Thank you Yoshi for your stance on DPS meters

[Packetdancer]

Simple solution for "toxicity" in endgame content such as Ex/Savave/Ultimate would be SE themselves Gating specific content (WITH STRICT RESTRICTIONS) instead of having the player base doing it themselves.

I think the counter-argument to that would be the idea that normal-mode versions of the raids are supposed to be that gating mechanic; you have to complete the normal mode raids to attempt the savage one. Whether or not you think that's an effective gate is perhaps a different matter.

That said, tuning gating mechanics isn't necessarily a terrible thing.

The Secret World, prior to its reboot, had a mechanic with an NPC literally called the Gatekeeper. (I speak specifically of the pre-reboot version of the game because don't know if they kept Gatekeeper in the post-reboot one; I fell off the game around that time.) Before this entity would let you into the Nightmare group content—more or less their equivalent of Savage—you had to defeat him in a fight where he used Nightmare-style mechanics... albeit scaled down somewhat, because you had to defeat him in solo combat. Anyone who made it into Nightmare content had to have been able to beat the Gatekeeper to make it to the content in the first place.

If this is genuinely a huge problem—which I'm not personally convinced it is, I admit—then gating the content on a solo instanced battle like that, one you had to get through on your own merit, would be one possible way to address it. Heck, make it so you have to pass the test on any given job to unlock the ability to use that job in the associated savage tier; have to pass the tanking test as DRK before you can use DRK in savage, have to pass the healing test as WHM before you can take WHM into savage, have to pass the DPS test as BRD before you can take BRD into savage, etc. Folks who are worried about it could know that if someone's playing a given job in a savage raid they've been able to pass that expansion's gating test as the job they're playing, people who want to get into savage have a fight to test their skills against and improve in, etc.

Don't even really need a DPS meter at that point, though you could certainly have a summary/assessment at the end of the test bout of how well you were doing.

(I admit, however, that I half-suspect that what would happen next is people would complain that because it was solo content, they now have no assurance the person won't be a DPS-greedy glory hound who just wants a high parse and won't play well with others when it comes to group mechanics...)

[Wanzer]

You can already do something to a degree by using a calculator (whether online like the the Stone Sea Sky one) and using one of those dummies with Stone Sea Sky.

It's just a bit of algebra if done manually

But people want to immediately dismiss even using said tool as at least some basic way to get some feedback of improvement.

I'm NOT saying it wouldn't be nice to have one in game like ACT. I'm simply saying there ARE tools you can use to get a rough idea. It's not just about beating said dummy, if you know the amount of time you're allotted to do it, when you beat it in how much time, or didn't beat it and what percentage you were at from that time frame.

It doesn't really help to find our flaws though. They are the tools I'm using usually since I'm not on PC, as you said it helps to give a rough idea of where we are at, but both aren't able to give us any answer to more specific questions. Yeah, it's just for a rough idea at the end, but that rough idea doesn't give us any accurate information to improve ourselves, especially since they don't point directly to our issues, and our issues can be anything. Sure, rotations are simple, it's mostly some basic logic and math, but sometimes there is still a bit more to it.

And the struggle... Yeah, sure, we can go deeper, taking notes of everything we are doing, but the time we would put just to find one issue wouldn't be a two minutes affair; especially if we have to try different things to compare our different results : and that would also mean kinda knowing what our issues are to begin with, and sometimes it's just not that obvious. A simple "yeah, you beat it"/"nope, you failed" isn't really what could help us to improve, same goes for knowing our DPS via the Stone Sea Sky calculator. It's still a good start to gauge where we are at, but it can't really lead us to improvements since we need to know what are our issues to be able to work on them. You can beat the dummy, however it doesn't tell you if you can do better or not. When I was hiting that goddamn 0.3 seconds left, of course I knew something was fishy, but the game itself just tells me "yay, you did it!" when I genuinely want to know "how I did it ?"

So yeah, there is, since years now, the beginning of something on the game itself, that never evolved, but that something is far from enough. Especially for a game that throws some DPS checks at us. So I really find it hard to be satisfied with the current situation.

