FFXIV Biggest Disease....Parsing

[Sebazy]

Disease or no, SE only have themselves to blame for how things are now.

You have to go back to ARR to see how things started going down this road. Trying to figure out your own personal damage where it mattered in the 8 man content of the time was challenging at best and rapidly gravitated towards being nigh impossible as you went towards the more dot centric jobs.

Scrolling text was vague, various damage types were merged, analysing the chat log was even more useless with imprecise timings and dot damage being omitted entirely.

Picture being a SMN or SCH and trying to optimise things for coil back then. The game simply didn't give players the tools some wanted. Cue third parties coming along and doing it for them. Of course this wasn't hugely important back in Coil because the DPS checks really weren't that steep. Parsing was a thing, but it was niche because most jobs simply didn't need it.

And then Gordias happened. Right out of the blocks even the gatekeeper punchbag Faust was a huge step up over anything Coil had expected of us. And that's before we get to the DPS checks A3S required during prog. I was covering for Solitude's team during the world prog race and hand of pain was unlike any DPS check I've ever seen before or since. Everyone had to bring their A game and as a result, everyone had to either be parsing, or use parser data to get their DPS to where it needed to be to pass that check.

This trend continued abielt to a lesser extent in both Midas and even Creator. Whilst Midas was overall a much more mechanics centric tier, A6S was still a pretty stern challenge and it wasn't uncommon to see midcore and casual groups repeatedly running out of time here during prog. Even Creator which was by far the easiest Savage tier yet enforced a high bar for DPS by way of phase pushes and mechanic skips often being borderline required to clear the fight.

Wether you agree with parsing or not. Just remember who's to blame for setting the standard here.

[KageTokage]

Unfortunately, MMOs tend to attract a lot of escapist types with severe self-worth issues. Parsing provides a very convenient, mathematical figure by which one can establish a hierarchy, and by extension compare their 'value' to other players.

Parsing high is just one element of what makes someone a good player. There are players ranked in the top 100 of their job that you wouldn't want within 100 miles of a week 1 prog, and that's kind of what Chair is getting at. Parsing high is a skill, but it's just one among many. Someone can grind 300 clears of a fight until they get a clean run where they skew on crit RNG, but that has absolutely no bearing on how consistent they may be or how effective they may be at progging mechanics blind and optimizing on their own.

This is why I don't like it.

A lot of players are inevitably as perceived as "worse" then others strictly because their parse colors/numbers aren't as good when mechanical consistency is going to be much more valued in hard content like savage and ultimates then being 1-5% lower then someone else and there is no way for FFLogs to provide an accurate metric of that when people can just cherrypick and upload only clean runs with good RNG.

[Azuri]

Sure thing. You fail to break out of greys but it's all because you are "mechanically consistent". Do you even believe yourself? There is a strong correlation between being unable to keep GCD uptime and generally being trash at the game. Regardless of how many anecdotes you come up with to prove the opposite.

[Sebazy]

This is why I don't like it.

A lot of players are inevitably as perceived as "worse" then others strictly because their parse colors/numbers aren't as good when mechanical consistency is going to be much more valued in hard content like savage and ultimates then being 1-5% lower then someone else and there is no way for FFLogs to provide an accurate metric of that when people can just cherrypick and upload only clean runs with good RNG.

A group that picks members purely on logs alone isn't a group I've ever needed nor wanted any part of tbh (A good thing as my logs are trash). 'Is the person reliable?', 'Are they able to take the pressure of progression without turning into a massive raging asshat?', 'Will the group have good chemistry to make the grind enjoyable?'. These questions are every bit as important, perhaps even more so.

[KageTokage]

Sure thing. You fail to break out of greys but it's all because you are "mechanically consistent". Do you even believe yourself? There is a strong correlation between being unable to keep GCD uptime and generally being trash at the game. Regardless of how many anecdotes you come up with to prove the opposite.

There's obviously a balance to things...

If someone is losing absurd amounts of uptime for the sake of mechanical consistency and getting deathless gray parses, then no duh, that's a problem, but some people act like orange parses are the only thing matters when having someone who's purple or even blue could potentially end up getting clears faster in the long run.

