Please add damage meters, Yoshi P.

[SaitoHikari]

The major context that is missing from all the WoW anecdotes is that WoW and the majority of other MMOs are largely raid-focused games. Raiding is literally perceived as the only activity of value in such games. There are many MMOs without officially supported parsing or a culture of raiding not reliant on them that still manage to be toxic as hell. From what I understand, WoW's parsing isn't officially supported either, but that community suffers from a complete lack of any decent moderation whatsoever.

FFXIV has managed an entire decade without falling to such depravity, regardless of whatever impact the current situation around parsing is. The major difference is the overall community mentality and how the gameplay flow is designed. I was a top-end raider in my previous MMO, Dragon Nest, and the kind of shit I saw in there (without any culture of parsing, as such tools didn't exist for that game) made me want to throw that game's entire PvE scene into the nearest volcano by the time I decided to quit for FFXIV. I also tried raiding in Lost Ark before I got the impression that it'd go the same way as Dragon Nest in the long term. Incidentally, both games have aggressively stupid gearing systems, so what passes as a skilled player could really just be a measure of how well geared you are (but of course people wouldn't admit to such a thing), as opposed to FFXIV where numbers are so tightly crunched that a player's contribution really is a measure of player skill and party coordination above all.

There probably is one thing I can absolutely blame parsing for in FFXIV though, and it's probably not what most people in here expect. There was a period of time during Stormblood where people were very judgmental about what classes you were playing as. What happened? FFLogs started calculating player contribution based on what party buffs and debuffs you brought to the table. Any increase in damage that another party member gained from any buffs and debuffs were additionally attributed to the player who was the source of said buff/debuffs. The 'Raid DPS' and 'Personal DPS' metric (though I could be wrong on exactly what they're called nowadays, I haven't stepped foot onto that site for 3 years now). It was an eye-opening look into just how powerful buffs and debuffs were in FFXIV. But the community took the data too far - people got so stupid over this that the selfish DPS such as Samurai and Black Mages were actively shunned from raid groups due to not possessing any party buffs (not to mention top-tier Bards frequently topping the charts in most optimized parties because of their crit scaling back in that era).

How did SE respond? They gutted the shit out of party buffs and debuffs in Shadowbringers, and we've only continued on this path of ever decreasing class complexity and loss of individual class identity ever since. Granted, a lot of it has also been done in the name of accessibility, which also brings up a different argument in support of parsing. One could say that the lack of officially supported parsing has put SE in a spot where they are more willing to redesign and overhaul certain classes with each expansion, rather than let the community grapple with the idea that they should try to improve themselves instead. Though imposing the latter idea without parsing isn't an easy task, perhaps even impossible.

Matter of fact, you can go talk to Ray Bradbury, who PREDICTED this decades ago. Fahrenheit 451.

Read the book. Montag lives.

Then go read Toffler. Future Shock.

I recently went back and read both of them...how they knew what was coming is still unbelievable.

You know it's time to get off the forums and take a walk outside if you have to resort to using literature/political commentary in an argument about numbers on a video game forum.