They Should Add An Official Damage Meter With One Condition

[Skiros]

1. Alright brace yourself. Because this is going to blow your mind. Are you ready? People might play the game differently than you

You shouldn't even bother responding to them since they haven't even cleared this tier. They haven't actually faced a week 1 enrage ever.

[Shurrikhan]

Why would DPS mains -ever- have anything that could possibly be construed as a benchmark for their success introduced into FFXIV? Whining about healers and tanks not doing their jobs is standard fare. Anything that could possibly reveal anything about a DPS's performance is vile heresy that blackens the tongue of any who dare speak it. FFXIV is way past giving the toxic casual playerbase any kind of pass/fail metric beyond just wiping in the content itself (where they can still imagine it's all the tank/healer's fault). Any remote potential that someone *could* possibly maybe pass any kind of judgement on a You Don't Pay My Sub player in any way, even if they don't say it out loud, if it puts the slightest judgemental thought in one single person's head, is strictly verboten.

DPS is the comparatively entitled role. Obviously so, since Shadowbringers. And I say this as a one who plays primarily DPS.

We don't have any short-term pass/fail metrics out of a few fights, from among a couple difficulty tiers, of one type of content. We don't have any further role-specific duties. Even while we might switch goalposts on a dime in regard to the other roles, such that their job is, above all, to hasten runs in one encounter, and to, above all, heal or mitigate our everything (including our blatant mistakes) in the next, measures of our own contribution, by being solely and directly damage and therefore most easily gauged, can be rendered as "toxic".

Yes, healers have their own Sylphies and tanks, much more rarely, have those who'd take their light party hostage over pairings of hypersensitivity and an oversized main-character complex if the remainder don't realize they can clear even without a tank (or a 4th for that matter), but getting past those are discrete milestones compared to getting past the idea that there is nothing wrong with learning from empirical data. Somehow the "numbers are scary (even when fully contextualized as to be far from abstract or misleading)" narrative is forever.

And the worry isn't even that it puts "a judgmental thought" in one's head; the rare wipe, or a run taking 30% longer than usual, is already enough for that. It's the worry that, empirically informed, people might better know what they're talking about, such that progress --rather than the stagnation of glaring matches, blind finger-pointing, or quickly disbanded parties-- becomes the norm.

[Semirhage]

-snip-

The overarching feeling I get from a lot of this community's...opinions...is something I can approximate with "thank god I'm not some filthy tryhard NERD who crunches numbers and tries to improve at some ridiculous nolife video game. Now excuse me while I spend seven hours a day in the same video game picking out my glamour."

[Shurrikhan]

I think you'll then see groups saying they require *SET BATTLE RATING* and a screenshot, which would change the screening of groups that are looking for certain people who can perform at said level. Even if you yourself can only see it, it's still going to be problematic and not really change the state of things if we throw in a damage meter - it'll just be a bit more difficult than merely denoting The Site That Shall Not Be Named. This screen at the least won't cause griefing, but it'll still be stigmatizing for finding a group if your score isn't high enough.

I forgot to add this before I posted, but people over-emphasize numerical values. I think if we were to take this screen, we should only display how many Stars as a Battle Rating for how well you did instead of numbers, because people love high numbers and always require a threshold if they are looking for certain parameters.

Honestly, I'd sooner take a flat numeric threshold than a comparative score than then has to compete with speedrunners just to be allowed into a late prog or casual post-clear group.

Take the 1-5 stars model, for instance, where 3 is "average clear performance". Give it just a week or two more and suddenly that goes from anything like an indicator of ability to clear without holding anyone else back to able to crush the fight.

Tl;dr: As few-tier scores (like the 5-star model) tend to be that much less adaptive to context, any formula for judging their performance would have to both be highly contextual and not comparative to others' scores (only to the parameters of the fight itself). Else they'd probably be far worse than any fixation on "numerical values" alone.

If that means that the upper end --say, the difference between what would be a 85th and a 100th percentile parse-- ends up collapsed and indifferentiable, so be it. We've always got fflogs for the more detailed out-of-game solution.

1-star: Cleared.
2-star: The relative potency per second, contextualized by role and accounting for rDPS, by which if your whole team had performed as you did, would have squeaked past enrage (by mere seconds).
5-star: The relative potency per second, contextualized by role and accounting for rDPS, by which if your whole team had performed as you did, would have been within 3% of the minimum time theoretically possible for a team at max ilvl at the time of the raid's release.
3-star and 4-star: Whatever evenly fills the difference between 5-star and 2. That might be a large seconds' gap between each star rating or it might be quite small.



Note: I still wouldn't take that in place of a full in-game parser, though. It'd simply help for comparing one's own numbers against boss's HP in a particular context and give a good, perhaps linkable, shorthand for fight completion.

