People advertising they're running Parsers

[LittleImp]

Just a quick question to the person who made this thread (or others who might think like him)...

Why do you even care? Like...

I would assume that seeing a competitive culture develop publicly gives them some level of anxiety about toxicity and increasingly public expectations around performance. I can kind of emphasize with people feeling that way, but the reality is that stomping down on this type of stuff just drives it underground; It never truly gets rid of it.

Parse fixation is a double-edged sword you will always have to live with in any game where someone can do more damage than someone else and chart it.

[VirusOnline]

I would assume that seeing a competitive culture develop publicly gives them some level of anxiety about toxicity and increasingly public expectations around performance.

It is exactly this.

The idea of being measured, just the very idea alone, creates insecurity in quite a lot of players.
No one in their right mind is going to parse anything beneath EX trials. Parsing just isn't for casual content and is not used for casual content as we all well know.

[Sythalin]

Cute switching out the letter P with B, but no.

Don't do it, you know it's not allowed. You want to run your Abacus with yourself of your group of friends together, go for it.

Don't ask, Don't tell is still very much in play, people can and will report you for it and if you get caught you're in trouble.

Run your calculator quietly, don't go shouting it out that you are going to check others with your math tools and decide if they can play with you.

You don't pay my sub.

[JanVanding]

I would assume that seeing a competitive culture develop publicly gives them some level of anxiety about toxicity and increasingly public expectations around performance. I can kind of emphasize with people feeling that way, but the reality is that stomping down on this type of stuff just drives it underground; It never truly gets rid of it.

Parse fixation is a double-edged sword you will always have to live with in any game where someone can do more damage than someone else and chart it.

Pretty much. I've been raiding in MMOs for a very long time, probably longer than some have been playing MMOs.

Parsers have been around a very very long time and while they do help in a lot of areas it always gives rise to an extremely toxic and selfish element in the community that love to shout loudest and force the rest to play their way for fear of disclusion. It can lead to jobs being told they're not welcome in groups because they're not "Meta", it can lead to insane obsession over a single metric that tends to eat away at the Souls of communities turning them bitter.

It was ever present in WoW, it carried through in Rift, in LotrO, EQ2, even superhero MMOs like DC Universe were not immune to the parsing min/max obsession.

I've always been on the side on, if you can clear it without dying and pull your weight you're good enough, there's no need to have an entire team of orange parse players, quite simply

Because the game isn't balanced around that and no matter how much certain players want that, it will NEVER come to pass...

Because once the toxic shouty types start dictating the balance and sorry this is part of why WoW sucks these days, controversy aside.

The game becomes balanced around a small portion of the playerbase, alienates the rest and they just give up

They quit, they go elsewhere.

As true as it was a decade ago as it is today.

[Caurcas]

Excel spreadsheets, a serious hazard to your self worth. Spoooooooky.

[Tsukino]

If that's a real quote then just...wow. Assuming that is real then it just sounds like he's walking a tight rope trying to appease the feelings of casual players and not trying to run off raiders.

Yes, that's an accurate summary of the situation. The whole thing is a PR dance to try and keep the most amount of people appeased at once.

Games, especially MMOs, are a business, and businesses (setting aside all the illegal stuff some do all the time) traditionally make money by having more customers pay them more money. FFXIV is in a position currently where it has very little competition in the raider space and the other aspects of the game with broader appeal. As such, they would very much like to keep them, and so they keep developing content for all of them. They also need to avoid doing anything that makes large groups of people angry and leave, which is why they're currently posting so frequently about what they're trying to do to fix the login queues and the lobby errors and such.

If they were to go too extreme to make one group of people happy they would risk losing some others while gaining little to nothing. For instance, if they really cracked down on showing off parsing they would lose a lot of the raiders who would become frustrated, feel targeted, etc. but they wouldn't really gain anyone standing on the sideline thinking "the only reason I don't play FFXIV is those parsing jerks." Similarly, perhaps much worse, if they just embraced parsing and put damage meters on display for everyone, they would lose tons of players who don't care about comparing damage dongs and don't like being bullied over poor performance and such, but it's not like they'd gain a bunch of raiders out there playing some other MMO just because FFXIV will ban you if you're mean to people.

That doesn't mean that you can't force a change or complain or argue about it one way or the other, of course. It seems like a stretch to me, but if any group of a large enough size petitioned them to do something and backed it up with their subscription fees, they absolutely would change course, because they'd have proof it's good for business.

