Please add damage meters, Yoshi P.

[Saraide]

I’ve played since early Heavensward, though I took a nearly three year break mid-ShB that I just recently returned from about 2 weeks ago. I didn’t actually begin raiding until late HW though, after slowly getting over my anxiety in regards to higher end group content. I think what happened with me is that I really, really loved HW Bard, and wanted to master it to the point where I wanted to show off my skills with the class and help out in general. Of course I’d fall flat on my face a few times, but that’s life. Everyone’s been there.

ANYWAY out of all that time, I only ever saw one PF demanding parse logs to join. This was a Baykko EX party about a week after release.

The leader was a dark knight, and he wanted people with 90+ parses. I scored 100 historical on the second day. Didn’t care much for the worshipping he did after he saw my record, it was just his was the only party up at that time of day (I don’t think cross world PF existed yet, not totally sure). I told him to ditch the requirement because we’d be waiting for hours otherwise.

The party filled up, with some people not having cleared yet but had seen enrage. Party lead complained for a bit, but I consider that ready to clear material.

Guess what? The Dark Knight asking for logs was just looking for a carry. He kept screwing up tankswap right at the beginning, resulting in myself repeatedly eating tank buster as a Bard. If I used my aggro cutting skills, it was the Black Mage eating them instead. After five pulls of us not even getting to 70% before wiping, people rightfully started getting frustrated and leaving. I left too, quickly formed my own party, and made it clear in PF that I was trying to pick up everyone else that left. About four members of the original party joined.

With 5 members not having cleared yet, we defeated the boss first pull, and farmed like 8 runs after that until everyone got the weapon they needed. What started out as a pretty bad experience turned rather pleasant in the end. Incidentally, that’s the only time I ever led a PF for high end content. I still have some anxiety in regards to running high end content on my own without a static (which is why I don’t plan on raiding again until next tier at the earliest), and it would take something really drastic to get me to lead one.

Point being these nightmare scenarios if people demanding logs for PF doesn’t really happen at all, and in the exceptionally rare cases that it does, it’s a big warning sign to actually skilled raiders that they’re probably someone really toxic looking for a carry.

I am in favor of people wearing their clown noses openly and for everyone to see like that PF host you encountered.

[VelKallor]

Point being these nightmare scenarios if people demanding logs for PF doesn’t really happen at all,

Allow a public parser to be used ingame, you will. Bet on it.

[Saraide]

Allow a public parser to be used ingame, you will. Bet on it.

Have you actually read that post you replied to? Because I get the feeling you have not read it at all and are just parroting your own point over and over again.

[Deceptus]

Rant

Hall of the Novice should be mandatory, especially if you use a job skip potion.

Job stone should be mandatory after level 35. No weapon should allow base jobs after that.

I also think that Stone, Sea, Sky dummies should be mandatory before you can enter the associated EX. If you can't pass the DPS check on a stationary dummy, there's no way you can do it live in game with movement mechanics.

[FireMage]

Have you actually read that post you replied to? Because I get the feeling you have not read it at all and are just parroting your own point over and over again.

It's like VelKallor is a garbage poster or something

[SaitoHikari]

Allow a public parser to be used ingame, you will. Bet on it.

You didn't read my post at all, did you? It feels like shitposting is still the same as it has ever been here during my three year absence.

You openly admit that you don't do EX or Savage content, and it sounds like whether or not anyone is parsing in them wouldn't change that at all, so how the hell would you know what actually goes on in these parties? One who actively avoids that content shouldn't be making assumptions about people who do choose to engage in them. Quite frankly, half this thread reads like people trying to publicly justify why they don't want to do that content to themselves. But openly saying that you don't want to raid because the community is toxic doesn't fly in a game where everyone and their mother keeps saying that this game is probably the friendliest MMO, so you default to blaming parsers instead. Instead of, you know, being quiet and just ignoring the content like most normal players out there. Flinging shit at a different faction within the community is a far cry from not wanting to raid because of personal anxiety.

