The issue nobody wants to address

[MentheusDreyar]

ima get heat for this but i'm sickl and tired of this stupid petty bs.

You will get heat, but feel free to always express your opinion ^^ anyway...

Having the most damage does not mean you play are class well, and inbefore people say "but the dps checks" SE been doing mobs with enrage timers and dps checks in most final fantasy games. Need to level up, gear up, use any buff or benefit to help, and using your skills well timed and buffs well timed.

As a DPS good damage indicates you are playing your job well or are on the right track at the very least, almost everything in the game as a Lv and Ilv requirement, so its doable at those levels, gearing up only makes it easier but if you can't pull your weight at minimum Ilv then you clearly aren't as good as you think, and if you STILL can't pull your weight after that then you are just bad...

Also it isn't hard to check ur damage output, simply seeing how much of the mobs/boss hp you take out all you need to know in my opinion, thats how i judge my performance and aim to improve if I see my attacks not taking a decent amount of damage i adjust my gear and timing on my buffs, and adjust my skills on my hotbar to be more fluid and comfortable.

But that's only a rough guess and not accurate at all, and is for sure not good enough for anything remotely challenging, especially progression raiding, you need numbers.

As for rotations, in most cases they are pretty much spelled out for you, it didn't takwe a parser to figure it out. Also whats wrong with simply trial and error? ralking amounts your friends on how they play? Why does everything need to be a "the parser figured it out"

Yes your Basic rotations are easily spelled out for you, but how do you think people discovered the Optimal rotations everyone uses currently? they used a parser to more accurately calculate everything. A parser just saves time and makes it easier to see what the issue/who the issue is damage wise.

My final thing, STOP backseat playing other peoples characters. It is rude, inconsiderate and just plain snobby. You have no idea what the person us doing, how the persons hotbar is set up, what the person net connection is or where they live. The more time you spend on whatching other pleople the less time you spend doing your role. If things go south don't blame any one player, talk on how the wipe happen and what the group as a whole can do to improve.

It's also rude, inconsiderate and plain snobby to just stroll into content and not perform on par with at least your expected minimum contribution, which is what people are angry about, if content is cleared then no one really cares if you could do better, but when you're holding back a group you deserve to be judged and removed if you aren't pulling your weight in anything above dungeon level content. STOP expecting us to carry people through content without them putting in effort to learn anything. In this case the player isn't putting out enough DPS (because you obviously can't parse mechanics), it's not our responsibility to teach them how to play their Job in the instance. If they can't meet the DPS check at the minimum Ilv or later it's not worth the rest of the player's time in keeping them to wipe over and over. If the problem is the mechanic's of the fight i'll give them a few tries at most, but after that it's clear they won't get it and we need to replace them to have a hope of passing the content.

The only time a "group meeting" would even work is for a pre-made group, randoms are too impatience and prone to rage quitting to bother with that, plus the major issue of language barriers if i physically can't explain it to them then i'll have no choice but to quit, or replace them. And i sure as hell won't eat a lock out if its only one person causing the issue that we could just replace.

[MentheusDreyar]

As to being allowed to use the figures produced by a parser to 'punish' bad players for not performing to other people's standards... Seriously!?!
I find it hard to believe anyone has such an inflated sense of their own importance that such a proposition seems reasonable.

You're blowing it way out of proportion, apart from the odd A-hole "other people standards" are basically pull your own weight and perform your role at least adequately. Most players will pick up the slack if someone is behind the curve, but when not even other player's putting in 110%+ can't guarantee a win and the under performing player(s) is/are clearly holding the group back from completing the content then they need to be "punished" by being removed from the group.

All the parser would do is enable to locate where the problems lie and to remove the weak links, that sounds perfectly reasonable to me... To be more precise it allows us to find the problems with the DPS that have no way of being singled out as easily as Tanks and Healers do currently and replace them.

I mean, i couldn't care less anymore tbh because the only thing i PUG on DF now is my leveling roulette, i've got a FC Alliance LS for everything else so i don't have to put up with bad players anymore.

You know why i no longer play with randoms? Because about 70% of the time i was the top DPS..... as a HEALER, if that doesn't say something about general player skill i don't know what will...Heck i wasn't really trying half the time, was watching anime on my Ipad and still performing on par or better than the DPS while healing.

[Archaell]

...

Kudos to you. You saved me a lot of listing in English dictionary.

btw. My points were never about other people performing to "other people standards". It was about people performing to "game's standards". There is big difference.

When it comes to my own standards... These are quite mild. Personally, I have never kicked a player from group for anything else than DCing - I would rather leave myself before doing that - and that's while tanking/healing for several random groups a day. In all honesty, I believe that parser would be enough of motivation to improve on one's own and enough of discouragement to intentionally getting carried.

