Parsers add replayability for casual players

[linayar]

No, there's an argument for their inclusion. Not mine, but there are valid arguments all throughout the thread.

I disagree. The status quo hasn't prevented all the contents from being cleared. Having official support for in-game parser becomes a matter of convenience, but that alone doesn't make it a good enough argument to have it.

I just take issue with the whole "harassment" thing, nothing would change in this aspect.

Except the number of potential incidents.

I can assure you, people of this community are reporting for pretty much everything. One could make the argument whether GMs actually act on most of these, but it doesn't change that fact, or the amount of GM time wasted having to go through them.

I don't think you can assure me of any of that unless you're a GM.

[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.

[Shurrikhan]

I think a lot of casuals would be happy to get rid of raiders and the content we genuinely enjoy. Which is why threads like these dissolve into an ‘us vs them’ theme.

Consider the argument in this thread. Many raiders are coming in and saying they want to not only hold people to their arbitrary standards in their own content, but they want the content aimed at the casual playerbase to also hold to those arbitrary standards.

I guess that just brings to question, what is an arbitrary standard?

Let's not pretend the numbers (e.g., boss HP and enrage timers) aren't coming from somewhere. Do we call each player playing at ~80% of what their character, if perfectly mapped out, could do in that fight under identical conditions "arbitrary"?
If the enrage timer were set to whatever clear time play-testers managed with mild experience over the given spec but decent enough understanding of many other factors of "good play" in the average of a few trial runs, is that, too, "arbitrary"?

Similarly, if someone, in having found several more ways by which to engage with their job -- say, by learning how to make use of a Yaten-Enpi extension for rotational sync, how to swap in an early Yuki rotationally to have Yaten-Enpi available for forced melee downtime, when to rotate in a Yuki-Hagakure vs. a Gekko/Kasha-Hagakure, when to remain in scripted Haga rotation vs. switch to "overclocked" or "ad-hoc" rotation -- and like that content is initially tuned for a given tier to have stakes by which that engagement felt pertinent and rewarding, is it "arbitrary" that they would want to see that tuning principle remain?

[FudoMyoo]

[Shurrikhan]

Should a factual statement be viewed as harassment?

Depends. What if I were to approach some woman in the mall and gently inform her that she's ugly? Factual or not it was completely unnecessary and probably a little embarrassing for her.

Let's consider the prior context here:

if you are part of the group your performance by default should be open to criticism.

__________________________________________

Analogous to this would be among a team of models, the majority of which found that one of their members has a waistline of greater circumference than their chest (as, parsers in this context have provided purely numbers, not any pass-fail evaluation--which is still found only in or through the content itself), and whose success is largely dependent upon their, on average, being passably attractive, for which certain ratios between the two areas may be more favorable than others.

:: I.e., let's not suddenly turn a measurement into an evaluation as to provide a straw-man for your pithy retort. A measurement cannot evaluate outside of a given criteria or its context, and this interaction would be among people with shared interests and responsibilities, not strangers.

[Rinhi]

So if you support parsing and want to point out to people that they could improve. Well hiding your own LOGS or posting on a character that has not see a run in ages. Is going to raise questions about your motives and honesty in this matter. Talking about using data to back your claims then hiding your own data is just being two faced. To those who support parsing and dont hide their data. Thank you for being open I give you credit and a nod of respect.

storm themselves said they haven't had done any hard content in several years in a different thread, so their opinion comes from a purely casual viewpoint
same goes for mine

Consider the argument in this thread. Many raiders are coming in and saying they want to not only hold people to their arbitrary standards in their own content, but they want the content aimed at the casual playerbase to also hold to those arbitrary standards.

Raiders don't like casuals who don't prepare for the hardcore content and who don't view that content with a hardcore mindset. That's a fair assessment. But another fair assessment is that the more hardcore playerbase can't and won't accept the casual mindset in the casual's content and instead want to force their own rules on it.

