Survey: Community Opinions Regarding Parsing/Parsers in Final Fantasy XIV

[Tridus]

Whoa, this thread heated up. Let's be respectful, folks.

Demonizing the individuals on the other side of the topic just makes you look foolish.

*Now that's odd. I posted this several hours ago. I have no idea why it didn't pop up until 8:27 pm. Another weird thing, Sebazy quoted my post but there is no duplicate and the time stamp for my post is over an hour later.

Has there been a forum issue, moderators?

Alexander intervened and moved your post to where it needed to be seen.

[Tridus]

Raiders would adapt. I agree they would and always do. I have a hypothetical question about that though. Would they be able to adapt to not using any parsers at all? Say the combat log was removed (since that's what parsers read) and thus, they could no longer be used at all. Could raiders still adapt to that?

FYI - ACT is actually reading FFXIV's network data (unless you change a setting to make it read memory, which is not recommended). If you removed the combat log but sent the same data across the wire, ACT would keep working just fine. You might be thinking of WoW parsers, which have API access to the combat log. The logs that get uploaded to FFLogs are written by ACT from that network data, not FFXIV itself. Breaking ACT as a group parser would require the server to send less combat data to the client, because if the server doesn't tell you how much damage anybody else is doing, ACT can't report it. It'd only be able to tell you your numbers, in effect becoming a personal parser.

And yes, they could. There would be side effects though, like having to tune fights less tightly because the lack of information would make it harder on groups to figure out what optimal rotations and melds are. Raiders were clearing stuff before there were accurate parsers, but having less reliable data has impacts on that.

The real impact of that would be felt farther down the chain. The top tier can adapt and figure out how to clear the fight, but the people who rely on rotation and meld guides the top tier produce? They'd have real trouble figuring out what's optimal themselves with the game giving even less feedback than it already does and without others having the data to produce demonstrably quality guides (thus making it harder to tell apart a guide from someone who actually knows what they're talking about and someone who doesn't). That would likely widen the gap between the top and the middle even more.

[Nedkel]

But you need a parser to see the DPS number O.o

You dont need a parser to play the game.
Its not a necessity to know who is doing what dps.

They can and they will.
But there are other sideeffects from a pure parserfree FFXIV.
Clearrates for Savage will probably go down.
Statweights will be unknown for long periods into the patch cycles if not unknown at all. So gearing would be more like a guessing game.
Job guides will be based more on opinions and feelings instead of facts.

All this won’t change much for the hardcore raiders but midcore and casuals may suffer hard from this.

On tank guides you could see everyone giving an advice to put all efforts into determination/direct hit, instead of Tenacity, because that brings about 2% more dps for the tank, despite tenacity giving 5% damage mitigation and 5% + 5% > 7% dps.
Thats not helping creating a proper guides at all, because community and guides creators focus entirely on tank dps, instead of some useful numbers and stats. Thats some madness, like how much of an impact the 2% would give out of 1-2k dps comparing to 5% mitigation out of 5k incoming damage.

[Deithwen]

snip

And yet a parser is necessary to play your job at it's maximum potential.

It becomes a necessity to know the other's DPS when you're doing high level content. Imagine the following situation : you set up a static and progress on the last available raid. Thing is your group reaches enrage every time without clearing it. No mistakes are made, no death. In this case it's DPS problem : one member is probably lower than he should be. How do you know which person needs to put more work on his gameplay without a parser ?

Also, your statement about stats, thing is we have to use a parser to understand the substats effects. It is not possible without it.

[Awha]

Lol, wasn't their an issue about a year ago regarding a host for one of FFXIV broadcasting events or something getting bashed for their performance during the event. While one event, pretty sure bashing a host for their performance does not help ones case when in SE's eyes when it comes to parse harassment is not a thing. I do not know all of the details read about this many moons ago, but no matter the details issues like this no matter how few and far between they are likely does not distill confidence in making such a tool widely available.

Once again I do not remember the details, but while the community may forget pretty sure the ones in charge of FFXIV will never forget. Personally I do feel they see the value of ACT and FFlogs, but simply do not have the desire to make it widely available. Granted getting ACT is not all that hard, but a hoop or two still needs to be jumped through to gain access to the tool. I think we should count our blesses, I remember a few FC mates talking about how SE use to treat third party programs in the past with FFXI. They were not so understanding or so I have been told.

PS my English is horrible sorry about that.