[MentheusDreyar]

The game's standards are the basic minimum standards. You must be at least "X" Lv and "X" Ilv to enter and have an understanding of your rotation for that level to beat "X" content. Like yourself, it seems most people's standards are around the minimum expected, which is absolutely fair. If content is getting completed no one really cares as long as it doesn't take forever and a day to complete. If they do more than bare minimum that's great, and i would expect more than minimum from higher geared player's more so than player's fresh to that content. It's the players that fail to meet that minimum expectation that shouldn't be there, which all player's with common sense would agree. I think about 98% of players would actually agree with my assessment, but as soon as parser's are mentioned everyone seems to get far too defensive to realize this and just assume everyone is a elitist parser jerk because we like to not wipe 100 times... In all honestly, don't give them a reason to kick you and you won't be kicked. It's that simple.

I agree with you on the parser's @Archaell, see my Sig in relation to that without the information people have a harder improving, especially the solo players.

[Whiteroom]

My final thing, STOP backseat playing other peoples characters. It is rude, inconsiderate and just plain snobby. You have no idea what the person us doing, how the persons hotbar is set up, what the person net connection is or where they live. The more time you spend on whatching other pleople the less time you spend doing your role. If things go south don't blame any one player, talk on how the wipe happen and what the group as a whole can do to improve.

I feel I need to ask this here,and not just for you, but anyone in the thread:

What do you consider your responsibility to be when you join a group?

Now please don't just go "RESPONSABILITY!? THIS IS A GAME!", when you join a team, you are agreeing to certain things. As a tank, you are agreeing to fulfill the tanks role which mostly involves keeping the aggro of the enemies while people attack it for example. So, what do you feel you are agreeing to when you enter a team?

To me, you agree to put all of the work* that pertains to the role you selected upon entering. As dps, in a four man group for simplicities sake, this means doing your best to achieve at least close to 50% of the damage. I say close to because obviously you will have healer and tank damage. Now, this doesn't come into question often if everything is going smoothly, though if someone is doing 6 times the damage of the other similarly geared person, they are likely to get annoyed at some point, as anyone would(note: this is player dependant and instance dependant.)

Now I ask this, because the Pro-Parser crowd, in my eyes, seems to think that you agree to do your job at least competently and not poorly enough to put strain (or too much strain, remember, they are also playing a game)on the rest of the team. The strain should come from the dungeon, not the team.

Where the Anti-Parser crowd seems to think that actually joining the instance is the extent of their responsibility. In my eyes, they don't see it as a team, but four independent players who happen to be in the same instance.

So, I have to ask:

"How is expecting someone to fulfill the role they agreed to when entering the dungeon, back seat driving the persons character?"

And

"Do you feel that you are there for the team when you join an instance? Or that the team is there only for you?"

I don't know what kind of an excuse the hot bar set up thing is, if you set your hot bar up in such a bad way that you cannot do your job that is your fault, not the teams. As far as connection and the like, that will not drastically affect output unless it is severe, and yes, if your team cannot complete content because your internet is so horrible, you probably shouldn't be on that team, and should be figuring that out. I would feel bad for wasting others time if I did that.

* By work I am referring to the instance being the task your party has to complete, and work being the amount of mechanics (dps, healing etc, as well as all other things) needed to complete the dungeon. Not work as in, you have to go to a building, punch in, slave under the bosses incompetent son for a wage you don't feel is appropriate for no gratitude.
^not an example from my actual job btw , just if you say the word work, people automatically think employment to earn money for some reason.

DCUO RELATED STUFF:

I too, came from DCUO, and my experience with their parser is quite the opposite. Of course you do have the odd person abusing it. And you do have the odd person misreading it. The overwhelming majority of the people I ran into, at least understood the basics of class damage, if people were doing mechanics rather than just straight dpsing, and if they joined late, etc. Now I quit after the whole Nexus/Paradox Wave debacle, but I can remember being in one tunnel in paradox, and after an extremely rough completion of it, my damage out being 1.2-1.4 million, while one dps had 200K, if that. Is that in anyway reasonable, even considering AOE mob damage, single target damage, or mechanics being completed? Especially given that we were both alive the whole time.

So, what adjustments would you make to DUCOs parser to make it better? One thing I would have suggested is some sort of an average dps since entering the instance, as I found one of the more common issues, (Note: Not saying I found issues common, but common among the issues that happened), to crop up, to be someone would leave part way through the instance, another would join and some joker might say "X's dps is way too low!" Since it only showed total damage.

Damn I hate that I feel the need to spell out what I am referring to with when I use words like Work, Effort, and Responsibility. Insert Malevctions X's and O's image here please.

[MentheusDreyar]

I feel I need to ask this here,and not just for you, but anyone in the thread:

What do you consider your responsibility to be when you join a group?

To perform my role to at least the bare minimum expected of me, by both the game and party if there is a general consensus within the party (like kiting adds or something when i don't technically have to do it). If i know i'm under performing i'll take advice and apologize, if i'm dragging the group down and causing wipes i'll concede that i'm not ready and leave willingly like any decent player would rather than waste more of those player's time. I'd also include looking up tactics on any content harder than a dungeon, so i don't waste more of people's time. Unless the content in brand new...