If raiders want casuals to respect their content, they have to also be willing to respect the casual's content.

honest question, what do you gain by being so disingenuous? almost no one (of the raiding folk that posted) said that casuals should be held to their standard, not a single one, yet most of you anti-parser posters are pretending they do and endlessly post and preach about it as if they do, why?
what do you gain from straight up lying?

people generally don't like it when other people waste their time or worse, play bad on purpose because 'they don't like how skill X or Z looks' or they RP as a freeze mage, which is straight up toxic and griefing.

not a single person is asking everyone to play like a tryhard pro-gamer in all kind of content, but just that people try to learn how to play their classes and not get coddled by people excusing and enabling their toxic behaviour

most of the arguments against it are completely hypothetical what-if scenarios or prior bad experiences, either by an a**, which is a valid concern, but one which also can be swiftly dealt with by a GM, or prior games, but those games weren't XIV

Let us make two assumptions here.
[...]

people against setting up some kind of standard will just ignore this post or dismiss it as anecdotal evidence, which it is, but use their own anecdotal evidence as a complete and undeniable fact

[SturmChurro]

..

People wasting my time is literally why I stopped doing extremes, and the few times I tried to PUG savage was even worse.. I gave that up in a matter of weeks. Constant 'trap' parties, "farms". I could barely prog, because even when a party was labeled a specific way people who have no idea what they are doing (or looking for a free ride) join anyway, and I had to repeat the same thing over and over and over - not even progging further. Tens of hours wasted. Don't get me wrong, when EW comes out I'll probably jump back into it (for a time), but God...

[Shurrikhan]

Correction: They will never implement a parser because it will potentially impact their bottom line. Their biggest concern is player exclusion.

If bottom-line impact were the reason behind which all else falls in regards to parsers not being officially allowed, then we'd see a larger investment in helping players get better through continuously but comprehensibly augmented challenge and in-game resources.

At present, parsers are one of the tools aiding player inclusion, by allowing those who cannot somehow translate guides perfectly into practice (be it by overthinking, over-assuming certain leniencies or rigidities in their guidelines, or whatever else) or otherwise require more palpable and hands-on learning that avenue by which to improve, get interested in further improvement, and find enjoyment in gameplay that comes out of the game's finely deliberate design elements (the underlying systems, the numbers, encounter scripts, etc.), opening up further avenues of player interactions to them and broadening the spans of what content they find interesting. Parsers don't uniquely perform any of those functions, and the third-party tools we have now are far from perfect, but they are significantly helpful to player engagement (expanding what content they'd find interesting, largely due to the processes involved in said content) and player learning (which helps them actually do said content, and is in some ways the actual or enjoyment for which designed fights then give space, exhibit, and reward).

[Wavaryen]

As I said, queue systems that auto makes groups. I don't think anyone has a right to tell others how they should play. Even if they are playing wrong. The group can vote kick and that is fine, but telling someone what they can and can't do in a queue setting? The convenience of said tools needs to have risks, and players who play how they want is that risk.

Now, if I was making a group and set the rules, or have a ls that people join that you set a standard. By all means judge, and call people out have at it.


Like I said before, I think these tools take something away from the rpg element. The players know a little too much about the number side and it reflects on the community. When you say you want people to just know class and play to your standards. What you are really saying is, I want the convenience of a queue system, with the perks of not having to make social connections and build my own groups.


That is why we keep going in a circle on this matter. Both are saying, this is a mmorpg and you group with other players. Can say the same thing for the case on this issue. The only thing left to say is, console players sorry you don't get all the perks of pc players. I mean we can change our texture models and do so other things that console people can't. So it is what it is. Not that I would do it. But it is a google search away.

[ZedxKayn]

I don't think anyone has a right to tell others how they should play. Even if they are playing wrong.

Hard disagree, as their party member, their performance directly impacts my enjoyment of the game, I'm not going to not say anything when I die in a pull because the WHM wouldn't stop using Cure I instead of more potent tools, or if some guy completely ignoring mechanics will force me to drain my MP to babysit him at the risk of receiving abuse if I choose to let him eat dirt.