FFXIV Biggest Disease....Parsing

[Ronduwil]

Sure, because they don't care about parsing. They just don't.

They care, but they know that trying to do something about it is futile. As Yoshi-P said, what's the difference between a parser and an excel spreadsheet that you cut and pasted your client-generated logs into? How far can they go to try and regulate what you're running on your computer? He said that they'd rather give players their privacy and rely on their honor than waste time and goodwill trying to police everyone's personal computer.

Posting someone's logs on the internet, however, is a different story, and he explicitly said that they will ban for that on the pretext of harassment, not because the player was parsing. He also said that they deliberately left ACT-style functionality out of the game because they didn't want to encourage players to blame each other for not clearing content. He said that games shouldn't exclusively be about efficiency. It's a refreshing departure from the way that the Blizzard development team acts, to be quite honest.

I personally feel that it would be nice to have an in-game parser that shows your stats and your stats only. I think that would give players who want to improve their performance the tools they need to do so without encouraging the bullying that comes along with team-wide parsers.

[Saraide]

They care, but they know that trying to do something about it is futile. As Yoshi-P said, what's the difference between a parser and an excel spreadsheet that you cut and pasted your client-generated logs into? How far can they go to try and regulate what you're running on your computer? He said that they'd rather give players their privacy and rely on their honor than waste time and goodwill trying to police everyone's personal computer.

Posting someone's logs on the internet, however, is a different story, and he explicitly said that they will ban for that on the pretext of harassment, not because the player was parsing. He also said that they deliberately left ACT-style functionality out of the game because they didn't want to encourage players to blame each other for not clearing content. He said that games shouldn't exclusively be about efficiency. It's a refreshing departure from the way that the Blizzard development team acts, to be quite honest.

I personally feel that it would be nice to have an in-game parser that shows your stats and your stats only. I think that would give players who want to improve their performance the tools they need to do so without encouraging the bullying that comes along with team-wide parsers.

This approach gates out toxic people who have no idea how to read logs and no idea about the game in general from wielding them as weapons, while allowing smarter and less toxic people to keep a tab on their own performance and who they should definitely silently kick from their party. Yea it sucks to get silently kicked when you have genuinely no idea what mistakes you are making but there will never be a perfect solution because people simply arent perfect beings.

Usually if you are in any content where parsing even happens with any semblance of seriousness and you ask someone on how to improve, chances are someone will point you at any half decent guide out there (usually towards the resources of the balance discord).

[Liam_Harper]

He also said that they deliberately left ACT-style functionality out of the game because they didn't want to encourage players to blame each other for not clearing content.

The biggest problem with that is that it's exactly what players do, blame each other when they don't clear content. Except now it's based on misconceptions. Players who are largely at fault for their groups not clearing blaming the group and actually believing they're in the right, but no one can disprove them because the only method to display performance is banned.

[Ronduwil]

The biggest problem with that is that it's exactly what players do, blame each other when they don't clear content. Except now it's based on misconceptions. Players who are largely at fault for their groups not clearing blaming the group and actually believing they're in the right, but no one can disprove them because the only method to display performance is banned.

Players are going to suck sometimes, and sadly there's nothing SE can do about that. What they can do, however, is not actively encourage that behavior the way that Blizzard does. They go even further, banning the behavior when it can be proven. That's better than doing nothing. It's way better than what Blizzard's done, which is to actively encourage and reward that behavior. M+ dungeons in WoW drop half the loot if you don't make the timer. On top of that, failing the timer degrades the key that was used to start the dungeon, impacting not only the quantity of loot for the current run, but also the quality of the loot in future runs. If you think players get mad at each other in this game because they keep wiping in Savage raids, just imagine your daily MSQ denying you tomestones because one player stood in the bad stuff too many times and another player was still learning their rotation.

But that's not all they've done. They keep track of everyone's runs and give them an in-game score based on their successes and failures. So if you run with a new or unskilled player, not only are you degrading your loot; you're also trashing the personal in-game score that others are going to use to include/exclude you from their runs. I could never imagine Yoshi-P signing onto something like that in this game, and that's why I'm playing it.

It's one thing to tolerate bad actors who operate under the radar. It's quite another to glorify and encourage them. Maybe I'm more supportive of SE in this regard than I should be simply because I've seen how much worse it could be.