[Dzian]

FFlogs and other sites should definitely be "Opt-In" not "Opt-Out". If they are a just a tool for self improvment then other peoples data shouldn't matter at all.

If Bill does a search for Gary and Gary hasnt registered on fflogs or opted in it should just say "This player isn't registered" instead of a "This player is hiding their data" There's a big difference between those two messages.

Personally I hid my data years ago (around Thordans Reign iirc) and tend not to care less. The only way to ensure any data on there is accurate is to upload everything you do yourself and well it's just easier to hide yourself.
There are situations on logs for example where there are 3 uploaded parses on an ex primal content I've cleared and smashed 55-60 times. The average of those 3 was rather low but by no means an accurate. My average performance was significantly better than those 3 runs that got uploaded but in order to show that I'd have to upload 55-60 parses and I just dont care that much.
However 3 parses. That's maybe 5% of my time in that piece of content.. It's a million miles from being accurate / usable data.

Should definitely be an "Opt-in" basis though. If you havent registered or chosen to make your data visible then it should be hidden from searches or perhaps even completely anonymised..
like if you look at someone elses uploaded parse from a party you were in your name would be replaced with just dragoon or whatever job you were on.

If they are just "a self improvement tool" then other peoples data being hidden wouldn't impact that in anyway..

[Ashua]

I don't think Parsing is a disease, and even if it were, it would be such a small part of the actual problems with this game it's irrelevant

you wanna know this game's biggest disease? the sheer amount of botting and RMT

Thank you for saying this. Honestly, you don't need to worry about parsers when there are bots out there that automate your class for you. It's so popular and used that if SE were to actually take steps to deal with certain bots about 50-60% of the player base would become stupid in their class all at once. Its been active and going on since 2014 when the game rebooted. Raids? There are add-ons to automation that literally map out the entire fight and guide where to move. Starting a new character? The program can do the entire storyline from level 1 to now automated completely. The entire economy is in shambles for 5+ years. I only play FF 14 for the storyline. House? Not a problem with bots. Even new bots have figured out how to deal with the new bidding system. FF 14 is bottsville. As many bots in the game as players. Just watch the stream of bots coming in Limsa using summoners. Who cares about a parser when you can use a bot and parse with 1% of every top-level player out there. I've lost many many friends because of this issue and short term not banning cheaters and bots may keep the sub up but in the long run it will start the decline of the game. Why play in an MMO when all the other players are NPCs? Oh, wait it's already happening with dungeons. FF 14 is really a social game at this point and now even that aspect is starting to get scrutinized. No serious gamer takes FF 14 seriously for challenging content anymore. Now the Social aspect is starting to suffer so what does that leave FF 14? It may fall faster than WOW did.

[Carin-Eri]

I can't honestly comment with regard to my experience of it on FFXIV since haven't encountered it yet - although I have to say I don't really want to encounter it either.

In the MMO I played before FFXIV became my mainstay game parsing was frankly, often little more than an excuse for the person who submitted the parse to wave their epeen at the 'lesser players' in the team.

[Johners]

I don't see an issue with parsing to be honest, any harassment that results from it can already be punished under the existing terms of service anyway. Higher difficulty content requires a performance level to clear due to enrage timers (which don't exist in normal mode). Players need tools to see how they're performing, how they can improve and ultimately how that compares to other players (seeing as many guides etc are written by the top performing players anyway).

Combat logging exists in other games as well, such as World of Warcraft, but the issue there is that they never enforced the terms of service against those abusing other players for performing badly. Having the toolset to analyse your combat performance is really a non-issue.

Not to mention in WoW (and probably FFXIV too) there's entire players that just enjoy parsing in the same way people enjoy pushing Mythic+ keys and seeing how well they can perform.

[Denji]

I personally am not a big fan of parsing; mostly because there is no easy way to stop people from being dicks about it.

I personally would not mind if they took a harder stance against parsers than they already do mostly because beyond a few people whom I speak to personally I've never seen it used ethically. It's always some doorknob in an alliance raid or leveling dungeon snapping at people or using it as a reason to dismiss other people's opinions or to be a jerk. I've reported them in the past but as far as I can tell, they've mostly given up attempting to moderate it.