Why not an ingame damage tracker?

[Ehayte]

What about a personal parser for each player that shows them their own DPS, but you can check or uncheck it to share with your Group, FC, or Alliance at will?

[Miitan]

It's quite clear that no one would EVER use a parser to check their own dps and try to work out how to improve it.

Parsers are obviously just there so you can ridicule other people with low dps.

Obviously.

[Seig345]

What about a personal parser for each player that shows them their own DPS, but you can check or uncheck it to share with your Group, FC, or Alliance at will?

I was thinking something along these lines. That takes care of the "I wanna see how I'm doing" issue.

The problem with this whole parser vs no parser thing, is it tends to boil down to the same thing as the forum White Knight vs Troll arguments, where both sides simply slap the respective labels on each other and ultimately make no progress in the argument. Here, it's elitist jerks vs slackers. You're inevitably going to have elitist jerks who are gonna start sniffing at people who don't meet whatever 'standard' they set as 'necessary' for a dungeon, kinda like the whole iLvl 90's only thing. Meanwhile you'll also have people who don't want to be told how to play the game.

Maybe it should just be FC only. PUGs are going to be hit or miss, and you're going to find yourself 'needing' that parser to tell people what's what in just about every single PUG. FCs are going to be the only setting where you're going to see any real 'progress' from using the parser to see someone else's DPS. In PUGs it's likely to just be used as a means of deciding who should be vote kicked, which isn't going to teach people to 'play better', it's just going to teach them to hate harder.

The 'Well then the 'elitists' and 'slackers' can just stay away from each other' bit doesn't quite work with SE wanting as little player division as possible. That's why PS3 (and soon PS4) and PC can play together, and that's why the in-progress button on the DF is an inclusive option, not an exclusive one.