Why people still USE ACT knowing their breaking TOS ??

[Espritduo]

To be completely frank with you, people would still look at you with suspicion if FFlogs was opt-in. It would arguably be even worse because you're being denied entry based on a tool you didn't even know existed.

I would say the toxicity around them would be a lot less, even if it isn't completely gone. Let's look at achievement scores as a comparison again. If you're a person who cares about achievements and see a person who hasn't enabled their achievements visible you most likely don't assume it must be because it's really low and they're pathetic. You do assume they must be someone who doesn't take achievements super seriously, since any serious achievement hunter wants to share and show them. But unless you're a real a-hole among a-holes you won't be treating them like trash because of it.

Same with fflogs. If in the opt-in fflogs world a person hasn't enabled it you probably will assume that they must not be a serious hardcore raider since any serious raider would have it enabled, but you would not automatically assume they must suck and treat them like trash unless you were a REALLY huge jerk. Most people, even ones that would have otherwise reacted negatively to poor logs, will give an unknown person in this situation the benefit of proving themselves in a duty first, which is fair. The people that wouldn't even give a person without logs a chance are going to be the super hardcore elite crowd, which if you don't have fflogs enabled, you aren't a part of anyways.

[KageTokage]

FFLogs really just makes raiding stressful to me because I feel like every mistake I make rotation-wise or mechanically is potentially getting smacked onto a permanent record that I have absolutely no control over.

I care about improving and doing well. I do my research on the Balance discord to know that I'm gearing/doing my rotation appropriately. But I'm not going to spend hours re-running the same raids for no purpose but to bloat some arbitrary score only a puny portion of the playerbase knows/cares about when I can be spending that time chasing other more tangible achievements.

The number of incidents where FFLogs has caused toxicity to be directed at me can be counted on one hand, but the mere fact that it enables such behavior at all irritates me. People should concern themselves with how someone performs in the now, not some silly number that can be easily skewed by inconsistent parses or misinterpreted via stupidity. A lot of people will only look at a bad parse without actually looking into what caused it, which can include deaths that were caused by mistakes on the part of other players. I cannot begin to count the number of times I've died at E6S due to getting an air bump circle but not having anyone get into it to keep me from dying for starters.

[Gula]

Actually, that streamer was only "caught" because he had his Twitch information in his character search. If it had not been for that, they never would have done a thing.

GMs can't follow you around and then ban you at will. If no one reports, you can get away with all caps slurs in /shout, bullying, harassment and threats. Anything goes. The difference is if someone reports or not.

[Arohk]

DPS meters are important to see how well you do and become better with your rotation.

[Deceptus]

Quite honestly:

To see who is the dead weight of a group. If you're in higher level content and you are failing dps checks, you need some sort of metric to determine who is or isn't pulling their weight. Since the game gives no indication other than Pass/Fail, ACT is almost a requirement.

In short, you can't have dps checks without a proper gauge of dps. People don't want to waste their time.

[Colt47]

Well, the history behind this whole thing is kind of a mess. The problem goes back to WoW, which had a very linear form of end-game that forced tons of people into doing raiding. You'd have guilds that literally ran 4/5 weekdays doing end-game content and most people, even those who normally didn't like that kind of content, would get looped into it. As time went on players pushed efficiency by developing mods and other UI helper systems to make the fighting easier to deal with. In turn, Blizzard began tuning up fights to compensate for the mods and started adding things like DPS checks, with Brutalis in the Sunwell raid being particularly notorious. DPS meters were developed early on to combat the developers use of DPS checks and the developers in turn tightened the checks until it was too much, so they built in difficulty modes for different tiers of players since it was causing a toxic relationship.

So to put it bluntly: DPS meters have nothing to do with the toxicity as much as the developers making DPS checks. The meters just exist to help people get through fights, and the unfortunate result of this is that it lets other recognize which players are not up to par with pretty high accuracy as the only thing people at end game want to do is clear the content to get the loot. What also compounds things is that DPS checks are often more like gear checks since someone with 490 gear is going to out-perform someone with 480, thus make fights like E6S easier to contend with.

It's a flaw that developed in the Tank -> Healer -> DPS trinity that put most of the hardship of the fight on the DPS role, which to be fair WoW made the easiest role in the game to play. FFXIV on the other hand seems to think that DPS should be super high powered finger DDR with way more button rotation maintenance than either the tank or healer roles. Gunbreaker and Paladin may have a lot of buttons to press but DPS is the role that has the pressure to press those buttons 100% optimally all the time.

