally encrypted so that ACT cannot read it). The information is literally sitting there on the RAM on the local PC, ACT only reads what is already there and collates it. This is essentially how some spywear works by scooping your encryption keys off the RAM. ACT is basically just an advanced form of pen and paper, it reads what is already there and collates it (hint, this info is located in your battle log). Its no different to manually copying your battle log and putting it in an excel spreadsheet. Trust me when I say there is no way for them to know or stop it unless they remove the battle log completely. Unless of course, FFXIV has some kind of punkbuster-like software or encrypts access to a specific memory space (which already happens to counter cheats).

Let me educate you on some points. Data is stored in CPU cache, RAM and persistent storage. Data in CPU cache can only be retained so long as power is fed to the unit, once power is gone, the electrons disperse thus the data is gone in a few nanoseconds. RAM is the same except RAM is essentially a massive array of capacitors, capacitors retain a charge for a brief while when power is cut thus you can forensically recover data from the RAM of a PC if you quickly chill the RAM sticks to prevent electron dispersion, when you delete something off the RAM while power is on, you literally have a few nanoseconds before the refresh cycle is initiated on the RAM banks. Persistent storage is both HDD or SSD, for HDD the data remains so long as the bits on the platter are not magnetically wiped, for SSD, the cells need to be flushed so if you delete something off either, the data is recoverable if you can get to it before garbage collection kicks in. None of this is relevant to ACT parsing btw because almost all these methods need local access to the machine to find the "trace", to do so remotely would require spywear that has root level access to your stuff.

[KarstenS]

parsing leaves a trace on their servers.

Um. No. It doesn't.

[KarstenS]

the parser is reading data from your memory you aren't supposed to see.

In its old base configuration, ACT is reading the log files which FFXIV saves in Documents\My Games\Final Fantasy XIV - A ream reborn\FFXIV_CHR<personal Number>\log

And anything like that leaves a digital trace, no matter how small or how unnoticeable it might seem.

You really don't know what you are talking about. Reading is a non invasive access. Without using some features of the memory management unit (MMU) you will not recognise any read access. Programms running in userspace don't can use these features. There is a technical reason, the "warden" of WoW is installed as a service with elevated rights.

Think of it like deleting files from your computer, they aren't truly gone, not for some time anyway.

And the reason is: The file content itself get not deleted. Only the link to the file get removed from the diretory structure. Save alot of time. In case of a SSD, you would need to overwrite the entire free space everytime you delete a file when you would want to delete the file content too.