[HoodRat]

I addressed comments like that already:

You've posted multiple times about how harassment is against the ToS now, so from that we can infer that you believe, for whatever reason, that harassment will be okay if an official parser is released. I fail to see how you flip-flopping your stance from

mass toxicity because of Parsers

to

you do not see it a lot

addresses that.

On tank guides you could see everyone giving an advice to put all efforts into determination/direct hit, instead of Tenacity, because that brings about 2% more dps for the tank, despite tenacity giving 5% damage mitigation and 5% + 5% > 7% dps.
Thats not helping creating a proper guides at all, because community and guides creators focus entirely on tank dps, instead of some useful numbers and stats. Thats some madness, like how much of an impact the 2% would give out of 1-2k dps comparing to 5% mitigation out of 5k incoming damage.

Some people actually believe that doing more damage is better than slightly decreasing the amount of overhealing the healers do. Crazy right?

[Adeacia]

Some people actually believe that doing more damage is better than slightly decreasing the amount of overhealing the healers do. Crazy right?

I can't speak for all healers of course but with me, the tank taking less damage means I'm dealing more. I admit I don't know if the healer dps would equal the slight drop in tank dps but it's not a total loss.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

I can't speak for all healers of course but with me, the tank taking less damage means I'm dealing more. I admit I don't know if the healer dps would equal the slight drop in tank dps but it's not a total loss.

Actually, you wouldn't. The near negligible excess damage would be covered through HoTs. Mitigation has a threshold in this game. Once it's been determined precisely how much is required to survive, anything beyond is wasteful. Hence why Direct Hit is currently valued higher than Tenacity.

Also in my opinion, things like stat weights are things players are not meant to ever see anyway for reasons I've seen in this very topic.

This renders them close to useless. It's already cumbersome we're dependent on third party programs to actually determine what secondary stats do whereas other games relay that information to their playerbase. Changing to where we have no idea what they do makes me why even have the stats in the game to begin with?

[KaldeaSahaline]

if the boss randomly decided to increase enmity on one party member, it would break your shirk combo. If they nerfed nin shadewalker, youd be screwed. If DRG only buffed spear damage instead of all piercing damage, and all buffs were solely for each jobs weapon type, you'd lose so much advantage that you'd be scrambling for a new meta. If healing potency dropped, you'd have no choice but to stay in tank stance and use jobs with mitigation in tank stance. most of you guys vastly overrate your skill and underrate how much the mob design more or less give certain party metas free reign.

If the design of the game forced me to change my playstyle I would. Simple as that. Anything less would result in failure. Not sure why you think suddenly raiding would just fall apart if the meta shifted. While I personally agree that encounter design has stagnated, I'm not entirely sure what your angle here is. If something no longer works/applies, people will adjust. Do you genuinely believe they wouldn't?

Why?

Still proving my point. It limits your experience to the full player base. You do not know how widespread parser harassment is, why are you even posting here on this issue? parser harassment is common, PERIOD. FFXIV is an exception because of SE's strong stance and even WITH THAT, parser harassment still happens, and the funny thing is, you still did not comment on that fact.

So because of it EXISITING TODAY while being against the ToS, it will ONLY increase with a public one, its simple logic. The oonly one is not understanding is you, not us.

Then stop passing your opinion as fact?

If you want to use the numbers (pun intended), it would appear that in this subset of the community (the forum reading one), that the one not understanding would be you, not me, as indicated by the number of likes my posts have received versus yours.

Me, personally, I don't care if people run the parser as long as they aren't discriminating/harassing others due to it.

Question for you personally. Do you believe that performance based discrimination in game is a bad thing? Not harassment, or job based, simply, skill/performance.

If so, do you believe that it is ok to discriminate against me trying to play a professional sport when I am not qualified to do so? How about would it be ok for an employer to discriminate against me because I have less/no experience when compared to a different candidate?

This thread was more or less civilized debating until the last couple of pages, which was something I was glad to see, since so many debates surrounding parsers and raiders tend to turn sour quickly. I’m asking everyone here now to just return to the polite debates that the majority of the thread has been. You can’t get anywhere with name-calling and hostility, and they do nothing for your arguments.

Please inform me if this is applicable to me.

So I have to ask again: when someone says "there will be more harassment", do they mean the above? Do they mean that, since they view being called out (even civilly) as harassment, there will be more of that?

Its something anti-parsers who use that as their main argument need to think about. Because as long as you view accountability as harassment, then yes: there would be more of it.

As for the rest of of your post: If that's how you envision's the FF14 staff, then naturally you'd come to the conclusion that they'd get swamped with reports.

