So this game has dps checks but we can't talk about our dps in game?

[Packetdancer]

Are groups supposed to just bang their head on the boss until it falls hoping the bad player just discovers that he was playing wrong randomly?

I still think they could solve the problem by having a tool akin to XIVanalysis, but not (strictly speaking) a damage meter in the normal sense.

Because they are unfortunately most likely right that some people would go "Look, if the developers didn't want me to tell the black mage he's so bad at this game he should do us all a favor and go step into traffic, the devs wouldn't have let the game tell me just how much the black mage sucks at his job!" Adding an ACT-style damage meter into the game would almost certainly measurably increase toxicity, not because the damage meter itself is toxic but because some players would view the existence of an official parser as dev-granted permission to be complete jerks.

But that doesn't mean you can't get creative and provide tools that still allow for analysis of your gameplay and measuring self-improvement, while also not serving as a blunt weapon you can beat other players over the head with. Witness, again, my Google Doc with a hypothetical example of this system. It's hardly a perfect, or even really fleshed-out, design... but it does serve as an example of how you could provide a tool that allows folks to test their performance and measure their improvement, without unintentionally also encouraging toxicity from the inevitable non-zero number of jerks every online community of sufficient size will have.

[Michieltjuhh]

Because they are unfortunately most likely right that some people would go "Look, if the developers didn't want me to tell the black mage he's so bad at this game he should do us all a favor and go step into traffic, the devs wouldn't have let the game tell me just how much the black mage sucks at his job!" Adding an ACT-style damage meter into the game would almost certainly measurably increase toxicity, not because the damage meter itself is toxic but because some players would view the existence of an official parser as dev-granted permission to be complete jerks.

You can apply that selfsame logic to damage downs, vulnerability stacks, and literally just being able to see other players in the first place. "Look, if the developers didn't want to me to tell the <insert job> he's bad at the game, then the devs wouldn't have let the game show me he has a damage down/vulnerability/isn't in melee range as melee/isn't visually attacking correctly!"

One step further to combat all this perceived toxicity and we may as well remove other player characters from the game and just occasionally say "other people were with you on this boss fight!".

[Packetdancer]

You can apply that selfsame logic to damage downs, vulnerability stacks, and literally just being able to see other players in the first place. "Look, if the developers didn't want to me to tell the <insert job> he's bad at the game, then the devs wouldn't have let the game show me he has a damage down/vulnerability/isn't in melee range as melee/isn't visually attacking correctly!"

I feel like there's an important difference of degree in comparing "I can see that this player is having trouble executing mechanics because they're taking excessive amounts of damage, collecting vuln stacks, etc." which is a very general 'failure to execute mechanics' thing, versus "the game itself is giving me a supposedly-objective concrete numerical rating representing how good this player is at their job". Saying that because we have one it would make no difference to have the other feels 'off' to me; even if someone could be confrontational to a toxic/abusive degree over the first thing (mechanics failures) as well as the second (numerical rating of damage), the latter feels like it would encourage it more (or make people feel more free to really "rip into" folks).

I mean, this is without getting into the fact the supposedly-objective number isn't actually that objective. You could have someone in the baseline gear needed to start a raiding tier and doing their job correctly, while still doing less DPS than someone less-good at the job who happens to have just geared it up better. Witness how something that's a 60% parse in a fight during week #1 of the tier can drop almost by half percentage-wise when you suddenly have a much bigger potential gear ilevel gap in weeks #2 or #3. Moreover, things like healer DPS and suchnot can be highly dependent on how much avoidable damage the rest of the party is taking, and DPS overall can be highly affected by raid buffs -- since any in-game parser would be likely to measure what FFLogs calls aDPS versus the calculated-after-the-fact rDPS value that FFLogs favors.

Yet if you put a damage meter in game, folks will be likely to judge without regard for those factors.