In competition with myself: a request for PERSONAL parsers

[RichardButte]

No its just useless a parser provides no context it just spits out a number and you have no idea why that number is high or low unless you can remember every action you did and when you did it over the course of a 10-12 minute fight. FFlogs is what gives that context so a parser on its own does nothing so we would need the parser and a SE sanctioned version of FFlogs which isn't going to happen.

I'm pretty sure the average player can say "I'll try to use (insert ability here) more often in my rotation and see if that helps" without reaching the end of the fight and forgetting they said it.

Also, a personal parser could of course have a breakdown of how much DPS each ability added so players could notice in a second that they're forgetting to weave in a DoT or something...

but DOES the data need to be that granular for you to see progress? I know it's a meme at this point to mention the SSS, but that allows all DPS to know how they're doing gear+rotation wise. And I understand our numbers are lower in the actual trial due to downtime but I dont feel blind and clueless about it. I get it's useful, dont get me wrong, but I don't think we're nearly as uninformed as people think.

It's not just progress, but feedback for when you might be forgetting something.

If a healer or tank forgets to do use a vital ability, people start dying so they'll know right then and there that something is amiss. If a DPS forgets, they may never realize it.

The other reason they can't ever officially endorse ACT is because it's third-party software whose code is beyond SE's control. If SE officially endorse it, and it has a bug that deletes all your character settings or something, then SE will get the support headache ("you told me it was OK to use this!"). The state of affairs now regarding ACT is as good as it's ever going to get.

It would be easier to try including a personal parser in the game's UI for a week or so and see how that goes first.

[Galaick]

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."

This is actually the best argument in favour of having ingame parsers

[Paladinleeds]

What I would suggest is to get around the "Lack of context". It offers a percentage of the maximum DPS you can put out with your ilvl and gear. So let's say SMN can pull off a maximum of 5'000 DPS and Joe Bloggs pulls off 2'500. The personal parser could say "You pulled off 2'500 DPS. This is 50% of your potential. Keep trying to improve your score!" It's up to the player to see what maximum they can hit. It will scale with your character's stats too, so it's always the maximum you can pull off with that very gear. You could even have differing responses dependent on the percentage reached. For example "This is 10% of your potential. You have a lot to learn. Keep practicing!", and "This is 99% of your potential. Great job! Think you can eke out the last 1%?" - since then it'll encourage them to improve with differing urgencies dependent on their performance. So a high performance would get a little encouragement, a low performance would tell you "You need to improve fast".

[uvuvwevwevweonyetenyevweugwemu]

I'm getting lost at this thread. So idea of improving using personal parser is to rely that every job give the same utilities and sticking with a permanent team for 2 years. And here I thought I was in a MMO forum.

[Enyalios]

I'm getting lost at this thread. So idea of improving using personal parser is to rely that every job give the same utilities and sticking with a permanent team for 2 years. And here I thought I was in a MMO forum.

Everything you say is either negative or makes zero sense

Sadly personal parsers will never be put into the game and this is a great shame. However there is a way round it without parsers that would satisfy both sides of the argument; A score card based on contribution. They already have fates and hunts scored indirectly by contribution so how hard is it at dungeon/raid/primals end to give a score card? Colour code, number it in a % I don’t care just show people they’re helping or not

[KaldeaSahaline]

What I would suggest is to get around the "Lack of context". It offers a percentage of the maximum DPS you can put out with your ilvl and gear. So let's say SMN can pull off a maximum of 5'000 DPS and Joe Bloggs pulls off 2'500. The personal parser could say "You pulled off 2'500 DPS.This is 50% of your potential. Keep trying to improve your score!" It's up to the player to see what maximum they can hit. It will scale with your character's stats too, so it's always the maximum you can pull off with that very gear. You could even have differing responses dependent on the percentage reached. For example "This is 10% of your potential. You have a lot to learn. Keep practicing!", and "This is 99% of your potential. Great job! Think you can eke out the last 1%?" - since then it'll encourage them to improve with differing urgencies dependent on their performance. So a high performance would get a little encouragement, a low performance would tell you "You need to improve fast".

To be clear, you're suggesting a fixed value calculation correct? In that not based on any external buffs/debuffs. I.e. no slashing/no cards, Trick attack etc right? Otherwise you'd need to make sure it works across every possible comp and account for varying RNG.

Would you have the system determine raw DPS withstanding those effects or would you artificially inflate them (i.e. maximum as of personal, measured against actual dps with raid buffs)?

Then you'd need to maintain that over every single patch cycle and expansion to make sure the calcs are up to date, etc.

It's a lot of work, and adds a ton of questions, and honestly isn't even that valuable.

I can think of a slightly better alternative. Unmitigated official parser for all platforms. Punish people who harass and keep it moving.

[Sebazy]

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.

