An Alternative? to parsers..

[Nedkel]

And about the parser thing, I think none of you have really stopped to think in how many ways it can backfire, and my guess is that many of you would never be able to understand to what point it could unless you had a time machine which you could use to witness in first person how it backfired in other games.

It is not only the community issues. Right now the rotation of most jobs, if not all of them, are player based. What I mean is that there are several things you have to consider: you have to manage and refresh dots, align your abilities with self buffs and party buffs that you need to apply and refresh properly and with the proper timing. One of the effects of these rotations is that they are very fun, at least for me, but another effect is that the gap between a player who can do it properly and the one who can't is huge, and that is fine in my book.

However a parser would make these differences obvious to everyone and this would lead to tensions among the playerbase. The problem is that the devs don't want tensions among the playerbase, so they would fix it. How? Easy: dumbing down the rotations. Dots? They get applied automagically when you get a crit. Self buffs? They become a passive trait, so nobody has to apply them and refresh them. The combo thing? Reduce it's potency and make it proc based, so in the end, all the player has to do is smash one or two buttons all day long and smash a third one when it is highlighted. Tank/dps stances? Remove them, tanks are always tanks. Enmity? Increase the tank multipliers for enmity generation to ridiculous numbers to the point that enmity is pretty much automatic. Now the rotation and gameplay is not a player based one, but a rng based one. Sure there will still be a little difference between those who can do it perfectly and those who can't, but it will be minimal, and so the damage output will mostly be based on the gear.

Parser on the other end will result in complete balance reconstruction, due to the playerbase paying attention only on DPS (like in wow) and not the other stuff around the design of specific class.
It will hurt the game design on a much higher level than the simplification of the certain classes.
Why? Because without parser, its up to the game developer how he will design the class, he will make sure to not make it overcomplicated, but may do something cool that doesnt fit into the "performance need", developer could give it a lot of aoe or single target damage, several boosts for the party members, aoe CC tools and etc stuff which on the dps meter will not be counted into the score.
When the playerbase is weaponized with numbers, the things happen to changeover drastically, from the moment or two people will categorize the classes for not the fun these are giving (redmage is awesome) or how they support the party, or how long they will be alive or how much CC or skillshoot do they have, but how much damage do they deal. That will lead straight forward to balance issues, people will stop playing a class with lower possible dps (why they should? because they will not want to be called) for the sake of the other with the highest, giving game developer false and bad feedback on how they should balance "issues" made of air. SE will need to buff certain lower dps classes in order to cater the numberophiles needs, ending up with some classes you will not be able to balance out due to the utilities they bring. At this point if you have a class that does no damage but has a lot of utility and fun to play mechanics, buffing its damage will result in making this specific class overpowered, you cant nerf or buff it either because it will drop the class from each end to another, what you will do?

You will just flat out the gameplay of specific class, taking away fun mechanics, utility, CC or buffs so it will no longer be overpowered, since it has dps on pair with other classes, and you end up with balance purely gray and classes not different to each other. Thats what actually happen in League of legends few years ago, they were just giving damage to each champion and then they were forced to delete some of their mechanics away, because it turns out a mage (which got dmg buffed) with teleporting skill every few second is far stronger than a stationary mage that deals like 10% damage more, what they did? They increased the teleportation cooldown several times, and the character was no longer fun as it was before, killed it entirely.
Valuing dps is not hard task to do, but how do you value the part of the character designs that doesnt bring damage but instead is helping entire team or keeping you alive? Thats the biggest problem which comes with balance, and i bet SE would not want their playerbase to cry over certain classes, because they dont do as much dps as the others and asks for buffs. That will be annoying.
Basing balance around numbers will kill class diversity and fun, its not actually good at all.

[Tridus]

You will just flat out the gameplay of specific class, taking away fun mechanics, utility, CC or buffs so it will no longer be overpowered, since it has dps on pair with other classes, and you end up with balance purely gray and classes not different to each other.

I don't know what game you think you're playing, but nobody cares about CC already. Utility and buffs are all DPS oriented, and people actively want them over jobs without them. Why? Little thing called enrage timers. Which are based on DPS.

Turns out making mechanics that require a certain amount of DPS to win causes players to prioritize DPS. Who knew?

Thats what actually happen in League of legends few years ago, they were just giving damage to each champion and then they were forced to delete some of their mechanics away, because it turns out a mage (which got dmg buffed) with teleporting skill every few second is far stronger than a stationary mage that deals like 10% damage more, what they did? They increased the teleportation cooldown several times, and the character was no longer fun as it was before, killed it entirely.

Teleporting is extremely powerful in a MOBA. Any class with it is at a distinct advantage to one without it. This isn't rocket science.

Valuing dps is not hard task to do, but how do you value the part of the character designs that doesnt bring damage but instead is helping entire team or keeping you alive? Thats the biggest problem which comes with balance, and i bet SE would not want their playerbase to cry over certain classes, because they dont do as much dps as the others and asks for buffs. That will be annoying.
Basing balance around numbers will kill class diversity and fun, its not actually good at all.

... again, what game are you playing? Balance is already a problem FFXIV, people are already complaining about it, and SE has already said they're addressing some of it. This has been going on since forever, and it's all based around numbers.

So long as the game says you need X DPS to kill the boss before it wipes you, people will be prioritizing DPS. Hiding the DPS doesn't solve that, it just makes it harder for people to figure out what the problem is and how fix it.

