Parsers add replayability for casual players

[Shurrikhan]

If by "criticism" you mean public shaming, name calling, abuse, screamed epithets, no thanks. Thats how WOW uses it, thats how it will be used here, it WILL be abused and misused. Badly.

I defy you to prove me wrong.

Let us make two assumptions here.

First, let's assume that how well a given finding can be generalized will depend on how general(izable) its samples were. Or, more simply put, randomization and sample size are pretty damn important, and without the latter, especially, any claim is largely nonsense.

Second, let us assume you have encountered a sufficient sample size to actually know what WoW is like in regards to parser usage.

I think most of us could agree that the prior is pretty reasonable. Admittedly, though, the last bit may be somewhat of a stretch.

By now I have done at least some 7000 dungeons in WoW; I've been playing a lot since Vanilla, after all, and am quite an altoholic who prefers group content over solo questing. In Shadowlands alone, I've done around 500 runs at the competitive M+ level, known here for its toxicity and demandingness. About a fifth of those have been run mostly as a premade group, so let's exclude them on the off-chance that, despite most M+ players making significant use of premades (i.e., having friends, fellows, or guildmates), these may not meet the standard for "randomization".

Over those ~400 remaining runs, I've seen 25 or so fall apart. I myself have abandoned 3 runs that could not be completed due to fellow group members clearly being too underprepared, intoxicated, or otherwise insufficiently abled to complete a given boss fight. However, only 1 of those those ~25 disbandments made any mention of parsing. I will go over it in detail later, but here are the reasons I've actually seen given, in descending order of frequency:

• Someone has been disconnected for more than a few minutes and 4-manning, if even possible, does not seem worth the effort.
• People are too frequently failing dungeon mechanics, such as those specific to bosses, mobs, or pathing (e.g., by backing into mobs, failing to address patrols, or pulling packs which synergize dangerously with each other, require more interrupts than your group can manage, or just generally can't be killed or trimmed down under given party CDs before the tank will inevitably die, etc.), typically causing the tank or healer to tilt and decide completion is not worth the effort.

• Completion randomly grants any other key, while failing to time would, until 9.05, half your loot and thus the chances of getting the gear the keyholder may have been hoping for. Moreover, keyholders hoping to reach the highest keylevel possible may care nothing for the particular dungeon's loot and, once unable to advance the key, may prefer not to waste further time. Often, this is put to a brief vote once it is clear the key cannot be timed. However, as players can only participate in the given pairing of dungeon and difficulty (key level) through that keyholder, it is not especially considered bad form for a keyholder to pull the plug on their own key.

• People are failing to fulfill basic responsibilities, leaving others to feel leeched off of in having to carry them; this stress is usually paired with perfect play by the remaining members still having little chance of timing the key, thus making it seem less than worth the effort.

  Here, community perceptions of "bad form" follow undue stress and the length of time it'd otherwise take to complete. If others were not playing remotely to the standards of play commensurate to the difficulty they've signed up for, and there's half or so of the dungeon (e.g., a good half-hour of what should have been 10 minutes) of that tilting grind ahead of you, the WoW forums and subreddits pass no scorn, while people leaving keys near just short of completion get an earful.

• Timed completion is required for a particular achievement, and that achievement is the (nearly) sole reason for a member's participation, causing them to feel that untimed completion would not be worth their effort.

  Following 9.05, items acquired from Mythic+ could be upgraded. However, the ability to upgrade one's items to a given maximum level is locked behind having completed all 8 dungeons at the +5, +10, and +15 keystone levels. This has increased the likelihood of people leaving likely-to-fail keys at those particular levels, as participants may have completed most dungeons even to the +15 level, yet still lack a +10, which gives no useful gear directly, for their second achievement. Or, to put it another way, there's been an increase in keys participated in by players otherwise overgeared, but that population will thus have little to no reason to stay for a key that cannot be timed.

That's it. Comments after repeated boss wipes like "We don't have the damage to do this..." have neither required nor made use of parsers. The critiques most common are things like "Guys, please interrupt", "Don't get stacks over 4 unless Mass Dispel is up," "Tank, you need to kite if you've got that little mitigation," or "I've got no healing to spare. Dodge or die." Even when critiques get more confrontational such as like "Tank, chill unless you're going to actual track party CDs," "Ffs, just play close so you stop pulling, Hunter," "Just kite, 4-head"... parsers are almost always completely irrelevant.

Across those ~400 runs, the only time I've ever seen throughput brought up in a way that wasn't already made obvious to everyone by having failed group DPS checks repeatedly was after the run had already been completed, when the healer berated a keyholder for "having no clue how to play". The numbers, which, despite being in a Mythic 7 would have been low even in a Mythic 0, were only a small part of his comments, and I and the other two party members quickly asked the healer to cool it--it was obvious the guy was lagging, and the run was already behind us, and timed at that.

400 runs in Mythic+, WoW's allegedly most toxic and elitist area of play outside of Mythic raiding -- only 1 time parsers had been, even as a sidenote, "weaponized" to scold someone for underperformance.

If anything is strange in that, however, it's only that the ratio (roughly 1 fixation on parses, however secondary, among some 25 disbandments, out of some 400 runs, or 1:25:400) has seemed almost identical to what I'd encountered across the thousands of regular and heroic dungeons since Vanilla (or tBC, in the case of Heroics), too. When new, harder content (tBC Heroics, originally, or later FoS, PoS, and HoR in WotLK, Cataclysm heroics pre-gear, MoP challenge modes, etc.) effects a throughput-based wall for a large group of people, demand for throughput-seen responsibility increases (sometimes to the detriment of things like utility being noticed) and from that comes a small chance that if (1) there seems correctable action in a given fight seemingly walled off by throughput and (2) blame is passed directly, that parsers may enter the discussion, usually first as a defense -- proof that someone was doing their job in a general sense and that critique should therefore start elsewhere or that their limits (of gear or what is reasonable to expect at the given difficulty) are already being pressed. In dungeons, especially where members cannot be so immediately replaced, this is almost always post-evaluative. There is little point in asking "Who isn't keeping up their end?" when nothing has yet fallen short.

Raids provide an obvious counterpoint to that, and trash before any first boss has therefore in many cases seemed as much about checking participants' capabilities as providing further aesthetic and stretch to a given raid. When players obviously aren't putting out the numbers that, in these pulls under those specs, would imply the participant knows what they're doing, and the waitlist is still growing, yes, people get replaced in part because parsers provides evaluative information. And, resultantly, fewer walls are hit, fewer players feel leeched off of, fewer players locked out on the basis of gear alone (that margin of acceptance tightening the less information can otherwise be come by, as a means of reducing would-be unnecessary stressors), and fewer raids are forced to be dull for those who know their class and builds just to allow for others to complete it (or, put less stress on others) when not fully bothering with the otherwise self-paced content of learning one's class and build. While it may ask more people to play at the level they are willing to put effort towards, which is in a sense exclusive, it also reduces stress and the toxicity stress often brings to bear.