They Should Add An Official Damage Meter With One Condition

[Sebazy]

If you seemed halfway useful, theyd keep you until you were holding them back from clearing content.

No offence but either you're paranoid AF or you suck to raid with if that's your actual experience.

- How good your damage numbers are is now softly endorsed by the Devs as a metric to judge another player by.

As opposed to judging a player by their ilvl, achievements, pets, mounts, glamour, choice of race etcetc?

- An increase of players being greedy dps. There are already a lot of players who use a parser and behave stupidly in groups to get big numbers, then rage out when they get a junk parse because someone didnt DP them or use their buffs right.

I suspect try hards like that already have numbers in front of them.

- Failure Verification: I.E it is now reasonable to demand someone link their personal meter when a group hits enrage to check to see whos weakest link. Afterall, you cant call it harassment to see their numbers if SE makes that information available. Much like it is not harassment to kick someone from group if their gear is suboptimal for a fight. If there are no meteres (and assuming no parser), it becomes a lot harder to pinpoint whos coming up short with DPS. Blame is spread a bit more evenly. Furthermore, with no meters present, the Devs can justify banning people who kicked someone by their DPS numbers means youre using a tool to see that and that is against ToS. That argument becomes a lot harder to make when you provide a tool which shows that. Oh and for iLvL issue, I and many players almost always avoid people who set an iLvL with a lot of these fights because its usually someone looking to get carried by getting overgeared people in the group who usually have cleared the content. Also iLvL isnt an accurate metric of a players abilty or true gear potential. You can get 590 i lvl just by farming tomes, and you may end up doing less output than a player in 588 gear if theyre using crafted but optimized equipment.

That's a lot of words to try and handwave away the responsibility of someone potentially holding back the rest of the group if they are hitting enrage. For the most part that's not really an issue in the overwhelming majority of Savage content and it certainly isn't in Extremes, but every now and again we get an E8S that really requires the entire group to be on the ball with damage. Being able to spot where the issue lays is the first step in solving it.

- a DPS meter in of itself is actually somewhat useless. See how much DPS you do is contextual to a lot of factors: Fight, Group Composition, length of Fight, How well you know your rotation, how well others know their rotation, buff window allignment, etc. Just showing a DPS number can lead to a lot of misunderstandings of ones performance. Pair that with Verification issues that may (and probably will) crop up, you can have people getting mad at a player because they think theyre doing poorly when in reality there's a lot of other factors going on.

A fair point, and the reason why I've often suggested that SE look at using Potency per second as a metric instead. However, DPS is still an important tool to learn the importance of 2 minute alignment etc.

- The unforeseen trends: Online communities with anything that has a difficulty curve that limits who can do said content will always have some level of elitism, toxicity, and bragging, either from those with huge egos, or those envious of other players' successes. How they display this can vary from game to game. Adding in a DPS meter, even a personal one, is going to feed this issue in some capacity, that is almost a guarantee, because adding any tool or feature which allows people to measure their ability is going to contribute to competition, bragging, elitism, envy, and toxicity.

It's been said a million times but I'll repeat it again, a toxic individual will use whatever tools they have to hand to attack their target. If it's not a parser, it'll be something else in the list.

[Ivtrix]

I would personally like to thank those who keep screaming that dps checks are toxic until they are pink in the face for providing me with quality content to continue reading on the regular. Keep it up!

[Gothicshark]

I 100% believe you quit wow and I did too. But who are you kidding, you won't quit FFXIV.

15 years of passionate WOW gaming, I love the Lore and Universe. I quit fully and permanently and deleted my account. If FFXIV went down the same path as WOW, I would do the same. However, I do not think Yoshi-P and Team will ever do what Blizzard did. Nor do I think they will add a Meter to the game, or at least one that can be used and seen by others. (They may add a personal utility that allows personal checks in specific solo situations. ie added as a function of Target Dummies. Or a new type of Target Dummy with that feature. Which would be keeping with their design philosophy. (I just hope it's not something that has to be quested to be unlocked,... Who am I kidding, they would totally add an RP for it.)

[Gothicshark]

That's not it, meters have been since Vanilla and the game continued to grow all the way into Wrath.

Meters were not common for the majority of players until Wrath, Hells unless you were raiding, there was no reason to add many of the addons that are considered essential to raiding, and frankly most peoples computers up until they upped the system requirements for the 1st time in MoP couldn't handle more than 1 addon. I remember being happy I could run the Full DBM at all times, when many people had to pick and choose what consent DBM covered, because they couldn't run more than a handful of Dungeons and Raids at the same time. Remember Addons sit in the Active memory of your computer, and the old min requirements barely could handle just WOW and a few required Systems.

https://www.kotaku.com.au/2014/09/wo...t-in-10-years/


Blizzard was hesitant to update the Requirements with WOD, but as they had to upgrade the Graphics they had to up the min requirements. Even now, the current min still can't handle a lot of addons.

[Shurrikhan]

Meters were not common for the majority of players until Wrath, Hells unless you were raiding, there was no reason to add many of the addons that are considered essential to raiding, and frankly most peoples computers up until they upped the system requirements for the 1st time in MoP couldn't handle more than 1 addon.

