Please add damage meters, Yoshi P.

[Effendi]

Nor does that toxicity specifically come from the average player, too, having convenient real-time, in-game access to throughput information (which is the only difference between using a parser and just uploading a battle-log).

I'd disagree.

Top tier mythic raiders are pretty laid back within their own circles. They don't usually interact with community at large. Is rare to see them pugging with the masses. The toxicity is most prevalent with the sweaty neckbeards that try to emulate them. And having in game DPS meters would enable and encourage these try-hards to have their in game hissy fits.

[Midareyukki]

Fair enough. But it's not really fair to say "mindsets that closer align with WoW" when there are plenty of 14 players who have never touched WoW and are aware of the toxic undercurrent of 14.

*raises hand* ^^

Never touched WoW, definitely saw some crap from our community in and outside the game.

Let's not kid ourselves. The community can get pretty bleak. It's not just crappy comments. There are some royal creeps out there, some people actively grief in content, and there's quite a lot of toxicity from people who should be more responsible. It's why we even call them Burger King Crowns.

Sure. We might not even reach the heels of WoW, nor do we want to.

But I already mentioned before. We very likely won't, you know why? Because people are this against that sort of thing, the ToS is really restrictive and because the rest of the game is so fluffy and doesn't push you on being a hardcore raider that this would have A LOT of scrutiny.
Again, I'm all up for cautionary tales, but at some point we need to understand the context we're in. People say "This is how WoW started", but did WoW had a community like ours to begin with? A dev team like ours to begin with?

Besides, we can always put restrictions in place to further protect people who might feel vulnerable to that sort of thing. Either keep the results personal to them and ask them if they want to make things public. That way, people can reveal their results to those with the know-how to analyze them and figure out what to do and where to improve.

[Ivtrix]

I'd disagree.

Top tier mythic raiders are pretty laid back within their own circles. They don't usually interact with community at large. Is rare to see them pugging with the masses. The toxicity is most prevalent with the sweaty neckbeards that try to emulate them. And having in game DPS meters would enable and encourage these try-hards to have their in game hissy fits.

This is pretty true in experiences I have seen. Most toxicity comes from midcore players who think they are a lot better than they actually are.

[KeshLives]

I'd disagree.

Top tier mythic raiders are pretty laid back within their own circles. They don't usually interact with community at large. Is rare to see them pugging with the masses. The toxicity is most prevalent with the sweaty neckbeards that try to emulate them. And having in game DPS meters would enable and encourage these try-hards to have their in game hissy fits.

Exactly. Most actual mythic raiders are good people to be around. They know they're playing a different game, more or less. It's what I call the 'wanna-be' players who cause most of the trouble, except that WoW is not at all effective at blunting those tendencies, and when people who get tired of their crap leave, it just concentrates it even more. I think that's basically what has happened.

As far as the perceived 'FFXIV toxicity', I've run into more toxic people in one thread on FFXIV's forums than I have in two years of FFXIV in-game. Slant that however you like, as I know some of you will do it anyway. Toxic people exist in FFXIV, I'll not deny, but the sheer quantitative difference is absolutely huge in comparison.

Some of you have attributed other motives to me, or tried to twist what I have said, but, really, you can cut down what I want to a very simple concept: I don't want FFXIV's 'normal' interaction with other players to ever turn into anything like what I saw in WoW in the last 3-4 years I played. Anything that I think could contribute to a slippery slope toward that kind of BS coming to FFXIV, I will be against. And, yes, in-game damage meters was a huge piece of where it started, many years ago, and since ACT exists, I see zero upside of having one actually built into the game.

You can of course, advocate what you like. I just don't have to agree with you, or you agree with me.

[Shurrikhan]

I'd disagree.

Top tier mythic raiders are pretty laid back within their own circles. They don't usually interact with community at large. Is rare to see them pugging with the masses. The toxicity is most prevalent with the sweaty neckbeards that try to emulate them. And having in game DPS meters would enable and encourage these try-hards to have their in game hissy fits.

The kind of judgments made among that level are based on far more detail, typically with greater sample size (or, until that breadth of samples are available, based on sims crafted for a given fight profile). Being able to see a number in real time, rather than only being able to plug it into fflogs or an equivalent site later, is not that. That wall you fear for was long since breached, independently of real-time, in-game information, which is the only difference formed from a in-game parser. Making summative analyses of one's logs outside the game already falls safely within the ToA.

That said, I'm not saying I want a direct parser to be featured as the norm. They're problematic, too, if only for fixation on the merely a portion of relevant details and being too skewed by things both outside of player control and easily compensated for (like gear) to act as a decent metric of relative performance.

