Parsers add replayability for casual players

[Mikey_R]

So, as I said, come up with an idea that avoids the main concern of harassment.

It has been suggested, personal parsers. Only you can see your own and you cannot see anyone else's. You cannot harass someone if you don't know their parse after all.

Things have been suggested for pretty much everything to cover the anti-parser's concerns, however, they keep coming back to harassment.

Even if people do not want a solid hard number, it has been suggested that a rank could be shown at the end of a duty for your personally that only you can see to give an indication of how well you performed but that gets thrown back saying, 'people will ask for proof of good play before you can join', whilst failing to realise, 1. That is how it currently is. Those high ilevel PFs are to weed out the ones likely to try and get a carry; 2. Join another party, or make your own. But again, people seem hesitant to do that as well.

This is why people come to the conclusion that, people just do not want to see how they are performing. The do not want to see that they are potentially being a hinderance to the group and so would rather remain ignorant than face the fact they are the ones holding the group back. They can then claim potential for harassment and the cycle continues. Unless I am missing something here with my admittedly biased view, there has always been compromise on the part of the pro-parsers however, no budging on the anti-parsers, which makes coming to a compromise impossible.

[Awha]

It has been suggested, personal parsers. Only you can see your own and you cannot see anyone else's. You cannot harass someone if you don't know their parse after all.

Things have been suggested for pretty much everything to cover the anti-parser's concerns, however, they keep coming back to harassment.

Even if people do not want a solid hard number, it has been suggested that a rank could be shown at the end of a duty for your personally that only you can see to give an indication of how well you performed but that gets thrown back saying, 'people will ask for proof of good play before you can join', whilst failing to realise, 1. That is how it currently is. Those high ilevel PFs are to weed out the ones likely to try and get a carry; 2. Join another party, or make your own. But again, people seem hesitant to do that as well.

This is why people come to the conclusion that, people just do not want to see how they are performing. The do not want to see that they are potentially being a hinderance to the group and so would rather remain ignorant than face the fact they are the ones holding the group back. They can then claim potential for harassment and the cycle continues. Unless I am missing something here with my admittedly biased view, there has always been compromise on the part of the pro-parsers however, no budging on the anti-parsers, which makes coming to a compromise impossible.

As you said it is impossible to compromise when the issue we are trying to form a compromise largely boils down to potential harassment is an issue. The reality is no solution can be made either would water down the metric to the point where it will not matter and or be used as a metric to cause potential harassment.

Unless they made the system that just have a letter grade at the end to avoid potential harassment / exclusion their would have to be only one grade and 100% of all players would be able to get it. Or it would lead to issues. Even if we just copied the same structure as fates the gold silver bronze that could still lead to potential harassment.

How in good faith can one come up with a compromise when the issue we have is based around a potential harm.

In short I agree with ya 100%

[Lanadra]

Unless I am missing something here with my admittedly biased view, there has always been compromise on the part of the pro-parsers however, no budging on the anti-parsers, which makes coming to a compromise impossible.

Have you considered that the unwillingness from anti-parsers to compromise, at least from how you view it.. might be because anti-parsers.. don't need to?

The development team, Yoshi P specifically, agrees with the view that anti-parsers hold: Don't want them. You're not getting them in any officially sanctioned manner.

It's hard to compromise from a position where you stand only to lose. Anti-parsers have what they want, full stop. There's no reason to take steps in a direction that they quite literally do not want. Especially not when parsers are already widely used and turned a blind eye to by the FFXIV dev team for the only scene that actually needs them.. raiding.

[RushRiviera]

It's hard to compromise from a position where you stand only to lose. Anti-parsers have what they want, full stop. There's no reason to take steps in a direction that they quite literally do not want. Especially not when parsers are already widely used and turned a blind eye to by the FFXIV dev team for the only scene that actually needs them.. raiding.

Good point. So, why not add an official parser that is only available during high-end raids? (Savage/Ultimate difficulty)

[Lanadra]

Good point. So, why not add an official parser that is only available during high-end raids? (Savage/Ultimate difficulty)

I'd personally have no issue with it because it would make no difference to my experience. It would at best be a convenience thing ultimately, and knowing that you're no longer using 3rd party software.

I don't even really mind the idea of a 'personal parser' that is game wide either... provided that I can turn it off and that standing policy about harassing people with parser readouts is maintained. Ergo, as long as it doesn't affect or change my own personal experience I don't really mind it. That is not what a lot of people in this thread want though, it's less about 'providing an official tool that's there for you if you want to use it', which would help console players in particular, and more about 'making sure you see at all times just how shit you are'.

And since we got smart alecks aplenty here I will reiterate: I play my jobs competently for the content I partake in. I avoid extreme/savage/ultimate because I am not interested in playing at that level or being proficient enough to do so. Just because I don't want to deal with a parser does not mean it's because of some fear of what I'll see about myself.

[Raelsar]

Good point. So, why not add an official parser that is only available during high-end raids? (Savage/Ultimate difficulty)

To use an old adage:
"Give them an inch, and they'll take a mile."

That's the biggest concern with any sort of official parser. If introduced, even in a supposedly constrained manner as noted above, the demands to allow it into all levels of content would never stop. The issues they create would outweigh the benefits as it spirals out of control... and unfortunately for the pro-parsing crowd, the historical examples lean towards it creating more social problems than it helps players enjoy the game. So yeah, it would have to be shown that player communities handle the addition of parsers well and don't become heavily biased towards a certain aspect of the gameplay as a result before even a limited implementation would be considered.