[VelKallor]

The overarching feeling I get from a lot of this community's...opinions...is something I can approximate with "thank god I'm not some filthy tryhard NERD who crunches numbers and tries to improve at some ridiculous nolife video game. Now excuse me while I spend seven hours a day in the same video game picking out my glamour."

Id say that the bottom line here is that the mentality has shifted since the days of nolifes in WOW hunched over a keyboard.

Times, and people have changed.

I was asked why i dont do savage or ex etc..my answer was simple. Im retired. Ive been there done that in earlier video games, done up to mythic in a few instances. These days, my time is my own to do with as I please.

i dont do schedules, dont do "be here at xyz time regularly", and in basic terms, I play for fun and really little else.

i have, in fact, been invited to no less than THREE statics, to which i have politely deciined. When it comes to "efficiency", Ive been there and done that as well. My old professions were both in the banking / fiunance sector and before that in the nursing / medical field. When you walk into work and have an exam dropped on your desk "have this done in one hour, passmark is 100%", and its a LAW exam, thats when you get tested.

Know what happened to anyone who failed? You were immediately suspended without pay. Id say THAT has a greater magnitude of importance, wouldnt you agree?

Whether you want to admit it or not, this is just a game. Little else. No more. its a game. Games are for enjoyment, not to be treated as a second job with 'checks for efficiency" "prompt attendance", "Job performance" etc.

Thats work, not play.

Thats more stress than many need, as you are very well aware, there is enough stress and grief already without adding to that load..,.and in all truth, people have more than enough to deal with as it is.

The last two years are TESTAMENT to that fact.

One of the more famous WOW guilds has just called it a day, Midwinter. Ive actually MET one of their members, she was a cool and very generous person with an evil sense of humour. What you dont seem to grasp is that in this time at least, people have developed a sense of perspective, more to the point of what is important. what no longer matters. or no longer needs to be a major stress point in their lives.

A video game pales into how you feel at the end of a work day, come home, dinners on the table, the kids need you...thats your priority now. Home. Work. Family. More to life than pixels in a video game..and nothing, NOTHING, is more important than the time you spend in things that MATTER.

One of the more ludicrous claims I have heard is " you cant do optimal dps I guess you cant handle challenges in real life either"...to which I laughed.

And yeah, I do spend a lot of time doing glamours...its great fun. Note that word. Fun. At the end of the day, Semirhage, bear one fact very much in mind.

The aim of any game anywhere is to leave the player with less stress and worry they had from when they sat down. The aim is to PLAY, my friend, not blow a gasket working towards "optimum" "beating enrage timers" and spending hours pushing pixels when they could be doing things that are far more constructive.

[VelKallor]

cont......

Lastly, whilst this wasnt you, accepted, one of the posts I saw in here in the last day or so was that "anyone who hides their logs is a sign they are mentally unstable". I will leave you to think on how that comes across.

So no, I dont want to and wont spend time "crunching numbers in a video game." Im way past that point. What matters now to me is not what mattered when I was actually doing the hardest content back in WOW...and Ill be blunt, tell you something I have never said before.

I look back on that, and where I am now, and I bitterly regret every moment of it..that was time better spent elsewhere. Time I can never get back, on someone I will never see again.

If a person gets enjoyment from mucking about with glamours, thats what they want to do..isnt it? Thats what matters to them? Thats their enjoyment?

One of FF 14 biggest drawcards is that endgame is what you want it to be..not what others think it should be, and CERTAINLY not on the rails a certain game developer has decided SHOULD BE.

Thats the difference.

There are times when you need to step back and reassess your own priorities, its the same for us all. In all truth?

I hope you never learned that the way I did.

[anhaato]

That sounds like a you problem

[LisSquid]

If you play a part of the game where you have no need of combat metrics, then why is this even an issue for you? No one is going to call your score at the glamour dresser.

[Rolder50]

Id say that the bottom line here is that the mentality has shifted since the days of nolifes in WOW hunched over a keyboard.

Times, and people have changed.

I was asked why i dont do savage or ex etc..my answer was simple. Im retired. Ive been there done that in earlier video games, done up to mythic in a few instances. These days, my time is my own to do with as I please.

i dont do schedules, dont do "be here at xyz time regularly", and in basic terms, I play for fun and really little else...

So if you don't raid, then why do you even care if people use damage meters? I assure you no one looks at them or cares about them outside of Extreme and higher.

[VelKallor]

So if you don't raid, then why do you even care if people use damage meters? I assure you no one looks at them or cares about them outside of Extreme and higher.

Thats a nice assumption...not not the reality by a huge margin.

The reality is this: If parsers are allowed, within 24 hours you will see some one screaming obscenities and spamming dps meters...........in Sastasha.

Deny it all you like...its no more than the truth.