I wish I could like this post more. It's honestly the significantly bigger issue IMO and something I've stated in one of these threads. I truly don't believe policing harassment would be difficult. I think the really difficult piece would be defining harassment. Your example did well to paint a good picture.

I've often asked "anti-parsers" what their personal definition of harassment is. More often than not, I've been ignored sadly

I'll state my personal definition: For me in order for something to be harassment it has to either be incredibly vile specifically directed vulgar language or repeated unsolicited statements and you need to make it clear it is making you uncomfortable.

Singular unwanted criticism does not qualify as harassment in my books. Repeated would qualify though as you stated you were not interested/or asked them to stop. Cursing out of frustration not applicable, but cursing directly at someone for xyz could be (personally I wouldn't report over it unless it was particularly vile).

I apologise in advance Hyomin =/

SNIP roast session

Wish I could like this more. Very well put.

One example of this would be to think about what is considered acceptable within the community within both games. A good starting point would simply be WoW's /spit emote, this sort of behaviour is typically seen as 'acceptable' (Personally I think it's an absolutely disgusting thing to have in a game), something that is reinforced by virtue of that emote being there. On the flipside of the coin, imagine if I went over to Ensemble or some other rival progression FC's house and started throwing out '/em spits on %t' at various people. I'd likely burn every bridge with that FC, earn a firm warning from a GM and get kicked and disowned from my own FC to boot. And rightfully so too, that would be utterly disgraceful behaviour, that's a view I suspect everyone would share, regardless of if they are a raider or casual

I'll retort with my personal example. I have a very strict rule I follow in World PVP games because I actually like PVP. I will only ever gank/kill you once. I do not bother with people that pose no threat/challenge. If I attack you and you don't fight back, I typically stop because again, not fun.

Once I've killed you, I no longer bother you. Sometimes people respect that, sometimes they want a rematch and engage on me. I will defend myself of course. I've had times where people spit on me for killing them. This isn't offensive to me, it's lets me know they're unhappy with what I did. In WoW it was actually somewhat useful back then. It allowed me to display my frustration towards a player I could not communicate with (i.e. being ganked by a skull 4-6 times back to back), or being repeatedly camped by 3-4 person group also questing.

I think in your example the GM part is a little silly. Unless you were emote spamming which I think is punishable? Everything else fits though.

There's a joke I read on Reddit: you're far more likely to be banned for hurting someone's feelings than you are for blatantly hacking.

Once again: even if an official parser is released, harassment will still be against the ToS. This is starting to look like those healer dps threads where the pro side kept saying one thing and the anti said kept arguing against something no one even said ever.

Preach.

End of the day a parser helps, but it is not needed to improve. If someone wants to improve they would use the wonderful tome of knowledge known as google. No amount of money or time SE puts into a parser or means to teach players their class will ever force someone that currently does not care enough to use google to find info regarding their class and performance. A parser does help refine ones play, but it is far from needed, and often times all someone needs is a quick google search.

How are you going to google something that doesn't exist without a parser? You going to trust some random guys feelings over mathematical data you can verify yourself?

Hmm, I thought I add more prospective to see where I am coming from in why an official parser is likely forever be no (private one or some kind of performance feedback AFTER you exit a run may be a different matter though.)

First off consider the censorship already in the game:
1. Can't send tells/ manage your social list, etc while in a dungeon
2. Chat removal from feast

While I know you and I are currently not agreeing on other topics, please understand that I believe BOTH of these issues should never have existed.

If I was launching an MMO with instances today, I would not have a restriction on tells/social stuff while in there. That's silly that it's even still an issue 3+ years later.

Chat removal from Feast is another perfect example of Yoshi and crew getting something wrong IMO. It's like you have a small issue with your toe, so you go to the hospital and instead of analyzing the issue, they cut your leg off. It's a knee-jerk reaction that the community has shown they weren't terribly fond off based on reddit/forums.

This should never have happened and should also be fixed IMO.

Now wouldn't you find it EXTREMELY hypocritical to put a parser and leave these other 2 forms of sensorship alone? When things are said like" harassment will still be against the ToS. This is starting to look like those healer dps threads where the pro side kept saying one thing and the anti said kept arguing against something no one even said ever." such things can be used for the SAME EXACT REASON to put chat back in feast or be able to send tells out of a duty. IDK about other people but even in WoW I never had to deal with random tells from the outside giving me harassment. It was useful as hell to send a tell to someone privately that is in your party about another member to work out some way to deal with the less then ideal situation.

Not hypocritical per-se, but inconsistent? Sure.

