Parsers add replayability for casual players

[Shurrikhan]

In fact, I've never known any parser to track literally "all of it".

It is objectively counting any and all throughput.

Mistakes will have a cost to, at minimum, one's own throughput, but how much so is still quantifiably measurable. The exact mistake -- e.g., that I flubbed a combo while you misaligned your CDs -- is irrelevant; how much they actually impacted our performance is all that will ultimately matter.

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.

Let's pretend for a moment that this wasn't already specifically regarding questions of whose throughput fell short, such as why a group is failing a dps check, or that such a question is somehow not most directly answered through metrics related to throughput.

You seem to be falling under the misconception that parsers can only measure DPS. ACT may call that satisfactory (though it includes more than that as well, just not via its mini display), as it was made only for those who particularly needed DPS metrics (for raids that are ultimately cleared or failed because of DPS), but that's far from from the limit of parsers.

Percent active time, enemy active time against you (a.k.a., kiting percentile), (de)buff uptime, specific (de)buff's uptime, specific (de)buff's uptime against a focus target, avoidable damage taken, number of instances of avoidable damage taken, vulnerability stacks acquired, deaths, raid time spent rezzing you, healer % uptime spent healing your avoidable damage taken, total mitigation, average percent mitigation, average %HP decrease per strike taken, average %HP decrease per strike taken above a set threshold, damage percentiles by source, incoming damage by source, effective healing done, overhealing done, average overhealing percentile, average overhealing cast as portion of total healing casts, damage dealt to specific targets, overkill percentage, and the like are all displayable in real-time through parsers. Heck, a parser can even run live comparisons between someone else's log over time or the time-charted events therein and one's current, allowing one to compare the actions cast and portions and running sums of damage from, say, the world's best ad-hoc build Samurai player in the exact same Savage raid even as you run it. The boundaries of parsers as a concept are far from barebone or basic.

The only relevant things a parser cannot calculate are those which requires mapping, such as whether one's movement was greater than the minimum distance by which they could have dodged a given AoE; granted, an official/integrated parser actually could do that. (There is no need to account for latency, a player's human response times, etc., separately from matters already tracked as average activity delays on non-casters.) So, what exactly is it that real-time data as a concept is so inherently reductive of?

Heck, look at the way WoW uses their logs: in addition to all we see already on fflogs, you can watch in-time replays of every player's and mob's positions, their health, their mana, their special resources, each cast made or aura/buff/debuff applied, pauseable, rewindable, fastforward-able, seekable, bookmarkable. We obviously don't need to go that far, but let's not pretend a parser is inherently some barebone "DPS box" alone.