[BloodRubyXII]

Can we have an actual replay function for Feast Matches now please? Which would eliminate any logical non-cheating reason for any Feast Player to use ACT which is at present, the only possible way to analyze a previous match effectively.

[testname]

I would appreciate Damage Metter only for Savage and only for premade party/static.

So PF with ransoms will be still polluted with people who do 4k dps and think it's fine ( coz they don't know )

also if SE reduce or add potency of 50 to this skill or that skill ( how they tune up jobs compared to others if damage metter are illegal ? - how they know how much % a job is behind others ? )

[Shurrikhan]

You mean that stance where they still allow them despite it being against their ToS but instead of allowing people to actually talk about a problem, they'll silently kick whomever is holding the group back?

As opposed to banning parsers so that instead of simply cutting out the person who is irresponsibly expecting to be carried by 7 others, each quite likely with limited time and patience, every group has to simply give up and disband or kick all players who appear to be performing the worst, regardless of their actual performance?

Though I suppose thrown blame, frequent frustrated disbands, and absurd requirements for joining to avoid leeches now that they cannot be easily identified (or else can threaten to ban you if you kick them for their blatantly obvious underperformance since you must have been parsing to see that they are cutting their AF phase short every time and aren't using CDs), are together just so much less toxic than silently removing the person who has no business there and moving on with the content as intended, right?

[Johaandr]

I took my time to learn a stranger BLM rotation and he did get good.

[Veliena]

Yoshi p's stance on the dps meter is the same as always, the main things he has issues with is the nudity mods and the other features of ACT, such as auto placing markers.

[Penthea]

I'm sure this will lead to constructive and reasonable posts.

My favourite thing is that some people think SE's stance has changed.

It hasn't. They only repeated what they have been saying the whole time, and added some details to elaborate on some things. Nothing has changed.

[StriderShinryu]

One thing that really seems to be evident throughout this thread and others like it is that many players just want the game itself to give some sort of indication of how the players are doing. It doesn't have to be a complete in game parser. It could be anything from just a personal letter grade at the end of an instance to some sort of full on trial/gate test to a full in game parser, but it just needs to be built into the game.

This would make it so that the game itself is providing the guidance and would remove the onus on other players to try to help others but risk being called out for it. Some players just don't have the ability to help others constructively, and some people who receive help take any little bit of even the most polite advice as a great offense. So remove the onus from being on the players.

Sure, this isn't going to solve the problem of some players being jerks, and it's not going to solve the problem of unqualified players trying to be carried, but nothing you can do is going to completely fix that.

[Liam_Harper]

Not true at all. WoW dungeon/raid finder content people don't care as long as it gets done; if anything there's people who should get kicked but dont. In PUG or harder content then yes dps is an issue and people should be pulling their weight.

This was my experience too. In my 6 years or so playing WoW I never got kicked or abused for dps and I wasn't that great. Dps in casual content was very rarely mentioned even in cases when it was exceptionally low, the general opinion being "it's only LFR/dungeons, who cares?".

What's funny about it is that FF14 has exactly the same amount of toxicity in endgame content, it's simply worded differently. Where in WoW someone toxic might say "we wiped because dps sucks, there shouldn't be people below 5k", in FF14 they'll say "group sucks, wtf guys this is easy, I guess healers are afk lol, quit tanking and uninstall plz, we'd be fine if our dps could play, how can you die 3 times on that is it possible to be that bad?". All of which is perfectly fine and 99% of the time won't net you a ban. Just look at the 2600 page thread mostly filled with nightmare runs in instances and tell me FF14 is a toxic free haven.

The game is riddled with toxicity at endgame and we just cover our ears and pretend it's sunshine. I'd say a good amount of it is frustration caused by the lack of parsers, decent players who can see exactly what the issue is in groups but have to stay silent, aren't even allowed to help or give advice and have to endure "dps'ing is easy, you just press buttons, I'm good at the game, wtf healer stop spamming glare reeezz me" from players who are anything but good. It is frustrating and they have to vent somehow.

Again, I don't think parsers in Normal are necessary, it's tourist mode, but carrying dead weight in EX upwards is either high stressful or simply impossible.