In competition with myself: a request for PERSONAL parsers

[akaneakki]

I dont want personal parsers because what will happen is that SE will design content assuming you are using personal parsers; i.e. "oh, we can add more dps checks and make them a lot tougher."

No they wouldn't, because they know some people wouldn't improve with one even if it's there. A tool is a tool, it depends on the person whos using it, willing or not etc. You need to explain why they would add more dps checks with parsers, besides havent you explained yourself before you don't raid? So why would it matter to you?

[Eylirria]

SSS is a horrible flawed concept that had only minor relevance to the content at hand during Gordias and arguably has little to none now. There's no provision to handle pushing or holding DPS as appropriate (Hi Cruise Chaser & Zurvan), nor is there any effort made at teaching a player how to maintain their APM and minimise disconnects during mechanics, something which is fundamental to performing well.

Not to mention, as a healer main, SSS is about as useful as a means to judge how long my keyboard is going to survive as it is any indicator of my performance in raids. It's not fit for purpose, not even slightly.

I know, that was kind of my point. Kind of like how a personal parser is just as useless.

[uvuvwevwevweonyetenyevweugwemu]

No they wouldn't, because they know some people wouldn't improve with one even if it's there. A tool is a tool, it depends on the person whos using it, willing or not etc. You need to explain why they would add more dps checks with parsers, besides havent you explained yourself before you don't raid? So why would it matter to you?

LOL that is an understatement. No they won't. I get it, you want to be a monster slayer, quickest and best there is. You have no idea how horrible players can be when it comes to abusing mechanics once they know the nitty gritty of the numbers. Do me a favor, try this little test:

Find any stormblood A rank, relay it. do not join a party. As tank, do 100k damage to it. Find another one, relay and same thing no party, as dps do 100k damage to it. Compare your loot and results. This is called JOB BALANCING.

That alone should scare the hell out of you from knowing your numbers is. The repercussions are currently limited to people who know and done thousands (yes thousands), imagine that happen to larger player base
.

[Sebazy]

I know, that was kind of my point. Kind of like how a personal parser is just as useless.

In your eyes perhaps.

Would a group wide parser be more useful to the right people? Most likely yes. Case in point, I linked a screenshot of a BLM doing 165 DPS in Rabanastre in another thread, how long do you think she would have lasted if people had have been able to clearly see that. Whilst I suggested that she simply shouldn't have been there in the first place, nobody would have deserved the almost inevitable butchering she would likely have received if her performance was there for all to see.

As such, a personal parser is the best compromise especially given the casual nature of this game for the most part.

Is it useless? Absolutely not, with a legitimate feature in the game, people will be more likely to discuss and compare numbers with friends, more people will potentially overhear that and get rough reference points from there.

It's not a feature to turn everyone into world first progression raiders, rather it's there to help give people something by which to gauge themselves if and when they decide to take some interest in that. If it improves even 10% of the population, that's huge as far as the more casual endgame content goes and frankly, if it helps avoid a repeat of the BLM I saw earlier, that's even better as that wasn't good for anyone involved.

Find any stormblood A rank, relay it. do not join a party. As tank, do 100k damage to it. Find another one, relay and same thing no party, as dps do 100k damage to it. Compare your loot and results. This is called JOB BALANCING.

I'm not really sure what your point is here? Tanks have a much easier time with these due to being rewarded for agro. Voke followed by 100ks worth of damage in tank stance works wonders. This isn't any kind of secret that I'm aware of?

[uvuvwevwevweonyetenyevweugwemu]

I'm not really sure what your point is here? Tanks have a much easier time with these due to being rewarded for agro. Voke followed by 100ks worth of damage in tank stance works wonders. This isn't any kind of secret that I'm aware of?

It relates to how devs can design any fights with a difficulty setting (=synced). Each job (even on the same role) has their own min and max. On top of that job min and max, there's also the mechanics min and max which sets the difficulty. Without it, there won't be such thing called difficulty, there's only spamming your rotations. This is an example of devs conversation:

dev A: Let's make a platform where people can fall off.
dev B: Ooh that's evil. I like it but they'd just avoid the edges.
dev A: Nah we'll make large AoE so only small edges they can stand on.
dev B: Some jobs would have lower damage from not doing positionals.
dev A: You mean like DRG? Yeah they do like their jumps.
dev B: Okay we'll make their loot range lower. Their max range is still 95% chance tho, right?
dev A: Yeah, if they do more than max just make the loot for another job. Obviously they don't need that gear.

[Eylirria]

In your eyes perhaps.

Would a group wide parser be more useful to the right people? Most likely yes. Case in point, I linked a screenshot of a BLM doing 165 DPS in Rabanastre in another thread, how long do you think she would have lasted if people had have been able to clearly see that. Whilst I suggested that she simply shouldn't have been there in the first place, nobody would have deserved the almost inevitable butchering she would likely have received if her performance was there for all to see.

As such, a personal parser is the best compromise especially given the casual nature of this game for the most part.

Is it useless? Absolutely not, with a legitimate feature in the game, people will be more likely to discuss and compare numbers with friends, more people will potentially overhear that and get rough reference points from there.

It's not a feature to turn everyone into world first progression raiders, rather it's there to help give people something by which to gauge themselves if and when they decide to take some interest in that. If it improves even 10% of the population, that's huge as far as the more casual endgame content goes and frankly, if it helps avoid a repeat of the BLM I saw earlier, that's even better as that wasn't good for anyone involved.

