Letter to MR Yoshi: Why parses system is destroying the ffxiv world.

[Shurrikhan]

You are neglecting key difference. First and foremost, FFXIV is not WoW nor does it boast even a fraction of the equivalent playerbase. The two cannot be directly compared in this regard because you'll inevitably see worse offenders in a game with several times the subscription numbers. It's no different than assuming Balmung or Gilgamesh are terrible servers because you come across more jerks from there than anywhere else. Considering Balmung once had more than triple the players of smaller servers, it's hardly surprising you will see more jerks from Balmung than say, Zalera.

Secondly, WoW focuses almost exclusively on raiding. Therefore, it fosters a stronger competitive environment—a fact made all the more evident with open world PvP. This inevitably attracts a more aggressive element. None of this occurs in FFXIV, thus you will see less people openly abusing parsers because the mindset between each game is different.

Finally, it ultimately comes down to moderation. If players who do abuse parsers are swiftly dealt with, this becomes a non-issue long term. The only way this ever balloons into a serious problem is if SE allowed it to happen. Regardless, their stance is entirely counterproductive to the game's design. As someone mentioned elsewhere, we have a game dedicated almost exclusively to pumping out damage—so much so, even tanks and healers are expected to contribute—yet the game goes out of its way to conceal all that information. Even worse, they waste development time and resources on frivolous pursuits in the name of "improving player skill!" which accomplish nothing, i.e., the tacked on job gauges, when a parser does precisely what they want.

While I am in agreement with almost everything you've said in this thread... Two things:

1. How is WoW any more focused on raiding than XIV is? Both have about the same amount of side-content, the only real difference being that apart from "pet battles" (analogous to our TT more than our LotV), the side content still uses the same main gameplay systems. If anything, there tends to be more actually useful things one can do (e.g. to improve their character) outside of raiding in WoW than XIV... PvP also sees hugely more focus there, and yet I've never seen any WoW PvPer somehow consider Battlegrounds, PvP Raids, Brawls, or Arenas as part of "raiding".

2. Why should parsers be uniquely saddled with a moderation check when the harassment is merely changing mediums, rather than being newly produced? That's like saying these newfangled Blu-Rays should be uniquely checked for pirating just because they're a distinct medium from DVDs... It's simply harassment. If whether the claims made are actually evidenced by fact or not matters, then it's not yet harassment, but merely criticism. Until people are going out of their way to harass someone, to demean their reputation, or are putting someone down without any reasonable potential to incite improvement, we're not yet at harassment. And once they are doing those things, the source is utterly irrelevant.

I strongly suspect that the frequency of actual harassment over poor performance would decrease with ubiquitous parser usage. People are far more assertive of suspicions than they are of fact, especially when acting in an officious manner. The more doubt possible, the more heavy-handedness is applied to compensate. I've had another DPS harass me (as in constant spam tells after the dungeon until I blocked them) for my openers despite clearing trash mobs and bosses nearly as quickly when he was "brb; bio" for 4 minutes straight. I thought he was just trolling at first. Sadly not. Over the last four years, I have seen (what was tending towards, but, unless the confrontation extended beyond the relevant content, never actually reached) harassment in DF groups only a handful of times, and in all but one case it was by the lowest performing player. (The only exception was a "speedrun Warrior" who kept imploding when he technically should have lived if he'd had an experience healer, but that's still iffy in terms of practical performance, given that the healer stated quite clearly that she only just swapped from SMN to SCH....)

I may have provoked some of that spam by mentioning, just the once, that Spread Shot works well on multiple targets, but that's about where I draw the line. Asking, "Hey, DRG, could we start clearing up these packs a bit quicker?" (as he fails to AoE in a 5+ mob pull) is not. And while it may be easier for the tank to notice what's going wrong and why when a parser is available, there is very, very little difference to the confrontations, if any, that ensue.

so having a public parser means overhauling GM policy and I am sure SE does not want all that extra work, time, and money investment. Much easier to just say no parsers.

How? The ToA says "no third party tools". This would not be that. And the GM policy is likely already immured in further unwritten guidelines; setting aside the question of "could this finding be made only through the use of a parser" would only make their job easier and their policies simpler.

Then you look at this game, and there really isn't any competitive gameplay in it outside of PvP (That's a joke/discussion for another time). On top of that, this game's inherent mechanics and enrage checks promote (if not force) healers and tanks to push as much dps as humanly possible to kill something in the appropriate time. There isn't anything wrong with that per say, but then as you say they hide relevant information that makes it impossible to actually tell who is good or bad at the game. This is a pretty big failure in the game's design in itself. You can't expect a competitive raiding environment to not have a means of gauging itself, and I think that's what the OP, and others like them, seem to honestly forget.

So, world firsts and clear progress are competitive in WoW but not in XIV? How does that work?

Healers are also just as expected to deal damage during healing downtime in WoW as here, multiple specs even needing to weave it in in order to regenerate resources or accelerate utilities. One healer spec even heals solely through DPS. That only deepened in recent years with the removal of MP costs from most basic offensive spells, as that was the only limiting constraint leading to "full sustain" (to intentionally and tactically... do nothing) downtime previously.