Of course I appreciate that there's a bigger elephant in the room here. But I also appreciate that simply taking a percentage of people from 2200 DPS up to 2500 is still a victory and nothing to be sniffed at. I'll happily take any improvement over what we have because lets face it, this game is too casual centric for us to get the integrated group parser we really want. And yes, I've already made a bunch of suggestions similar to this over the years, ironically including a potency per second based dungeon ranking and a gold saucer mini game that's pretty much what SSS should have been in the first place.

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.

I actually agree wholeheartedly. The thing is, SE are pretty conservative when it comes to this game, I suspect a cop-out is pretty much the best thing we can hope for realistically. Compare this thread to similar suggestions that were made a few years ago. This discussion is surprisingly positive imho with a healthy split of naysayers actually wanting more like yourself. You don't have to look that far back to see the same sort of suggestion getting hammered and shot down by swathes of people who flat out didn't want any form of parsing in their game. I'll take that thanks <3

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.

I really wish I was exaggerating, alas, that's not something screenshots do. And no, they weren't dead the whole time (5 deaths, and they got raised reasonably promptly on all but one occasion, there's no way I was hard casting a raise on them after their performance earlier on), neither were they lagging or DCing, their movement was smooth and consistent, as was their partners.

Looking at the log a bit more closely would almost have you believe they were sat in the corner AFK but the replay shows otherwise. From the first minute alone I'd almost wonder if they were either a bot or simply auto following their partner and being multi boxed. But once the panic clearly sets in and they pretty much drop any attempt at casting much of anything, you can clearly see that they are aimlessly running around with all of their effort being channeled into simply staying alive. They simply shouldn't have been there as they didn't have the mechanical aptitude or awareness to cope with the content. As unbelievable as it is, it would have been better for them to simply be AFK as at least they wouldn't have been such a burden on myself or the one other decent healer there.

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

Here's a sobering link for you.

To say I felt drained after that ~1 and a half hour Rabanastre would be an understatement. And this is coming from someone who did 10hour+ raid days on the first week of Gordias.

Any sort of thing that helps avoid experiences like that is a good thing in my eyes. It won't turn that BLM into a Leith anytime soon, but every little bit helps in these cases.

[RichardButte]

What I would suggest is to get around the "Lack of context". It offers a percentage of the maximum DPS you can put out with your ilvl and gear. So let's say SMN can pull off a maximum of 5'000 DPS and Joe Bloggs pulls off 2'500. The personal parser could say "You pulled off 2'500 DPS. This is 50% of your potential. Keep trying to improve your score!" It's up to the player to see what maximum they can hit. It will scale with your character's stats too, so it's always the maximum you can pull off with that very gear. You could even have differing responses dependent on the percentage reached. For example "This is 10% of your potential. You have a lot to learn. Keep practicing!", and "This is 99% of your potential. Great job! Think you can eke out the last 1%?" - since then it'll encourage them to improve with differing urgencies dependent on their performance. So a high performance would get a little encouragement, a low performance would tell you "You need to improve fast".

This could work as well.

Just some form of metric to actually determine how well you're doing would be a start.

I can think of a slightly better alternative. Unmitigated official parser for all platforms. Punish people who harass and keep it moving.

I'd still take the idea over the nothing we have now, though.

[uvuvwevwevweonyetenyevweugwemu]

Everything you say is either negative or makes zero sense

Sadly personal parsers will never be put into the game and this is a great shame. However there is a way round it without parsers that would satisfy both sides of the argument; A score card based on contribution. They already have fates and hunts scored indirectly by contribution so how hard is it at dungeon/raid/primals end to give a score card? Colour code, number it in a % I don’t care just show people they’re helping or not

It's not a shame to have a hindrance. I get people don't have time to practice runs for learning stuff, the only common thing they have is rushing through contents, social pressure is not something you fix by throwing the game out the window with a parser. I've agreed to color-based score card in the past and that's basically what they're asking.

[Paladinleeds]

To be clear, you're suggesting a fixed value calculation correct? In that not based on any external buffs/debuffs. I.e. no slashing/no cards, Trick attack etc right? Otherwise you'd need to make sure it works across every possible comp and account for varying RNG.
...
I can think of a slightly better alternative. Unmitigated official parser for all platforms. Punish people who harass and keep it moving.

Yes, I am. It would be a fixed value calculation based on the buffs that individual job brings. No external forces. It would be the maximum that is possible with that individual class. SE already take into account individual max DPS into account (and put it at a percentage for the encounter) when designing encounters so they know what each job is capable of. They also know all the stat weightings etc, so it could easily be an automated calculation based on the stats that automatically scales with stats (pulling from the same dataset that the stat weights and potency calculation pulls from). And let's be fair, SE have flat out said they won't release an unmitigated official parser. Numerous times. What we're doing is speculating on building something they very well may add.