As for the "personal parser" argument... it kind of falls into the same issue. Even if players can't see the output of other players, it being there means that someone is going to inevitably talk about their own performance; saying "I did X DPS" is going to responded with "You should have been doing X+Y DPS!", leading to all sorts of problems. No matter how constrained you try to make it, the numbers will get out and the issues will never end.

Unfortunately, as history tells us again and again... people tend to do stupid things when handed a tool that has an easy avenue for misuse.
Rules are in place to help keep that under control, and sometimes the best rule for keeping people safe is to forbid the average person from using it.

[RushRiviera]

To use an old adage:
"Give them an inch, and they'll take a mile."

That's the biggest concern with any sort of official parser. If introduced, even in a supposedly constrained manner as noted above, the demands to allow it into all levels of content would never stop. The issues they create would outweigh the benefits as it spirals out of control...

That doesn't really make sense, the demands to allow a parser into all levels of content are already here. That's what this entire thread is about. This thread is 50 pages long so people are obviously already making demands for a parser. Adding one that is only available for savage and ultimate raids literally gives the majority of pro-parser players what they want... So there will only be a small minority left asking for it to be added to all content.

[Shurrikhan]

Unfortunately, as history tells us again and again... people tend to do stupid things when handed a tool that has an easy avenue for misuse.
Rules are in place to help keep that under control, and sometimes the best rule for keeping people safe is to forbid the average person from using it.

History also tells us that what precedes a given notable tool is still a techne of its own, just as capable of setting contexts of interaction. Just because superstition, for instance, lacks the procedures of what we've since boxed in under the labels of "science" doesn't mean it wasn't acted on.

With our without parsers present, you still have a situation where someone there is a disparity between what is (A) required—e.g., by healing, damage, or mitigation checks—or (B) reasonably expectable—given minimum gear and, for one's level, at least basic level of engagement and understanding—and what's happening in a given setting.

Consider, then... what are the current means, without parsers, by which players can (or are likely to) remedy the situation?

They can, of course, work off whatever indicators of others' mistakes they were able to notice during their own attempts to play well, which can be easier said than done as content grows more difficult. They can state what mistakes they've seen, implicatively pointing fingers, point-by-point, until the voice of the group has found its culprit(s), be they people or actions. They can make assumptions based on known/perceived likely underperformance innate to an undertuned job (especially if early in any given expansion), passing blame with little need even for eyeballed evidence.

What, then, does a parser add? What new means does it create?

We will never see everything that occurred in a fight; a parser, however, will account for all of it. (It's not necessarily contextualized, but every point of throughput is accounted for nonetheless.) We will often make overmuch of the particular mistakes we've seen; a parser will not. We will often assume larger performance differences from perceived imbalance than we ought to; a parser makes no assumptions. We may have the wrong idea of what optimized play entails; a parser forms no ideas, only shows the facts of one's performance.

:: The addition of a parser is little more replacing the likes of children bickering over who owes whom how much of a favor instead with a ledger that can, in this case, appropriately quantify each interaction and bring it all to a sum, thus altogether skipping any need to bicker.

[Alxyzntlct]

...We will never see everything that occurred in a fight; a parser, however, will account for all of it. We will often make overmuch of the particular mistakes we've seen; a parser will not. We will often assume larger performance differences from perceived imbalance than we ought to; a parser makes no assumptions. We may have the wrong idea of what optimized play entails; a parser forms no ideas, only shows the facts of one's performance.

:: The addition of a parser is little more replacing the likes of children bickering over who owes whom how much of a favor instead with a ledger that can, in this case, appropriately quantify each interaction and bring it all to a sum, thus altogether skipping any need to bicker.

Um... that's not actually true (that bit I highlighted in bold), at least in my experience. The #1 problem I've had with other people and parsers is the fact that the vast majority of people who use them specifically stop paying attention to a lot of game mechanics and instead focus on the pretty dps numbers. In fact, I've never known any parser to track literally "all of it".

To me, that's the biggest problem with a parser; it doesn't track everything, which leads to some folks focusing on just specific aspects of gameplay rather than all.

Which makes the following statement about the addition of a parser also patently false; so long as any tool doesn't account for everything, then there will be discrepancies in how people perceive and then use such a tool. And it's that perspective difference that folks want to avoid having formally introduced into the game since it leads to unpleasant experiences.

Am I missing something? Is there really some magical parser out there that inherently knows FFXIV gameplay and mechanics and is accurately tracking not only the individual abilities but also denoting context of when and where they all need to be used?

[ZedxKayn]

Um... that's not actually true (that bit I highlighted in bold), at least in my experience. The #1 problem I've had with other people and parsers is the fact that the vast majority of people who use them specifically stop paying attention to a lot of game mechanics and instead focus on the pretty dps numbers. In fact, I've never known any parser to track literally "all of it".

To me, that's the biggest problem with a parser; it doesn't track everything, which leads to some folks focusing on just specific aspects of gameplay rather than all.

Which makes the following statement also patently false; so long as any tool doesn't account for everything, then there will be discrepancies in how people perceive and then use such a tool. And it's that perspective difference that folks want to avoid having formally introduced into the game since it leads to unpleasant experiences.

Am I missing something? Is there really some magical parser out there that inherently knows FFXIV gameplay and mechanics and is accurately tracking not only the individual abilities but also denoting context of when and where they all need to be used?

Such as?
Movement is tracked, enemy casts are tracked, downtime is tracked, fflogs offers pretty accurate replays