A personal parser is useless. The number you're showing there is meaningless without the person being able to compare it or put it into context against anything. Compare it to themselves? That's not going to do much if they've already learned a bad rotation and they're doubling down on it. If a 330 SMN is doing 2200 DPS and suddenly, by the magic of personal parsing, they realize if they do things a little differently they can do 10% better and start doing closer to 2500... you're still not fixing the much bigger, much more obvious elephant in the room. If you think that's still good enough, then you don't want a parser for what a parser is, you want a mini-game to play against yourself while playing FFXIV, and it doesn't need to show you damage per second, it could show you Potency Per Second, or Chocobo Cheers per Second, or what have you.

People that are doing bad, most of the time, have no idea that they are doing bad, or how bad they are doing. Going from 2200 to 2500 is an improvement, yes, but it's paltry when they should be doing closer to 5000. All you did was give that person the illusion that they've improved a lot. They're not going to find out how badly they are doing until they look up SMNs in general and go "Oh... I'm doing roughly half of what I could be... something's off" if they care.

Personal parsing is such a "cop out" that it's laughable. Parsing in FFXIV is such a done to death subject. Devs know that everyone doing difficult content use it, they know that a lot of people that like to perform as best as they can will run it... they don't care, they're okay with it, just because you know you're doing X amount of damage per second doesn't make you inherently better than someone else, it's just a tool. But the community is so... scared that someone will call them out on how bad they are, that they come up with the most ridiculous and convoluted reasons as to why this game should never get a parser... It already has one. People that care about it already run it, they just keep quiet because it's a Don't Ask Don't Tell type of deal with SQEX... if they ever made a parser part of the game, there's no reason to think they wouldnt continue doling out punishment for harassment like they do now.

And if you're doing ~160 damage, which I assume is an exaggeration on your part, they were either dead the whole time, or link-dead. Still, way too many people think that people will make it their job to continuously scan the meters and "kick" underperforming people. You know that how often you can kick people goes up every time you do it, right? It's not like you can just sit there kicking people all day, and nobody likes to stand there idle waiting for the group to fill up. There's a gross overestimation in this community that if one day everyone got to see each other's numbers, all of a sudden they'd all turn into crazy rage toxic monsters that do nothing but votekick at the slighest sign of underperformance...

Fun fact: Most people in your average Rabanastre/Roulette run underperform. The runs survive anyway.

[Vanitas]

As much as my heart burns for a parser of any kind I'd sooner believe they'd actually touch the companion system, add more egis, or that legendary FC primal thing before they considered adding parsers. I sometimes wonder if the devs really care about closing that gaping canyon of a skill gap or just content padding sub numbers. /shrug

[RichardButte]

The number you're showing there is meaningless without the person being able to compare it or put it into context against anything.

You mean like the DPS I was doing last run, or even 10 minutes ago?

Self comparison is still a fine means of improvement. It's not necessary for every player to be doing the maximum potential damage for their class and gear, but just being able to SEE yourself visibly improving is HUGE.

You know you've gotten stronger when you can do more pushups or lift more weight, just as you'll know you've gotten better at your rotation when you see your numbers improving over the course of trying to down a raid boss.

If nothing else, having this visible form of progress would also be nice, since tanks and healers can generally see the improvement of their survivability and healing output as they acquire better gear, but it's still going to be hard for DPS players to figure out their contribution when there are 1-3 other DPS in the group.

[Oscura]

Personal parsers would be useless if only just because it's a half-measure. It exists to placate people who want to parse but also to not offend those who don't want others to see their DPS.

Either support parsing, or don't. Personal parsing is just objectively useless, parsing is only born from comparison, and self-comparison is the easiest way to lose sight of objective reality. How do you think the average player would react if they told someone, "Wow, I went from 1300 to 2600 dps, I've literally doubled! I've gotten so great at this game!" Only for someone to reply, "Actually, <on the same class with the same gear> I'm doing 4200, so you're not good at this game"? Seeing progress is great, but it's absolutely pointless without context.

[Reinha]

A personal parser is useless. The number you're showing there is meaningless without the person being able to compare it or put it into context against anything. Compare it to themselves? That's not going to do much if they've already learned a bad rotation and they're doubling down on it.

I was under the impression that the most useful comparisons are the parses from the same job and in the same instance, uploaded to fflogs for statistics and analysis. That wouldn't change whether the parser is showing your party members or not. If you are the only SMN in a Shinryu ex farm, seeing other people's dps is not going to tell you how well you are doing as a SMN. A 70th percentile RDM does slightly less damage than a 25th percentile SMN in Shinryu ex, so without knowing how other SMNs do you might think beating a RDM is an accomplishment. Whether the official parser was public or private it likely couldn't even be used to upload parses, so it would be better used for self-improvement.

Besides, once an official parser is implemented, what would stop us from comparing our numbers in /fc chat or a "Show your parse" thread? Voluntarily talking about numbers would not be forbidden anymore and it would be about as accurate as comparisons to random party members.

Personal parsing is just objectively useless, parsing is only born from comparison, and self-comparison is the easiest way to lose sight of objective reality. How do you think the average player would react if they told someone, "Wow, I went from 1300 to 2600 dps, I've literally doubled! I've gotten so great at this game!" Only for someone to reply, "Actually, <on the same class with the same gear> I'm doing 4200, so you're not good at this game"? Seeing progress is great, but it's absolutely pointless without context.

You just gave an example of how one would obtain context for their numbers in-game.