I could handle some 9-12 addons simultaneously on a potato of a computer that barely managed such high spec games as... Call of Duty II, Halo, and Warcraft III. Most parties usually had at least someone you could ask for your numbers if you were curious about them, even if not every player bothered with a parser. Vanilla/TBC parsers (I think it was pretty much just Recount back then; no Skada and 10 years before any Details) were a fair bit less efficient for their core job than current ones, but their costs were still pretty mild since they pretty much only had those initial/core functions, none of the auto-graphing or comparison chart features of a modern WoW parser.

[Klytania]

Anyway add a damage meter

[Elesh]

Also, for the OP, stating that "there are no valid arguments" doesnt mean its a true statements. There are plenty of realistic and valid arguments why in game Parsers are a bad thing.

You're ascribing morality to a tool. That's like saying 'knives are bad because someone killed someone with a knife'. Parsers are a tool. Full stop. They're a tool. They, themselves, are not good or bad.

What is good or bad is how they are used, and how they are moderated. Which is the real thing that needs to be considered.

But lets humor the idea of an in-game parser, what can we expect?
<snip>

You just described most of the 'bad use cases' - but those can be mitigated by messaging and moderation. Going back to the knife example... we don't allow people to bring sharpened knives to certain places because there's not a lot of justification for them in those places. We punish people for using knives in certain ways as a deterrent to keep people from abusing the tool.

Same thing with parsers. By having firm messaging about how you can and cannot use the parse tool, by designing the parse tool to be positioned appropriately(ie. with a focus on your own personal numbers rather than others) and by having rules with specific punishments to deter misuse... you can mitigate the negative impact of them.

You describe the worst case scenario as if it's impossible to prevent... but it IS preventable. Knowing that those are the 'worst case scenarios', the team can come up with solutions to mitigate them.

ex. If the team makes it clear that it is against the rules to press someone to show their parse and that such behaviour is punishable... they make it clear that you shouldn't do that. They could also add a 'report for parse abuse' option to the in-game reports that would submit the chatlog for review to make it easier to report... just as one possible option.

The tool itself is not bad. The tool is meant for people to self-evaluate to help themselves understand where they fit in the game and how well they're performing. It can be used for bad... but to believe we can't have a tool because it could be used for bad is a level of pessimism I'm not comfortable with.

[LisSquid]

I am so mediocre with such mediocre dps and performance and feel like if I lived in the same world as the anti-parsers I'd have been beaten behind a 7-11 for my greens by now.

[CosmicCoqui]

You're ascribing morality to a tool. That's like saying 'knives are bad because someone killed someone with a knife'. Parsers are a tool. Full stop. They're a tool. They, themselves, are not good or bad.

What is good or bad is how they are used, and how they are moderated. Which is the real thing that needs to be considered.



You just described most of the 'bad use cases' - but those can be mitigated by messaging and moderation. Going back to the knife example... we don't allow people to bring sharpened knives to certain places because there's not a lot of justification for them in those places. We punish people for using knives in certain ways as a deterrent to keep people from abusing the tool.

Same thing with parsers. By having firm messaging about how you can and cannot use the parse tool, by designing the parse tool to be positioned appropriately(ie. with a focus on your own personal numbers rather than others) and by having rules with specific punishments to deter misuse... you can mitigate the negative impact of them.

You describe the worst case scenario as if it's impossible to prevent... but it IS preventable. Knowing that those are the 'worst case scenarios', the team can come up with solutions to mitigate them.

ex. If the team makes it clear that it is against the rules to press someone to show their parse and that such behaviour is punishable... they make it clear that you shouldn't do that. They could also add a 'report for parse abuse' option to the in-game reports that would submit the chatlog for review to make it easier to report... just as one possible option.

The tool itself is not bad. The tool is meant for people to self-evaluate to help themselves understand where they fit in the game and how well they're performing. It can be used for bad... but to believe we can't have a tool because it could be used for bad is a level of pessimism I'm not comfortable with.

Because it has been used for bad in other games that have built in parsers already. It's the reason why Yoshi does not want it here because he has seen it in other games. That last bit of your statement "we can't have a tool because it could be used for bad is a level of pessimism I'm not comfortable with" completely ignores that fact. It always leads to toxicity no matter what. With one being officially added, parse harassment would result in a few day suspension versus the current possible instant ban.

[Sebazy]

Because it has been used for bad in other games that have built in parsers already. It's the reason why Yoshi does not want it here because he has seen it in other games. That last bit of your statement "we can't have a tool because it could be used for bad is a level of pessimism I'm not comfortable with" completely ignores that fact. It always leads to toxicity no matter what. With one being officially added, parse harassment would result in a few day suspension versus the current possible instant ban.

It's every bit as likely that Yoshida doesn't want to implement it because the community will do a better job of it, for free?

And no, having a parse tool doesn't always lead to toxicity no matter what at all. That's simply stretching the truth far beyond reality. There are plenty of people that parse purely for their own ends across a wide variety of content and have no interest in saying a word about it outside of their own private circles and statics. Where's the toxicity in using it purely for self improvement and optimisation?

And again no, SE officially adding one has absolutely no bearing on what penalties would be thrown for harassment for a couple of different reasons. Remember that this game has an exceptionally hard stance on verbal harassment, if SE were to make it very clear that this isn't acceptable with the release of a parsing tool then the reality is that the status quo really wouldn't change. You don't need to use third party tools to get account strikes which will rapidly lead into an instant ban, simply copying and pasting lines of NPC dialogue or asking to be kicked from a duty is enough to achieve that. There's no reason for parser related abuse to be treated any differently unless SE explicitly chose to which is incredibly unlikely to happen. This isn't FFXI or WoW.