And then the people playing DPS also have to deal with long dungeon queues and other barriers to reaching max level so it's basically the hardest role to level and the hardest role to play. On the upside, the only places where the cracks show are in PVP and Savage, which makes sense since those are the modes that push the combat the system the most. I'm sure when they finally get to that FFXI version III they will have something better, but I don't think they are going to try to fix this one. The best thing they could do is animation fixes to the core races from 2.0.

-----------------

Comparing PvP HOT bars to the non PvP ones I think SE devs realize at some level they over did it on complexity with dps. However, it's like they are swinging to two different extremes with them. The PvP bar is too simplified because it puts the core rotation on one button. If someone has a three weapon skill rotation they do not need to have one button to use all the skills. World of Warcraft works fine with the way they have things set up and they don't have a lot of differences between pvp and pve skill sets. Using Machinist as an example, we should have that 1-2-3 combo on buttons 1-2-3. The thing that makes us have to look away from the field and figure out what we need to do next is the deviation to use the Air Anchor and Drill/Bio blaster, on top of unloading all the OGCD Gauss rounds and Ricochette rounds between overheat cycles. I'd get rid of the energy gauge for the robot and just have it as a cool down, probably get rid of the 50 heat gauge auto fill button as that's a pain in the neck and shouldn't even be needed in there with Air Anchor now boosting heat gauge, and make auto-crossbow overwrite the normal aoe shot as it isn't part of a combo.

[Tsumdere]

FFLogs really just makes raiding stressful to me because I feel like every mistake I make rotation-wise or mechanically is potentially getting smacked onto a permanent record that I have absolutely no control over.

I care about improving and doing well. I do my research on the Balance discord to know that I'm gearing/doing my rotation appropriately. But I'm not going to spend hours re-running the same raids for no purpose but to bloat some arbitrary score only a puny portion of the playerbase knows/cares about when I can be spending that time chasing other more tangible achievements.

The number of incidents where FFLogs has caused toxicity to be directed at me can be counted on one hand, but the mere fact that it enables such behavior at all irritates me. People should concern themselves with how someone performs in the now, not some silly number that can be easily skewed by inconsistent parses or misinterpreted via stupidity. A lot of people will only look at a bad parse without actually looking into what caused it, which can include deaths that were caused by mistakes on the part of other players. I cannot begin to count the number of times I've died at E6S due to getting an air bump circle but not having anyone get into it to keep me from dying for starters.

If you join groups and they are openly toxic to you because of your parses (which are perfectly fine btw), you don't want to be in that group in the first place. FFLogs are saving you a lot of grief by letting you know which parties and people to avoid. Good raiders will look at the circumstances surrounding low numbers. Bad raiders will unga bunga number only.

Removal of parsers won't make those people less toxic - they'll find other reasons to be just as mean.

[Colt47]

If you join groups and they are openly toxic to you because of your parses (which are perfectly fine btw), you don't want to be in that group in the first place. FFLogs are saving you a lot of grief by letting you know which parties and people to avoid. Good raiders will look at the circumstances surrounding low numbers. Bad raiders will unga bunga number only.

Removal of parsers won't make those people less toxic - they'll find other reasons to be just as mean.

I mean in the end it really comes down to the people and their personal struggles. Everyone is struggling to some degree in life and sometimes that struggle is partially or completely related to a game. Sometimes we even vent our personal pain into the quantifiable in an effort to find some level of resolution to it, turning things like a DPS meter into a burning effigy that we sacrifice to find some level of closure. The real struggle with Savage or challenge mode content in MMOs is finding a good way to communicate the true difficulty of the encounter and to assure others who don't like the content that there are other ways to find a rewarding experience. If we ever figured out how to solve this problem it would probably do far more to reduce toxic behavior than restricting DPS meters.

[Gula]

Quite honestly:

To see who is the dead weight of a group. If you're in higher level content and you are failing dps checks, you need some sort of metric to determine who is or isn't pulling their weight. Since the game gives no indication other than Pass/Fail, ACT is almost a requirement.

In short, you can't have dps checks without a proper gauge of dps. People don't want to waste their time.

It's nowhere close to a requirement. There is no content that will disappear if you fail a few times. It's a requirement because you and others personally have no patience for trial and error.

[Awha]

Far easier way to reduce "toxicity" players do not take getting removed or being called out personally and either use the experience to seek out info to get better, or just ignore it and move on and find like minded players.