I've quietly observed many random raiders over the years. You can easily tell who is (or was) a high-end raider or not by paying attention to the amount of max HP they have and what glamours they're using if they have savage/ultimate weapons on display (and now there are ultimate-exclusive portraits too). For example, I think DPS with BiS gear have anywhere in the realm of 68-70k HP in parties (not too sure, as again I've recently returned and it's a guesstimate as I'm only item level 613 with about 64k max HP in parties right now). I can probably count with one hand the amount of times I've run into a random raider acting toxic in my past 5-8 years of playing this game, most are usually quiet and chill people. But what usually happens are non-raiders starting shit in random parties and blaming other people for not pulling their weight, only for actual raiders to step up, heavily imply that the person being toxic is the one not pulling their weight and that the toxicity seems like an attempt to mask that, and kick them out. Come to think of it, I've observed people who are obviously parsing usually shutting down otherwise unchecked toxicity rather than causing it.

There is an old saying in the raiding community that I still hear being said today: A clear is more important than the parse.

---

Quite frankly, SE should add in-game support for parsing in some way, and I say this as someone who hasn't used them ever since like 3 years ago, since I haven't participated in any content that really needs it. Namely, my reasoning behind this is that I find that commendations are heavily weighted towards tanks and healers. DPS contribution is more based on feelings at this point, a DPS can perform exceptionally well but hardly ever get recognized for it, because the average person can't really tell how good they're playing other than paying attention to how fast things are dying. Though doing this in roulettes would be dicey, and the content in roulettes are lower in difficulty for a reason, thus they do not need a parser to begin with.

But since EX content, Savage, and Ultimate are nowadays designed around hard enrages, there should be in-game support for parsing there. If SE were to implement it for that kind of content, I guarantee you that parsing via third party tools would die overnight, because nobody actually parses outside of the high-end content for reasons other than morbid curiosity (or someone is using it to prioritize giving comms to very impressive DPS). SE can make it a party finder only option requiring consent from everyone in the party to parse. So if the party leader wants to parse, such an intention would be listed in the PF, and joining such a party would be your consent to the parser being active for that content.

[Packetdancer]

Stopped reading right there.

"Some" truth? SOME?

Oh yeah Ive heard this before "Ive never seen it so you are making it all up"

No, I've seen it. I know it's not being made up. I just do not think it's useful to speak in absolutes.

Do I think 'damage meter' type parsers can encourage toxicity? Yes.

Do I also think combat analysis can be an extremely valuable tool for self-improvement? Yes.

Both of these things can be true.

I've seen a lot of people who used parser tools for self-improvement where getting the information they used for that self-improvement -- be it just looking at timelines of "crap, I dropped my DoT for X seconds there" or using actual analysis tools like XIVAnalysis -- would have been near-impossible without parsing/logging tools.

It's why I think if they did add anything, they should add something personal which aids in that sort of self-improvement, rather than a general "here is a thing that tries to assign a numeric value to every player in the duty instance".

Because first of all, those numbers are not accurate (or at least, not as "real" as they could be, given the difference between aDPS and rDPS), and secondly, assigning a numeric value to every player invites the jackasses to be toxic and judgmental.

(And no online community -- including this one -- is free of jackasses.)

That's why I very specifically feel that a tool which is personal, rather than public, can provide the data some people demonstrably want for self-improvement while also avoiding the toxicity that a more traditional pure 'damage meter' can encourage.

Theres a very good reason a WHM doesnt use Asylum in Hall of the Novice..it doesnt come till level 52..

In Hall of the Novice you are a Conjuror, not a White Mage as you dont get the jobstone til level 30, Asylum is 22 levels after that. [I]If the NPC is telling you you arent using a spell you dont have yet on a class that doesnt even have the jobstone yet , the player aint the problem here.

Yes, exactly!

You have hit on exactly why I suggested that there should be optional continuations of the Hall of the Novice at later levels. Right now, you have Hall of the Novice, which is very, very limited; it teaches some useful concepts at a very early level, and then... leaves the players completely on their own to discover things, in a game which often has extremely bad discoverability.