They can and they will.
But there are other sideeffects from a pure parserfree FFXIV.
Clearrates for Savage will probably go down.
Statweights will be unknown for long periods into the patch cycles if not unknown at all. So gearing would be more like a guessing game.
Job guides will be based more on opinions and feelings instead of facts.

All this won’t change much for the hardcore raiders but midcore and casuals may suffer hard from this.

I agree with this assessment based on my personal experience.

So then they really wouldn't be able to adapt. I figured as much. Just shows how dependant people are on these things.

I'm still on the fence about parsers. I see the benefits, but also the drawbacks. Also in my opinion, things like stat weights are things players are not meant to ever see anyway for reasons I've seen in this very topic.

? Where did you get him saying they wouldn't be able to adapt from that? He very clearly stated he believed they would adapt, and that the lower skilled echelons of the playerbase would likely suffer the most from the lack of information, both points I personally agree with.

You state that stat weights are things we as players shouldn't have insight into. Do you also believe that the way the game currently handles crit/dh and other percentages is good design? In that they give you absolutely no bearing how useful more of it is, or what % you're currently operating near?

You dont need a parser to play the game.
Its not a necessity to know who is doing what dps.

Nothing would make me happier than getting grouped in DF with you to see if your words match your actions.

It's also not a necessity to have a car, but it sure can be handy (and dangerous too).

On tank guides you could see everyone giving an advice to put all efforts into determination/direct hit, instead of Tenacity, because that brings about 2% more dps for the tank, despite tenacity giving 5% damage mitigation and 5% + 5% > 7% dps.
Thats not helping creating a proper guides at all, because community and guides creators focus entirely on tank dps, instead of some useful numbers and stats. Thats some madness, like how much of an impact the 2% would give out of 1-2k dps comparing to 5% mitigation out of 5k incoming damage.

Defense is irrelevant on tanks. Nothing kills us short of the absolute most difficult content while progging. We always have way more defense than we currently need. Why bolster that and cause additional overheal when we can do more DPS, which would make less healing required than taking less damage.

Do you know what 250 less damage taken is called? Overheal.

I can't speak for all healers of course but with me, the tank taking less damage means I'm dealing more. I admit I don't know if the healer dps would equal the slight drop in tank dps but it's not a total loss.

You can actually do both. Tanks can deal more damage and with smart GCD and oGCD usage you can heal all incoming damage with no difficulty and push more DPS.

[Awha]

How are you going to google something that doesn't exist without a parser? You going to trust some random guys feelings over mathematical data you can verify yourself?

If I happen to play on console or had no desire to download a third party program I would follow the guides and information on internet. Also people have put together decent rotations from just class previews, they are far from perfect and if say SE blocked ACT tomorrow and a new class came out. The theory crafting community with time would come up with an on point rotation. Granted it would take a little more time for the community to come up with said rotation but I am pretty sure they will be able to do it. People are funny like that, if they want something bad enough they will figure it out no matter how long it takes. Parse makes the gathering and viewing of data easier, but I am pretty sure those work on said programs know how to view the data without the use of a parse so in short they would still have access to that data.

End of the day ACT is not going anywhere we will still have access to the tool. I just highly doubt SE will ever release any official means of tracking performance especially after one of their hosts for nico nico was more or less bash their sub-par numbers. Granted it is one case I highly doubt Yoshi-P will be forgetting said case anytime soon. Maybe if powers shift and Yoshi-P is moved to another project we might get an official one, but while he is behind the helm I highly doubt it.

Granted that shafts console players, and players that wish to refine their play without the use of third party tools. I still fail to see how that is SE problem. We have an option available to us, while it may not be readily available to everyone that is not SE problem. SE tends to stick to their guns no matter how pointless people feel about it. I mean I would love for them to bring back the chat feature in PvP and be able to mail between my own characters on a server. More or less many have shown neither action does much of anything to counteract the issue they were put in place to combat, but we still have said limitations.

I mean unless by some means everyone can prove that the whole community wants this and the whole Koike incident never happens again I do not see us ever getting an official one. I would like to have an official parse, but I also do not see the point we have ACT and FFlogs an official one would be nice but not necessary.

Also If the person really wants to refine their rotation and play that much they will find a means, even if that means bugging a raid buddy to parse them.

Though thankfully from what I can tell not many are asking for them to be removed, I certainly am not. Sure I would like for FFLogs to be opt-in instead of out, but I do not want it to be removed.

Maybe if we asked them to release a parser on mogstation we might get an official one that way.