I'd certainly agree that there's a lot of room to make sure people have the information (and awareness of what parts of the picture they lack) to, in replacing uninformed finger-pointing or rapid disbands for fear of being called out for parsing if one makes an informed decision, with the goal that the conversations that would follow an unambiguous laying of facts (all have the same list of numbers) would be as productive and conflict-free as possible (as per when each also has the same understanding of said shared numbers).

There's a lot of polish to be done, imo, before a parser would be worth adding now, given how long it's already been delayed anyways; it's just not for fear of making anything worse, since all that could go wrong essentially already has, just through different forms (ban threats, overdefensiveness, finger-pointing, feeling gag ordered into rapid disbandment, etc).

It's more a matter of these critiques being ill-aimed. The problems being mentioned are both already here and separate from real-time, in-game throughput information (as per damage meters / parsers, as compared to just logs). Which in turn keeps us from looking at how we could mitigate the conflicts the status quo already rakes us through or otherwise productively examining our existing points of conflict and how not only new features but also what exists prior to or without them specifically interact with those points.

The hissy fits already exist and are regularly seen in game, all the worst for the fact that if, say, a normally "undertuned" job notes that they're objectively doing just fine, they just gave those who believed (uninformedly) otherwise or (knew this but) are spiteful about their own failings, they'd have just handed the local, friendly witchhunter an axe for their neck.

[FireMage]

It's sad that people don't understand what toxicity actually is and that meters would allow to see who actually is toxic

[VelKallor]

This is pretty true in experiences I have seen. Most toxicity comes from midcore players who think they are a lot better than they actually are.

Id agree with this. Nicely put.

It's sad that people don't understand what toxicity actually is and that meters would allow to see who actually is toxic

I tend to find that some people are..shall we say..predisposed...to that mindset from the beginning?

Something for you to consider, no?

[Shurrikhan]

I tend to find that some people are..shall we say..predisposed...to that mindset from the beginning?

Not doubting it, but how do you mean, more specifically? Or, since it's a predisposition, is there a place that previously disposed it more specific than just "elsewhere (certainly not from us!)" or the like?

There was a term bandied about on WoW for a bit to describe the interactions that Mythic+'s keystone system (not the timers, nor the difficulty, but just the way that only one player gets punished in that noticeable fashion [key downgrade] for the party as a whole failing) -- player-unfriendly-ing design.

Here, the biggest conflicts we seem to come across, though, are dually at the most casual group content levels (disparity between people playing the content as it is [trivial], and people playing it as they imagine/want it to be [decently threatening]) and at levels of entry towards the other side of that learning curve/cliff [Extremes, Savage, and Ultimate], especially when one hasn't had the sum of luck and/or will to figure out what they can optimize or even that they can. Might there be improvements that could be made to or around either of those areas that would reduce player frustrations and, perhaps thereby, the likelihood of "toxic" encounters?

[FireMage]

I tend to find that some people are..shall we say..predisposed...to that mindset from the beginning?

Something for you to consider, no?

Nothing you say is worth anything on this topic, remember? What I stated was a fact. Not pulling your weight in a cooperative setting is objectively being toxic

[VelKallor]

Not doubting it, but how do you mean, more specifically? Or, since it's a predisposition, is there a place that previously disposed it more specific than just "elsewhere (certainly not from us!)" or the like?

There are people who...lets just say...are more than willing when the situation arises, to disregard the better angels of their nature and allow the more...adversarial facets of their personality free rein. They have that nature concealed or restrained, but when circumstances permit, or they are in an environment that enables that part of their personality, they feel free to..indulge.

Many years ago, a book called Lord of the Flies illustrated that behaviour. Given free rein or "tacit permission" to exhibit shall we say..less than civil attitudes, will gladly do so, especially when confronted with that behaviour, have a convenient excuse.

The mentality "They are a bad so its fine for me to scream abuse at them, swear at them, kick them, they need to git gud or GET OUT, they are BENEATH ME" comes to mind.

Gong back to WOW, I am reminded of two instances where a "raid leader" used dps charts to continually harass a player to the point they came in one day and bragged how they drove the player out of the game completely. They were PROUD that they "got rid of the dead weight", "weed out the bads".

What gets lost in the back and forth here is one immutable fact: that there is another human being at the other end of that keyboard.

I will also ask this: would those who make those kind of comments ever DARE do so to the other persons face? The answer is a flat no, as that highlights the other side to this kind of predisposition: those who do are also snivelling cowards..as is obvious: walking up to someone in public and screaming abuse at them has often severe consequences.

Do it in a workplace or other social setting? Hope you like handcuffs.

One of my own rules is simple: if you wouldnt have the guts to say it to their faces, in person, then dont say it.