Please add damage meters, Yoshi P.

[Renalt]

As I said way earlier, I'm pretty done with this thread and not participating in the argument anymore because it's just beating my head against a wall. But fun little tidbit I just learned yesterday that I wanted to share, on the subject of toxicity, there's apparently alliances of venues in which basically a top venue enforces rules on how the venues operate and who to blacklist and whatnot and if you don't get on board your venue basically gets killed because the alliance will try to make sure no one visits it.

You know, for anyone who thinks 14's community isn't toxic.

Damn...I kinda wanna delve into this cutthroat world of FFXIV venues. Seems like it would be an interesting rabbit hole.

[Packetdancer]

A fundamental disconnect, right here.

That you would dismiss out of hand the very valid fact that parsers ENABLE toxic behaviour, a trend and fact that has been proven correct time and again, is where you are wrong.

The way I've put it before is that combat parsing/analysis tools are indeed just tools, like fire. Or a knife.

Fire can be used to cook or to (at least mostly) sterilize; a knife can be used to cut food, or perform surgery. Those are good things! But fire can also be used for arson or other harmful things, and muggers can use knives.

Tools for parsing or other combat analysis are not themselves inherently toxic, any more than fire or knives are inherently bad. They can be used to improve your own performance. They can be used to help a static optimize their strategy for a fight. Etc.

I actually wouldn't say they even cause toxicity; it's not like people who are going to use a parser to try to be cruel/toxic to someone else would otherwise be angelic bastions of light. I mean, a mugger doesn't become a mugger because "oh, gosh, knives exist, I guess instead of being a kind person I'm going to go try to shank someone and take their wallet."

(They do, as you put it, enable people to be toxic... but let's be honest, we've all run into people who are capable of being toxic just fine even without referencing a parser of any sort.)

And yet, even as someone who is very in favor of officially moddable games in general (albeit not FFXIV at this point, for reasons which I've detailed at length elsewhere) and who also believes that there's immense value in personal performance analysis tools...

As someone who has worked in the industry, I still would not put a pure 'damage meter' parser in any multiplayer game I created.

As I have said before, people are sometimes going to make spitballs to try and annoy other players with; that doesn't mean I as the developer need to hand them the straw and the paper to do so. Or, to go to my earlier analogy... someone might be the sort who's likely to try to go grab someone's wallet regardless, but I don't need to hand them the knife; that only encourages them.

I do agree at a high end it can be very useful to know where a group is falling apart; if the game added a performance-focused parser that shared information with the group as a whole, just make it something that's only enabled in savage and ultimate content. (Realistically, I don't care whether the RPR in my alliance is performing optimally in the current alliance raid. I potentially care a lot more if said RPR and I are both in a PF group that isn't making the P8Sp1 DPS check. Not because I want to berate said RPR, but because if we just numerically cannot make the DPS check, I may want to consider bouncing and trying a different PF group...)

But I absolutely, firmly, 100% believe that if a game can provide tools for a player to improve when they actively want to do so, that's a great thing to do. Whether it's a competitive FPS having a 'play against AI' mode where you can practice (and get a breakdown of your accuracy or whatnot at the end, ideally) without the pressure of worrying about letting down real human teammates, or an action RPG that has jumping puzzles having a practice area, or...

Well, an MMO providing personal combat analysis tools of some form.

[Shurrikhan]

As someone who has worked in the industry, I still would not put a pure 'damage meter' parser in any multiplayer game I created.

Same. Though for me that's a matter of it being a wasted opportunity to do more / better.

Just like some may mistake "took no Vuln stacks" for "is playing perfectly" when eyeballing, some may mistake one person's {comparatively high raw damage} for {comparatively high performance} by forgetting to account for other factors that raw damage includes/conflates (single-target buffs received, item level, not having been PKed earlier, etc.).

