Lets talk about the FFXIV player base..

[Gemina]

This is an enormous issue. I started playing in Stormblood and thought I was pretty good. I spent over a month at level 70 before I learned about FFLogs and was able to see that my best performance was 16th percentile in an alliance raid. It was the kick in the pants I needed to get better. If I'd never seen that I'd probably still be terrible. No one had ever said anything about my performance, though I'm certain that I frustrated a ton of players with how bad I was.

If players aren't allowed to let people know that there is significant room to improve and provide feedback on how to do so, then the game needs to. Being given a rating compared to other players at the end of instances would be a good start.

Yeah... No it's not. This is more attributed to supporters of parsers getting their voice to be acknowledged and heard throughout the community. While this is not necessarily a bad thing because it does promote better play, the unfortunate thing about it is that they make a bigger issue than what is realistically present.

If we were to go by that philosophy than every PS4 player would suck. Do you truly believe that? Are you going to tell every console player right here and now that they have no place in high end duties?

Truth of the matter ties into what the OP is talking about. The common denominator is so low now that if you care about your performance and rotation; you actually read and understand tooltips; then you are already better than 80% of the players out there.

[Mechnikov_the_Jotunn]

Truth of the matter ties into what the OP is talking about. The common denominator is so low now that if you care about your performance and rotation; you actually read and understand tooltips; then you are already better than 80% of the players out there.

I sadly agree with this. I don't think giving the group a letter grade is the direction it needs to go in either.

SE's light anti-parsing stance seems to be based in that they don't want people to sweat about performing perfectly in-game, something a lot of people have weaponized into running as far into the "I can auto-attack through the dungeon and it's valid" kind of camp.

Problem is that if you're given a colorful sticker regardless of how you do on a test for example, the natural outcome is that everyone stops trying because there is no longer a difference in doing well and "doing". It's why you see people argue that if it takes you an hour to clear a dungeon, you cleared, why are you angry? Because we can do it in 20 minutes.

I believe a larger issue is that we can't control our experience in FFXIV very well. If you want to gather/craft and ignore all combat stuff? You do you. Savages? Go for it. But we want to play with like minded people and simply saying to "Make a group in DF" isn't a helpful response. How would you control that? Anyone can have item level 500, and I'm pretty sure there isn't a nice way to portray you want to clear dungeons in however much time without it sounding like you're implying something negative on the general community.