(Now, I do kinda think that Hall of the Novice should be mandatory your first time through MSQ, simply because I know a lot of players who never noticed it was there. But plenty of games have tutorials they force you through.)

Hall of Novice :Level 15 -> Jobstone:Locked to MSQ level 30 "Sylph Management" -> Asylum: level 52

...you didnt know?

No, you evidently didn't read.

Which is fine. And folks can disagree on things. But you outright said at the top of your post you weren't going to bother reading the rest, so all I ask is that you please don't make incorrect assumptions about what the rest of the document said.

At any rate: in no place did I say that Hall of the Novice should teach people about Asylum; that would be absolutely ridiculous considering its level range.

The example with Asylum was specifically "P'ahrsurr", the Scion NPC who would give you an XIVAnalysis-type breakdown of duties you'd recently run, and provide advice. Because I think people having the option to go get a personal assessment from some NPC with advice -- generated from actual battle data -- about what they might find would help them improve would be useful.

As it is, people demonstrably want that sort of breakdown right now. It's just that if you're on console, you need to go ask a PC player to log things for you and upload it so that you can feed it through XIVAnalysis or look at the timeline.

(Worse, if you want to feed it through XIVAnalysis, it requires the logs to be publicly accessible... which may or may not be a thing anyone else in that content wanted to be the case.)

An NPC that provided that sort of analysis to someone individually and personally on request would solve those problems.

Ahhh yes this is modeled on WOWs failed and utterly reviled Proving Grounds, a recycled, pathetically overtuned and imbalanced "test of ability" requiring players to use abilities they no longer had after Blizzard got out their chainsaw..one of them called for us to use Rain of Fire in an instance that hadnt been recoded to match the dps of a spell that had been NERFED by 50% because of repeated pvp whining.

I... actually have not played WoW save way back at launch, where I wandered off before too long, so I admit I'm not familiar with what you describe. But okay?

For the record, though, the idea of optional later training/tests for role mastery in my write-up came from the original Secret World, which had a test for each role before you could do Nightmare content (TSW's equivalent of savage content). Specifically, there was an NPC -- literally called the Gatekeeper -- who would not allow you down the Agartha branch that led to Nightmare versions of content until you had passed one of his tests.

(I will admit to some lingering healer-main amusement that the Gatekeeper's healer role test was basically "keep alive this party of complete idiots I am going to create, a bunch of little NPC Gatekeeper avatars who will greed and stand in the bad and repeatedly ignore mechanics.")

And while I don't like necessarily gating access to content on passing some test, I do think having an optional test you can measure yourself against can be a very useful tool for those who want to work on some self-improvement. I know that I found the Gatekeeper's DPS test a useful tool to test new deck builds against.

(Original TSW had a sort of... 'design your own class' system, which was interesting but about 75% of the 'decks' you'd come up with were extremely broken and/or otherwise non-viable. Having a way to test them was useful. It's less so here, where there is numerically 'one true rotation' as calculated by the Balance, but it's still a nice option to have.)

Plus, in conjunction with the idea of an NPC that analyzes server-side battle log data and gives you in-game advice, having a test you can run to generate those logs without having to yeet yourself into public group content seems nice.

Mandatory Hall of the Novice.

Okay, this one you actually read correctly.

Yes, the first time you go through MSQ, I do want Hall of the Novice -- and specifically only Hall of the Novice -- to be MSQ-required. Because it makes sense, both mechanically (lots of games do have a tutorial) and narratively (the Scions have reason to want you to be certified upon your joining, before sending you into the field on combat operations).

Mandatory job assessments.

Nope. Optional.

Hall of the Novice is not a job assessment, it's a tutorial. So yes, I'm okay with that being mandatory, once, for initial MSQ progression. Because it's a tutorial. And the game already wants you to run it. But a hypothetical Hall of the Journeyman or Hall of the Master would be optional stuff if you wanted to get more advanced in your training/practice.

At any rate, like I said, folks can disagree; demonstrably, you prefer not to have any tools for analysis/practice/training -- even ones that are personal-only -- in the game, and that's a valid opinion to have.