Like-wise i'd offer advice to players when i see them doing something i know is wrong or see where they can improve. But do you know what causes all the negativity about bad players? When they refuse to listen, take advice and assume we have hostile intent and we get responses like "STFU i'm doing fine" "I play how i want" etc, etc. when they clearly aren't and causing problems for the rest of us.

Many of us have put up with this kind of vile hostile behavior for just trying to help for so long that we honestly don't try anymore and just kick them as it's a lot less hassle and trying to help them when the majority clearly don't care about overall group performance in group content. These "me, me, me" players are the reason we need parser's to weed out the bad players ruining the experience for many others.

If they don't want to help themselves we certainly won't help them and it's not our responsibility too. Occassionally i'll find a glimmer of hope in the player base when someone actually accepts advice...then lose it again in the next PUG.

[Anyan]

I don't want to see parsers in this game, and it's for my own selfish reasons.
I have used and, some would argue, benefited from using them before, but I still don't want them.
At the end of a dungeon or raid, instead of going "yay we did it!" I went "what were my numbers?" It wasn't about us (players) against them (the enemy) anymore, it was my numbers against everyone else's, including my friends. I became competitive in a way that now makes me very uncomfortable, and I didn't have as much fun anymore.
I don't want to become that person again. I don't ever want to sit there at the end of a dungeon/raid worrying weather or not I got good numbers. I don't want to see that kind of competitiveness parsers bring that has such a huge risk of turning toxic become a part of this game. I don't want to see my best friend being called horrible names just because she wasn't on the top. I don't want that pressure, and I don't want to hear her crying over something that is suppose to be fun.
I don't mind parsers in PvP because you're already competing against others. Hell, I even encourage it. In PvE though? No, thank you!

[Whiteroom]

At the end of a dungeon or raid, instead of going "yay we did it!" I went "what were my numbers?" It wasn't about us (players) against them (the enemy) anymore, it was my numbers against everyone else's, including my friends. I became competitive in a way that now makes me very uncomfortable, and I didn't have as much fun anymore.

This is, imho, the most valid argument against parsers. It also ties into the everything becoming a dps race point I made a few pages back.

A counter to this, is to look at the games current meta, everything is dps, tanks, healers, everything is dps centric. Not exactly on you point I agree. Part of the fault in this, and your feeling, lies with the developers I think. Developers tend to consistently fall back on dps, and dps checks as the main core mechanic in almost every encounter you come across. If encounters were designed to be less reliant on dps, then I think it would alleviate this problem. However, this is a problem with MMO's as a whole, not just FFXIV. And meant for another thread I would say.

But, yes, I totally agree with they way developers set up the game, that it can break immersion.

However, I also have only found myself in the same situation after the content is on farm mode. In which case, what you suggested is already happening for other reasons.

On top of this, I feel that as long as the developers continue to add content with tight dps checks, alleviating the problems that come with the constant failures of these instances is of greater importance than the effect of a parser on immersion after content is on farm. Also, once again on the developers, this is currently a hot topic as players can get as far as level 60 content and still be doing little more damage than auto attacking, as commonly linked parsers have shown. You have people doing dps in the 200s, where close to 1000 is very easy to accomplish, and only say 600 is needed to complete almost anything. That is a pretty big discrepancy.

I still contend that the majority of low performing players have no idea that they are performing poorly, and think they are doing enough or more than enough. Therefore I think if they were presented with the actual, they would take steps, however small to improve.

[Hayward]

-snip-

This guy gets it.

I would also say that SE needs to ease up on the DPS checks because of the knock-on effects of hyper-competitiveness and outright rude behavior.

[dank1]

Why are some of you people taking this to extremes
Plot twist: There already are parsers, anyone who can be "toxic" with parsers is already probably doing it, funnily enough though that is rarely the case lol.

Why would parsers make the game any more "toxic" than it already is?
I'll go ahead and speak on personal experience and when it is I encounter toxicity in game, surprisingly it's from the underperformers, I've been cussed at multiple times for pulling large, for using slaying jewels, for tanking off grit (while holding aggro and topping the dps chart) all because those players are molded into assuming tanks cant overperform and anyone who isnt full vit and tries to pump out dps is bad, I've been kicked from groups cause of it and I just sit and think if numbers were available would they be less ignorant if they knew they were being out dpsd by a tank? Would they realize hey maybe I shouldnt be judging this guy because he overgears me and is outdpsing me so maybe just maybe he knows what hes doing?

The only times ive seen toxicity from so called elitists is after a wipe and trust me that had nothing to do with dps numbers or at least they dont call them out.

Tbh I rather the playerbase be toxic if theyre at least informed, rather than toxic and ignorant, spewing random bs out only cause they see the tank without tank stance on and automatically think its a bad thing not realizing that guy is the reason the run was decently quick.