SE's most difinitive statement yet on parsers

[kidvideo]

All of this discussion has led me to wonder "what is SE's real definitive rule on RMT & harassment"? Those are two itches that I want to scratch.

[Sebazy]

I think you are tarring a lot of people with a rather tired brush tbh.

Ps, I'm still waiting for you to quote where I was being insulting etc! Chop chop

[Bixby]

Here's a wrench I don't think I've seen thrown into this conversation yet: how useful parsers can be for finding bugs and balance issues. Blizzard is constantly patching weird, obscure bugs in spell interactions and making small tweaks to balance because players running parsers find things that testing misses. Any developer worth their job will tell you real-world tests are going to find stuff that your testing environments won't. Users will always do things developers and designers don't think of. And letting users have parsers makes that worlds better. Everyone feels their DPS or threat or HPS or whatever is too low or too high, or swears they're missing when they shouldn't be or that an ability isn't quite doing what it says on the box.

Without parsers, it becomes incredibly difficult to make the case for any of that, because it's just vague forum noise with no real data to go on, and likely to be drowned out by "It's fine, shut up." With a player base armed with parsers, you get enough actual data to see whether it's true or not.

Without parsers, you end up with years of "ROFLDRG" because everyone assumes their DPS is crap, and there's never anything solid to make them see otherwise.

[Exstal]

The last few pages have been, "lolwut" from the anti-parser/cheating accusers. Although it was already said here it is again.

Currently:
1) ToS forbids third-party programs
2) A third-party program has the ability to do parsing
3) Parsing is cheating

Add-on support
1) ToS forbids third-party programs
2) A third-party program has the ability to do parsing
2b) SE has a first-party program with the ability to do parsing
3) Parsing is cheating

See how that makes sense? Get it? Got it? Good.

[Staris]

The last few pages have been, "lolwut" from the anti-parser/cheating accusers. Although it was already said here it is again.

Currently:
1) ToS forbids third-party programs
2) A third-party program has the ability to do parsing
3) Parsing is cheating

Add-on support
1) ToS forbids third-party programs
2) A third-party program has the ability to do parsing
2b) SE has a first-party program with the ability to do parsing
3) Parsing is cheating

See how that makes sense? Get it? Got it? Good.

except they fail to acknowledge you can manually parse the combat log with pen/paper. (It exports to a damn file lol)

[Sebazy]

except they fail to acknowledge you can manually parse the combat log with pen/paper. (It exports to a damn file lol)

Unfortunately dots do not get recorded in either the log or combat window

[Kaethra]

Interesting fact, it appears Lady Amandine of Haukke Manor has 75,000 hp. But like I said, they won't report those other threads I linked, so there's no danger of posting such info here. Course there's no way to prove how I arrived at that number. Maybe I used a parser, maybe I added up all the numbers in the log file (manual parsing), or perhaps I did a couple of 300ish damage hits and used the percentage in game to arrive at that number (another method of parsing, though rough).

All three methods are wrong by the people in this thread. All three methods can be used to determine who's not pulling their weight and can be harassed for it. All three methods can be used to the same end.

I'll tell you what is more unfair than any method of parsing. My 17 button mmo gaming mouse. One hand is on the WASD keys and will never waver and the other can control targeting with the movement of a wrist and the thumb has access to not just 12, 24, but all 36 hotkeys across 3 hotbars. All with the ease of having the skill to use a Numberpad without looking at it (or adding machine for you older peeps like me). Talk about an advantage over controllers. You thought regular mouse and KB users had a slight advantage...

Point is, there's much worse things than parsers that are legit. And no one's proved that parsers are even disallowed except for a probably mistranslated off handed remark. You want to really prove to us that parsers aren't allowed? I'll tell you how to do it. I'll even do Half the work for you. Go to these threads, and report them. They aren't discussing parsing, they are parsing. Everything they arrived at has been through parsing. The fact those threads exist do every bad thing that you all have brought up. They make the game easier, they tell us how to play content without slugging through it first, they give us ammo to throw at bad players. If you don't do this, then you are a liar, and don't even believe in what you have been saying all along.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...otation-Reborn
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...-Temple-Reborn
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...age-Calculator

[Markas]

Why isnt this over yet?

[Sebazy]

Theres life yet!

[Sebazy]

You learn a Summoner's abilities by playing the job, not by parsing. You learn about your abilities by reading the description, not by parsing.

If dot damage could be accurately timestamped and sent to the chat log I'd agree. BLMs can get a feel for how they are doing simply by activity time and raw big number hits, MNKs will quickly learn that a boss fight boils down to keeping those greased lightning stacks going. SMNs don't have that luxury as simply keeping the core 3 dots on and festering is barely half the story. They have no easily digestible feedback from the game as to how they are doing. For the most part, all they get is a bunch of small numbers flying around the boss getting obscured in the spam.

Ruin II also weaves in well with off GCD abilities and pet commands. There is nothing in the game that highlights this.

Don't get me wrong, Mnks and BLMs benefit more from optimising positioning through studying replays rather than parsing different openers and 'rotations'. I'm singling out SMN because the game does such a horrible job of providing feedback for dots, it's a particularly extreme example and I do appreciate that it's not the norm for the game as a whole. /TLDR = The game does not provide sufficient feedback for SMN dps. Perhaps that's a topic for another thread