I just personally disagree; I think we could benefit from having optional tools that people could use for self-analysis and improving their performance when they want to. Especially because right now, PC users have those tools (in the form of ACT logs, FFLogs timeline visualization, and XIVAnalysis log breakdowns) while console players are left with no equivalent.

So, yeah, I do think there's a place for the game to add tools to help folks with self-improvement. I just don't think that we'll get a productive outcome if whatever analysis tools the game added took the form of a 'damage meter' type parser...

And I think, despite your flailing around and generally accusatory tone towards me, it sounds like you actually agree with me on that part.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Shurrikhan]

As you seem to want to dismiss or handwave the OVERWHELMING PROOF of how a parser culture can AND DOES poison a gaming community

By all means, provide any of that proof wherein parsers are the cause of those conflicts instead of merely something that has informed them or facilitated their resolution, and you might have something. To instead argue, though, that what facilitates those resolutions is inherently toxic is a classic case of shooting the messenger -- or the likes of blaming communication for the source of all evils, despite its presence having proportionately replaced, in those same conflicts, the use instead of force and unintelligible yelling or blaming your thermostat for your room being cold.

The difference between having a parser (or, better yet, a more comprehensive or relative-potency-based parser, as not to bother considering differences due only to greater primary stat and provide greater contexts) or not is simply that when there becomes a conflict to be resolved (e.g., someone has leeched, or line-skipped at everyone else's expense, etc., to a degree that it'd be more comfortable for the group as a whole to train or even replace that person and try again than to trudge through the content as is), those on whom the focus falls are, 90+% of the time, those deserving of that focus.

Why? Because damage does happen to correlate that tightly with error, especially in modern fights that tend towards damage down debuffs from failed mechanics over vulnerability or direct damage alone.

And that's a hell of a lot better than what eyeballing alone manages, all while incurring fewer distractions in one's own play from checking others for faults in theirs, less of the typical subjective biasing, and altogether fewer bad feelings incurred in gathering that data. Rather than creating a fight out of even checking basic facts as to why the repeated failings or untenable state have/has occurred, the facts are simply there. They don't preclude all context, but the basics are there -- objective and shared.

Does that make someone falling under some arbitrary number necessarily an issue? No. The bounds for a conflict arising are exactly as before. Time spent in replacement or training is time wasted unless the later benefits would outweigh that waste.

At most, an inevitable conflict simply becomes known a bit sooner. If, for instance, playing too safe a strategy for the first phase of a fight has put the party way behind on meeting enrage, a raid leader could make the decision to simply reset and rethink that first phase before those habits become more ingrained. Yes, some who have learned the fight on other jobs or know the job well enough to generalize may, in seeing low performance relative to ilvl from another, then check to see what's messing up in order to give quick and actionable advice so that the party can do better and they've small chance more that the game as a whole gets less difficult because players improve. For those in the know, it can indicate certain tightly correlative happenings.

And yes, sometimes a person who does not care to improve sufficiently to do the content they signed up for and would otherwise be able to tie up others time, patience, and emotions with that mismatch (but still not for long enough to be dragged through to a clear) may be caught out before things escalate to a fever pitch, but the conflict hasn't changed; the confrontation was still inevitable. The only difference is that all 8 people (yes, including whoever came horribly underprepared) saved time and stress. That is NOT a bad thing.

___________

Consider also any reduction (less information being available) relative to the status quo.

If it is bad that someone might be kicked for underperforming, why I can see whether or not the BLM is only ever casting Ice spells? Why can I see anyone else's animations? That's where the outputs arise from, so surely that should be kept private, no?

And gear? What if I don't want to have to go through the hassle of gearing up? Nevermind that it's specifically because of players underprepared in every other sense being so hard to address due to threat of witchhunting that our ilvl requirements get so inflated... why should you be able to see what my ilvl is or what materia I use? (Surely you elitist pricks just don't understand the majesty of full Piety melds and want to exclude my genius, and so you shouldn't be able to know what I have for or on my gear in the first place. /s)

Those sarcastic suggestions are actually less absurd, though, than preferring eyeballing alone (and a penchant for witchhunting or conflating self-improvement with elitism/ToA violation) over having shared objective metrics. Which is the only real difference, respectively, between excluding parsers or making them a baseline feature available to anyone.