There are ways to make an at-a-glance indicator of performance far, far more reliable and precise than what raw damage alone can do and ways to contextualize that performance data as to maximize its use for learning. Give no context for something and, just like any tier list that even comes with an explicit warning that the differences will not exceed those of player familiarity and that every job is wholly viable, its perception can grow rampantly disproportionate. Would that still simply replace other, equally bad misconceptions that were already there? Yes, but given the opportunity to do better, we should do better.

And I agree that viewing these tools needs to be optional. Some don't care to do anything that would require the degree of learning or engagement that those tools are meant for, and that's fine. Moreover, some just cannot concentrate with that shit in the corner of their vision.
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My sole point of disagreement is in that I don't think parsers uniquely enable any toxicity. To me, for something to enable toxicity, there'd have to be something about it that either (A) supplies a means for unwanted behavior that the doer was already predisposed to or intending to do or (B) cues (i.e., things that seemingly gives reason for) that unwanted behavior where it wouldn't otherwise exist.

If anyone were looking to check something at a glance with the intention of pushing others down or themselves up at others' expense, there's no bottleneck there over means of doing so; people can, and do, 'lesser' others over job choice, glamour, language, spelling, vuln stacks, etc., to the point that adding "low damage" is a redundancy that can only replace other (if far less likely to actually have any negative impact on others) choices of 'excuse' for that meanness; it provides no real increase to the means of harassing others.

And what new cues it does trigger aren't, in themselves, related to harassment, but rather just hasten and thereby lessens (in terms of stress caused for the average person affected) already inevitable confrontations by reducing the time it takes for the inevitable desire to fix the problem that's becoming increasingly visible to focus where it's most useful. Under the existing system, one of two major forms of harassment (silent, as compared to vocal) is purposely protected, made less visible and armed against threat of discovery, but despite partially silencing reactions to their impact, it still had an equal impact -- it'd make runs stressful to the point of people preferring to disband over continuing as is. With parsers, both forms are visible and can be more immediately addressed, but to no net increase in harassment (more likely a net decrease). As such, I can't see how someone would necessarily prefer that things stay exactly as they are unless they're specifically taking advantage of its purpose-built blindspots.

[Ransu]

So you were a burden and were removed. This is a GOOD thing that happened. Use your dismissal to learn to not be a bad

Seriously, players like you shouldn't even be allowed to play online games.

[Estecka]

Listening to him, you'd think loosing is against the ToS, and that the best way to learn is to be forbidden from practising.

[Shurrikhan]

Listening to him, you'd think loosing is against the ToS, and that the best way to learn is to be forbidden from practising.

To be fair, I don't think he's made those cases for players just doing actually casual content. From what I remember, his threshold for "not griefing" in dungeons, for instance, was at least using AoE as roughly appropriate and rotating a majority of one's non-redundant CDs.

That said, I wouldn't necessarily put much stock in what someone who often has at least seemed to intend to inflame first and convincingly opine only as a distant second would think on this, especially given the low-hanging flammable fruit obvious to this topic. There are some conflicting interests, to say the least, between making any sort of cohesive sense and merely getting people riled that would push any pro-parser position he might hold to a comic extreme.

[FireMage]

Seriously, players like you shouldn't even be allowed to play online games.

You being butthurt that someone actually stands for making an effort doesn't detract from facts, all it does is make you a brat

[SlouchyBard]

Damn...I kinda wanna delve into this cutthroat world of FFXIV venues. Seems like it would be an interesting rabbit hole.

You wanna be Alice or the Cheshire Cat? We could go get the Cards after us. Haha

[Renalt]

You wanna be Alice or the Cheshire Cat? We could go get the Cards after us. Haha

Haha Perhaps I could be the Mad Hatter. We can show up and watch everyone Bee's Knees in silence.

[SlouchyBard]

Haha Perhaps I could be the Mad Hatter. We can show up and watch everyone Bee's Knees in silence.

Perfect! But instead of listening to whatever stuff they have on their Spotify. We can listen to our own awesome Spotify playlists.