[BluexBird]

I would assume that seeing a competitive culture develop publicly gives them some level of anxiety about toxicity and increasingly public expectations around performance. I can kind of emphasize with people feeling that way, but the reality is that stomping down on this type of stuff just drives it underground; It never truly gets rid of it.

Parse fixation is a double-edged sword you will always have to live with in any game where someone can do more damage than someone else and chart it.

This makes no sense. When people step into Savage (sometimes Extreme), they are expected to perform mechanics correctly. This alone is a form of measuring your abilities - you don't need a parser for it. If you fuck up a mechanic, people will see. They'll KNOW it was you. And if someone in your party decides to be toxic about it, who are you going to blame? Who are you going to complain to? No one, that's who. Because there isn't anyone to blame except yourself. You have no choice other than to get better.

Here's what you CAN do if someone is toxic towards you screwing up the mechanics - you can tell them to piss off. You can point out to them that you're still learning. Or you can just blacklist them. What're they gonna do, kick you out of the party? Oh wait yeah... that actually is something they can do! GO FIGURE!

The exact same logic applies to parsing. If someone tells you you're doing bad, you can choose to handle it the same way as someone telling you you're not doing mechanics correctly - you can use it as an opportunity to improve yourself..... or you can get butthurt over it.

[LittleImp]

This makes no sense. When people step into Savage (sometimes Extreme), they are expected to perform mechanics correctly. This alone is a form of measuring your abilities - you don't need a parser for it. If you fuck up a mechanic, people will see. They'll KNOW it was you. And if someone in your party decides to be toxic about it, who are you going to blame? Who are you going to complain to? No one, that's who. Because there isn't anyone to blame except yourself. You have no choice other than to get better.

Here's what you CAN do if someone is toxic towards you screwing up the mechanics - you can tell them to piss off. You can point out to them that you're still learning. Or you can just blacklist them. What're they gonna do, kick you out of the party? Oh wait yeah... that actually is something they can do! GO FIGURE!

The exact same logic applies to parsing. If someone tells you you're doing bad, you can choose to handle it the same way as someone telling you you're not doing mechanics correctly - you can use it as an opportunity to improve yourself..... or you can get butthurt over it.

People's feelings aren't usually very rational.

Also, a lot of people who play this game aren't necessarily obsessed with getting stronger or becoming better. They want the rewards behind certain content, but don't want to feel pressured to push their limits too hard.

[Nafreyu]

I'd like to think it's because they have a vision of what they want their community to look like. They are also not a western company that has an apathetic attitude to fostering the right behaviour, unlike another group we could mention.

While parsers and other QoL addons are a godsend, they are probably firm in wanting to steer away from raider.io, and the various personalities that have evolved around the abuse of that.

If that's the cost, then I am totally okay with this.

[JanVanding]

People's feelings aren't usually very rational.

Also, a lot of people who play this game aren't necessarily obsessed with getting stronger or becoming better. They want the rewards behind certain content, but don't want to feel pressured to push their limits too hard.

It's not even for not for a want of trying and it's something as of false identification that "casuals" are given.

The largest demographic of players today are semi professional or professional employees that work a lot and dedicate what free time they can to enjoying whatever game it is they have chosen to play.

Josh Strife Hayes went into detail about how it's a large commodity that every developer aims to monopolise

In my instance, I work constantly 5-6 days a week and when I can sit down and play, I play, I don't expect to be carried, I don't expect to be handheld, I expect to learn like everyone else and have accepted that Savage as much as I'd love to do it, Time constraints of work schedule dictate that it's not happening, but I do have time to learn and farm EX content, I do have time to learn my job and get to a decent enough level with it...

I just can't do what I did at College where I could just no life whenever my course work was done or half term break.

Time is the reason we don't sit and look into perfecting at the macro level, because that requires a lot of time the average player cannot spare and sorry to say it hardcore players

You too one day will be in the same position, where time restrains what you can do and you too won't like people thinking you're too "lazy" to learn something either. That day comes for us all unfortunately and I say that as someone that was once a hardcore Raider that probably no lifed content in other games that some of you only saw at a fraction of what it used to be.

Savage and Ultimates are designed for you, they're designed for you to spend many a nights working out with your data the most effective and efficient way of clearing.

EXes are for us, the people that like a little bit more challenging content but don't have the time to go into the macro level.