______________

Now, again, my perspective is that first impressions for any newly implemented system are important, and it'd therefore be a waste to use up those first impressions on just copy-pasting ACT over to the main game like so many other now-baseline plugin features before it. As the parser offers the most to the community overall as a self-diagnostic and learning tool, it should be built to capitalize on that. That means tracking more than just raw damage. That likely also means including synergetic tools by which to, say, easily track one's rotation or compare it against others' (your other pulls, others from your party, or maybe even imported logs), give yourself a holistic grade based also on avoidable damage taken, utility use, etc.

But at no point is purposely blinding the party in order to leave things entirely to highly limited, subjective, and increasingly emotionally charged information-gathering (any sharing of which is likely to be tinted by ego and rank-jostling)... going to be preferable to a shared, objective baseline of relevant metrics.

[Hanaya]

If there's already a PF culture in practice of demanding logs for all content, then please let me know where this exists so I can go see it for myself. Either I've been under a rock and choosing my PFs over the last two years carefully or....

Am genuinely curious though, not trying to be funny.

yes. I have 245 days of playtime in this game and I literally have never been asked to show my logs to anybody for any content. I've completed every savage tier since I started playing, cleared ucob, farmed ex trials, and no one has ever required fflogs to join a party (or even asked me for them in general). I imagine it does happen with parsing parties though, but I think... that's pretty reasonable, because if you're joining a parsing party, it's only fair for everyone to be on the same page.

Honestly, no one has ever flamed me for my dps or mentioned parsing in general. However, I'm on crystal so the aether/primal communities could be way more toxic for all I know. but at least on crystal, almost everybody is very positive and the (miniscule) number of toxic people get called out immediately and kicked if they continue to be toxic after that.

[VelKallor]

By all means, provide any of that proof..

Lost Ark

https://forums.playlostark.com/t/thi...meter/479048/4

The idea of a DPS meter is something that has been pushed back against by SGR and Gold River directly; the team believes it would encourage more toxicity within group content, and aren’t in support of bringing one in because of this.

then lets go to Guild Wars 2

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/topi...arty-toxicity/

DPS meters have created a highly toxic environment within the LFG system. Name calling, party kicks, and general rude behavior over not hitting a certain "benchmark" score are ALL behaviors that were, for the most part, considered anathema to the Guild Wars ideal. Now, this behavior is more the norm than the exception.

and

https://kaylriene.wordpress.com/2022...t-and-shaming/

In the end, what I find true is this – damage meters themselves are not a problem in the purest sense of the word, but the attitudes and behaviors that emerge around them and the data provided can be

Then we have the previous video on what was called instrumental play, and the pitfalls it can and does create.

Now lets look at SWTOR , this thread

DPS meters have ruined every game they have appeared in. First, they encourage people to ignore proper fight mechanics to pad numbers. So many fights have mechanics that reduce overall dps that are completely ignored by players who want to pad their DPS Meter numbers..

Second, dps numbers do not reflect raid performance; they reflect player gear. A player who maximizes performance in lesser gear will often have less dps than a player who is average in superior gear. That is a truism in MMOs that many players simply ignore.

In PVE, you are doing well, when your team downs the content. Period.

ands nnow lets look at WOW....\

Sounds like someones regularly on the bottom of the meters and is angry over being called out over being carried

Last of all, GameFaqs

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards...craft/72186501

..........This competition, rather than encouraging teamwork, is what mostly contributes to toxicity in online communities. Essentially, the tool is NOT the problem; it's the community and their need to be on top individually rather than as a group. The damage meter is just the tool which gives the community an avenue to indulge in toxic behaviour.

I have said this before but it bears restating. You may say all you like that a dps meter is there to help you with your performance.

BUT.

I can 10000% gaurantee you this. The day that SE allows dps meters ingame, in less than 24 hours you will have "that guy" spamming dps meters and screaming abuse.................in Sastasha.