Maybe you should sick to single players game where it doesn't matter if certain jobs are completely nonviable in some content. That doesn't work so well in a MMO.

[Nedkel]

I don't know what game you think you're playing, but nobody cares about CC already. Utility and buffs are all DPS oriented, and people actively want them over jobs without them. Why? Little thing called enrage timers. Which are based on DPS.

Turns out making mechanics that require a certain amount of DPS to win causes players to prioritize DPS. Who knew?
<snip>.

I am playing Paladin in FF14 and played tanks in other games as well.
Paladin statistically is not doing the greatest dps out there, yet is the most deff class oriented and has a lot of utility for entire team.
Would you imagine him getting dmg buff to do as much aoe damage as warrior?
Orienting entire game on DPS is a bad design and should be gone, it makes classes flat in playstyle.
Btw CC is still nice on trash mobs, it works wonders if you pull too much of them.

WoW is over 13 years old and is still by far the largest MMO on the market. If that's failure, sign me up for some failure. Also, what are you basing that number on? I sure hope it's not a Blizzard subscriber count compared to Warcraft Census count that I already debunked.

It doesn't, since none of those are subscription MMOs.
Almost like the market shifted and players moved on to different genres entirely. Shocking!
Yeah, it's 13 years old, the current expansion is basically done, and the new one doesn't have a release date yet. Not exactly an abnormal market pattern for MMOs.

Its still a market that shares the mostly the same customers. World of warcraft is losing ground under the feet despite it being so successful.
It could be the biggest, and by far the biggest when it comes in number of players active decrease. The games i have mentioned are old enough and fair in comparison to World of wacraft, did you see them losing numbers to the wow degree? no

New content will bring back some old playerbase, but if the game is doing so well, why does it lose so many in between the expansions? Maybe newbies are not attracted to the game? Why? Who knows, one of the reasons is community, thats for sure.

If you're playing a DPS job, doing 160 DPS in Rabanastre is an extremely clear indicator of someone's ability to play the game. Either that or an indicator of their desire to watch Netflix and get carried.

Kick them away, you could see if they use skills or not, its not "rocket science".

Except the tank here would get called out on poor performance. Why should DPS get a pass?

There is no justice in this world, also for a guys who call the tanks, because they could wait another half an hour for another tank to take his place, lol.

And where do you think the guides come from? The people making them first have to figure out what the optimal rotation is. They do that by using parsers.

The same way people from tera or SWOTR do.
The discussion is about the ingame supported parser, making it easy for everyone to use, not about the third party dps counting tool.
Maybe you are not calling people because of their poor performance, but believe me there are others who will call you even if you are playing different class and you do like 20% less dps. It does not support a good habits across community.

Would be cool if you said something of any substance here, but okay.

Its not me calling earth and skies because everyone in the universe is so bad and they need a parser to judge them. xD

Your definition of failure is very unique. There isn't a MMO developer on the planet who wouldn't trade places with Blizzard this second. SE included. WoW is the most successful MMO ever made by such a huge margin that nobody else is in the same league.

And the biggest playerbase lose of the gaming industry as well.

Someone playing badly in PBUG is going to just get themselves killed a lot, which is just fine. Someone playing badly on a CoD team is most definitely getting called out on it with language far worse than anything you'll find in XIV.

Never experienced a calling on poor performance on games like Rainbow six even on games like battlefield and etc. There is nothing be mad about in these games.
Do you want to bring world of warcraft experience into this game?
I dont, no thank you, the community there is super toxic, since its super easy to judge others by their average dps. Giving players a tool to judge others performance will lead the community into being more and more toxic, and it doesnt matter if someone is an ice mage or not, there will be situation where people will be called for poor dps even if their class is not good enough on it or their EQ is not good enough or have lags or whatever. There will be players called and there will undeserved calls and harassment. You could even see it on the blizzard forum, when someone is complaining, there is always someone bringing up something against the OP straight from the wacraft logs.

You dont want to take it into the consideration, not only people who are afking or spend time watching netfil pressing one button will be called but also ones who just dont know how to play, or doesnt have good eq because they play the class for first time. Tension will be spreaded between those who deserve and on those who doesnt.
Will you be able to judge someone who will do 30% less dps than you or even 40%? Will you call him a scrub? You may not, but if the tool would be widespread for community there will be undeserved calls and this will create toxic enviroment SE doesnt want to have in this game eot.

[Sebazy]

Btw CC is still nice on trash mobs, it works wonders if you pull too much of them.

I actually have to look at my bars to remember where Repose is now, it's been that long since I've used it =/

CC was massive in the betas and very early days of ARR, I'd routinely have 2/3rds of each pull slept so the DPS could focus stuff down one by one in lower level dungeons. With aoe now? If it's not a Holy stun, it's usually a waste of time.

[Nedkel]

I actually have to look at my bars to remember where Repose is now, it's been that long since I've used it =/

CC was massive in the betas and very early days of ARR, I'd routinely have 2/3rds of each pull slept so the DPS could focus stuff down one by one in lower level dungeons. With aoe now? If it's not a Holy stun, it's usually a waste of time.

Stunning a trash mob/lesser boss and stopping them from aoe feels really nice. :P
I am using shield bash all the time, its my last hope button and saved me many times as a PLD.